• ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    The trouble is that I’m not a “majority” I am a person. More to the point, I am a person who is more used to not being in the majority than I am in it. “Good for the majority” in many cases has often left me out.

    Let’s be more specific here then. When means of production are owned publicly then they’re used to create things that are socially necessary and benefit most people. Things like roads, hospitals, schools, public transit, and so on. This is where work should be directed in a fair society.

    That’s not clear at all. Let’s go with the “at least communism fed everyone”. In the United States, literally no one starves who isn’t anorexic or similarly mentally ill. Homeless people are fat.

    That’s a false statement https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/31/us/food-insecurity-30-million-census-survey/index.html

    We can talk about other metrics too (spaces races and whatnot), but capitalism seems to at least keep up with communism in those regards without some really absurd double standards.

    Absolutely false, the life style in imperial core is directly built on the exploitation of other countries. US was literally founded on genocide and slavery. Even within US itself people of color are exploited at a far higher rate than whites. US also holds 20% of world’s prison population, predominantly minorities, and these are used as slave labor.

    Which of course never happened in the Soviet Union or Cuba, or any of the the other places?

    Hard to subjugate the population to the will of capitalists when you don’t have capitalists. Means of production in states like Soviet Union or Cuba are under public control and the work is directed towards common benefit.

    Look, I’m not even you’re opponent here. There is a profound philosophical question here, one that if anyone actually bothers to attempt to solve it, the sort of violence you think is a solution might actually become possible.

    We have mountains of historical evidence that communist revolutions result in improved living conditions for the people of the country. It’s also worth noting that violence has never been the first thing revolutionaries reach for. Revolutions invariably start with peaceful protests, strikes, and other non-violent means. These actions are invariably met with state violence, and that’s how things escalate towards violent revolutions.

    However, the key point to acknowledge here is that capitalist states are inherently violent. People are forced into a situation where they have to work for capitalists or starve on the streets. The purpose of the work is to create wealth for the business owners, which is fundamentally different from the purpose of work in a socialist states. In effect, majority of the population is coerced into slaving for the capital owning class. This system is maintained through state violence.

    The part you have to get over first is accepting that it may truly be the case that if we figure those rules out honestly, some of your heroes may turn out to have been “not so heroic” and some of your examples of good governments may turn out to have been the tyrants their detractors have claimed all along.

    Having personally lived under both communism and capitalism, I find the former to be vastly preferable. Communist states aren’t perfect, but they are a significant improvement over capitalism.