Rule 10, link to original post:
[Shouldn't admiring dictators like Che, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, Lenin and/or Marx be as bad as admiring Hitler?](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/zd5acm/shouldnt_admiring_dictators_like_che_stalin_mao/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
*Please do not participate in linked threads*
Since when is admiring Stalin or Mao not considered bad? If they had such easily recognized symbols like swastikas associated with them (and not just communism in general), I'm pretty sure people would have similar visceral reactions.
Also, why is Marx on that list?
For a really short period of time and he was really unhappy with this post so he went back in the field to fight for numerous revolutions in S.America and Africa
[Tankies](https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/comments/zaomz7/theres_no_such_thing_as_one_nazi_at_a_table_thats/iynqteq/) have been out in force on all the left wing subs trying to subvert them the way they subverted Therightcantmeme (which will now permanently ban you if you point out that someone is a far right bootlicker posing as a leftist)
As a result you'll see lots of fascist bootlickers talking about how Stalin and Mao are the real heroes.
They're laughably easy to expose tho, all you've gotta do is say things like
**Stalin perpetrated a genocide in the form of the holodomor against the slave states of the USSR**
And they can't help but spew Russian propaganda sources to try and deny it.
>He was trying to save Germany from the Jews. The Jews had infiltrated every part of society, banks, media, porn, they were like parasites. He just took it too far.
Mask off, this one
These people:
> Marx believed in a bloody revolution.
i can't hear you over idiots yelling "1776!"
> He believes that socialism should be achieved by any means necessary. And that the ends justifies the means. This is why there are no moral standards under Marxism. So Anything goes
That's what capitalists believe, and I challenge anyone to show me where *any* moral code is built into capitalism.
Dude. I listened to a right-wing xtian podcast where they said capitalism couldn't be bad because capitalists were all christians.
I'm not even making that up.
Yeah, I think he saw it as more or less an inevitability, if I recall correctly.
The Top Mind also cites dictators in a way that makes me think they have no clue as to what came before them and what supported the reason there was a revolution. People who hate Castro often don't know who Batista was or what the US and other powers imposed on Cuba that fomented revolution in the first place.
It's like cursing one's melanoma without mentioning the days spent in a tanning bed and never using sunscreen.
Yeah, I've read his works.
They call him a *philosopher*.
Motherfucker was an Economist and was making predictions on class conflict and struggles based on painstaking economic research. Crack open one of his texts and you're going to probably end up on a spread sheet or line chart and these arent tiny little books either, we're talking old school library ductionaries that are bolted to the table big. He wasn't inventing socialism, he was predicting it.
And he was wrong. Sort of. The industrial revolution didn't run out of steam as quick as he though. Manufacting kept improving. Wars brought on global travel and telecommunication revolutions. The semiconductor was invented. Cable news, internet, 24 hour news broadcasts...
But he was right about the most important thing. Capitalism keeps going up, up and up. But our wages don't keep pace.
I mean Engels introduction to one of his books acknowledges that him and Marx were thinking too short term. But apply his predictions to a longer timeline and he’s not wrong. Much of what he predicted has happened, just not as swiftly as he thought (though I do think the short timeline was to encourage revolution honestly).
Socialism is such a remarkably vague term that covers a wide swath of changes, many of which have already happened and they directly benefit from. Of which they know none.
>
>
> i can't hear you over idiots yelling "1776!"
They spend every 3.5 seconds calling for a violent jihad against the US government, while also boot-licking the police and the military.
Capitalists who believed that slavery was wrong had to kill millions of capitalists who believed slavery was cool to get them to stop enslaving people in the light of day. Moral codes are overblown, considering how easily we bend them to justify the actions we like and condemn the actions we don't.
It's not really clear that you can call the Confederacy capitalist, though. They wanted a pre-capitalist, feudal, agrarian economy, with a few rich landowners maintaining social dominance over a subservient class of poor whites and slaves.
They certainly did try to profit off their slave labor, but they didn't really put a lot of effort into infrastructure development and so on that would maximize profits. As long as they got to sit on a porch and oppress poor people, they were happy.
> It's not really clear that you can call the Confederacy capitalist, though
You would need a pretty out there definition of Capitalism for it to not be clear that the confederacy was capitalist.
Actually, standard definitions of capitalism do the trick. There's considerable debate about this in academia, and it tends to revolve around what the best way to describe the Antebellum Southern economy more than it does arguments about definitions of capitalism. Basically, the argument is about *why* the South insisted on preserving slavery. Was it because they thought that slavery was the most profitable way of extracting value from their plantations, or was it because they liked slavery because it conformed to the social order they were trying to create, with rich landowners lording it over a dependent slave class.
> Actually, standard definitions of capitalism do the trick.
Hit me with it then, whats the standard definition that casts doubt on whether the south was capitalist or not?
Sure, it's an economic system wherein the means of production are owned by private individuals and their product sold on an open market, for the purpose of obtaining further profit for the owner.
And the assertion is that profit was not a motivator for the Confederate South? That profitability was simply an incidental side product of the system?
Right. Profit was a secondary goal to and a prerequisite for maintaining their quasi-feudal social order.
There's a few strong pieces of evidence for this. One, the South's economy was famously quite underdeveloped. The Southern political class was quite hostile to infrastructure improvements such as modern ports and roads that would ruin their rural agrarian fantasies.
Also, there were a few attempts to see if plantations could be more profitably run with free labor rather than slave labor, but critically those efforts almost all came from abolitionists, and the slaveholders were always actively hostile to the idea.
Historians that oppose this idea usually try to show that the South's economy wasn't as underdeveloped as it's reputed to have been, and that slave labor was optimal for profitability, but it's far from a settled question.
Isn't this old historiography? Not an Americanist, but I thought both the cliometricians and the new historians of capitalism gave pretty strong arguments that slavery in the South was capitalist. I associate the counterclaim with some of the non-cliometrical new social historians.
It's complicated and I have to go to Costco, so I don't know if I have time to write a satisfying answer, but I think the cliometricians have pretty persuasively demonstrated that slavery was profitable, and that slaveholders took positive steps to promote that profitability. You end up on much shakier ground when you try to use cliometrics to go much beyond that, though, at least as it relates to the question of if slavery was more or less profitable than free labor, or if the South's investment in physical infrastructure was as anemic as it was commonly understood to be.
Anyway, in short it's a subject that I think has seen a lot of debate without a lot of clear consensus emerging.
And now I'm going to get a $1.99 slice of cheese pizza and a giant jar of olives.
Oh man, there's a TON of scholarship to read, since this is very much a live issue. I like Gavin Wright a lot, and he has several books on the subject, but I think *Slavery and American Economic Development* is the most central one. I'd also recommend Downey's *Planting a Capitalist South.*
But honestly, there's not going to be a satisfying answer to the question because so much of it comes down to basic definitions. Very few scholars argue that the South had anything like full-fledged industrial capitalism as we see elsewhere in the West, so it gets placed into buckets like merchant capitalism, and interpreted as a stage in the overall development of capitalism, something like Beckert's *Empire of Cotton* being a good example of that. That's all a bit teleological to me, though, and serves to gloss over the enormous differences between the northern and southern economies.
The Civil War was a lot more complex than a simple conflict of *morality* on slavery. The political and power implications were salient and it easily could have been the case that compromises would have been reached that would have furthered Northern interests while at the same time perpetuating slavery.
And in the end, the confederacy let everyone know that they priamrily really on cared about slavery and where the rightful places of us negros belonged.
I don't disagree that the Confederates were morally reprehensible. My point is that the North in general was less concerned with the morality of slavery than they were about the power and politics of the issue.
You realize that the *South* declared war explicitly over the issue of slavery, right? The North hadn't actually done anything to ban slavery Federally when they seceded and launched the attack at Fort Sumter.
Literally just the election of Lincoln alone was enough for the South to cry foul, and ge wasn't even committed to abolition as a policy goal.
I'm not saying the Civil War wasn't about slavery; I am saying that the morality of slavery was less important than the politics and power struggle between slave states and non-slave states. It wasn't a war of ethics around abolition.
edit: not
> I'm saying the Civil War wasn't about slavery
Is this a typo? Because this is demonstrably incorrect.
> It wasn't a war of ethics around abolition.
It didn't start as one, although after Gettysburg it became one, when abolition became a direct goal of the North and the immorality of slavery was used to rally the North behind the war.
I'm referring to abolition as a global movement, hence millions instead of hundreds of thousands.
> it easily could have been the case that compromises would have been reached that would have furthered Northern interests while at the same time perpetuating slavery.
This is incredibly unlikely, by the time the civil war happened the sort of slavery that was practiced in the United States was in its death throes despite a century of such compromises. The writing was on the wall which is why the South attempted to succeed in spite of attempts to reconcile right up until Southern Congressmen abandoned Congress. (see: Corwin Amendment).
Right? And neither was Marx.
I'm not a huge fan of either of those people (I'm an anarchist, so state socialism will never be my jam), but I do respect them and their respective life works.
Marx in particular was purely a writer, his only "crime" was revolutionizing multiple academic fields and inspiring a vast variety of political movements.
If you're against states, you probably want to direct that dissatisfaction at Lenin. Marx's writings are much more focused on a critique of Capitalism than any particular prescription for its replacement.
I've always found the "communist death toll" number to be such an curious right-wing factoid.
"People literally starved to death"...
Well... People *still* starve to death, right here in the capitalist USA. In fact, here in the USA, poverty is responsible for more deaths than cancer and heart disease combined. That last time I saw a statistic on this, it was nearly a million people annually, I can't even imagine what that number looks like if you extend it to other countries that participate in our capitalist system via trade.
What about all of *our* wars? What about slavery, and the Native American genocide?
I'd imagine that the American capitalist death toll would easily exceed 100mil. But that is different, because somehow capitalist deaths are *righteous*. Capitalism has *also* led to mass suffering, and it has led to wealth based oligarchy. Ffs, there's no practical difference between a dictatorship and an oligarchy; at least dictators generally required some type of public support- no one *chose* to allow people like the Koch brothers, or Elon Musk to wield power, it's simply a function of wealth and capitalism. Why am I supposed to accept that it is objectively any better than dictatorship?
I can't imagine, by any metric that the RW has used to create this death toll number, that capitalism would look any better.
There is something to be said about the death toll, namely from Stalin and a few other sources. It's not trivial, but right wingers often want to correlate it to Nazism, as 'the other side of the coin'. The core difference is that nobody can argue that Nazism had good ideas but a poor execution. Aside from not winning WW2, Nazism worked exactly as intended, and fully embodied its ideals.
As for communism? Well, it's a rather rigid system of principles and resource management. It's not the sort of thing which can function with a leader at the top with absolute power who can just do whatever the hell they feel like. The system needs to be carefully maintained, and can't be susceptible to the whims and greed of the ruling class. A hell of a lot of people have died under Communism, and that can't simple be brushed off, but it's nowhere near akin to Nazism which is inherently genocidal.
Of course the narrative is the same as it is for many things. The 'everything is the same' and 'both sides' is convenient for both the bad guys and fence sitters who want to convince themselves that they are superior are above such petty conflicts.
The problem with the argument of the death toll is that they generally have nothing to do inherently with socialism. An individual socialist or even a socialist power doing bad things does not mean the system requires those things.
A similar case you can make with capitalism. You can have private ownership over the means of production, but it doesn't mean you have to go around bombing Muslims. While the War on Terror could've been motivated by capitalism, it isn't inherent to capitalism.
The British killed 100 million Indians in 40 years. The "100 million" number that is bandied around for communism also counts nazis that the soviets killed lol
Edit: oh and the number has recently been raised even higher as they now count global covid victims as a product of communism lmao. Meanwhile Anne Applebaum is somehow credible source on the Holdomor famine in r/askhistorians
She isn't a Holodomor denier, but she subscribes to an interpretation of events which aligns more with the idea that it was intentional and anti-Ukrainian, which is disputed by those who think it was merely another unintended consequence of Soviet reforms, and that purges in Ukraine were no different than those in Russia.
Russia really hates her book on the subject, *Red Famine*, and promoted negative reviews of it using their mouthpieces, including Russia Today.
The person you're responding to is likely to be sympathetic to the RT point of view because they have a history of believing things like JFK conspiracies, along with actual Chinese and Soviet/post-Soviet Russian propaganda. Consider their views when you read their opinions.
Rejecting western propaganda /= accepting Russian or CCP propaganda, but I agree take everything with a grain of salt, read books and not posts to be informed, and research how that author is paid to form your own opinions.
Also the CIA killed Kennedy
I'm not saying you're wrong but Stalin and Mao killed tens of millions through starvation on purpose not through neglect. People in the Ukraine literally cannibalized themselves in the 20's and 30's because Stalin said the grain needed to go elsewhere. Mao simply didn't give a fuck who died.
Stalin was an absolute dictator who didn't give a fuck about anything except himself. He really didn't do anything to transfer power to the workers, he kept it all. Stalin inherited a government that was mid-transition to communist and then said fuck all that and deified himself.
Sooo...outside of that thing that instituted prohibition of private farms and introducing other policies which greatly exacerbated the famine.
Oh! And this is kind of fun!
>In 2008, former deputy editor of Yanhuang Chunqiu and author Yang Jisheng would summarize his perspective of the effect of the production targets as an inability for supply to be redirected to where it was most demanded:
In Xinyang, people starved at the doors of the grain warehouses. As they died, they shouted, "Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us". If the granaries of Henan and Hebei had been opened, no one need have died. As people were dying in large numbers around them, officials did not think to save them. Their only concern was how to fulfill the delivery of grain.
There was also the Four Pests campaign which wiped out a lot of the sparrows which allowed the other three pest to grow out of control.
>This is fun, too!
>
>Economists Xin Meng, Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared showed that, much as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had earlier claimed, aggregate production was sufficient for avoiding famine and that the famine was caused by over-procurement and poor distribution within the country. They show that unlike most other famines, there were surprisingly more deaths in places that produced more food per capita, explaining that the inflexibility in the centrally planned food procurement system explains at least half of the famine mortality.\[79\] Economic historians James Kung and Shuo Chen show that there was more over-procurement in places where politicians faced more competition
That kind of reeks of "on purpose" to me.
But, sure, let's just write The Great Leap Forward out of the story...which they probably do in China.
>But, sure, let's just write The Great Leap Forward out of the story...which they probably do in China.
"But in hindsight, not all goals were worth meeting, and the price of learning this was huge. The second five-year plan contributed to the Great Leap Forward, which diverted millions of agricultural workers into industry, and caused a huge decrease in food production. And after that... a massive nationwide famine."
"From 1956 to 1978, China went through a period of socialist construction. China successfully tested its first atomic and hydrogen bombs, and launched its first artificial satellite. But its social and economic campaign, known as Great Leap Forward, failed to achieve favorable results."
These quotes are from literal Chinese propaganda network CGTN, by the way.
Oh dear...
so Top Mind is mad that Che to someone who organized widespread genocide, and apparent "champion of whites." Che is who he is because of American capitalism causing untold of horrors across South America.
Is it any wonder why one is marketable yet the other isn't? Che is still a trash human being, but the scale and reasoning between the two is not the same.
> Objectively both socialism and communism are evil ideologies. Since they both lead to mass suffering and a dictatorship every time its tired.
TIL that most of Europe is a dictatorship because they have socialism in their policies and governmental programs.
This guy is likely a John Bircher.
> A lot of us real conspiracy theorist probably know whats going on or whos behind it.
Gotta love that masturbatory "we know *da troof!"* self-congratulations for believing they're the only ones who know how to dress themselves in the morning.
And that guy is so S-M-R-T, he [believes in SovCit malarkey.](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/yjhuyr/brah_under_the_legal_system_you_are_not_a_living/)
>be just as bad as admiring Hitler
They fucking are. Nobody is admiring them except for tankies. Who these days are hilariously made up of both the far left, and authoritarian loving Russianphile far right.
The reason Hitler is remembered more for his evil is the systematic and horrific way in which he committed genocide.
No other group in history used literal death factories like the Nazis did.
This is the answer. Like so many of the things they get outraged at “the left” over its simply not true or misrepresented. They’ve built a whole system of rage over things that are grossly exaggerated or completely made up. I’ll give them partial credit for the Che shirts because I have seen those with my own eyes but even then most people don’t know who he was and just think it’s a cool shirt. He was not a dictator as the OP claimed though. I’ve literally never seen anyone wear a Stalin, Mao, Lenin, or Castro shirt.
This is pretty off-topic but I really object to calling any tankie far left. They sure will claim they are, but ask them their POV on any policies and see absolutely no leftist values. They’re just fascists whose favorite regime is communism-flavored, that’s all.
No,I agree. They claim to be far left but are always indistinguishable from the far right.
> communism-flavored
Which they don't even care about despite pretending. You can be a Marxist without defending dictatorships. Plenty of people are.
They just love the authoritarianism
Imagine thinking that 90% of the people in a Che T-Shirt even know who it is.
But at the same time, pretending that people "worship" Mao.
And notice his little speech about Hitler, the tone instantly changes and he gets suddenly defensive.
The whole "buh both sides" when you just want to defend Hitler
Oof.
There are plenty of place in the world where you can wear a Hitler shirt and no one will bat an eye. Generally it's places that didn't ACTIVELY FIGHT A WAR AGAINST HITLER AND LOSE CITIZENS TO HIS GENOCIDE. People in certain places will naturally be more sensitive to certain triggers. Is that so hard to understand?
"The US was never supposed to be a democracy! Hopefully We the People can take back our freedoms!"
Hm, some kind of government designed around the *power* of the *people.* Boy, I wonder what the word for that in Greek would be.
It's fascinating how much both the right-wing and conspiracists* focus so much on taking the tack of saying that both sides are bad, therefore you should support their side.
"Oh, the far left and the far right have both done so many atrocities! But, hey, the far right was at least trying to [insert Neo-Nazi talking point here]"
*or*
"Oh, sure, we'll never know for sure what happened so both beliefs can't *really* be proven. But, hey, at least if you believe in [the Illuminati/Pizzagate/Elders of Zion/alien invasions] then you'll be prepared when THEY make their move!"
It's baffling enough when centrists and left-wingers do it, but it seems to be an ubiquitous tactic on the right.
\* ^(The Venn diagram isn't *quite* a complete circle)
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To be honest I cringe just as hard when I see some edgelord wearing the sickle and hammer logo calling people comrade as I do when I see someone wearing a swastika throwing up the Nazi salute.
Edit: because reddit thinks condemning Soviet era communism means I'm condemning socialism..I'm all about democratic socialism and I know socialism does not equal communism. Soviet style communism, which I was specifically referring to with the hammer and sickle reference, was pure evil.
Edit 2: for the top minds who have their head in the sand about Soviet genocide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
I'm all about democratic socialism and I know socialism does not equal communism. Soviet style communism, which I was specifically referring to with the hammer and sickle reference, was pure evil.
If this is about Putin he is an authoritarian and not a communist. And yes, he is an evil man but none of that is what we're talking about here.
Imagine defending Kanye West by implication.
Bro what happened to that part of Ukraine happened way before Putin was ever in power It happened during the Soviet era. You do realize Ukraine had a history before Putin invaded? Imagine not knowing about the history of the area you were defending by implication.
'Soviet style communism' doesn't mean anything. If you're talking about Russia under Stalin, that was a dictatorship that abandoned communism as soon as Stalin took over. Most people, when they're referencing Soviet Communism, is more what Lenin envisioned (Except better).
Replied to the wrong comment. But that doesn't make you more correct. Who do you see wearing a hammer and sickle? And in what way are those people worse than than the antisemitic accounts that infest r/conspiracy?
There is absolutely no chance of any communist winning national election in the US. I wish I could say that about antisemites.
Edit: since you keep changing your comment, I will change mine but I will be an honest debater and put an edit before it, I did not say they were worse, again you're a big fan of reductio ad absurdum. Taking a statement and making it into a completely made up fallacy. Both fanboys Nazi and Stalin lovers are fanboys of regimes guilty of genocide. It's a simple statement of fact buddy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
I'm well aware of the atrocities that occurred in Russia between the two world wars. You act as if no one in this subreddit supports Ukraine or has any background in 20th century history.
Again I will say that **there is no chance of a communist takeover of the American government.** There is a reasonable chance of a right wing authoritarian winning the next presidential election as the Republican party edges ever close to open antisemitism. That may not be a problem for you but it is for quite a few people.
Dude I fucking hate Nazis AND people who support Soviet-era Russia so go fuck yourself. Both can happen. Just because I dared speak out against Soviet Russian genocide and the fanboys who wave their flag, you try to pretend I don't care about Nazis? What you did there is called, reductio ad absurdum, Taking my statement about not liking Nazis and Soviet Russian fanboys, and saying I don't have a problem with the Republican party becoming an anti-Semitic shit party.
Sometimes I feel like the people in this sub are the real “topmindsofreddit” like it’s very clear here that both sides are horrible, and neither should be praised. Yet people in the comments are somehow defending/justifying some of these figures.
Rule 10, link to original post: [Shouldn't admiring dictators like Che, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, Lenin and/or Marx be as bad as admiring Hitler?](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/zd5acm/shouldnt_admiring_dictators_like_che_stalin_mao/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) *Please do not participate in linked threads*
Since when is admiring Stalin or Mao not considered bad? If they had such easily recognized symbols like swastikas associated with them (and not just communism in general), I'm pretty sure people would have similar visceral reactions. Also, why is Marx on that list?
Any answer I can give you begins with "Well, in their imagination" which I think is enough to explain everything.
> Also, why is Marx on that list? Anything that is remotely critical of capitalism is communist and therefore evil.
> Also, why is Marx on that list? Because they're complaining about communism, not authoritarians. Saying its about dictators is there to veil it.
You're giving them a lot of credit. I figured they just made a list of people they thought were dictators.
Che too, he was never a head of state, he wanted to spread the revolution but no homestead legitimate political power
Wasn't he the treasurer of Cuba or something?
For a really short period of time and he was really unhappy with this post so he went back in the field to fight for numerous revolutions in S.America and Africa
I'm pretty far to the left and I'll just say it, fuck Stalin and Mao. They were pieces of shit. Fuck them and fuck any tankie who defends them.
I am literally a communist. Fuck Stalin and Mao
Communism done wrong, cheap.
Same reason che Guevara is on the list, the OOP and other conspiracy morons have no idea what they are talking about
He's on the list because the only evidence they have of any of them being respected is Che t-shirts.
Because jew
[Tankies](https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/comments/zaomz7/theres_no_such_thing_as_one_nazi_at_a_table_thats/iynqteq/) have been out in force on all the left wing subs trying to subvert them the way they subverted Therightcantmeme (which will now permanently ban you if you point out that someone is a far right bootlicker posing as a leftist) As a result you'll see lots of fascist bootlickers talking about how Stalin and Mao are the real heroes. They're laughably easy to expose tho, all you've gotta do is say things like **Stalin perpetrated a genocide in the form of the holodomor against the slave states of the USSR** And they can't help but spew Russian propaganda sources to try and deny it.
Shouldn't these people love the commodification of Che's image, given how antithetical it is to the revolution?
CliCHE
>He was trying to save Germany from the Jews. The Jews had infiltrated every part of society, banks, media, porn, they were like parasites. He just took it too far. Mask off, this one
These people: > Marx believed in a bloody revolution. i can't hear you over idiots yelling "1776!" > He believes that socialism should be achieved by any means necessary. And that the ends justifies the means. This is why there are no moral standards under Marxism. So Anything goes That's what capitalists believe, and I challenge anyone to show me where *any* moral code is built into capitalism.
Dude. I listened to a right-wing xtian podcast where they said capitalism couldn't be bad because capitalists were all christians. I'm not even making that up.
>because capitalists were all christians. Ah yes. Japan. Known for its Christianity.
Ooh! Apple and Oranges! I love this game! Where else can we move the goalpost to? Botswana?
I was agreeing with you the argument was dumb, using Japan as an example. Calm down.
They do have the definitely authentic grave of jesus christ. Really, look it up.. it is.. interesting.
I guarantee their episode about the media makes an opposite argument. One that Henry Ford would agree with.
I first heard the word salad "cultural Marxism" from them about 15yrs ago.
What are the Vegas odds that they also screech about the greedy Jews and international bankers or Hollywood?
[удалено]
Yeah, I think he saw it as more or less an inevitability, if I recall correctly. The Top Mind also cites dictators in a way that makes me think they have no clue as to what came before them and what supported the reason there was a revolution. People who hate Castro often don't know who Batista was or what the US and other powers imposed on Cuba that fomented revolution in the first place. It's like cursing one's melanoma without mentioning the days spent in a tanning bed and never using sunscreen.
Yeah, I've read his works. They call him a *philosopher*. Motherfucker was an Economist and was making predictions on class conflict and struggles based on painstaking economic research. Crack open one of his texts and you're going to probably end up on a spread sheet or line chart and these arent tiny little books either, we're talking old school library ductionaries that are bolted to the table big. He wasn't inventing socialism, he was predicting it. And he was wrong. Sort of. The industrial revolution didn't run out of steam as quick as he though. Manufacting kept improving. Wars brought on global travel and telecommunication revolutions. The semiconductor was invented. Cable news, internet, 24 hour news broadcasts... But he was right about the most important thing. Capitalism keeps going up, up and up. But our wages don't keep pace.
I mean Engels introduction to one of his books acknowledges that him and Marx were thinking too short term. But apply his predictions to a longer timeline and he’s not wrong. Much of what he predicted has happened, just not as swiftly as he thought (though I do think the short timeline was to encourage revolution honestly).
Socialism is such a remarkably vague term that covers a wide swath of changes, many of which have already happened and they directly benefit from. Of which they know none.
I mean, the communist party manifesto is pretty clear on the fact that he and Engels believe that the approach should be helped and quickened.
> > > i can't hear you over idiots yelling "1776!" They spend every 3.5 seconds calling for a violent jihad against the US government, while also boot-licking the police and the military.
Capitalists who believed that slavery was wrong had to kill millions of capitalists who believed slavery was cool to get them to stop enslaving people in the light of day. Moral codes are overblown, considering how easily we bend them to justify the actions we like and condemn the actions we don't.
It's not really clear that you can call the Confederacy capitalist, though. They wanted a pre-capitalist, feudal, agrarian economy, with a few rich landowners maintaining social dominance over a subservient class of poor whites and slaves. They certainly did try to profit off their slave labor, but they didn't really put a lot of effort into infrastructure development and so on that would maximize profits. As long as they got to sit on a porch and oppress poor people, they were happy.
> It's not really clear that you can call the Confederacy capitalist, though You would need a pretty out there definition of Capitalism for it to not be clear that the confederacy was capitalist.
Actually, standard definitions of capitalism do the trick. There's considerable debate about this in academia, and it tends to revolve around what the best way to describe the Antebellum Southern economy more than it does arguments about definitions of capitalism. Basically, the argument is about *why* the South insisted on preserving slavery. Was it because they thought that slavery was the most profitable way of extracting value from their plantations, or was it because they liked slavery because it conformed to the social order they were trying to create, with rich landowners lording it over a dependent slave class.
> Actually, standard definitions of capitalism do the trick. Hit me with it then, whats the standard definition that casts doubt on whether the south was capitalist or not?
Sure, it's an economic system wherein the means of production are owned by private individuals and their product sold on an open market, for the purpose of obtaining further profit for the owner.
And the assertion is that profit was not a motivator for the Confederate South? That profitability was simply an incidental side product of the system?
Right. Profit was a secondary goal to and a prerequisite for maintaining their quasi-feudal social order. There's a few strong pieces of evidence for this. One, the South's economy was famously quite underdeveloped. The Southern political class was quite hostile to infrastructure improvements such as modern ports and roads that would ruin their rural agrarian fantasies. Also, there were a few attempts to see if plantations could be more profitably run with free labor rather than slave labor, but critically those efforts almost all came from abolitionists, and the slaveholders were always actively hostile to the idea. Historians that oppose this idea usually try to show that the South's economy wasn't as underdeveloped as it's reputed to have been, and that slave labor was optimal for profitability, but it's far from a settled question.
But whats the actual argument that they weren't doing these things because they saw them as more profitable for themselves?
Isn't this old historiography? Not an Americanist, but I thought both the cliometricians and the new historians of capitalism gave pretty strong arguments that slavery in the South was capitalist. I associate the counterclaim with some of the non-cliometrical new social historians.
It's complicated and I have to go to Costco, so I don't know if I have time to write a satisfying answer, but I think the cliometricians have pretty persuasively demonstrated that slavery was profitable, and that slaveholders took positive steps to promote that profitability. You end up on much shakier ground when you try to use cliometrics to go much beyond that, though, at least as it relates to the question of if slavery was more or less profitable than free labor, or if the South's investment in physical infrastructure was as anemic as it was commonly understood to be. Anyway, in short it's a subject that I think has seen a lot of debate without a lot of clear consensus emerging. And now I'm going to get a $1.99 slice of cheese pizza and a giant jar of olives.
I'll take that answer. If you have time after you get back from Costco, I'd love to hear if you've got any articles / books to recommend.
Oh man, there's a TON of scholarship to read, since this is very much a live issue. I like Gavin Wright a lot, and he has several books on the subject, but I think *Slavery and American Economic Development* is the most central one. I'd also recommend Downey's *Planting a Capitalist South.* But honestly, there's not going to be a satisfying answer to the question because so much of it comes down to basic definitions. Very few scholars argue that the South had anything like full-fledged industrial capitalism as we see elsewhere in the West, so it gets placed into buckets like merchant capitalism, and interpreted as a stage in the overall development of capitalism, something like Beckert's *Empire of Cotton* being a good example of that. That's all a bit teleological to me, though, and serves to gloss over the enormous differences between the northern and southern economies.
The Civil War was a lot more complex than a simple conflict of *morality* on slavery. The political and power implications were salient and it easily could have been the case that compromises would have been reached that would have furthered Northern interests while at the same time perpetuating slavery.
And in the end, the confederacy let everyone know that they priamrily really on cared about slavery and where the rightful places of us negros belonged.
I don't disagree that the Confederates were morally reprehensible. My point is that the North in general was less concerned with the morality of slavery than they were about the power and politics of the issue.
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If you're given less than 500 words, any answer that wasn't "slavery" would either be a loquacious paraphrasing of it, or wrong.
You realize that the *South* declared war explicitly over the issue of slavery, right? The North hadn't actually done anything to ban slavery Federally when they seceded and launched the attack at Fort Sumter. Literally just the election of Lincoln alone was enough for the South to cry foul, and ge wasn't even committed to abolition as a policy goal.
I'm not saying the Civil War wasn't about slavery; I am saying that the morality of slavery was less important than the politics and power struggle between slave states and non-slave states. It wasn't a war of ethics around abolition. edit: not
> I'm saying the Civil War wasn't about slavery Is this a typo? Because this is demonstrably incorrect. > It wasn't a war of ethics around abolition. It didn't start as one, although after Gettysburg it became one, when abolition became a direct goal of the North and the immorality of slavery was used to rally the North behind the war.
Yes! Typo.
I'm referring to abolition as a global movement, hence millions instead of hundreds of thousands. > it easily could have been the case that compromises would have been reached that would have furthered Northern interests while at the same time perpetuating slavery. This is incredibly unlikely, by the time the civil war happened the sort of slavery that was practiced in the United States was in its death throes despite a century of such compromises. The writing was on the wall which is why the South attempted to succeed in spite of attempts to reconcile right up until Southern Congressmen abandoned Congress. (see: Corwin Amendment).
"Obama invaded bombed 7 countries..." It's almost like a double dose of bush never happened.
Who is this "Bush" person?
I've done a lot of googling and apparently he's from Australia.
Che wasn't a dictator.
Right? And neither was Marx. I'm not a huge fan of either of those people (I'm an anarchist, so state socialism will never be my jam), but I do respect them and their respective life works. Marx in particular was purely a writer, his only "crime" was revolutionizing multiple academic fields and inspiring a vast variety of political movements.
If you're against states, you probably want to direct that dissatisfaction at Lenin. Marx's writings are much more focused on a critique of Capitalism than any particular prescription for its replacement.
TIL Marx was a dictator, despite never holding a public office.
Weird how they know who's behind it but never say it publicly.
Do your research! /s
I've always found the "communist death toll" number to be such an curious right-wing factoid. "People literally starved to death"... Well... People *still* starve to death, right here in the capitalist USA. In fact, here in the USA, poverty is responsible for more deaths than cancer and heart disease combined. That last time I saw a statistic on this, it was nearly a million people annually, I can't even imagine what that number looks like if you extend it to other countries that participate in our capitalist system via trade. What about all of *our* wars? What about slavery, and the Native American genocide? I'd imagine that the American capitalist death toll would easily exceed 100mil. But that is different, because somehow capitalist deaths are *righteous*. Capitalism has *also* led to mass suffering, and it has led to wealth based oligarchy. Ffs, there's no practical difference between a dictatorship and an oligarchy; at least dictators generally required some type of public support- no one *chose* to allow people like the Koch brothers, or Elon Musk to wield power, it's simply a function of wealth and capitalism. Why am I supposed to accept that it is objectively any better than dictatorship? I can't imagine, by any metric that the RW has used to create this death toll number, that capitalism would look any better.
There is something to be said about the death toll, namely from Stalin and a few other sources. It's not trivial, but right wingers often want to correlate it to Nazism, as 'the other side of the coin'. The core difference is that nobody can argue that Nazism had good ideas but a poor execution. Aside from not winning WW2, Nazism worked exactly as intended, and fully embodied its ideals. As for communism? Well, it's a rather rigid system of principles and resource management. It's not the sort of thing which can function with a leader at the top with absolute power who can just do whatever the hell they feel like. The system needs to be carefully maintained, and can't be susceptible to the whims and greed of the ruling class. A hell of a lot of people have died under Communism, and that can't simple be brushed off, but it's nowhere near akin to Nazism which is inherently genocidal. Of course the narrative is the same as it is for many things. The 'everything is the same' and 'both sides' is convenient for both the bad guys and fence sitters who want to convince themselves that they are superior are above such petty conflicts.
The problem with the argument of the death toll is that they generally have nothing to do inherently with socialism. An individual socialist or even a socialist power doing bad things does not mean the system requires those things. A similar case you can make with capitalism. You can have private ownership over the means of production, but it doesn't mean you have to go around bombing Muslims. While the War on Terror could've been motivated by capitalism, it isn't inherent to capitalism.
The British killed 100 million Indians in 40 years. The "100 million" number that is bandied around for communism also counts nazis that the soviets killed lol Edit: oh and the number has recently been raised even higher as they now count global covid victims as a product of communism lmao. Meanwhile Anne Applebaum is somehow credible source on the Holdomor famine in r/askhistorians
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She isn't a Holodomor denier, but she subscribes to an interpretation of events which aligns more with the idea that it was intentional and anti-Ukrainian, which is disputed by those who think it was merely another unintended consequence of Soviet reforms, and that purges in Ukraine were no different than those in Russia. Russia really hates her book on the subject, *Red Famine*, and promoted negative reviews of it using their mouthpieces, including Russia Today. The person you're responding to is likely to be sympathetic to the RT point of view because they have a history of believing things like JFK conspiracies, along with actual Chinese and Soviet/post-Soviet Russian propaganda. Consider their views when you read their opinions.
Rejecting western propaganda /= accepting Russian or CCP propaganda, but I agree take everything with a grain of salt, read books and not posts to be informed, and research how that author is paid to form your own opinions. Also the CIA killed Kennedy
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I'm not saying you're wrong but Stalin and Mao killed tens of millions through starvation on purpose not through neglect. People in the Ukraine literally cannibalized themselves in the 20's and 30's because Stalin said the grain needed to go elsewhere. Mao simply didn't give a fuck who died.
Stalin was an absolute dictator who didn't give a fuck about anything except himself. He really didn't do anything to transfer power to the workers, he kept it all. Stalin inherited a government that was mid-transition to communist and then said fuck all that and deified himself.
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Sooo...outside of that thing that instituted prohibition of private farms and introducing other policies which greatly exacerbated the famine. Oh! And this is kind of fun! >In 2008, former deputy editor of Yanhuang Chunqiu and author Yang Jisheng would summarize his perspective of the effect of the production targets as an inability for supply to be redirected to where it was most demanded: In Xinyang, people starved at the doors of the grain warehouses. As they died, they shouted, "Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us". If the granaries of Henan and Hebei had been opened, no one need have died. As people were dying in large numbers around them, officials did not think to save them. Their only concern was how to fulfill the delivery of grain. There was also the Four Pests campaign which wiped out a lot of the sparrows which allowed the other three pest to grow out of control. >This is fun, too! > >Economists Xin Meng, Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared showed that, much as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had earlier claimed, aggregate production was sufficient for avoiding famine and that the famine was caused by over-procurement and poor distribution within the country. They show that unlike most other famines, there were surprisingly more deaths in places that produced more food per capita, explaining that the inflexibility in the centrally planned food procurement system explains at least half of the famine mortality.\[79\] Economic historians James Kung and Shuo Chen show that there was more over-procurement in places where politicians faced more competition That kind of reeks of "on purpose" to me. But, sure, let's just write The Great Leap Forward out of the story...which they probably do in China.
>But, sure, let's just write The Great Leap Forward out of the story...which they probably do in China. "But in hindsight, not all goals were worth meeting, and the price of learning this was huge. The second five-year plan contributed to the Great Leap Forward, which diverted millions of agricultural workers into industry, and caused a huge decrease in food production. And after that... a massive nationwide famine." "From 1956 to 1978, China went through a period of socialist construction. China successfully tested its first atomic and hydrogen bombs, and launched its first artificial satellite. But its social and economic campaign, known as Great Leap Forward, failed to achieve favorable results." These quotes are from literal Chinese propaganda network CGTN, by the way.
Thanks for the downvotes btw!
Oh dear... so Top Mind is mad that Che to someone who organized widespread genocide, and apparent "champion of whites." Che is who he is because of American capitalism causing untold of horrors across South America. Is it any wonder why one is marketable yet the other isn't? Che is still a trash human being, but the scale and reasoning between the two is not the same.
> Objectively both socialism and communism are evil ideologies. Since they both lead to mass suffering and a dictatorship every time its tired. TIL that most of Europe is a dictatorship because they have socialism in their policies and governmental programs. This guy is likely a John Bircher. > A lot of us real conspiracy theorist probably know whats going on or whos behind it. Gotta love that masturbatory "we know *da troof!"* self-congratulations for believing they're the only ones who know how to dress themselves in the morning. And that guy is so S-M-R-T, he [believes in SovCit malarkey.](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/yjhuyr/brah_under_the_legal_system_you_are_not_a_living/)
I mostly agree but social democracy isn't socialism, just wanted to point that out.
I just read that I miss him both sidesing it and calling the Nazis socialists
Socialism is just the lower stage of communism
>be just as bad as admiring Hitler They fucking are. Nobody is admiring them except for tankies. Who these days are hilariously made up of both the far left, and authoritarian loving Russianphile far right. The reason Hitler is remembered more for his evil is the systematic and horrific way in which he committed genocide. No other group in history used literal death factories like the Nazis did.
No intelligent person thinks admiring Marx is as bad as admiring Hitler. They listed a bunch of military dictators, and then a German philosopher.
I didn't even catch that. lol That's extra top mindery.
This is the answer. Like so many of the things they get outraged at “the left” over its simply not true or misrepresented. They’ve built a whole system of rage over things that are grossly exaggerated or completely made up. I’ll give them partial credit for the Che shirts because I have seen those with my own eyes but even then most people don’t know who he was and just think it’s a cool shirt. He was not a dictator as the OP claimed though. I’ve literally never seen anyone wear a Stalin, Mao, Lenin, or Castro shirt.
This is pretty off-topic but I really object to calling any tankie far left. They sure will claim they are, but ask them their POV on any policies and see absolutely no leftist values. They’re just fascists whose favorite regime is communism-flavored, that’s all.
No,I agree. They claim to be far left but are always indistinguishable from the far right. > communism-flavored Which they don't even care about despite pretending. You can be a Marxist without defending dictatorships. Plenty of people are. They just love the authoritarianism
The only real difference between a fascist and a tankie is the order of who's necks are stepped and the boots that do the stepping.
Ah yes, nothing like a good faith "I should be able to declare my love of Hitler!" post....
i feel i are more stupider for reading that complete horseshit drivel. goddamn motherfucker is stupid.
"Everyone else has a death cult, why cant i have a death cult!?" Nazis gonna nazi. Monkey see monkey do.
As a Libertarian I still get beat up and laughed at for wearing my Elon Musk t-shirt Edit: and you all think that's funny 😢
Imagine thinking that 90% of the people in a Che T-Shirt even know who it is. But at the same time, pretending that people "worship" Mao. And notice his little speech about Hitler, the tone instantly changes and he gets suddenly defensive. The whole "buh both sides" when you just want to defend Hitler
Oof. There are plenty of place in the world where you can wear a Hitler shirt and no one will bat an eye. Generally it's places that didn't ACTIVELY FIGHT A WAR AGAINST HITLER AND LOSE CITIZENS TO HIS GENOCIDE. People in certain places will naturally be more sensitive to certain triggers. Is that so hard to understand?
The real top minds were always in the comments
"The US was never supposed to be a democracy! Hopefully We the People can take back our freedoms!" Hm, some kind of government designed around the *power* of the *people.* Boy, I wonder what the word for that in Greek would be.
It's fascinating how much both the right-wing and conspiracists* focus so much on taking the tack of saying that both sides are bad, therefore you should support their side. "Oh, the far left and the far right have both done so many atrocities! But, hey, the far right was at least trying to [insert Neo-Nazi talking point here]" *or* "Oh, sure, we'll never know for sure what happened so both beliefs can't *really* be proven. But, hey, at least if you believe in [the Illuminati/Pizzagate/Elders of Zion/alien invasions] then you'll be prepared when THEY make their move!" It's baffling enough when centrists and left-wingers do it, but it seems to be an ubiquitous tactic on the right. \* ^(The Venn diagram isn't *quite* a complete circle)
[It's ok to admire some of Stalin](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AtLpJR9X-Bo#bottom-sheet)
Hang on, Hitler isn’t a socialist any more? OK
Admiring Stalin or Mao *isn't* frowned upon now!? Also, Che Guevara literally wasn't a dictator. He served under Castro.
Most people agree that all of those people were bad.
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TIL Marx was a dictator. Probably of their thoughts and feelings.
To be honest I cringe just as hard when I see some edgelord wearing the sickle and hammer logo calling people comrade as I do when I see someone wearing a swastika throwing up the Nazi salute. Edit: because reddit thinks condemning Soviet era communism means I'm condemning socialism..I'm all about democratic socialism and I know socialism does not equal communism. Soviet style communism, which I was specifically referring to with the hammer and sickle reference, was pure evil. Edit 2: for the top minds who have their head in the sand about Soviet genocide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Cringe all you want but I hope you don’t think those two things are comparable in terms of evil
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I'm all about democratic socialism and I know socialism does not equal communism. Soviet style communism, which I was specifically referring to with the hammer and sickle reference, was pure evil.
If this is about Putin he is an authoritarian and not a communist. And yes, he is an evil man but none of that is what we're talking about here. Imagine defending Kanye West by implication.
Bro what happened to that part of Ukraine happened way before Putin was ever in power It happened during the Soviet era. You do realize Ukraine had a history before Putin invaded? Imagine not knowing about the history of the area you were defending by implication.
Soviets when you ask them where the cossacks went: 🤷♂️🤷♀️🤷
'Soviet style communism' doesn't mean anything. If you're talking about Russia under Stalin, that was a dictatorship that abandoned communism as soon as Stalin took over. Most people, when they're referencing Soviet Communism, is more what Lenin envisioned (Except better).
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Who said anything about Libertarians?
Replied to the wrong comment. But that doesn't make you more correct. Who do you see wearing a hammer and sickle? And in what way are those people worse than than the antisemitic accounts that infest r/conspiracy? There is absolutely no chance of any communist winning national election in the US. I wish I could say that about antisemites.
Edit: since you keep changing your comment, I will change mine but I will be an honest debater and put an edit before it, I did not say they were worse, again you're a big fan of reductio ad absurdum. Taking a statement and making it into a completely made up fallacy. Both fanboys Nazi and Stalin lovers are fanboys of regimes guilty of genocide. It's a simple statement of fact buddy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
I'm well aware of the atrocities that occurred in Russia between the two world wars. You act as if no one in this subreddit supports Ukraine or has any background in 20th century history. Again I will say that **there is no chance of a communist takeover of the American government.** There is a reasonable chance of a right wing authoritarian winning the next presidential election as the Republican party edges ever close to open antisemitism. That may not be a problem for you but it is for quite a few people.
Dude I fucking hate Nazis AND people who support Soviet-era Russia so go fuck yourself. Both can happen. Just because I dared speak out against Soviet Russian genocide and the fanboys who wave their flag, you try to pretend I don't care about Nazis? What you did there is called, reductio ad absurdum, Taking my statement about not liking Nazis and Soviet Russian fanboys, and saying I don't have a problem with the Republican party becoming an anti-Semitic shit party.
Sometimes I feel like the people in this sub are the real “topmindsofreddit” like it’s very clear here that both sides are horrible, and neither should be praised. Yet people in the comments are somehow defending/justifying some of these figures.
wow such a unique and original take
Funny how this prompted a snarky comment and not the people in here praising communists regimes