this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Where do we put the *cides from left dictatorships?
Left and Dictatorship do not have compatible definitions. This is like asking "where do we put all the pregnant virgins?"
So by your definition, Soviet Union and communist China were not actually left, just pretending ?
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russian-politics-right-confusion/
Giving lip service to being "left wing" but not actually behaving in such a manner does not make a government left wing.
I don't mind working with different definitions, but I don't think yours is very common.
What do you think about Marx, is he not left wing either?
If he is, what do you think about his notion of dictatorship of the proletariat?
Because this notion is pretty much the ideological justification for the dictatorships that were built in Soviet Union, China and other Marxist governments.
It is the standard definition. You just aren't personally familiar with it, because, and I'm sorry if this sounds like a personal attack, your education system and media are designed in part to indoctrinate you into liberal ideology.
Uh - yes? It is from Marx that we get this definition you call "not common"!
That it is absolute democracy, run by the people themselves!
Revisionist trash!
Indeed, you resorting to personal attacks makes it less likely for me to be willing to talk with you or your friends at Hexbear. I'm not American by the way, my country is way more socialist but never was communist (the split happened by opposition with Soviet dictatorship).
How can dictatorship be absolute democracy? You said dictatorship is completely opposed to left ideology just before.
If it's absolute democracy how can it be also a dictatorship?
By the way, this dictatorship is supposed to be an intermediate step in Marx's ideology, to protect the revolution from counter revolutions, before "real" communism is instated. Strangely it seems to never have happened, the countries that tried it staid at the dictatorship level, which was pretty much an oligarchy.
What happened in your opinion? Why did it not work?
I didn't attack you in any way. Not sure what you're on about. I'm also not a Hexbear user.
I didn't call you American. I called your country liberal, which is a pretty safe bet since you're here on Lemmy speaking English, and the majority of the Imperial Core and Periphery have some kind of liberal democracy going on. Unless you're in Cuba or Vietnam, there's little chance your country has anything resembling socialism going on.
Because it is the whole population doing the dictating.
Yes, dictatorship in the common parlance, meaning absolute rule by an individual or minority.
You have spent a very long time on this point. I don't mean to be rude, but didn't you think for a moment you might have misunderstood? Dictatorship of the proletariat means the common people rule themselves.
Only if you believe Lenin. And...
Yes, strange, indeed. Because the USSR was revisionist trash, as I already stated. They forgot the "proletariat" part of "dictatorship of the proletariat". Odd that you seem unaware of Cuba and Vietnam, though.
Because it was revisionist trash.
Look up what European social democracy means. It is just called socialism in most countries in there, and it's distinct from communism. I think there's a difference of vocabulary evolution compared to the Anglo-Saxon world.
Didn't mention Cuba and Vietnam because they had less impact and deaths than the big two. But please describe me how they avoided oligarchy and allowed proletariat dictatorship which is not a actually dictatorship but something certainly better than liberal or European style social democracy.
If it is just the common people ruling itself why is it not just democracy?
What I said about the intermediate step is in Marx writings not just Lenin's.
I'm so amused to see arrogance and naivete packaged together this way. You not only think I'm unfamiliar with the well-known concept of social democracy, but you also fell for the lie that it has anything to do with socialism. Social democracy is a liberal's dream come true. It is not leftist or socialist in any way.
Of course it's distinct from communism. It's capitalism. You still work for a wage, and owners still extract surplus value. Workers do not own the means of production, there.
Social democracy was a reaction to the socialist revolutions happening elsewhere, a placation, a concession to grease the wheels of capitalism, to soften the exploitation. Meanwhile, the most brutal exploitation was outsourced to poorer countries elsewhere. Look up unequal exchange.
Less impact? Cuba continues to thrive to this day. Vietnam only had to fend off the US in a brutal battle and win.
Because they govern according to socialist principles, which rule from the bottom up.
... It is democracy! Socialism is about universalising democracy.
Don't get slippery. You said dictatorship. And at that precise moment, I do believe you were referring to the absolute control of a single person or small group. Marx did not advocate for that. Lenin did.
Right, you're so full of modesty and realism with your certitudes about communism being the best system and Cuba being a democracy.
Or social democracy was a compromise found, considering the failure of both communist and unregulated capitalist experiments, that tries to mix economic efficiency of liberalism with social safety nets through regulation. It seems, countries who implemented that have among the best quality of life for the poorest half of their population. But maybe that's a big lie peddled by the comically evil capitalist elite, which is a pretty convenient scapegoat for all the issues of humanity, and allows preventing any deeper questioning of where those issues come from.
Yes, many of those countries are guilty of exploiting poorer countries, through colonialism or out-sourcing. But in the later form, it actually brought value to those developing countries, many of them have seen very fast growth in all domains and taking large percentages of their population out of poverty.
In the case of Marx, if I said dictatorship, I meant proletariat dictatorship as he writes himself. For example, here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch03.htm
So, I guess you don't like Marxism-Leninism because of the dictatorial oligarchy it created? Well, Cuba claims to come from Marxism-Leninism. You can find it in their constitution: http://cuba.cu/gobierno/NuevaConstitucion.pdf
It also proclaims a single party as being the leading force of the country, and the party leader, as being the leader of the country. How is that democratic? Do you think a single party can represent the opinions of the whole population? Or maybe you like to choose which opinions are allowed to be represented, that would not be very Democratic.
The little bit of election they have is done with a show of hands, so it is easy to bully people into voting for whatever the party requires. Information is censored, independent journalism is repressed, so it's hard for the people to be informed of what the government is doing and make them accountable, but they can't do much anyway since they can't vote freely, and even if they could, well there are not many parties to vote for.
Of course, some courageous souls still try to fight against this dictatorship. Guess what happens then, the dictatorship playbook: arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials, torture and extrajudicial executions. https://www.hrw.org/news/2008/02/18/cuba-fidel-castros-abusive-machinery-remains-intact
But they have good schools and medicine, so we should forget about the dictatorships aspects?
I prefer to believe that this is not what you actually want. I think you focus on what's positive in there, and you proclaim, "see, that's real good communism!" and you ignore the rest because it makes your view of the world easier to live with. Easier than accepting that there is no magical political system that will make everything better.
Yes! Exactly that!
Which ones of those are we funding?
Who's we? I'm not American.
Good. I'm glad you can't vote in our elections. We have too many genocide supporters who like whataboutism already.
It seems I am actually opposing more genocides than you do. I just want people to consider they happen on both sides of the political compass, because the issue is human nature rather than a specific political theory. Once you get that, you may stop stupid politician polemics at best, killing each other at worse, and start building consensus to reach social progress.
I oppose all genocide. In my country, we're paying for one and I want to stop. I have little patience for those who see people who want to stop funding genocide and are like "yeah? Whatabout all the genocides you're not funding? Huh? Huh?!"
Well, then you should orient your impatience at someone else than me because I'm not supporting that either.
If you say so.
File them under fiction
Name one. I think almost everyone here is operating on USA definitions of Right = Conservative and Left = Progressive, btw
That's not a US definition, that's how the seats where distributed in the french parliament after the revolution
It's the definitions currently used by Americans. Conservatives and the GOP are Right Wing, and they directly oppose progress and changes in all of their policy stances, in some cases even wanting to dismantle the laws already implemented and return to a previous era.
Yes and I'm telling you that the same definition is used around the world.
Btw back then the frech conservatives were monarchists that opposed the new democracy itself and wanted to dismantle it
Thats fair sorry, I was thinking it meant something different in another culture but I was probably confusing it with Liberals or some other political identification.
Holodomor, the current Uyghur issue.
Cambodia was more of an omnicide, but it counts
Ah yes, the well known leftist government on 1930s Soviet Russia...
Someday we'll find a true Scotsman
If I say I'm being persecuted as a Scotsman and someone points out I have never been to Scotland and have no Scottish heritage, that's not a "no true Scotsman" fallacy because I don't meet the definition of Scotsman no matter how much I claim to be one.
You: "Hey dude, could you pass me that can of Coke?"
Sane person: "Huh? There's no coke here. No cans of anything."
You: "What do you mean? That right there-" points to bottle of orange juice
Sane person: "Wtf? This isn't a can of coke!"
You: "Pfft, so it doesn't meet your fake standards. No True Scotsman!!"
Edited to add names for clarity.
More like
"Here's your coke"
"This is orange juice"
"What are you, an idiot? This is clearly orange juice, why would you think it's coke? Here's a coke"
"Still orange juice"
"Well you see, coke is made from sugar and artificial flavors, and orange juice is made from orange. That's why orange juice isn't coke."
Nah you're right, this isn't No True Scotsman, just regular gaslighting
How did you somehow misunderstand my comment so badly? Okay, I edited it for clarity.
You are the one who, in this instance, is trying to insist orange juice is in fact coke. You are the one claiming no true scotsman.
Even in your attempt to twist it, you still include an explanation of why "no true scotsman" just doesn't apply here. What you are calling communism does not meet any definition of communism, just as no orange juice meets the definition of coke.
The Bolshevik Party which took control in 1927 onwards were the party of centralized disciplined government structure, so compared to the Menshevik party that wanted to structure Russia after a Western Social Democracy rather than the current path they were on to Dictatorship, The Bolshevik's would be right wing. I take a very small amount of liberty to call going from a Monarchy to Dictatorship as fairly conservative and transitioning to democracy as Progressive.
Let's ignore the political opponent massacres of the Great Purge and ideology fueled agricultural disasters of the Great Chinese Famine, and focus on the Holodomor in Ukraine, the Cambodian genocide, the Uyghur genocide in China.
Happened under communist dictatorships that are generally considered to be at the left.
This guy: This dictatorship is on the left.
I'm not sure what your comment means, but I'm actually saying the opposite of dictatorship being of a specific political side. I'm highlighting the fact that political extremists will end up killing in the name of their ideology, which ever it is, left, right or whatever other cult.
My comment means a Dictatorship, by definition, isn't left wing.
How do you define extremist? It used to be an extremist view to say women should have the right to vote, or people shouldn't own slaves. Hell, Democracy used to be an "extremist" view.
So someone willing to kill in the name of an ideology is an extremist, but that's the easy extreme case. In general in modern democracies, no politician would admit to that, so the definition is rather relative to how far the political positions of a party are from the average of the last governing parties for a specific country.
So you're highlighting the fact that extremists will kill people in the name of their ideology, and you define extremists as people who will to kill for their ideology. Sounds pretty tautological no?
You're confusing tautology with just writing the same definition in two different orders.
A square has four sides of equal length. Four sides of equal length length make a square. That's not a tautology.
Okay, so you're highlighting the fact that a square has four sides of equal length. Seems rather pointless, no?
Dictatorships aren't progressive. I don't even consider them communisms, tbh. How can workers own the means to production if one guy or family owns the nation?
Agree with your last sentence but it is the path all the Marxist revolutions have taken. A reason being that proletariat dictatorship is a step to communism in Marx's ideology. But from history, it seems it just stops at the dictatorship.
So maybe the conclusion is that Marx methodology doesn't actually lead to a progressive/left country.
There is Kerala, a state in India with 34.6 Million people.
TBF there probably would be more than a few if not for USA intervention, like when they overthrew the Marxist Democratic Socialist Allende of Chile in 1973.
There is also Nepal currently, although they've very recently enacted a constitution in 2015 and score lower than the USA according to DemocracyMatrix they still qualify as a "Deficient Democracy" the same as the USA.
There was also San Marino from 1945 to 1957 where the "Rovereta Affair" ended in a coup and the Christian Nationalist party took control of the government. TBF though they probably would have just had a shitty Stalinist communism just like Turkmenistan did.
I realize most people define communism and socialism as republics in which most if not all goods are public, but I personally like to include nations in which a sizeable number of goods and services are state owned or distributed, which would include a great many democratic nations like Germany or the UK (as long as we agree the crown has no real political authority in the UK).
The Uyghur genocide would be the most recent.
I wouldn't call that leftist, but more authoritarian.
That said, do a subset of leftists have the weirdest obsession for defending it because they somehow view China as leftist? Yes.
They're not mutually exclusive. To give another example, Cuba is unquestionably leftist but it's also a dictatorship.
China's a Communism like North Korea is a Democratic Republic.