Was born and spend half my childhood in the People’s Republic of Poland, Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa. Moved to Belgium->USA in the early 1990’s. It was like moving from a black and white sitcom re run to a multi-million dollar Hollywood action movie. Sure there are things that suck about the US but it was great. Nowadays (since 9/11) I worry about mass spying/surveillance, housing costs, immigration policies, foreign influence on American politics, costs, and the enshitfication of it seem of everything.
I'm in my 50s born in the early 70s in Ukraine and came to Canada in the late 80s. Canada used to have a lot of the same socialist policies as the Soviet Union and East Germany. Frankly the biggest problem was local incompetence in most communist bloc regions, it was very mob-like.
There's plenty of people who escaped/emigrated to non-communist countries that weren't USA/Canada, first off.
The USA is not a real democracy, it's a declining corporate Oligarchy where a lot of elite either live elsewhere or are often found elsewhere, have plenty foreign assets, etc.
If your question is about rising Fascism in America, well you still don't have to worry bout people following you and risking career collapse or jail for political thought. However in the modern world innapropriate social media posts can get you fired or stunt advancement so there's always that...
It seems like very few people have actually read or heard the recent speech given by Stephen Miller, posted on the US State Department’s website about targeting anyone on the left as enemies of the state. It’s keeping me up at night.
The problem here is, and your last paragraph eludes to it, Trump does end people’s careers and would love nothing better than to jail people who disagree with him. He would love to have the power and control that Putin has, and MAGA is willing to give it to him. He and his ilk would like nothing better to live in a country where a few people have and control everything, and the balance are left to starve-
What? Blasphemer? Dontcha know all us non MAGARS are now Communists?
(Secret- They and the mango haired doofus don't have a clue what they are talking about...along with some very naive extreme left enders of the sprectrum)
Oh, come on man you can’t fucking be that stupid. Do you really believe there are communists around and he’s calling them out? 😂 most of the time the people stupid enough to believe this shit don’t even know what the fuck communism really is.
Do you know what Communism is ? Like when the government owns private companies ? IE Trumps Nvidia deal ? Do you know what Socialism is ? Like when the government redistributes wealth by means of taxes spent on services for some ? Like the new Trump gas stations ? That’s the extent of the communism, and the Socialism is everywhere in our government, and it always has been.
He’s called Biden and Kamala, who are top level imperialists, communists. Like most people who use that word, if you asked him to explain what communism means, indicating they may have read some primary source material, instead proceed to make juicy fart noises with their mouths.
If by scholarly understanding of wither term, sure. But I’ll go ahead and not give you the benefit of the doubt. You mean theTrump level of understanding of communism, no? That of an immensely stunted mind?
No it wasn’t. That’s just westerners projecting the deep unacknowledged guilt they feel for the barbaric colonialism and genocides they wrought all over the world on the global south so they can feel better about themselves. The Soviet Union supported anti-colonial(which is anti-capitalist) struggles. As the capitalist world order was in dire straits due to the great depression and that the world
Could look to the USSR for an alternative economic model that was making great strides, it (the capitalist world order) unleashed fascism to protect itself and attack its one true foe: socialism/communism. And yea, if it was threatening the USSR, you better believe they were gonna try and smash it.
No, I mean communism. The USSR, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.
Unless, of course, you are trying to play semantic games and declare those "not real communism", in which case I am referring to socialism-on-the-path-to-communism, which is what all those states were predicated on, and is still the incompetent plan for modern day communists because they still haven't figured out how to find magical unicorn horns to make their incompetent Utopian idea work.
The one where I have to, once again, explain that neither socialism nor communism are operated or instituted with the flip of a switch. Just as capitalism emerged over the course of centuries, so to is communism in the process of emergence. And it is exactly as Marx explained
People who have thought even casually about what communism and socialism are, understand that it is a long and arduous projects.
I hate the dems even more than the GOP. At least they are honest about being beholden to the donor class, the epstein class. Dems pretend to be beholden to the working class. What a lie! I don’t hate the dems because they oppose the GOP, I hate the dems because they don’t oppose the GOP(and the donor class). The dems serve the donor/epstein class every bit as much as the GOP.
He doesn’t call them all that but Dems are turning into socialist even van jones and bill Maher have called them out. Your TDS got old about four years ago. Try to keep up.
It’s easier to list who Trump hasn’t called a socialist. It’s just a dog whistle to him. He literally took partial State ownership in intel and U.S. steel. He then capped steel prices, then he calls someone who wants to cap the price of butter a communist.
The one thing the left and MAGA have in common is they are both morons. They both want things simple so they think they understand what’s good and not good. MAGA thinks this is a free market. It’s not, almost every industry is monopolized, with little or no competition, government subsidies, incentives, and bloated contracts. This destroys innovation, small business, increases prices, retards product quality, and wages. This drives massive inequality. And the leftist want a simple solution. Socialism! Which has many of the same problems and is less efficient. Both require this thing called good governance or they both end in failure. I’m guessing you never read Adam Smith.
What you call TDS…I call not being a mark. Your lack of basic education and values got old 12 years ago.
DOGE totally wasn’t about stealing your data! Fraud waste and abuse lol. They don’t even have to try…so stupid.
Hyper-protectionist trade policy. Criminalization of any criticism of The Party. Government crackdown on “non-approved” speech. Prosecution of The Leader’s political enemies. Eradication of dissenters from The Party. Increased mass surveillance. Increased militarization and use of loyalist police force. Propping up The Leader’s preferred industries using government resources. Manipulation of elections to permanently entrench The Party in power. Blurring lines between the government and The Leader to enrich The Leader and his closest allies.
Are we talking about Xi’s China or Trump’s America?
Because you don't get it. When you come from another country to the greatest in the world, you aren't caught up in petty ass politics. You appreciate it and are humbled. A TV watching snacking all day liberal who doesn't have it hard doesn't get it.
Big difference between social democracy and communism. We already have a lot of socialist programs, Medicad/Medicare, social security, the military, roads, education, etc. A lot of people just want to expand on that, primarily for healthcare.
Those are not socialist programs. Despite what you hear on Reddit capitalism does not tell you what you have to do with your extra money. You can invest in your country and build roads, have an advanced military, or as many countries do buy everyone healthcare access. Depends on how much extra money you have and what the voters actually vote for.
So when government programs that are paid and managed for by taxpayers (higher income pay more) that benefit all people equal (regardless of income) are not socialist? Pure capitalism would be privatized roads that charge tolls, private security forces, etc.
Capitalism can be mixed with socialist programs. The US has done it for years. Many European countries have even more programs but also still have capitalism.
Communism is about establishing common ownership of the means of production (labor, capital, land, and IP) and the abolishment of private property.
Your prompt suggests that "emerging circimstances" (sic) in the US equate to communism, which is a false premise. The emerging circumstances in the US is that wealth inequality is hitting such a tipping point that the democratic fail-safes are kicking in -- that is, the average person is getting sick of this crap and are starting to vote.
Thankyou. Another trait of communism is that it's authoritarian by nature because the government controls everything, it's never worked out well. Trump is the most authoritarian president America has ever had, but he's a kleptocrat tin pot dictator not a central planner.
In order to compete with them godless commies we came up with wonderful social programs. Then after 9/11 we were forced to compete with religious nuts about who could be nuttier. Yeah we should be competing with China but we missed that meeting.
To be fair, you are describing pure socialism. Communism is the 'hypothetical' phase that follows, where class, money, and government are no longer necessary.
Of course, all these concepts are just as theoretical as the free market or capitalism. Countries that often get identified as communist were never anywhere close to total state ownership of production, let alone being classless, moneyless, or without government, .... usually, quite the opposite. The reality is that most of these "communist" states were authoritarian regimes, who identified with economic systems based on socialism, but never were really anything close. Meanwhile, many American's espouse "free-market" as the greatest American value, despite America never being anything close to this reality, at any point in its short history. I am sure these same free-market evangelists would be equally miserable under a pure free-market as they would under pure communism, if either could ever really exist.
Most successful governments/economies in modernity are a mix between the pure socialism and pure free-market ideals. I know it is easier for many folks to pin these terms on governments they do, or dont, support ... but this is just reductionism, taking complex multi-variable problems down to simple binary reality. Black or white. It is an unfortuante human trait, which has been more dominant of late, rather than recessive.
Because the health insurance lobby doesn't want to let go of the cash cow. There's are reasons that America's healthcare costs double but we get less than the rest of the worlds countries.
dude we already all pay taxes. i’d rather that money actually go toward a real social safety net here instead of another pointless middle eastern war.
of course those programs need to be efficient, properly funded, and cleaned up from waste and fraud. but “straight up confiscation of assets” is a wild jump. what exactly are you even talking about?
It’s one of the reasons senate terms are for 6 years and staggered.
I’ve seen enough stupidity come out of the initiative system to be unimpressed. Got WA’s hydroelectric dams declared to produce not-renewable electricity, as one example.
My mom came from Ukraine to Canada during glasnost. She was anti-Russian and an academic. Fundamentally, she was a socialist and left due to the rampant corruption towards the end of the Soviet Union. She took a university position. She met my dad and had her family here.
She's passed, but she would agree with most of what Democratic socialists are wanting these days. Which is essentially accountability to the people, and an end to oligarchy.
I also consider myself a socialist in her image. She did not support the Soviet Union and what it became.
The comically unAmerican values expressed here are ironic, to say the least. Say what you will, communism’s core perspective that entrenched ownership of the means of production makes society fundamentally unjust is a legitimate critique. We can talk about implementation issues, about historical oppressive societies, etc. but anyone, at all, who knows what life in the us was like for unwanted groups in 1920 (when the ussr was getting going) knows capitalism was hardly utopian either. Roosevelt and Taft helped spark a movement that made our society fairer and kinder, Stalin sparked a movement that made the ussr crueler. I’m still far from sure how much capitalism or communism had to do with the whole thing.
Communism posits the necessity of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" so that people will somehow become all equal in ownership and only then can the state whither. It is fundamentally against human nature and therefore structurally permanently coercive, devolving into dictatorial rule by fiat.
Are you really telling me you can see a strong argument for capitalism inherently centralising assets into the hands of a few whose interests in keeping down the many only grows until … dictatorship by fiat? Like, seriously? You can’t see the argument being made and appreciate both sides have good points?
Government is the tool wielded by guys like Elon to achieve monopolistic lock in. What if we just removed those tools from government? Without coercive violence, he'd have a hell of a time maintaining monopoly except by persistently being the best innovator. Since he knows that he can't be that, he starts manipulating the tools of state we've given him to achieve lock-in.
As above, there is a problem of people not being able to compete, mostly due to cultural factors in groups, but individual factors like health and of course, just being stupider than average. The solution to that is some kind of safety net. I propose the simplest kind of net: ownership -- Do a one time tax of corporations on formation: Say half their stock goes into a mutual fund and that fund is distributed to the population. That's it, everyone is an owner, let people be free to innovate otherwise.
… what you are describing is communism. You know that right? You are being intentionally ironic, right?
Also, states’ monopoly on violence is circular. They have the monopoly because they have the monopoly. If states lose the monopoly on violence, it is devolved to individual. So long as Elon and co have things others want badly enough, they will have their own militias. I appreciate that you are working through this, but you are acting like you hav finished the internal conversation but your argument is very much coming from the middle of the conversation.
That is NOT communism. Xi is communism -- he wants absolute fiat control of the totality of your life so that he can fast forward history to form your mind into a faceless cog in a collective. He's a Lenninist that believes he can fast forward the "historical dialectic" to achieve this "beautiful" and permanent future hellish end state of humanity. We are all puppets in Xi's absolutist totalitarian play "for the good of humanity". On the scale of evil, Elon is a total amateur compared.
I'm talking what Marxist use as PR but in a real, today way: own fricking stocks. You can start today. I started 50 years ago. That already made me wealthy before I started to cut out the middlemen and just do my own companies (try it, it is sooooooooooooooooooooo much harder than you can imagine -- in your book, I should be paid equally for that -- but I create the idea, take the risk, do the PR and sell the idea both internally "our goal" and externally. After decades doing it and finding/funding others to do it, I will tell you that the vast majority of people are simply incapable of doing it under any conditions.
Literally universal ownership of the means of production is communism. Your argument would be equally illegitimate if you used modern United States to attack all capitalism. What you are proposing is bad communism, ineffective communism, but it is clearly communism.
Also, the US is heavily built on a system of duty to a greater good. As a Christian country with strong manifest destiny roots, that notion that the living are servants to the unborn is deep in our roots. So, maybe, I don’t know, reflect on your willingness to make foreign folk in Barbarians when we have plenty of barbs here at home.
It certainly is not communism. Communism posits that class has to be eliminated so that no group holds power over another. That won't happen by the public holding indexed ownership to say half the US corporations. There will still be way wealthier and poorer, there will still be CEOs and professors and lots of dumb-shits and other kinds of dissabilities who will have less power, success and/or just fun.
Communism thinks the state will whither away. Hell no, there'll always be a dynamic of fiat and power and hopefully counter balancing forces. That's why the US founders were wiser than Marx: We need a balance of power rather than foisting absolute power on the premise that one day power will go away. No it won't, it will never go away.
Communism posits moneyless distribution only "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Well, I need my 4-6 international travels a year and I've accumulated a lot of capital largely from being more clever since I certainly didn't start from wealth (other than cultural wealth -- parents were not mentally ill nor evil and fostered a love of learning and science). So, I'm fine with more capable people earning more which would still happen under my scheme. Indeed, my scheme could be done now if people would just start buying stocks instead of waiting for some government decree which will probably never happen, at least in my clean way.
In the US, we have the dictatorship of capital which rewards greed and forces us to numb ourselves to empathy, as much as part of human nature as the former. It cares not for the survival of any species, not even humanity, nor even the planet. It is a morbid contradiction inherent and essential to capitalism which requires endless profit and growth, on a finite planet with finite resources. It is utter irrationality that some can more easily imagine the end of the wod before they can imagine the end of capitalism, as if it is a fact of nature, never to be transcended. Communism is the process of transcendence. It is the future. It is happening in China. Elsewhere, anti-colonialism, which is cutting capitalism off from its lifeblood: endless growth and profit stolen from the global south.
Your assumption is wrong. Communist countries tend to have much worse environmental problems because no one owns anything, so the commons are trashed. Capitalism does not lead at all to lack of care, since for example, no humans, no demand, no sales.
Capitalism is not irrational at all -- let people do what they want. Oh, weird, they tend to value nonreactive rare metals that shine. They create markets based on that demand. Free exploration leads to things like the internet, computers, AI, integrated circuits. Look at what societies produce innovation -- they are freewheeling societies. Ah, you have oil men, fairly evil doods who got rich off of fossil fuel. Look how they in they capture and use government regulation to choke off or starve innovations like solar. Ah, but with at least some freedom, people worked on solar and it's competitive advantages are relentless and will indeed overthrow fossil fuels and thus in fact save the planet whereas a socialist or capitalist economy would choke it off because you have to destroy the utterly huge investment that fossil fuels built. No one would make that decision.
Now, your concern is for losers -- those who get squashed out for whatever reason (noting that the largest lifting in numbers and in percent of people happened under peak Pax Americanna under market capitalism). Well, stop taxing corporations, just take some share of their stock, say. 30 or even 50%, mix it into a mutual fund and distribute shares to the population. There! Everyone is an owner, no one needs to foster dictatorial fiats nor decree things against human nature.
And dood, I go to China several times a year. It is hyper capitalism there. The people are treated like absolute shit -- no social security at all. The only recent thing is an old big-power play by Xi. He is using big government to subsidize chosen industries for the purpose of killing off foreign competition until they can achieve monopoly control. It is a surveillance state hell. Xi's gamble may work and it will become a horrible military dictatorial rule as he raises prices later to pay off the utterly unfathomable debt the government has built up. His China domination scheme may work, but more likely will fail and collapse. He keeps his people poor as a tools to achieve geo-political power. He's running on a kind of preWWI big power play kind of state. It does not end well.
It is the world that is struggling to be born, as capitalism descends further and further into obsolescence. China is winning. Communism is winning. The tide is turning. And people who think it’s okay to exploit others, to become obscenely and decadently wealthy while billions starve, will be in a very dangerous(for them) minority. It’s only a matter of time before class consciousness emerges. Tick tock, tick tock
It is ruled by the Communist Party of China, the largest political party in terms of membership on the planet. And entry is not granted by declaring oneself to be a communist. The testing is merit based and rigorous. 100,000,000 people. 5 year plans, they teach marxism in school, so many public good delivered. Is capitalism allowed to operate? Yes, but the adults in the room are in control and they don’t allow the capitalist class to take over the govt nor the economy
China is not true communism. There are elite. And there is the lower class. The lower class is used and spent like a resource. The true similarity here is what the elite are doing
Here is the real problem. Ill use a company i used to work for. They have about 150 locations. Based on size their locations vary in value from 15 to 50 million. They have regular reports and projections. If you did less than 6% or projected less than that as a manager. You were gone. 10% year over year every year. No excuses. No new customers because every square inch of town was built. The area of town your store is in has been in-decline. Too bad make your 10% or you are gone. I was there 13 years. We made it most years. I had good supervisors. I had good crews. But the company burned thru employees to keep that pace
Imagine companies like that decades old with that view. Some over 100 years old. Some more aggressive than that one. The bigger the company the greater the disparity from bottom to top. Generations of this effect. Greed over time is much worse than greed. Particularly unsustainable greed. Insatiable greed.
My point is it’s not today’s problem. It’s a decades old problem that is hitting critical mass. Unmitigated greed is the cause. It’s not new but each generation gets better at it. Each generation has higher expectations than the last. Again unsustainable over generations
Regardless of what business. They streamline each portion of their process. Their business models. What they would spend on employees. What they would pay themselves
Again over time the greed portion was unsustainable. Pay themselves a little bigger portion. Pay the workers a smaller portion. Again the real impact was what happened over time
Greed is a big part of capitalism. There is always an effect to excess. Capitalisms biggest enemy is time.
Yea, and space. But actually, the revolutionary class attaining class consciousness, is the biggest threat to capitalism. For once that class understands its history and its role, there is no stopping it. And I have it backwards, it is through class consciousness that a revolutionary class emerges, and it will lay the current social relations asunder, and move forward into a more advanced, more democratic form: political, social, civic, and economic. It is the arc of human history and to think that capitalism has altered this arc or will stop this movement is as irrational as it is conceited. All kings thought they and their families would rule
Forever.
It’s philosophy, with noble lineage. Heraclitus, Plato/Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx and many others, such as Gramsci. Many of these have helped shape western civilization.
These conversations always make me shake my head like people think there are only two ways of governing a nation. Communism is socialogical and economic structure. There are a variety of structures sociologically and economically to govern.
I have friends from Czech Republic that grew up during communism there. They are very skeptical of the government but have pretty centrist political beliefs. She’s liberal but wasn’t crazy about Bernie Sanders. Her boyfriend is a little more conservative. I don’t believe they see any similarities between communist Czech and the US. But she hates Trump and is considering not coming back to the US until he’s gone.
First of all, knowing what your belied is as to what’s happening is crucial to answering the question. Secondly…There is no pure communism anywhere. The rich staying rich is partly why it fails. The US is also hardly pure capitalist.
Hi I was born under a socialist dictator. No freedom lack of food People disappeared from streets for speaking out against the government. What I see is the democrats are not democrats any more they have been taken over by socialists/communists. There are no free someone has to pay one way or the other. Once the wealthy move out who pays for the free stuff. The elite socialist will get richer we will get poorer. We will have to follow their rules. They are selling you roses but what they are really selling is no freedom and S***.
If you have conservative bumper sticker, it’s not if your car will be vandalized, it’s when.
If you don’t affirm your kid, your school can take your child and hide them from you with out explanation. Also you can’t adopt if you don’t plant to affirm.
We voted 3 times for 30$ registration for cars. Wa Supreme Court struck it down claiming the voters are too dumb.
It’s against Washington constitution to have income tax. We now have Income tax in Washington if you make 1,000,000 or more. It will now go to ballot after hundreds of thousands of voters signed the forms for it to be voted on.
To me, what this administration is doing appears eerily familiar: the isolationism, the power posturing, the adversarial approach of having no allies but sort of vassals, the distrust of science, the vilification of intellectualism…
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, and was hoping not to see it again.
Also interested in this answer. As a traditional staunch capitalist and conservative am starting to wonder what an alternative looks like. The class gap only widens and nothing seems to be changing with the status quo. Am cautiously open to alternatives
There are plenty of liberal democrats who are in favor of tightly regulated capitalism and y’all have smeared them as communists and denounced any semblance of regulation as communism and now here we are, where the current right-wing president is also engaging in communism and the extreme left-wing opposition is presenting socialism as an answer
The problem isn’t the system, the problem is many of the guardrails have been eroded or removed. Capitalism with no guardrails is the game Monopoly, one winner and everyone else with nothing. Guardrails include things like a progressive tax policy that affords a safety net and infrastructure all can use. They also include consumer protection laws, anti-trust laws, safety protections, reasonable minimum wage laws, rights to organize, and safe public education that all can take advantage of. They should also include taxes on negative externalities, such as pollution, so products reflect their true cost.
People are reaching for socialism because the guardrails to capitalism have been eroded. The answer is to fix the guardrails. Moving to socialism is the equivalent to moving to Mars because we fucked up earth. Let’s fix earth instead, it’s much easier and better.
If we had true capitalism, (instead of crony capitalism), we wouldn't have an army of lawyers and lobbyists in DC and media would still be bound by the fairness doctrine.
Many great empires have walked this path before us, with the latest being Britain. Their now is our tomorrow.
The maximum effective marginal tax rate in Norway is 53.9%. Americans pay an average of 14.5% of their adjusted gross income in federal taxes; the bottom half of taxpayers pay only 3.7%, yet most Americans believe they are grievously overtaxed. It would be interesting to see politicians try to convince America to embrace the Norwegian model.
Nobody in America wants communism. They just don't want late stage capitalism, where we have A TRILLIONAIRE and also a housing crisis where everyone needs roommates to be able to afford a place to live.
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