I remember reading in a book about domestic violence, one story was about a chinese man (I think this was in the 70s) being prosecuted for DV against his wife after the communists took over. There was dialogue from the man about how he abused his wife because thats what his parents and her parents did, and their grandparents, etc. Its the way it always was. I have no idea if that was a national policy (the criminalization of DV) but in theory communist nations are more egalitarian.
Communists came to the aid of black people in the US too. They offered legal support for lynching targets and people being railroaded by the legal system.
Women fought for the USSR in WW2. I don’t think they were fighting for any other major nation involved.
but they weren’t even close. With the government owned industry, relentless nationalism, and harsh suppression of dissenters, they were much closer to fascist. It doesn’t matter what they called themselves; after all, North Korea isn’t a democracy just because they call themselves the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
If you look at what Marx advocated (simplified)
Revolutionaries would overthrown the capitalists (bourgeoisie) and seize the means of production
the means of production would be returned to the common person
society would thus evolve to be “classless.”
every “communist” revolution stopped after Step #1. Human nature being what it is, the revolutionaries found they liked controlling things, thank you very much.
that’s why communism can’t work on a national scale. Human nature forbids it.
Of course. If you hew to true Marx, no Communist state is communist, or if a true communist society is set up, it won’t last very long.
By a similar argument on Christian church is really Christian.
Any ideology evolves over time. Or it dies.
“Give my that old time Marxism,
Give me that old time Marxism,
Give me that old time Marxism,
It’s good enough for me.”
Hasn’t pretty much every revolution stopped after Step #1? The failed communists pretended to care about the common people, just like every other revolution, paying lip service in exchange for willing bodies (or not so willing, in their case).
We live in a world with competing -isms, none pure, all mixed, all fucked up. None of our socioeconomic systems were designed for, or capable of dealing with the economic, political, social, religious, environmental, ecological, etc. issues of 8 billion people in a suddenly-connected, rapidly-industrialized world.
“Human nature” evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, with much smaller in-groups and a finite ability to extract resources and alter our environment. We can look back and chide earlier philosophers at their naivete, but they at least pretended to be concerned about the greater good, in such stark contrast to those who wield real power and wealth today.
It’s one thing to wish upon the stars for human camaraderie and see it fail; it is something entirely different, and altogether more vicious, to peer into human vulnerability and cynically wring it tighter, pitting worker against worker, race against race, sex against sex, religion against religion, with the sole desire of coming up on top.
This sociopathy is the hallmark of so many of our countries and societies, no matter what they label themselves. But that isn’t the defining characteristic of our species, either. Of the 8 billion or so, how many do you think would put “world domination and exploitations of my inferiors” at the top of their bucket lists? Most just want to eat, pray, love, drink, play, fuck. Yet unfortunately the social systems that have heretofore survived have enabled – nay, encouraged and demanded – that sociopaths slaughter their way to the top. And the rest of us, we’re supposed to look at these systems, throw our hands up in the air, and go “Whelps, I suppose that’s human nature!” Meh.
The communists weren’t naive, they were desperate; their movements weren’t ill-intentioned, just too easily co-opted. But still the question remains: How do we deal with the 8 billion? None of the systems have a good answer yet.
Not that I approve of slavery, but as such they were fed, housed and clothed and got rudimentary medical care … if you were poor white trash at the time and were starving on your farm the local authorities would probably take away your kids so at least they wouldn’t starve to death. If you were in a city you probably got your kids taken, ridden out of town or thrown into debtors prison. As far as things went, they were just fine letting poor white trash adults starve to death.
The only reason slaves received enough food and other necessities was because there was enough to go around. If there had been any serious famines and somebody was going to starve to death, it would have been the slaves. They were at the bottom of the social ladder and had the least control of their own economic conditions.
It’s true some white people lived in greater poverty than some slaves did. But that’s because they were free to choose to live in poverty. If a white person decided he wanted to live in the streets and beg, he could so so. A black person trying to live like that would have been enslaved and put to work.
Corrupt politicians… unfortunately, not an original communist, or Chinese, invention. It occurs in all from the smallest revolutionary political parties to large, established bureaucracies, and the only question is how much the public tolerates and how much damage they can do (quite a lot in authoritarian setups). In Imperial China, we would be saying people are being screwed in spite of, or as an unforeseen consequence of, Confucian ideals.
This is true, as long as you stay in China and pay your share of high taxes to the people. There are numerous Chinese billionaires that have attempted to move to other parts of the world, shift income to other jurisdictions to avoid the Chinese taxes, etc., that have been renditioned and scurried away to a re-educations camp.
also once you get people who have never had money involved in the hustling and deal-making to obtain it they get caught up in the modern equivalent of gold fever and dont squawk about such things as freedom of speech and the like cause there too busy becoming or trying to become billionaires to care