• ngwoo@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Russia was communist once and China pretends to still be that means I’m a bad leftist if I don’t send death threats to people who support Ukraine and Taiwan.

    Actual thought process some people have listed above

    • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      The funny thing about that is that Russia was never communist. Though many don’t understand the difference between communism and Communism. The irony being that Communism was basically cosplay of communism. But never actually communism.

      • bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 years ago

        I mean, there was a pretty solid chance of actual communism before the Bolshevik coup. I think that if the Soviets overthrew the provisional government we’d have a fully socialist government, which could have eventually became communist.

        It was still not communist, but lets remember that it could have been before the party communists made their state capitalist government in the name of communism

      • Saledovil@sh.itjust.works
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        2 years ago

        I arrived at that conclusion by analyzing what ownership means. Ownership means that you either control something, or the person who controls it is accountable to you. In a state with an authoritarian dictator, such as Stalin, the dictator controls the means of production, if not directly, then through his subordinates, who are accountable to him. Therefore, in the soviet union, the workers didn’t control the means of production, Stalin did. Basically, the Soviet Union was the endstage of capitalism.

        • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          The Soviet Union was a state. Therefore not stateless, therefore not communist. The Soviet Union had a separate political class. One that scapegoated, imprisoned, and even slaughtered any proletariat that dared criticize the vanguard party and it’s leaders. Therefore not classes, not communist.

          The Soviet Union nominally implemented Communism. But communism and Communism aren’t the same thing. I could name my dog Communism. And my dog would be Communism. But not communism. The soviets cosplayed communism. But never were or will be communist.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Not all Authoritarians are Fascists.

    That said, I would agree that whomever supports Putin, supports Fascism - there is nothing at all Leftwing in present day Russia, quite the contrary.

    China is more complicated.

    • Akasazh@feddit.nl
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      2 years ago

      China is more complicated

      That’s because they found a way to voor communist thought to the most capitalist industry in the world.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Well, they managed to pull about a billion people out of poverty over the last 4 decades or so, which means that mainly they were following leftwing ideals.

        (I come from a country which had actual Fascism until the 70s and what the Fascists did was the exact opposite of that: the vast majority of people were dirt poor and kept dirt poor whilst a tiny elite tightly interwined with the Fascist Government gorged themselves on the wealth of the country).

        However, it’s been some time since China did that lifting of the masses out of poverty, and they’ve been shifting to Capitalism whilst keeping the Authorianism from their implementation of leftwing policies (they called it Communism, but they never really reached such utopical state, so I’m wary of calling that Communism).

        Are they even left of center nowadays? I don’t know enough in detail how modern China operates to pass judgement on that - outside of China we mostly hear of what’s done in domains that reflect the part of their ideology that falls on the Libertarian-Authoritarian axis, not the stuff that falls on the Left-Right one.

        I don’t think they’ve yet moved all the way to Fascism, though, even if they’ve kept the Authoritarianism going.

  • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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    2 years ago

    A great way to tell if they mean “anti-imperialist” as “against the conquering and subjugating of other groups” or instead just “in favor of anyone that declares themselves to be against the United States and Western Europe.”