"Alt Right" activist asks for Lenin Statue to be removed

[Deleted]

No, it doesn't. Try again.

Yes it does.

[Felya]

You get that it was a point of contention at this point?
Whether or not the US is like the EU or like a state.

No, only one side carried the American flag. They were the ones who wanted to keave America. This is nothing like EU... EU is not the federal government of any country.

- - - Updated - - -

Yes it does.

You are comparing America, to Europe... not a country in Europe... but, Europe...

[Elegiac]

Yes it does.

It does not. "Means of production" does not mean "all property".

[Chrysia]

Do i need to explain 'most' to you?

No, because the limited suffrage the US won was better than the zero suffrage they had previously.

[Deleted]

Mussolini rejected egalitarianism, a key component of Socialism. Yes, he was raised socialist, but Fascism isn't "rooted in socialism."

No it opposed the internationalism of socialism, in favor of nationalism.
Benito himself considered 'socialism', by which he meant, as currently practiced, was 'dead', a sham, a mere replacement of the same system that socialism was meant to oppose.
- Instead favoring his 'improved' version.
Feel free to read his book on the matter, it's much better than Mein Kampf, because Mussolini could write.

- - - Updated - - -

It does not. "Means of production" does not mean "all property".

i have this strange dejavu, almost like i said that:

It bans private property.
It actually expects and encourages each individual to do their best work.
For the collective - because again, it bans private ownership of the means of production.

Oh wait, i did.

- - - Updated - - -

No, because the limited suffrage the US won was better than the zero suffrage they had previously.

For most they started with zero suffrage, and ended with, zero suffrage.

[Elegiac]

i have this strange dejavu, almost like i said that:

Oh wait, i did.

In which case you are contradicting yourself. Private property =/= means of production.

[Mittens]

Are you saying Nazism didn't result in mass murder?

1833 is after every major armed conflict between Britain and the United States. You can in no way accurately claim George Washington fought the British to preserve slavery.

If we make a body count nazis are far behind commies. And even disregarding the horrible examples by state-led implementation, communism doesn't work unless we assume post-scarcity and at that point we might as well add magic.

[Chrysia]

No it opposed the internationalism of socialism, in favor of nationalism.
Benito himself considered 'socialism', by which he meant, as currently practiced, was 'dead', a sham, a mere replacement of the same system that socialism was meant to oppose.
- Instead favoring his 'improved' version.
Feel free to read his book on the matter, it's much better than Mein Kampf, because Mussolini could write.


For most they started with zero suffrage, and ended with, zero suffrage.

What Mussolini considered it is irrelevant. It bore no resemblance to Socialism and was a far-right, conservative ideology built upon preserving national identity at all costs. It's literally as far from Socialism as you can realistically get.

And yet, it was still a better system than under the English, when they had nobody who even might share some of their concerns in government.

- - - Updated - - -

If we make a body count nazis are far behind commies. And even disregarding the horrible examples by state-led implementation, communism doesn't work unless we assume post-scarcity and at that point we might as well add magic.

I've already acknowledged that Communism isn't feasible with current production, and by population, Nazis aren't behind Communists. Mao's Great Leap Forward is responsible for something like 3/4 of the deaths under Communism, and it was mainly so bad because the population of China was and is so goddamn large. In raw, visceral numbers it is horrible, but you really do have to take per capita into account if you're going to compare ideologies implemented in different times to different populations.

[Grapemask]

These communism debates always go in circles, because one side wants to say communism is evil without question, and the other side inevitably gets to "Communism has never been tried," then the other side rolls their eyes, and eventually we're always back at square one and going around and around and around again.

All current examples of communist parties have not been the greatest, yeah. But it is also true that they're not accurate representations of Communism, with a capital C. Whereas capitalism can be only partially in effect and still work (or however we define that it's "working"), the problem with Communism is that it needs all of its central tenants to be held for its theories to work out. But communist parties to date have tended to only apply those needed for dictatorship - centralized power and control of all resources by that centralized power being the most common theme. Groups piggybacked to power by usurping popular peasant-class movements while warping those movements to their needs.

Communism isn't evil in and of itself. Communism could be fine for anyone knows. The groups that pretend to employ communism have been overwhelmingly shitmongers. Kind of like Nazism, only Nazism was designed to shitmonger as soon as the party elected Hitler to run it.

Anyway, the real meat of what I was wanting to respond to here...

How can it be completely irrelevant? Both Washington and "Confederate" was a rebell, traitor and slave owner.....

Because it's not at all the same argument. The hatred of Confederate monuments isn't because the men happened to be slaveholders. That's not the debate. Maybe that will be a topic American society takes up in the future and then we'll decide we hate all of the monuments to people who ever had slaves, but for right now, we're talking about something else.

Washington and Jefferson and company - our people, our cultural ancestors - won their war, and it was not a war for slavery. Yeah, you can be a shitmonger and try to twist slaves into it and pretend that had anything to do with what they fought for, but any good historian would smack you in the face for diverting from the actual complaints the colonists had. Taxation, tariffs, trade, representation, laws, and some of the same globalism stuff we have today with the sentiment of "it's ridiculous that the people in charge are on the other side of the planet" (an argument that actually made sense then, pre-internet, cars, and planes and all).

The Confederates, on the other hand, seceded for slavery, fought a war to maintain their independence in order to keep slavery, and hey, did we mention slavery, the basis of everything the Confederacy was about. Anyone trying to say it was anything else is talking revisionist history; a particular revision that began in the 1900s when the wealthy Southern aristocracy tried to rebrand the whole thing. And hey, also, they lost.

And that's the topic of debate. These are monuments to people who fought to maintain slavery... and lost. These statues exist only to glorify people who fought for slavery, and they were erected only because racist southerners wanted to take a stab at blacks while they weren't busy lynching them for postcard photos. These monuments were literally built for the specific purpose of showing hatred. Defending them is insane and speaks only of handwaving, desperate attempts to revise history, or just plain ignorance.

There is some context to when a Confederate memorial can be appropriate. Gettysburg and other Civil War battlefields have some decent examples. Places where we remember that Americans killed each other in a Civil War and it sucked. But when you cross that line of remembering tragedy and turn to celebrating the people who fought for slavery, you done goofed.

[Mittens]

What Mussolini considered it is irrelevant. It bore no resemblance to Socialism and was a far-right, conservative ideology built upon preserving national identity at all costs. It's literally as far from Socialism as you can realistically get.

And yet, it was still a better system than under the English, when they had nobody who even might share some of their concerns in government.

- - - Updated - - -



I've already acknowledged that Communism isn't feasible with current production, and by population, Nazis aren't behind Communists. Mao's Great Leap Forward is responsible for something like 3/4 of the deaths under Communism, and it was mainly so bad because the population of China was and is so goddamn large. In raw, visceral numbers it is horrible, but you really do have to take per capita into account if you're going to compare ideologies implemented in different times to different populations.

It's not a production issue, it's a resource issue. For communism to work you would need to have infinite resources and some resources like land are always going to be scarce.

[Chrysia]

It's not a production issue, it's a resource issue. For communism to work you would need to have infinite resources and some resources like land are always going to be scarce.

Not infinite, just enough that your population doesn't undergo scarcity. That would mean your population would have to have room to expand indefinitely, I agree, but that's true of any socioeconomic system, and is never going to coincide with reality. It's a red herring.

I see you didn't respond to my rebuttal of the rest of your point. Nazism, as a percentage of the population that they controlled, killed more innocents than Communism did. They also unquestioningly killed more intentionally, as Nazism's greatest losses of innocent life were in concentration and labor camps, whereas most of Communism's deaths were from poorly allocated resources. Both ideologies committed atrocities, but the Communists mainly did so through neglect, rather than outright malice.

[Kraenen]

Communism: a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. Seems pretty neutral to me.

His claim was that Communism was worse than Nazism because the implementation of Communism resulted in mass murder, as if Nazism didn't. It unambiguously did.

And you're forgetting there's a pretty important step in between your definition and the current reality. The forceful taking of property. This is not a morally neutral policy by any means.

[Chrysia]

And you're forgetting there's a pretty important step in between your definition and the current reality. The forceful taking of property. This is not a morally neutral policy by any means.

The forceful taking of the means of production, not all property.

[Mittens]

Not infinite, just enough that your population doesn't undergo scarcity. That would mean your population would have to have room to expand indefinitely, I agree, but that's true of any socioeconomic system, and is never going to coincide with reality. It's a red herring.

I don't think you are getting this. All economic systems require the economic calculation problem to be solved, which essentially asks how to distribute resources efficiently. Most systems approach this problem by forming a state and that state passing the necessary laws for the redistribution to occur and ensure(this is the most important part so keep dips on this) it. Communism by its definition is stateless, so their approach to the problem is through the formation of small communities that have high trust and look for each other in exchange of intangible goods (as an example look up gift economy). Small communities with no form of hierarchy just flat out suck at defending their turf. So in any fight for resources the small community is just flat out crushed by any organized military.

[Kraenen]

The forceful taking of the means of production, not all property.

Okay? So you're saying that since it isn't taking away all property, just production like factories and who really knows what else (and money), that it's a neutral ideology. Right...

[Chrysia]

I don't think you are getting this. All economic systems require the economic calculation problem to be solved, which essentially asks how to distribute resources efficiently. Most systems approach this problem by forming a state and that state passing the necessary laws for the redistribution to occur and ensure(this is the most important part so keep dips on this) it. Communism by its definition is stateless, so their approach to the problem is through the formation of small communities that have high trust and look for each other in exchange of intangible goods (as an example look up gift economy). Small communities with no form of hierarchy just flat out suck at defending their turf. So any fight for resources the small community is just flat out crushed by any organized military.

Riiiiiight, but it still doesn't require infinite resources. That's one solution, an overkill one, as plentiful resources is sufficient, the other solution is getting the entire human race to view themselves as one community. Neither is feasible at this time, or any time in the foreseeable future.

I'm not arguing that Communism is likely, or manageable. I'm arguing that Communism isn't evil because it isn't Stalinism.

- - - Updated - - -

Okay? So you're saying that since it isn't taking away all property, just production like factories and who really knows what else (and money), that it's a neutral ideology. Right...

The seizing of means of production, depending on the use they are put to and the compensation provided, can in fact be morally neutral.

[Kraenen]

The seizing of means of production, depending on the use they are put to and the compensation provided, can in fact be morally neutral.

I feel like I'm pulling teeth here - how is forcefully seizing property morally neutral?

[Chrysia]

I feel like I'm pulling teeth here - how is forcefully seizing property morally neutral?

If it's being seized in order to efficiently protect the lives and livelihood of the populace, and the owner is compensated sufficiently, then it's morally neutral. This hasn't, in general, happened in practice, and isn't likely to either, but it can be morally neutral. There are negative aspects and positive aspects to it.

It's kinda like emergency services having the ability to seize any vehicle in the event of an emergency. It's not ideal, but it's better than emergency services being unable to respond to emergencies.

[Mittens]

Riiiiiight, but it still doesn't require infinite resources. That's one solution, an overkill one, as plentiful resources is sufficient, the other solution is getting the entire human race to view themselves as one community. Neither is feasible at this time, or any time in the foreseeable future.

I'm not arguing that Communism is likely, or manageable. I'm arguing that Communism isn't evil because it isn't Stalinism.

- - - Updated - - -



The seizing of means of production, depending on the use they are put to and the compensation provided, can, in fact, be morally neutral.

But that's the thing, communism only works in small communities where people have stupidly high levels of trust because they know each other well. We know from the Dunbar's number that the limit to how much people you can know well dwells around 100-250 people. You cannot possibly convince the entire world to be part of a high trust community, so unless we return to a tribal hunter-gatherer society and stay there forever, communism will remain a failure.

[Chrysia]

But that's the thing, communism only works in small communities where people have stupidly high levels of trust because they know each other well. We know from the Dunbar's number that the limit to how much people you can know well dwells around 100-250 people. You cannot possibly convince the entire world to be part of a high trust community, so unless we return to a tribal hunter-gatherer society and stay there forever, communism will remain a failure.

Which, again, I'm not arguing Communism is feasible. I'm arguing it's not evil.