FunkyStuff [he/him]

It’s weird that boomers tend to strawman us as responding to criticisms of AES with “that’s not true socialism.” Maybe socdems who think Norway is socialist but Cuba isn’t would say that, but anyone who’s reading Marx and is actively participating in discussions about socialism above a high school level probably understands that real socialism has been tried and has succeeded.

Which brings me to my next point: Socialism’s biggest success story is China. It defies every trope yet it looks like most Western leftists are too afraid to claim it as the success it is, evidence that without sanctions, coups, and blockades socialism is a system that can take us to the future capitalism is currently killing. For every rags to riches story in America, there are thousands of people who received dignity, employment, and an economy that worked in their favor thanks to Chinese socialism. It’s the best example of what socialism can achieve without being sabotaged, a country that went from a feudal backwater with tyrannical landlords, where the local warlords could claim the peasants’ daughters as their property, where famines would routinely come and kill several million people, to the largest and most advanced economy in the world in less than a century. And they accomplished this by taking on Western capital and beating them at their own game.

protest for the sake of conducting the genocide more effectively is definitely enough reason to cut settlers some slack!

At least in Star Wars they explain the context with the scroll at the start of the movie, libs think that Ukraine literally popped into existence in 2022.

“Not humanly possible” is a quote from an American swimmer commenting on the Chinese athlete’s performance.

If China tested fewer athletes than the US, you’d call them lax. But they test more than anywhere else and that’s sketchy because it makes this particular metric look better.

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

communism made lemmy so where does that leave us