axont [she/her, comrade/them]

Every person who says this will simply describe capitalism with more welfare

Invincible. It’s pretty good, but really violent

I know this is just a forum and the libs are always confused by nuance, but exploitation does occur in socialist countries, just in a vastly different character and at a much smaller scale. Cuba for instance does have private land owners who employee workers, and China of course has various large corporations.

However these are symptoms of the positions the nations find themselves within. Socialist nations tend to find themselves in the middle of capitalist encirclement. Until the last capitalist is extinguished, class based exploitation will continue to exist.

I think perhaps you should read more of what Dr. King actually advocated for and said. He didn’t endorse violence, but he didn’t condemn it either. He typically didn’t come from it from this moralizing angle either, most of his emphasis was his belief that violence was first and foremost a poor tactic, but at the same time he understood why violence happens. You’ve probably heard his 1967 statement “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

When is violence permissable or moral then? Absolutely never? You have to imagine the types of situations people in the world face. I know a person from Gaza who was nearly finished with his university studies, now he lives in a tent with his mother and his little sister is dead. When I’m able to talk with him, he expresses almost nothing but violence and hatred against the Israeli state and the IDF.

Are you saying my friend Ali is in a bubble he should get out of? Or are you simply talking about your own experiences? Because even if so, you should at least feel some inclination of rage towards the people who did this to my friend.

If you just want to limit it to Haiti, Cuba, and the USSR, then yes each of those revolutions led to a vastly more humane society than the previous one. It also depends on who you’re asking. Tsar Nicholas II certainly didn’t see the Soviet Union as an improvement. Cuban plantation owners with dozens of slaves didn’t see socialism as an improvement. There are winners and losers in history, the losing side usually isn’t going to be pleased.

And who loses in a revolution? In a successful socialist revolution it’s the capitalist class, colonizers, slavers, the previous bureaucracy, regional landlords. The USSR went from a backwater literal peasant kingdom to a space faring modern country within a single generation, despite a famine and despite the brutal loss of life in WW2. It’s very easy to say the country that sends women to school to become nuclear engineers is not as brutally oppressive as the country with a monarch that forcefully sends women to become nuns. How do you determine oppression? Go look at things like literacy, child mortality, education, home ownership, access to clean water, and what kind of occupations women have. By those metrics, socialist revolutions typically and vastly reduce oppression.

I don’t know why you think we’re proposing a society without violence. We’re proposing a society where the working class wields the violence against the capitalist class until the capitalist class ceases to exist. We don’t like when violence happens to us and people in the same position as us. And if gaining more control over our own lives involves violence against the capitalist class, then that’s what it takes.

I genuinely couldn’t give a shit about a capitalist’s supposed civil rights, and I take John Brown’s advice for how to treat racists.

I make one “sort of” exception for Czechoslovakia. I regard it as the only time a country became socialist by voting on it, but they had to do a coup with the implicit threat of violence to enforce the new government. The communists won a plurality in 1946 and had a coalition government. Fearing that they’d lose power, they began stacking the cops and courts with ideological communists. This fear turned out to be true after the liberal parties kept doing sneaky tactics to undermine the socialists. So in 1948 the communists had a coup to consolidate power and ally with the USSR.

And I know this wasn’t “bloodless” or “civil” since this all happened in the shadow of WW2.

Oh ok, I guess nothing is good then and no one should even try to make alternatives. Cool

We got told to cool it with the emojis on other instances, because there’s a Lemmy bug that makes our emojis look giant when we’re not on Hexbear. A lot of us think it’s funny though that our pig shit image takes up the whole screen. I want it to be larger.

Warning: 🚨 ⚠️ Hexbearian detected! Everyone, into the posting bunkers!

Westerners deciding who’s doing real socialism or not. Westerners expressing their most vile sentiment for foreign countries rather than their own imperialism. Westerners praising the words of their own imperialist intelligence agencies. Westerners unironically praising their own nations for civil liberties like the freedom of fascists to assemble, freedom of racists to express themselves, freedom of parents to own their children, and freedom of school districts to continue racial segregation. Westerners praising imperialist nations like Norway as socialist while using bold language like fascism to describe places under that same exact threat of imperialism, like Cuba and Vietnam.

Westerners claiming foreign governments are merely pretending to be socialist, while claiming unorganized misinformed chauvinistic westerners are the true heirs to socialism, despite all they do is post online and complain about foreign nations.

Westerners praising anarchist movements from 100 years ago despite having no common cause with those movements, no connection to the circumstances within them, and probably no actual admiration of them. Westerners praising a bastardized, sectarian, perverse form of anarchism rather than attempting unity with organizations in their areas. Westerners refusing to speak with actual anarchists in their area, who by and large don’t give a shit and just want to hand out food or help at shelters. If Buenaventura Durruti were alive today he’d be regarded with scorn by western chauvinists.

Westerners continuing to bring up Trotsky of all people, who wasn’t relevant to world affairs for the last 15 years of his life and certainly not the past 80 years. Westerners not reading a single word of Trotsky’s work, westerners focusing entirely on Trotsky’s feud with Stalin, westerners not knowing that Trotsky was a literal military commander. Westerners calling themselves Trotskyists in 2023 for some reason. Westerners deciding they have a feud with Joseph Stalin, a man who died in 1953.

Westerners attempting to praise their own socialist leadership, who happen to be a scattered group of imperialist-aligned social democrats, Twitch streamers, and actual antisemitic grifters such as in the case of Caleb Maupin.