On this 4th of July, I offer up a defense of

[Peter_Kropotkin]

a defense of Communism…

Now, in Marx’s day, he looked around say in 1850 and he
saw two problems facing the society/state…
One was the vast poverty he saw given the wealth of the state/society
and Two, was the problem of Alienation… that by the work in factories,
people became alienated from themselves and their society/state…
Both problems exist today…

The first question was the poverty question… one can look around
the various countries and see poverty, but it has been said that America
is the richest country in the world, and we see poverty… and Marx clearly
saw one of the reasons for this widespread poverty in the world…

It is called the theft of wages problem… and I have gone over it before,
but as a refresher, once again, I will explain this problem…
I work in a business… (for simplicity sake, I have simplified
the problem) I work in a sandwich shop… and for $5.00 dollars
and hour, I make sandwiches… the owner of the sandwich shop
then turns around and sells that sandwich for $10.00 a pop…
By my efforts, energy, I created a sandwich for $5.00 and whatever
the owner can get past that $5.00 dollar is profits… it is also
wage theft…and this is Capitalism… it survives because of this
wage theft… all bonuses and income and profits, come from
this wage theft… it is the heart of capitalism…remove wage
theft and capitalism itself collapses…this leads us to the second
aspect of poverty… that to keep wages low, as it must in order to
survive, capitalism needs a large base of unemployed workers
to keep wages low… This is basic economics… the larger amount
of goods, means that the price of those goods is low… the less
number of goods, say diamonds, and the price because of scarcity,
remains high… lots of workers and the wages can be keep low,
few workers and wages go up… supply and demand…
and this is why businesses hate, absolutely hate entitlement programs…
if a person can get by without work, then they don’t need a job…
and business are forced to raise wages to bring in workers…
supply and demand… most of what businesses do, is based
around this idea of supply and demand and wage theft…

so, for Marx, the question was, how do we end this wage theft?
Which for Marx also helps end poverty by paying people wages
that they can live on and even, prosper… which is bad for business
as they need people to suffer so they can be paid vastly less then
they need… The less you pay people, the greater the profits…
this is as simple a formula as one can find for capitalism…

The second problem for Marx was this question of alienation…
workers become alienated from their work by the sheer
numbing of work itself… I worked in a factory lite job,
a checker in a grocery store for almost 2 decades…
I’ve seen this alienation at first hand… and as it is clear,
from management, that I am easily replaceable, and stated
to their workers time after time after time… if we think about
this alienation as another word for investment… if I am invested
in my work, I am not alienated from it…that the alienation
investment problem goes both ways… I cannot become invested
in work, if I am alienated from it… and one of the ways business try
to overcome alienation from their workers is a common one,
in my former job, there were signs everywhere saying for one
to take ownership of any problems… This pretend taking ownership
of problem is really a way for ownership to pass accountability to workers
in terms of customers… I was a victim of this at work one time…
a customer had a problem with me, and I was reprimanded by
management because I ‘‘didn’t take ownership’’ of the problem…
a problem not caused by me, a problem that was strictly a company
problem, but by passing the buck on this so called ‘‘ownership’’
question it was decided that I was wrong… or known as
the management ownership… in which if there is a problem,
blame the workers and if there is credit to be taken, management
takes it… and yet, management still wonders why the workers
aren’t invested in the business…

So, how does one solve these two problems which still exists today…
the poverty questioned caused by wage theft and the lack of investment
of the workers in their work… otherwise known as alienation…

So, what was Marx’s solution? by having the workers own the businesses…
by means of the state being a worker state… or to paraphrase,

Government of the worker, by the worker, for the worker…

for Marx, the government owns the means of production
and as the workers are the government, they own the means of
production… That is the basic solution of Marx… and if we
look around today, we see a solution that seems to answer both
sides of the question without a worker state… the workers
owning the business… and we hear of this all the time…
of companies owned by the workers… and virtually in every
company, the workers are far happier and make more money…
and if you own something, you are far more invested in it…
and if you are paid in two different ways, one by wages and
the second way by owning stocks in that company and as those
stocks go up, the worker gets money in that way…
we have a greater investment in work if we are getting the benefits
of our efforts, both in wages and in stocks…
this is problem the solution that Marx should have gone for, but
he didn’t make the connection between workers and workers
owned business… and this solution is done without the government…
so, there is no need for workers to own the government, as Marx wanted,
because workers are now engaged and invested and nowhere near
poverty due to their owning the place of businesses they work in…

I didn’t think there was a solution to the dual problem of
poverty and alienation but there does seem to be a solution…
which I didn’t see before…

so, we can offer up a defense of communism by taking businesses
and instead of sacrificing workers for greater profits, we see to it
that the workers own the businesses, corporate America changes
because CEO’s and the board of Directors, no longer drive the
businesses but workers now owns the businesses…
we see profits in a different light… not to make CEO’s
vastly wealthy, but to improve the lives of those who actually
do the work, make the effort of producing and working in the
business…they are now the ones being rewarded…
as it should be… and the benefits of profits don’t go to the
people who didn’t actually do the work, like CEO’S and
the owners of the stock… the workers get the benefits…
as the should be getting the rewards of work…

Kropotkin

[Nausamedu]

Why am i not surprised that you are not going to offer a up a defense for the democratic socialists of nazi germany?

There is no defense for communism. Especially not through some tu quoque whataboutism where its only defensible because “look at how much worse this is”.

What logic goes into the idea that you have a system that killed hundreds of millions like capitalism, and you take another system that killed hundreds of millions, trying to defend it and champion it because… because what? Dead hundreds of millions are acceptable if they die in accordance of your taste?

Stop defending things that have failed a hundred times over and instead come up with something that does not start with “yeah i know im either the first or the second largest mass murderer in human history, BUT”

[Peter_Kropotkin]

after some busyness, it is the fourth, I’m back…

anyway, as I mentioned, Marx was about the workers,
and thus we should look at the workers in relations to
the systems… and among the various communist thinkers,
the theorists we have of course, Marx, plus Lenin, Stalin,
Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and today, we have
other communist theorist including Slovoj Zizek to name just one…
and each one of them offers us something different in communist
theories… Thus, the first myth dispelled is that there is but one
version of communist theories… we have dozens of communists
theories… and all of them talk about in some fashion the role
of workers… and that is exactly what we need to look at,
the state of the workers…

The first attack will be on the Soviet Union version of communism…
and what was the role of the workers in the Soviet Union?
and that is why we know that the Soviet Union wasn’t
true communism…was it a top down political system or was it
a bottom up system? did the workers have a voice or a say
in what the system did? NO, and that means the workers role
was, the worker was no more than cannon fodder for the system…
(exactly the same role that capitalism has for its workers,
and that is part of my disagreement with both communism and
capitalism) the workers are just there to prop up the system
and nothing more… but that isn’t what Marx believed in…
his priority was the workers and putting them first…
a true communist system and I do point out that Marx
was and believed himself to be an economist, not a political
theoriest… and that is important to note… his focus was on
the economics, not on the political…and that focus was on
the economics of the worker…so, we can eliminate the Soviet
Union as a true communist state… any system that has a
‘‘Ruling committee’’ is not a communist state… for Marx,
the idea was that the worker via the ownership of the means
of production was actually in charge of the political and economic
system of that country…communism isn’t a communist state
if the workers have no say or voice in their lives…

and therein lies what true communism is, it is a place
where the ruling party, as such, is the workers by
them owning the means of production… that is what Marx
envision as a communist state…

So, Kropotkin what was the Soviet Union, if not a communist state?
it was a dictatorship, pure and simple… current day Russia is
no different… and there it is, there is no difference in the system
of the Soviet Union and current day Russia of Putin…
they both are dictatorships… and so for the millions killed, they
were killed under a dictatorship, not communism…

so, what to know what a true communist state looks like?
We haven’t sees one yet… and when we do, it will be about
the workers being in charge, not the executive committee…

Kropotkin

[Bob]

@Nausamedu

What logic goes into the idea that you have a system that killed hundreds of millions like capitalism, and you take another system that killed hundreds of millions, trying to defend it and champion it because… because what? Dead hundreds of millions are acceptable if they die in accordance of your taste?

What logic defends one historic tragedy against another? Leaders, whatever political leaning they have, make mistakes, mostly with regard to power. Some were ruthlessly pragmatic, like Lloyd George ordering the Irish units to the front in WWI to prevent them from going home and joining in the uprisings that led to the liberation of Southern Ireland.

There is a difference between intention and implementation. Many influences were pulling in different directions during the Soviet Revolution, and Marx never foresaw Russia as an ideal country for implementing his Manifesto. Besides, Marx’s writing is far more complex than is generally understood, which is perhaps why people only focus on how it went wrong.

Looking at it from a different perspective, we might understand that the fight against Communism also had casualties. Because I’m lazy, I used AI to come up with the following figures:

Broadly speaking, the human cost associated with anti-communist campaigns includes:

• The Korean War (1950–1953): roughly 2.5–3 million dead, including civilians on both sides.
• The Vietnam War and related conflicts in Laos and Cambodia: approximately 3–4 million deaths, although responsibility is shared among North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, American, Cambodian, Laotian and other actors.
• The Indonesian mass killings (1965–66): between 500,000 and over 1 million suspected communists and alleged sympathisers murdered.
• Anti-communist repression across Latin America (such as under military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador and elsewhere): perhaps 200,000–300,000 deaths and disappearances, although the precise figure depends on which conflicts are included.
• The Greek Civil War, the Malayan Emergency, the Philippine insurgencies and numerous African proxy wars (Angola, Mozambique, etc.) together account for hundreds of thousands to over a million additional deaths.
• The Soviet–Afghan War also belongs partly in this category if one considers Western support for the Mujahideen as part of the anti-communist struggle. Total deaths are usually estimated at around 1–2 million, though responsibility is distributed among the Soviet military, the Afghan communist government, insurgents, and foreign sponsors.

If one simply adds the principal conflicts in which anti-communism was a major motivating factor, the total reaches many millions of deaths, plausibly somewhere between 8 and 15 million, depending on where one draws the boundaries. A broader definition—including every Cold War proxy war, famine exacerbated by conflict, and repression by anti-communist governments—could produce considerably higher figures, perhaps exceeding 20 million. However, unlike the often-cited estimates for communist regimes, there is no widely accepted scholarly total.

This doesn’t constitute “whatabouterism” but shows that political leaders have always sacrificed people for their ideals, whatever ideology they are fighting for.

In defence of Marx, his motivation was to stop the dominance and exploitation of the working class. That clearly wasn’t Stalin’s or Mao’s primary objective.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@Nausamedu

One system serves the minority political status quo, the other side serves the majority of people.

I am on the side that serves the majority of people. The needs of the many outweighs the needs of a few.

Both capitalism and communism has killed millions of people around the world. As a politically reformed communist all I can say is that the ideal is that the same past mistakes do not repeat.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@Peter_Kropotkin

Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin understood that bourgeois democracy was an inherent weakness always ready to be exploited by capitalists. There’s a reason why Marx’s democratic worker associations never took off right away and why democracy overall had to be suspended.

Likewise the state is forced to intervene with a political vanguard otherwise a communist revolution wouldn’t be strong enough to succeed. There’s a difference between theoretical articulations and applying stuff to reality.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@Bob

Revolutions are messy, and again, there is a huge difference between theoretical articulations on paper to that of boots on the ground implementing things.

Sure, Stalin and Mao weren’t perfect, yet it was Stalin who modernized Russia and the same could be said for Mao with China.

[Bob]

@MrAuthoritarian

Sure, Stalin and Mao weren’t perfect …

In official communist narratives, both Stalin and Mao were sometimes described as transformative leaders or ‘reformers’, yet outside of these frameworks, they are far more often judged as authoritarian rulers whose modernisation efforts were inextricably linked to mass repression and catastrophic human loss.

Mainstream historical judgment usually does not call them “great reformers” without heavy qualification because their policies produced enormous suffering, purges, famine, terror and coercion. Their defenders typically argue that their regimes achieved rapid economic or social transformation, but this argument is both morally and historically disputed, given the extreme human cost.

[Nausamedu]

@Bob

There is a difference between intention and implementation.

The thing is Bob, there is a difference between intention and implementation, but there is also a difference between being able to tell people’s intent, and being a sucker.
The left seems to really struggle with this latter issue considering how they are constantly putting their own executioners into power, and then keep excusing them afterwards too, even though millions starved to death under socialism and communism, but somehow the benevolent leaders were always exempt.

At what point are we willing to consider this a mental illness on the part of the people than a question of “intention” on the part of the “benevolent” leaders?

@Bob

This doesn’t constitute “whatabouterism” but shows that political leaders have always sacrificed people for their ideals, whatever ideology they are fighting for.

This brings us then full circle and let me just ask once more: Why are there no threads and people making excuses for the Nazis?
You see, if its not whataboutism, and the standard is truly “well, people die”, then we might as well engage in the idea that maybe the Nazis also had a problem with implementation instead of intent, because the intent was to create a unified, utopian society of peace and no need.

Its one astonishing feature of humanity how its capable of simultaneously criticizing being handed shit when its from one hand, but eat and lick it clean when its the other.

@MrAuthoritarian

One system serves the minority political status quo, the other side serves the majority of people.

And my question is: Does it?
Does it serve the majority of the people?
Because if you had said “they will serve you whatever you want to hear” that would have been true. They in fact always made sure that that is the ONLY thing you get to hear, literally outlawing every other voice.
However looking at their track record, their serving somehow always ended up with “self” rather than just “serving”.

Im still looking for that line in history where the benevolent “serving” leaders starved together with their people instead of taking chunky shits on golden toilets in their “service”.
And may i add: This goes both ways. For both communism and capitalism.

@Bob

In official communist narratives, both Stalin and Mao were sometimes described as transformative leaders or ‘reformers’, yet outside of these frameworks, they are far more often judged as authoritarian rulers whose modernisation efforts were inextricably linked to mass repression and catastrophic human loss.

Well, turning a city into rubble is also transformative.
What is the point behind using words which have no attached quality to them?
Mao too most certainly transformed the country. Now how positive it is when children are beheading and giving their own parents to the authorities in religious… cough… i mean ideological fervor… stands to question.

[Bob]

@Nausamedu

The thing is Bob, there is a difference between intention and implementation, but there is also a difference between being able to tell people’s intent, and being a sucker.

This kind of indifferent, cynical comment is what I am used to. It reminds me of how I met a guy in Germany who was all friendly until he heard I was born in England, and then he turned on me. When I asked him what was up, he said, “I knew an Englishman once, he was a bastard!”

All I can do is shrug my shoulders and say, “Have a nice day!”

@Nausamedu

The left seems to really struggle with this latter issue considering how they are constantly putting their own executioners into power, and then keep excusing them afterwards too

Only this is a story that doesn’t fit the historical record. I think there will always be the problem that people take the comic book version of history, lacking a deeper understanding of what happened and how good intentions are often usurped by the power-hungry. The most important thing for you is to have a box where you can dispose of things you don’t want to understand.

@Nausamedu

Why are there no threads and people making excuses for the Nazis?

Because if you understood what happened in Germany and the rest of Europe, you would understand that, much like Trump, Hitler’s intentions were all up front. First of all, Germany beat France in 1872 and crowned their Kaiser head of the Holy Roman Empire. Then the First World War came about due to the stupidity of the (related) royal families of Europe, and Germany was beaten. The reparations that France demanded were completely utopian, but they wanted to avoid being attacked a third time.

It was the reparations, however, plus the “Dolchstoß” legend that Hitler used to identify Judaism as a cancer, and the necessity to expand eastwards. This went under the radar because other countries in Europe were themselves going through an antisemitic period, and they also thought the reparations were excessive.

Hitler also had a lot of sympathy in America, where many of his ideas came from, including eugenics, and he also gained financial support from there. So, Hitler was never intending to be a benign ruler; it was always about revenge and domination because he saw Germany as a superior race.

@Nausamedu

Well, turning a city into rubble is also transformative.

Stick to your cynicism, and you will never truly understand anything.

[Nausamedu]

@Bob

This kind of indifferent, cynical comment is what I am used to. It reminds me of how I met a guy in Germany who was all friendly until he heard I was born in England, and then he turned on me. When I asked him what was up, he said, “I knew an Englishman once, he was a bastard!”

All I can do is shrug my shoulders and say, “Have a nice day!”

It was not a personal attack Bob, believe it or not, you are not the only one on the planet who is veering to the left. Wanna hear something funny? Every political test i take lists me as left too.
I just have zero illusions. Thats all.

@Bob

Because if you understood what happened in Germany and the rest of Europe, you would understand that, much like Trump, Hitler’s intentions were all up front.

Right. I keep on forgetting that most people do not view the left’s “intent” as up front even though it played out dozens of times all over the world.

@Bob

Hitler also had a lot of sympathy in America, where many of his ideas came from, including eugenics, and he also gained financial support from there. So, Hitler was never intending to be a benign ruler; it was always about revenge and domination because he saw Germany as a superior race.

Name me a couple of communist/socialist leaders and revolutions that intended to be benign.
That should be a rather interesting read

@Bob

Stick to your cynicism, and you will never truly understand anything.

I am very sorry for pointing out that the social rule people are still making excuses and defenses for, is one of the most destructive cancers throughout human history, and that they thrive, live and breathe demagogy and word plays exactly like this one.

[Bob]

@Nausamedu

I am very sorry for pointing out that the social rule people are still making excuses and defenses for, is one of the most destructive cancers throughout human history, and that they thrive, live and breathe demagogy and word plays exactly like this one.

Firstly, ‘the left’ has never been a single political entity, and socialist or communist governments have differed greatly in terms of doctrine, strategy, institutions and policy. Even within the Marxist and socialist traditions, there have been significant differences between revolutionary socialism, social democracy, market socialism and state socialism, for example, with each proposing different ways to organise ownership, democracy and economic control.

I am aware that, particularly during the early 20th century and the Cold War, there was a strong tendency among many anti-communist states and commentators to treat ‘the left’ as a single entity. This was partly a reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution and the spread of communist movements, creating the perception that left-wing politics always posed the same revolutionary threat.

However, historically, socialist politics have been highly diverse. Social democracy pursued reform through parliamentary democracy and welfare states, while revolutionary socialism aimed to overthrow capitalist systems. Market socialism attempted to combine social ownership with markets, and state socialism relied on central planning and state ownership. Even within communist-aligned regimes, there were real policy differences regarding nationalities, administration, economic incentives and the degree of local autonomy.

Opponents often reacted to ‘the left’ as if it were one uniform danger, especially when communism was spreading. However, in practice, socialist governments and movements differed substantially in both theory and practice. The historical record shows both ideological family resemblance and genuine political diversity.

I would argue that we must distinguish between these three layers:

1. Left-wing self-understanding: what a movement says it is trying to do.

2. The left-wing institutional form, which is how power and the economy are actually organised.

3. External reaction: how its enemies, rivals or anxious people label it.

These three aspects are often collapsed into one, which is why the statement ‘the left always does X’ is too simplistic to be historically accurate. Therefore, the claim that “the left always governs the same way” is historically unsound because it collapses distinct traditions into one category. What often did recur was not identical left-wing rule, but a similar anti-left reaction from opponents, who treated communism, social democracy, syndicalism, and reformist socialism as if they were the same threat.

Secondly, Marx was a far more expansive and methodical thinker than is often suggested by later Marxism, and many of his concepts were adopted well beyond the confines of orthodox party doctrine. His work was not confined to economics or revolution; he also offered theories on alienation, social formation, ideology, labour and human development, which were later adapted by scholars in fields such as psychology and psychiatry. In this way, Marx became a resource for critical enquiry across disciplines rather than just the founder of a rigid political system.

He was perceptive about the instability of capitalism, class conflict, exploitation and the way economic structures shape social life. However, later regimes frequently turned his ideas into rigid state doctrines that differed sharply from his own broader, more dynamic critique. Therefore, Marx’s writings were more intellectually broad and flexible than many subsequent “Marxist” traditions, and his influence spread to disciplines studying human subjectivity, social power, and culture. Later uses of his ideas were therefore often reinterpretations of Marx, rather than direct continuations of everything he himself developed explicitly.

I discovered Marx through Erich Fromm in the 1980s. Fromm’s books To Have or To Be and The Art of Loving are rooted in his broader humanistic socialism and in ideas he took from Marx, especially the critique of alienation and the view that social conditions shape human character.

[greenfuse]

@Peter_Kropotkin

so, what to know what a true communist state looks like?
We haven’t sees one yet… and when we do, it will be about
the workers being in charge, not the executive committee…

or, the big problem with communism is that it slides to dictatorship and not slowly. Marx did two main things: he pointed out problems with capitalism and I think much of this holds well for today; he proposed a solution. That has not gone well at all. Neither captialists nor communists want to admit that perhaps he got one right and the other wrong, period. Capitalists don’t want the criticism to be accurate and communists don’t want the solution to lead to what it leads to. How could he be wrong about one and right about the other? Well, that’s often the case that people get something right and something else wrong.

[Nausamedu]

@Bob

Firstly, ‘the left’ has never been a single political entity, and socialist or communist governments have differed greatly in terms of doctrine, strategy, institutions and policy. Even within the Marxist and socialist traditions, there have been significant differences between revolutionary socialism, social democracy, market socialism and state socialism, for example, with each proposing different ways to organise ownership, democracy and economic control.

If thats the case and its not your shoe, then stop trying to lace it on.
You know perfectly well who i am talking about when i speak of “the left”, and its not the people who are calling themselves socialists while living in a capitalist world by capitalist laws.

@Bob

Opponents often reacted to ‘the left’ as if it were one uniform danger, especially when communism was spreading. However, in practice, socialist governments and movements differed substantially in both theory and practice. The historical record shows both ideological family resemblance and genuine political diversity.

And again: Just like myself, these type of people on the left would be insulted to be mentioned on one page with “the left”.
As i told you, i am classified as a leftist too, and im perfectly aware that i have nothing to do with “the left” despite being left leaning on nearly all policies and denouncing just about all forms of authoritanianism.

@Bob

I would argue that we must distinguish between these three layers:

1. Left-wing self-understanding: what a movement says it is trying to do.

2. The left-wing institutional form, which is how power and the economy are actually organised.

3. External reaction: how its enemies, rivals or anxious people label it.

Or you can simply look at their actions instead of the entire “how x, y and z are labeling” it.

@Bob

Secondly, Marx was a far more expansive and methodical thinker than is often suggested by later Marxism, and many of his concepts were adopted well beyond the confines of orthodox party doctrine. His work was not confined to economics or revolution; he also offered theories on alienation, social formation, ideology, labour and human development, which were later adapted by scholars in fields such as psychology and psychiatry. In this way, Marx became a resource for critical enquiry across disciplines rather than just the founder of a rigid political system.

Marx would denounce almost every form of the modern left.
Bringing up his name is borderline nonsensical when almost none of the movement based on his theories, would survive his critique. One of his most central tenets was decentralizing authority and removing all forms of authoritarianism.

Bringing up Marx in the context of “the left” is like bringing up Jesus Christ in the context of America or the UK, between two deep state prescribed mass murders.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@Nausamedu

People want to tell me about the superior democratic liberal representative and republican ideals over communism yet I have lived on streets sleeping in the snow in the middle of winter.

I have seen others freeze to death not surviving the weather. I have seen people be malnourished going hungry.

I have seen people kill themselves within broad daylight publicly because the misery of continuing to live was too much.

I have seen all of this under the political liberal model.

[Peter_Kropotkin]

I’m back, it’s been a very, very busy weekend so far…

and I offer up more evidence for the existence of communism…

as I have mentioned, there are several different types of economic
systems, and the one we shall look at now is the longest lasting one…
The hunter-gatherer economic system which lasted over a million years…
with various hominids…So, what exactly happened within these
hunter-gather system? We know that within the hunter-gather system
that tribes were generally small affairs… usually with no more than
10-15 families, maybe 100 people, and from the evidence we have,
they were communistic systems… in other words, goods were
gathered and then shared with the entire tribe… and jobs, such
hunter and perhaps a shaman, plus tool makers, and of course,
cooks and those who gathered fruits and veggies, most likely
women…each person contributed to the tribe within these jobs…
and we have evidence that old people were taken care of by the
younger members of the tribes… Old people who could no longer
contribute to the tribe due to age where still taken care of…
all in all, it was clearly a communistic system where goods were
freely distributed to all members of the tribe…even if you didn’t or
couldn’t work… a much fairer system then we have today in modern
day America… and what underlines this form of economics?
the answer, as is usually the answer lies within biology and
evolution…

Via evolution, human beings have evolved to be social, tribal
groups… we cannot survive alone, for our needs, both
bodily and psychologically can only be met within a state/society…
think about the hunter-gatherer who in order to hunt,
had to recruit others to hunt… hunting is a communal act
involving several members of the tribe… and foraging fruits
and veggies, also a communal action… it takes a number of
people in both activities to gain substance for the tribe…
the only way to survive in this world is to become part of a tribe…
that is realistically, the only path to survival in this world…

a conservative belief such as ‘‘Rugged Individualism’’ where
a man alone in some fashion builds something, simply
couldn’t happen in a hunter-gatherer society… a man alone,
is a dead man walking…

the basic fundamental truth about human beings is that
they can only survive within a tribal, collective society…
working with each other in order to meet our own individual needs,
collectively working with each other…
and in looking at communism, that is the basic idea behind communism,
that we survive by working together, and collectively share goods with
each other…

I do note that until human beings began to settle down in cities,
that the two economic systems of human beings, one being the
hunter-gatherer society and the second system was the
system of human beings following the herds of animals, we
simply followed animals as they wondered across the landscape…
the next system, as mentioned was cities… and what do all three
systems have in common, at the heart of each system lies
cooperation… human beings cooperating with each other to
meet their own individual needs… farmers would bring their crops
into town and barter them for other goods the farmers needed…
Money, as we known it didn’t begin until fairly recently, roughly
700 BC… well after the Iliad and the Odyssey were written…
and only a short time before Socrates was born… the economic
system of the cities for over 10,000 years was the barter system…
you traded your cows for tools or salt… the word salary is derived
from the Latin term, salarium, which originates from sal, the Latin
word for salt…and it originally referred to a soldier’s allowance
used to specifically to buy salt… in those days, salt was
an extremely valuable commodity and was often the basis of trade
and used to pay people with… and in the Indian Vedas, the wealth
was defined by the number of cows one owned… which makes
sense in society/state where the economic system was trade
and bartering goods with each other…

And all of these is used to remind us that the idea of the
conservatives, best described by Ayn Rand, was a
fairly modern idea… for the vast majority of human existence,
we used the hunter-gatherer system to gain our goods,
and then within the context of the city, again, it was
by trade and barter that keep the system running…
cooperation by another name is still cooperation with each other
and that was, is and will continue to be the way of human beings…

and we return to communism… which was the system of the
hunter-gatherer for over a million years…
capitalism as we know it, is a fairly new system and at its heart,
is still a system that requires cooperation between people to work…
share and share alike has been the economic system of
human beings for millions of years… let us start there in
our thinking about our own economic system… and which
current economic system best fit the longest economic system
in human history? I can give you a hint and it ain’t capitalism…

Kropotkin

[MrAuthoritarian]

@Nausamedu

Everybody wants to talk about the millions of people that have died under socialism or communism, but nobody wants to talk about the millions of people killed in the name of economic capitalism which I find very fascinating.

[MrAuthoritarian]

People that usually complain about “Whataboutism” are usually intellectually lazy themselves as they don’t understand the differences of nuance.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@Bob

There hasn’t been a single revolution yet in human history that has been without bloodshed.

Even Gandhi had to resort to violence.

This of course isn’t to defend the utilization of revolutionary violence, merely pointing out this phenomena exists well past Stalin, Mao, and communism.

It would be nice if political revolutions were non-violent and peaceful but as of yet human beings haven’t mastered this. I think it is largely because prevailing power structures don’t give up power so easily, nobody willingly surrenders power. As a consequence would be revolutionaries are forced to adopt drastic measures to get them to surrender it.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@Bob

Over here in modern America the neoconservatives, capitalists, and republicans will refer to democratic socialism as a stepping stone or gateway to communism overtime.