Comment on Why is lemmygrad not a banned instance anymore?
rocketeer8015@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year agoI wonder how korea fits into that view, overthrowing the western backed dictators sure didn’t work out that well for the North Koreans. And what are your thoughts on the Khmer Rouge, chinas mao etc… I don’t think any of those regimes would have turned out any nicer even if there had been a successful communist enclave in Europe.
It looks to me as if communism in practice is little more than a thinly veiled ploy to fool uneducated masses into accepting a authoritarian government. Personally I think that it’s a fragile system that’s extremely vulnerable to be taken over by authoritarians “in the name of the people”. It‘s an idealistic system, and idealism is similar to religion in the sense that it’s prone to radicalisation because it’s members consider themselves to be right and just by default. It’s also prone to sacrifice individuals(even lots and lots of individuals) for the sake of the “whole”, which tends to be the 1% at the top in practice.
AnarchoYeasty@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Korea. You mean like South Korea which had a military dictatorship at the time of the war? The problems with Korea largely come from a few issues.
1.) Strong USSR influence on their ideology of Juche. 2.) During the Korean war the United States bombed North Korea more than all the bombs dropped on Europe during WW2. We actually ran out of targets to bomb because we bombed so much. Still NK bounced back after the war and for awhile was much better off than SK was despite the horrific prison system there (which I won’t even attempt to defend. But again, this is what happens when Russia is your primary influence. 3.) They are completely isolated from the rest of the world.
You also need to consider why Korea was ripe for revolution in the first place. They were colonized by imperial Japan and were enslaved and their entire way of life threatened by them. Many of the communists in the region started as liberation fighters attempting to remove the Japanese from their land. After the war America switched places with the Japanese and began to occupy Korea and installed a government friendly to them, a government filled with collaborators who worked with the Japanese during the occupation. Even before the Korean war broke out that pro American military dictatorship began executing people assumed to be communists slaughtering entire villages and committing horrible massacres. To many of the communists in the north they viewed the American imperial occupation no different than the Japanese.
China was extremely connected to and influenced by Stalin. Maoism, also called Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, or MLM is literally an extension of the Marxist Leninists beliefs created by Stalin and Lenin. Had their been a less authoritarian communist influence in the region who knows how Mao would have operated. There were certainly people who had libertarian communist beliefs in the region involved in the early resistance in both China and Korea to both European colonization and Japanese occupation. However these voices were largely silenced thanks to the strong influence of Stalin.
The Khmer Rouge has absolutely nothing to do with communism. Similar to China Korea and Vietnam, Cambodia was colonized by the Europeans, and Cambodian rebels were attempting to liberate their lands. Pol Pot was not a communist. He aligned himself with communism to get help from others but was not a believer. He literally wanted to destroy the working city dwelling classes and return cambodians to nature. That’s the exact opposite of what communists believe. Not to mention that Pol Pot was supported by the United States
…wikipedia.org/…/Allegations_of_United_States_sup…
As an attempt to weaken Soviet influence. And it was the communists in Vietnam who actually invaded and removed the Khmer Rouge from power. So if anything, Pol Pot is a strike against the west. Not against Communism.
All of your last paragraph is a critique of Marxist-Leninist belief and I agree that it is a terrible ideology. But just because ML is communist doesn’t mean all communists are ML. As I pointed to before, the Spanish had a very strong libertarian communist influence in the form of the CNT-FAI who were defeated not because their government failed but because the Soviets played power games while the Fascists under Franco received troops and arms from Italy and Germany.
You also have the Makhnovists in Ukraine lead by Nestor Makhno who believed in the Soviet system (Soviet means workers council and not ML. The Soviet System is basically that the workers should get together and decide how to run things themselves). Makhno fought against both the USSR and the Europeans who were attempting to secure victory for the Tsars. Makhno liberated the villages from both the reds and the whites (USSR and tsarists respectively) and liberated the people. He told them that he came to destroy the old ways of power, taught them how to organize themselves, and said he didn’t care how they did it, they just couldn’t go back to how things were. Their movement grew and in 1919 they controlled most of Southern and Eastern Ukraine, including some major cities even though their base was primarily with the peasants. They instituted civil liberties in the region for the first time ever. Literacy rates skyrocketed, and the people successfully organized themselves into a non authoritarian Soviet system. The way that Lenin described how it should have worked before he came to power and switched up. They would have continued to work except they were betrayed. The Makhnovists aligned with the reds temporarily to drive out the last of the whites in the region and after a tough fight where the Makhnovists did most of the fighting they were ambushed by the reds the night of their victory while they were celebrating and drinking in their camp.
The Free Territory of Ukraine (the name the Makhnovists fought under) and the CNT-FAI both provide examples of how communism can and should work. Under their reign the people prospered and flourished. They were defeated by war and betrayal both. Not because their government didn’t work. That would have been true even if they were liberal capitalists aligned with the West.
Today, while not explicitly communist (but definitely heavily influenced by communism) you have places like Rojava in Syria which is the single freest place in the middle east, attempting to bring Murray Bookchins communalism into being while creating an ethnic homeland for the Kurdish peoples. You also have the EZLN in Chiapas who are fusing leftist belief with traditional Mayan culture to create the last holdout of Mayan culture and civilization in Chiapas.
Neither the Kurds in Rojava, nor the Zapatistas in Chiapas are perfect. But they represent a resistance to imperial power and the hope of oppressed peoples to have their own homeland.
Communist beliefs are not authoritarian in nature. The ML’s and MLM’s mistakenly believe that you need authoritarian governments in order to destroy the capitalists and bring about communism which is supposedly their end goal. I do not support them in that. Communism can only come from destroying vertical hierarchies. You cannot bring about communism through the use of new vertical hierarchies, because as you’ve correctly pointed out it’s too easy for someone to rise to the top. That is why the successful libertarian communist attempts first destroyed the hierarchies and organized the people along democratic horizontal structures.
If you are open to learning more and like to read I’d suggest you read The Conquest of Bread by Pyotr Kropotkin. It’s a plan for how a communist revolution in Paris could have worked and organized itself. The first half is very interesting in my opinion. The second half gets bogged down in details and numbers specific to the ideas and reality of Paris in the early 20th century. But the vision Kropotkin lays out for society is amazing and one that I would absolutely love to experience.
jbloggs777@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
I appreciate the effort you put into this comment, thank you.
It does however appear that communism is fragile, with opponents having plenty of opportunities and encouragement to throw spanners into the works. Past examples seem to suggest that violence/force will always be required to enact change, which is going to be hard in any region where most people see themselves as doing OK, with food on the table, varying degrees of free expression, and opportunities for at least their children.
I suspect that the best hope of wider success of communist ideals would be to win the hearts and minds of people by having a functioning, peaceful example in the world - perhaps a future China - that can influence public opinion and policies elsewhere.
In the meantime, working to peacefully improve the current systems wherever possible seems much better, and using your feet where not is better for most.
AnarchoYeasty@beehaw.org 1 year ago
I’d love for there to be a communist nation in the world. Except the US government won’t allow that. Chile democratically elected Salvador Allende a democratic socialist to be their president. And the United States responded on September 11 1973 (the irony of that date) by backing Augusto Pinochet a fascist who launched a military coup and established a dictatorship marked by his favorite tactic of throwing leftists out of helicopters, the source of one of the alt rights favorite memes.
Isn’t it funny how the CIA always is behind overthrowing attempts at doing communism and socialism well in South America Africa and Asia. And then we all sit here and say “See, communism just doesn’t work!”.
Violence and force is always necessary to extract change from the powers that be. Hell they use violence and force every single day to keep us in line so why shouldn’t we use violence and force to fight back? And you’re right people won’t want to do that when they are safe and cared for. That’s why we aren’t launching a revolution. Communists are instead attempting to organize people and build new (ideally horizontal) power structures so that when the system gets bad enough to mobilize we will be ready.
Allende is all the evidence you need that peacefully bringing about change has its limits. Allende didn’t kill people to get into power. But the fascists and their liberal allies sure killed people to keep their power.
jbloggs777@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Thanks. The US has a terrible interventionist history in South America - I don’t think anyone can argue that. I feel that they have changed their approach a bit though. Less violence, and more reliance on international and regional organizations, along with “soft” measures like sanctions to maintain the status quo that helps to protect their national interests. Iraq was the major disappointment of my time - despite worldwide protests, the coalition of the willing moved in.
Nowadays, it mostly seems like the US’ enemies are those who position themselves as such. It will increasingly be proxy wars, with the US and their friends and partners providing a mix of carrots and sticks to potential friends and partners, in line with the principles of international law, like we see in Ukraine today.
Similarly, if a country doesn’t want to go that way, it should be free to do so - it cannot expect the same privileged access to markets etc., and there should be carrots offered for “good behaviour” like respecting human rights. Here I see the possibility of China offering an alternative with a protective umbrella for other countries. If respect for human rights is important on both sides, and there are options for citizens to migrate / vote with their feet then this could be a good result, reestablishing a bipolar world along with “value competition”.
China’s rise has been pretty peaceful, and gives me hope. Similarly, the EU continues to be a rich powerful bloc that engages in economic and value competition with the US, and manages to protect its people from some of the worst aspects of the US’ influence. I’d like a little more democracy and freedom back in the EU though … we’ve been slipping into tyranny in some ways (eg. some of the covid politics and resulting witch hunts, and their handling of the financial crisis and greece, putting politics ahead of solid economic advice).