These discussions on communism vs capitalism that devolve into comparing the US with the USSR are like discussing feudalism vs liberalism in 1825, when the only perceptible legacies of the French Revolution were the Reign of Terror and Napoleon’s degeneration into monarchy.
If you’re sensibly anticapitalist, for the love of Marx do not argue in favor of states that rejected all pretension of wanting to let the economy be democratically managed, ultimately turning into party-controlled hierarchies rather than socialism. If you’re a liberal in 1825 and rather than arguing in favor of ending serfdom and enfranchising everyone you keep going on about how Robespierre wasn’t really that bad, you’re politically useless.
Lenin’s State and Revolution is great and set the foundations for the Bolshevik discourse that led to them being capable of leading a movement large enough to gain power over Russia, the problem is that not even Lenin himself was consistent with the principles he proposed. The idea that you can legitimately sustain some sort of pretension of achieving worker democracy when the Bolsheviks consistently ended up repressing all other leftist factions wasn’t coherent, to the point that Stalin wasn’t a sad degeneration of Leninist practice, but a necessary consequence.
We unfortunately see the same result in almost all countries that followed the ML model, where a party elite ends up monopolizing power and divorcing itself from the rest of society, ultimately instituting themselves as a separate class that sees no ideological issue with bringing back capitalism, as they find it to be more consistent with the really existent power dynamics in the country.
ALL of these issues are deeply important to me, but all of them arise as symptoms of Class Warfare
A society that achieves socialism might still be homophobic, transphobic, racist, ableist and sexist. These things persist in culture even if the socioeconomic system might promote them, you cannot just will them out of existence because the conditions that made them sprout no longer exist.
Euthanasia is for people who want to die. Not for murdering babies with special needs.
You’re hardly qualified to judge that.
You do not know how that person reached their conclusions. For all you know, it might be an ethical framework you know shit about, or the verification that plenty of human beings will often assume incapacity to live an adequate life rather than a rational analysis of all viable options.
Emotional attachment clouds judgment.
All humans are subject to rationalize as the result of their emotions rather than to actually reason. I’m going to go ahead and use your scale of acceptable evidence to judge whether other people are rational or not and assume that you’re irrational because your narcissism prevents you from analyzing the biases you’ll easily assume are clouding anyone else’s judgement.
Communist Filth/Capitalist Filth (lemmy.ml)
Why not? (media.mas.to)
Class War > Culture War (lemmy.ml)
Heroism (startrek.website)