• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    11 hours ago

    All countries have always been governed by the property owning class. With all its faults, capitalism has resulted in “peons” having the most say they’ve ever had. It’s not a lot, but it’s sure better than under classical democracy, feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, and “communism” at least as practiced in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and China.

    • undergroundoverground@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      (Capitalism is a) brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.

      Edit: In this they take on the posture of a severely depressed person who views hope as a dangerous delusion.

    • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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      2 hours ago

      “communism” at least as practiced in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and China.

      What are you talking about? Research how many rights women and lgbt people lost when the GDR fell for an example of how wrong-headed this line of thinking is.

      For those who want light reading, I highly recommend “Why women had better sex under socialism, and other arguments for economic independence”

      • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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        2 hours ago

        I remember an anecdote from an East German woman after the Berlin Wall fell saying West German women were just now beginning to advocate for what the East German women already had.

      • sozesoze@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Yes these rights rights were lost, but this paints the GDR in a positive light regarding regarding civil rights when in reality people who showed a smidge of dissent were persecuted.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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          2 hours ago

          when in reality people who showed a smidge of dissent were persecuted.

          Look up how the stasi dealt with lgbt dissidents after being told to solve the issue and then come back here and say that with a straight face.

          Dissidents for “hey we need to fix the problems of socialism” or dissidents for “we have to dissolve socialist democracy and let the capitalists pillage us” were treated very differently.

          And the ones arguing for dissolving socialism got what they wanted, and the result is justification enough for their oppression tbh. Better to suppress right wing dissidents than let them oppress vast swathes of the population.

        • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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          2 hours ago

          Yes these rights rights were lost, but this paints the GDR in a positive light regarding regarding civil rights

          Because they were, especially compared to West Germany.

    • celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 hours ago

      And yet despite your copium, we have less than 20 years to take control of our economic system before we all die from climate change.

      Capitalism is fuelling climate change. The feudalism and classical democracy and communism of yesteryear aren’t the fossil fuel portfolio heavy ideologies that match the destructive power of capitalism.

    • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      6 hours ago

      That’s wildly ahistorical. It has allowed the creation of Labor Aristocracy, Proletarians that benefit from the fruits of Imperialism, but Socialist countries like the ones you listed did far more for the working class than Capitalist countries have. You should read Blackshirts and Reds.

    • i_love_FFT@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      Countries are defined by land-hoarding class, because the nomadic people define themselves by their group instead of the land on which they live.

      Without hoarders (landlords), we wouldn’t need to put as much effort towards regulating land use, instead we could focus on regulating behaviours. Ex: “this land is a national park, you are not allowed to trash it. Go next door, there you are allowed to pour the trash from your industrial process into the ground, because it’s your private land”