this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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I mean to be fair... groups that consider themselves far left also exterminate groups.
The trick is to not go too far. You wanna end up at Scandinavian liberal socialism, but not overshoot it to let's create a famine for kicks and kill all people wearing glasses.
Is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement.
I think it's necissary when talking about "left governments" to have that caveat. I wouldn't personally consider the Khmer Rouge, USSR, or CCP, left wing but they did.
They are just different shades of authoritarianism.
[Citation needed]
Yeah, you wouldn't want society to become TOO egalitarian and fair! 🙄
Speaking as an actual Scandinavian leftie: nope. Not good enough.
Social Democratic Liberalism (which is what it actually is. Socialism is a very different thing) is still capitalist and thus exploitative at its core.
It's better than most, but it's far from the utopian ideal that people from the American Left tend to think it is.
You're thinking along the wrong axis there. There's a HUGE difference between ultra authoritarian leftism like that of the USSR and Pol Pot's Cambodia, and libertarian (original meaning, not bastardized American definition) leftism.
It's actually a "The end justifies the means" situation - Marxism-Leninism tries to achieve Communism (the Perfect Equality utopia) via the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat stage, a form of Autocracy, and all tries so far in the so-called "Communist" countries got stuck in that stage.
So whilst the end objective is not authoritarian, it's used to justify means to supposedly get there which are most definitelly authoritarian though they're are supposed to be used only temporarily
Whilst I'm pretty sure in the very beginning of the Communist Revolutions most people in it were guided by leftwing principles and trully saw the authoritarianism as merelly a distasteful temporary need, nowadays in those countries the genuinelly leftwing grand objective seems to be just an excuse to be used in justifing the continued use of authocratic power by those who hold it, rather than something those in power genuine want and expect to one day reach.
This take is too anarchy-pilled. I don't love the idea of a vanguard party but it's hard to honestly argue something of the sort isn't necessary to push things along until broad cultural norms shift far enough Left to be self-sustaining.
Yeah, fucking red fascists and their completely free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing, guaranteed employment and guarantee of retirement pensions at 60 years old (55 for women). Fucking red fascists supporting anticolonial movements all over Latin America, Africa and Asia, allowing Vietnam to decide a future for itself instead of being forced into submission by American bombing. Fucking red fascists saving Europe from Nazism and saving tens of millions of lives from extermination and genocide. Fucking red fascists with their self-sufficient economic system that doesn't rely on the exploitation of the global south. Fucking red fascists respecting the cultural diversity of the peoples (look up the evolution of number of speakers of Occitan Language since 1900 to see what's real cultural erasure happening in real time)
You are literally free to do so. Take a flight to China tomorrow, and visit Kashgar in the Xinjiang province, or visit the Tibet region. You'll find that people are living normal plentiful lives and support the Chinese government in their majority. China is, as a matter of fact, the country in the world with highest government satisfaction rates consistently
That info comes from western organizations like the University of California or the Pew Research Institute, BTW, not from any "evil CCP propaganda".
The fact that you believe Uyghur or Tibetan people are unhappy with their government is because you've fallen for propaganda yourself. Western-manufactured organizations like the East Turkestan Liberation Organization (based in Türkiye, NATO nation) or the Tibetan Government in Exile (based off India) create propaganda implying that people in said regions aren't happy with the government and want independence, but if you look inside China and ask the actual population, you'll find that's a very minority position. Certainly nothing in Tibet like the literal police violence against pro-independence protestors causing 800 wounded in Catalonia in my homeland of Spain because their right to self determination is violated abusing the Spanish constitution.
Ohhhh, I get it, you're a Zionist! Should have started from there, I would have wasted a lot less time if I knew I was dealing with a genocidal maniac, gotcha. Bye
POV Lemmy user learns that people can do both bad and good things at the same time
Yeah, communism may have provided all the astonishing advances in human rights to hundreds of millions of people, saved hundreds of millions of lives from poverty and serfdom, and introduced doubling and tripling of life expectancy where it arrived despite having to contend against the western capitalist empire. But did you know they had prisons during the WW2 times when 25 million soviets were murdered by Nazis?
POV Lemmy user doesn't learn anything
Close your ears if you want, I made my point and you're just shouting "lalala I didnt listen".
You didn't make a point. All you did was provide a list of good things and then point at it. I could make a list of all the good things accomplished by the United States or the UK, but that doesn't suddenly invalidate the bad.
I could make you a list of bad actions committed by the governments you view favorably. Then you would simply either engage in "whataboutism" and then complain about how another nation has done bad things. Or you would simply ignore those bad actions and provide a list of more good things.
At best it's an incredibly simplistic and inaccurate way to view the world, at worst it's intellectually dishonest.
Ok, great, both systems have done good things and bad ones. Now let's make a balance.
Capitalism by the UK, in India alone, has murdered over a hundred million people. Tell me something on the same order of magnitude done by the USSR (hint: the worst famine in the USSR was 5 million deaths and less than a million people died in Gulags).
Communism has defects in real life implementation, but if it's empirically better at giving better life outcomes at comparable levels of development, why not go for it?
If I could point toward actual socialist governments not based on exploitation (rather than Scandinavia) I would. But it really is just a hypothetical idea at this point.
I've never been optimistic enough to believe the libertarian/anarchic theories work on any scale above small communities. Anytime I discuss egalitarian and anarchic societies I can't get beyond the point of humans are intrinsically greedy andviolent which that collapses the system.
So anything thats acturally left wing is bad? Because left wing means genuene real socialism, as in not capitalism socialism. As in the type of socialism that doesn't require oppressing the global south (which shouldn't even be a question).
LIBERALISM = REACTIONARY
SOCIALISM = REVOLUTIONARY
Finland keeps putting hundreds of thousands into poverty thanks to its "liberal socialism" constantly pushing austerity policy as the rest of Europe. And even when things were better in Finland, that's because the entirety of the western world is supported on the exploitation of Africa, South America and Asia.
I don't wanna end up at Scandinavian liberal socialism because it's currently electing fascists into government, and because it perpetuates the exploitation of the global south.
Oh wow I'm shocked that this guy, of all people, doesn't like Finland. CRAZY.
I mentioned nothing about not liking Finland, I just don't like their governance system because it's leading to fascism. You can stop your weird adhominem and address my points
Why don't you just invade them?
Poor quality bait
Or better yet, it's just fine having a plethora of different views on different individual topics and not subscribing to any particular ideology.
Everything is an ideology my guy. Even apathy/indifference
Sure, if you put stock in classifying yourself. Eventually people get overly consumed arguing ideologies and the right way to be that the individual topic of debate is lost, and the conversation turns into a popularity contest. It's arguably the core issue the US is dealing with at the moment.
So your ideology is just "do-nothing-ism" and "I-just-wanna-grill-ism". That just means conservatism, i.e. "let things remain as they are".
Wow that's quite a few assumptions, not sure how you extrapolated that conclusion from two comments. And for the record, you are quite wrong lol