161 points
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Agree with you in general, but I think a lot if people here are not really informed what differences there are materialistic ideologies.

Yes, Stalin bad.

But Guevara is not Stalin.

Marx is not che

Engels is not Marx

China is not communist.

Marxism is not materialism

Socialism is not communism

Also the amount of people bringing the “the 3 times people tried socialism were bad, so the whole ideology must be bad” argument are way to high IMHO.

How many times was capitalism tried? How many times it worked out? Is the USA a “functioning” state with all the oppression, racism, greed, invading other countries out of monetarian interest and environment destruction?

While I agree with you, that oppression is bad, no matter what the oppressor calls himself, we should talk about policies without resorting to dogmas and generalising people in favor of fear the hegemonic class is propagating to stay in power.

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114 points

Yeah, that’s not the tankies here; these are “North Korea is a great country, actually” tankies.

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93 points

Also, “anything negative about a communist country is US propaganda”

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73 points

or “russia is correctly in invading ukraine”

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15 points

Should probably listen to Blowback Season 3.

Not to say they’re a perfect country but to pretend that anyone in the West can critique them when their material conditions are dictated by the actions of the West is just comical.

If you aren’t a materialist, what are you even doing? As if history happens in the realm of pure thought…

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23 points
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The material conditions forcing North Korea to make work camps

Bugger off, tankie

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78 points

When a liberal says “tankie” they mean anything remotely communist-looking. When a leftist says “tankie”, they mean authoritarians who like red flags and self-proclaimed communists who nonetheless support hierarchies and have no plan or intention to bring them down. I think the vast majority of people here knows this already.

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32 points

I think the vast majority of people here knows this already.

You are way optimistic.

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4 points

Mostly True, while (at least in my part of the world) there are a lot of people who like red flags but fight against hierarchies.

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3 points

There are plenty of Marxists and Marxist-derived socialists who aren’t Tankies.

They just don’t make up the majority.

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Is the USA a “functioning” state with all the oppression, racism, greed, invading other countries out of monetarian interest and environment destruction?

I hope you realize that this is an incredibly privileged take. The US is rife with issues, but the hardships experienced by the average western citizen doesn’t even compare to the suffering that you would find in, say, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or (to a less extreme extent) Maduro’s Venezuela. To compare what a US citizen deals with on a daily basis due to capitalism to what a citizen of any of those countries had to go through is very reductive and may be perceived as disrespectful to many who had to live those experiences.

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24 points

The US is rife with issues, but the hardships experienced by the average western citizen doesn’t even compare to the suffering that you would find in, say, Pol Pot’s Cambodia

I have some fellas from Detroit that would disagree.

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24 points

My dude you need to stop right now before you end up saying that genocide isn’t that bad. Because that’s what Pol Pot did.

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You can’t be serious…

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23 points

The United States, for all it’s faults, is the pretty side of capitalism.you don’t even need to look to the most poor countries to see a standard of living that makes even directly post ww2 soviet union look like a great place.

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9 points
  1. Im not from USA, and from my point of view its mich worse than most other countries (no healthcare, no independend courts, murder sprees in schools nearly every day, opression of half of the world (a half of them just to get more oil to destroy the planet faster), one of 3 of the biggest war-pushers in whole earth, polutes and destroys earth mode than every other country per citizens, etc. PP.)

  2. capitalism mostly opresses and profits from people out of the country to Funktion. if its Bad in Venezuela or Cuba or Afghanistan, or even early russia, thats at least partly fault of US.

  3. Venezuela is not communism, China isnt, russia isnt. Most of them have failed, at least partly because caputalist societys atack them and stop a as soon as they are born and they can’t form a stable democracy. Before reading Marx, your bashing of communism isnt worth anything, as you clearly don’t understand what you are talking about. We never had communism, and some would say not even socialism. You sound like you don’t even know the difference, since you keep talking about communism, which is a utopian society after humanity has stopped a lot of bad habits and has learned to live without working against each other in competition and working together instead, which arises maybe after generations of workig socialism, which we clearly didn’t have.

4.you exactly prove my point. I dont agree with tankies either, but the number of people around here blindly copying capitalist propaganda while understanding nothing they bash about is too damm high.

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2 points

You have a warped view of USA that doesn’t reflect reality. You’re seeing it through the lens of sensationalist news media and hyperventilating social media posts.

The actual reality for Americans is that it’s a vast, beautiful land with an amazing spectrum of various experience. Violent crime is rare overall, and most Americans have never seen or heard any gun violence in person. Health care is available to pretty much everyone, even if you don’t have money. We have state-run healthcare facilities that the poor can make use of like county health departments.

My life in the USA is great, because I don’t live in a big city. I live on my own land, in a nice house that I own, and I’m just middle class income level. It’s pretty easy to accomplish if you choose a low cost of living area rather than a big metropolis or suburb thereof.

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2 points

Well of course the standard of living in the imperial core is higher than the countries it has exploited or destabilized. A lot of American wealth is the fruit of imperialism.

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2 points
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3 points

Seems weird that you want to ignore the fact that communism has never worked once lol

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Capitalism has killed orders of magnitude more than communism.

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6 points

There have been orders of magnitude more people living under capitalism than communism

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2 points

And Capitalism also killed more people than Fascism.

That doesn’t mean Fascists movements don’t need fiercer opposition than Capitalist Liberals.

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7 points
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Again: seems weitd that you think, a New thing needs to work after 3 -5 trys.

Capitalism was tried 100erds of times and still doesnt work…

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132 points
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Based.

They already have lemmygrad.

Honestly, I don’t think we need them here.

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27 points

the have genzdong in there lol

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104 points

tankies more like no thankies

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90 points

This comment section is really something uh

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133 points
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Tankies on their way to explain why teaming up with the Nazis to conquer Poland is actually based and totally in line with Marxist philosophy.

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19 points

Can you give an actual example?

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9 points
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74 points

Thank fuck. I thought Lemmy was some ultra militant leftist hellhole before the shift.

I don’t like extreme radical left any more than extreme radical right.

Fuck Che Guevara. Read a book.

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57 points

tankies arent radical left. they are authoritarians ffs

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5 points
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6 points

already have. maybe u should get urself another book to read for once.

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3 points

Do you know its possible to read books and disagree with them?

The ML obsession with treating books as religious tomes is getting tiring.

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31 points

what if the book is Che Guevaras “Guerrilla Warfare”

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18 points

Is being a good tactician and being a genocidal, totalitarian extremist an oil and water situation?

He can be both.

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2 points
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27 points
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How about Saw Gerrera?

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16 points

Saw Gerrera is an extremist and must be brought to justice for the good of the Empire.

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5 points

This, but unironically. That man lost it and became a monster.

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20 points

c/EnlightedCentrism

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13 points
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12 points
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Che Guevara did a lot of good for people, like the people of Cuba. Considering he fought, and helped Cuba free itself from being a colony to the United States and against Batista. I didn’t know people fighting for the right to not be under colonial rule and have their own self determination is “extreme”.

Also maybe go check out “On revolutionary medicine” by Che Guevara. I’ll also leave this quote from him.

…the life of a single human being, is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth…

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