挂路灯人

Might not be your intention but you’re making a very benign concept that is essentially a necessity at any sort of scale (representative democracy) sound quite ominous. For any organisation of groups beyond a few people everyone voting on everything is simply unfeasible.

This is not even to get into the weeds of the uneven development of class consciousness, etc.

I love how the only political action you can conceive of is voting for pre approved candidates handed down to you. Joining a party that actually aligns with your goals, never. Engaging in political agitation (from something as simple as handing out fliers to organising rallies/events), impossible. No the only way to engage with politics is to tick off blue or red genocide before ignoring it for another 4 years.

I’m not right wing in the least

Doubtful

I just think convincing left leaning Americans that Democrats are as bad as Republicans is a tankie psyop to split the leftist vote.

Faux leftist not knowing what actually constitutes the minimum requirement of being a leftist, classic.

Are you sure you’re not American, with this American tier understanding of the left right divide you could have fooled many people.

They were/are Socialist. Communism is an end stage that can only be achieved once the class struggle has been overcome on a global scale. Unfortunately since no button exists to make this happen instantly and perfectly a transitional period is necessary, and the most successful/best answer that has been put forth thus far on how to implement this is the proletarian state. This is what tankies (and communists more generally understand/believe).

Congratulations you believe the exact same thing as tankies in that regard.

Wow I didn’t realise Ben Gvir had a Lemmy account.

You really do see all those who don’t revere you as less than, bots, and shills. No wonder you can be so flippantly pro genocide.

It was a really normal question as well to be this much of an asshole about it really shows the kind of person you are.

I’m genuinely asking what you define as leftist. I am not Amerikan. I don’t know what you would as it doesn’t seem to align with the global norm for what others would call leftist.

But I suppose everyone who doesn’t prostrate at your feet and revere your moral and intellectual superiority is a bot or a shill or otherwise less than.

Can you please define leftwing? When you say leftwing do you mean Obama?

No you definitely are. I can see your comment history. I am curious why you decided to suddenly start pretending to be illiterate. It makes it really annoying to parse and translate what you’re saying in my head.

Also your original comment was a strawman anyway.

All I did was point out that much of the leadership of NATO around it’s founding were former high ranking Nazis, as part of the systematic issue in the west at the time of parachuting Nazis into positions of power as they were ideologically opposed to the communists. This was in comparison to the Soviets who put Nazi scientists to work I’m workcamps for minimum wage to work off their debt to society.

Why are you suddenly pretending to be illiterate?

poverty rates plummeted all over the world during the 20th century

If you exclude China from those calculations global poverty by headcount is worse today than 1981 and roughly the same by percentage.

Americans care about freedom. You should probably learn this

So we’ve moved from most people to Americans. Interesting. Also given America has the largest prison population in the world in raw numbers not even per capita I’m not sure that’s particularly true, especially when American prisons are by design essentially slavery.

Perhaps but they appear to be talking about the current. Either way, the answer however is largely the same just reframed and rephrased. They were built to be functional and quick to deal with the fact hundreds of thousands if not millions would be homeless if nothing was done due to the destruction of fighting the Nazis. They then were not able to be maintained and modernised post 1991 for the reasons outlined.

Certainly the DPRK, I am not very well read on Laos however.

By almost every metric they were massively successful seeing some of the largest leaps in life expectancy in history side by side with the largest strides in poverty alleviation, infant mortality and more.

If you exclude just China alone from global poverty statistics global poverty by headcount is worse today than in 1981.

Not that you really care you just want to pontificate from your soapbox about “the silly Marxists” who dare to actually wish for and push for better.

Ok so maybe I wasn’t clear that the housing built in a hurry to house people post war was left to rot and not modernised post 1991 as the soviet union collapsed this was followed by shock therapy and capitalists in power who don’t give a shit thus leaving the modern “commie blocks” in eastern Europe today ugly neglected and rundown.

why is the outside so neglected?

I wonder why the Soviets stopped tending to their infrastructure around 1991 surely nothing happened around that time?!?!

China, Russia, Vietnam, Cuba

If it was democracy, that’s what we’d call it. But we are not talking about democracy. The post is quite explicit about the fact that after a socialist revolution and before ‘true democracy’ comes a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which is different.

This is your warped view not reality. Communists do not talk of class dictatorship as separate from democracy but the base upon which it is built. It answers the question of democracy for who. The dictatorship of the proletariat is essentially short hand for democracy for the masses, repression for the bourgeoisie. Just as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is democracy for the bourgeoisie and charades and repression for the masses.

My grandparents were workers in the GDR. They were part of the proletariat, they didn’t have a say. That’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. A government run by ‘socialists’ with a higher standard of living than that of the general population.

See this isn’t true just off the bat. But I don’t really want to relitigate that with you as it’s entirely irrelevant to the point at hand.

The fact is, you have a preconception of what certain words mean and it is stopping you from grasping what’s actually being said.

I could talk at length about my direct experience with the dictatorship of the proletariat in China and how the people’s voices and wishes are weaved in at every level from direct elections at town, city and county levels to the CPPCC, ACFTU, government hotline like 12345 and mandated representation for minorities etc. versus how the bourgeoisie are outright banned from people’s committee and congresses but it’s not at all relevant to the theoretical point at hand here that you repeatedly look directly in the eyes before casting aside to continue hammering on a strawman of your misconceptions.

It is natural for a liberal to speak of “democracy” in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: “for what class?” Everyone knows, for instance (and Kautsky the “historian” knows it too), that rebellions, or even strong ferment, among the slaves in ancient times at once revealed the fact that the ancient state was essentially a dictatorship of the slave owners. Did this dictatorship abolish democracy among, and for, the slaveowners? Everybody knows that it did not.

[…]

If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of “pure democracy” as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy. (Let us say in parenthesis that “pure democracy” is not only an ignorant phrase, revealing a lack of understanding both of the class struggle and of the nature of the state, but also a thrice-empty phrase, since in communist society democracy will wither away in the process of changing and becoming a habit, but will never be “pure” democracy.)

“Pure democracy” is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy.

Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky