• You believe artistic expression that does not glorify the State is subversive behavior.
• You believe exercising any form of personal privacy is subversive behavior
• You believe it is theft (and subversive behavior) when someone else makes a profit from your labor, even though they pay you fair-market wages.
• You believe personal property should be abolished, and that no one should own anything, including their own bodies.
• You believe you are entitled access to free clothing, free education, free food, free housing, and free medical care from the State (e.g., the Bureaucracy) even if it is all sub-standard; but you will accept having to wait in line for days to receive any of it.
And these are just my personal favorite; there are plenty of other inane stereotypes in that thread, and this wonderfully mindnumbing caricature:
Obviously, Marx was a naïve idealist – ignorant of human nature and unhappy with the lack of free handouts he mistakenly believed he deserved for just being alive.
Look around. Capitalism works for those who know how to work it, and who are both willing and able to do so. The rest would become proletariat drones under any of the real-world “Communist” systems mentioned before (if they were allowed to live). Even Karl Marx was a slacker who lived off the wealth of others – I doubt that he would have survived in a real-world Communist state, or been happy in a real-world anarcho-syndicalist state.
Unsurprisingly, there is a grand total of zero citations in that thread, so it looks more like adults playing around than people attempting to have a meaningful discussion.
ETA:
• “Real” Communists are actually State Socialists currently living in Feudal Empires (e.g., China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam).
I think part of the problem is that most people (including self-professed socialists and communists) don’t read any theory.
AES isn’t communism, that’s kind of the point. Socialism is the next stage on the road to the theorized end stage that is communism. Communism will never sustainably be the organization of society 5 minutes (or even 5 years or probably 5 decades) after the revolution. That shit takes time and a lot of work, and AES systems were/are the attempts at doing the necessary work to reorganize society and eliminate the bourgeoise and their influence through socialist (as opposed to capitalist) proletarianization.
True, but the people who say “AES countries are not communist 🤓” mean it to say that those countries are actually tyrannical regimes. Saying that these places are socialist isn’t gonna work because these people don’t know what that word means either.
Anyway, you can argue that these countries are communist because they’re working to build communism, the same way that a communist party is communist. Because really, these words are synonymous to everyone but scholars.
True. Exactly why these people need to shut up until they read more (or any) theory lol
Indeed, good point. I do think it ought to be an educational priority to get people to understand and more commonly use this definition of “communist” as opposed to the “classless, moneyless” definition.
They’re kinda right but for the wrong reasons: as you say, AES haven’t reached full communism yet because there’s still a bourgeoisie; so they have to be tyrannical to the bourgeoisie to usher in the new world.
If you’re using communism to refer specifically to the classless, moneyless society where production is done for common need/want instead of individual profit, that is correct. However, communists have used the term to refer to something that actually does currently exist as well.
From the very first point in Principles of Communism:
This quote from The German Ideology is both very important and too often overlooked:
With this in mind, while no AES has abolished class society, the people directing these states are communists, and movement they are taking to liberate the proletariat is communism.
True, fair points. When I see the “real communism has never been tried” type statements, my head tends to get stuck on the definition being used by the person making the statement (i.e. as the classless, moneyless society). I do, however, recognize and stand behind the definition you’re pointing out.
The quotes you’ve provided illustrate perfectly the value of reading theory.
The dual use of the word communism is a major sticking point for those who don’t understand this already.
Yes we tell people to read theory, but many wont, and newcomers have a hard time separating the two, possibly leading some to turn away out of confusion that might otherwise embrace the theory.
Besides just using the socialism --> communism explanation, is there a better way to clarify definitions for new people? I’m a new concert and I figured it out, but it was quite the journey, but I’m quite persistent in my research.
Easily the “nOt ReAl CoMmUnIsM!” guys. The anti-coms are so far off base that their arguments make no sense and are easily disproven, even for a left-lib. The #notmycommunism people are far more insidious, as they keep people trapped in a doomer mentality, where communism “works in theory but in practice turns into a dictatorship.”