I mean, they have a point. But considering they run a whole journal on literal communism, it’s hard to take them seriously. The message falls flat when it comes from a different flavor of dangerous fantasy.
They dehumanize and kill everyone equally.
I think the West (US especially) has a great system of government figured out, and I wouldn't try to say any group attempting to break that is better than another. It's not disingenuous to say that both are authoritarians who kill millions.
I disagreed and said that they are both equally horrid.
Expressing equal hatred for people and systems that kill countless millions through starvation, gulags/concentration camps, and disappearing them, is not childish. I have a ton of solidarity with victims of other evil regimes.
"it's the same because they're both bad"
ok...
My family is from a communist country and I can assure you, that is communistic.
We've had those for ages. Called commisaries. Here's a picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Navy_020813-N-364...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Commissary_Agency
> the government will seize buildings from bad landlords.
We've had eminent domain since the founding of the nation.
The US army have their own government owned supermarkets. And there are plenty of US states and other countries with public stores which are definitely not communist. Is the US army communist ?
In Berlin we voted to seize housing from megacorp landlords profiteering from housing, I don't think Berlin is communist either. https://qz.com/2065655/berliners-voted-to-seize-housing-from...
In Berlin you didn't realise that population increase is what enriches landlords and screws regular people, but you still vote for a lot of immigration. Population increase in a finite, well-settled country is what gives rise to landlords.
Trump sent a bunch of government checks to people during Covid and no one called him communist for this.
Giving people money on a temporary basis is the opposite of the government opportunistically taking over areas of the market.
Communists left the chat in 1989, grandpa. There are multiple factions competing for power but communists aren't really in the ring right now. It's mostly different flavours of establishment factions and alt-right factions.
It’s a magazine with a professed socialist view point but it’s more aligned with left-of-center American politics. Think Sanders or Mamdani rather than Stalin or Mao.
> Sanders or Mamdani
Sanders and Mamdani are about as far left of center as one can get at the moment, such that they almost meld into Stalin or Mao.
The mental gymnastics you’re doing to blunt that fact is absolutely incredible.
No, they aren’t. They are about as far left of center as you can get and be competitive in US elections, maybe, but that’s a very different thing. There’s a lot to their left (as you an see from the by the opposition from leftist as sellouts to capitalist/imperialist/etc. institutions both have.)
So, when's Mamdani's Great Purge coming? Do you think he's gonna stand by the standards of his historical ideological equivalent, Stalin, and execute a couple hundreds of thousands of elites (if we're going by the same proportions as the USSR), or is he going all out - maybe he could get a million deaths in? Maybe he could also start a famine or two on the way there?
The utter insanity of American politics baffles me. "Anything left is abhorrent totalitarian communism in the making" isn't just a meme, it's a foundational piece of mainstream American ideology that has been at its core for nearly a century now.
This is unfortunate but perhaps inevitable. There are not that many left that remember the horrors of either ideology clearly.
... Oh, come on now. I can't tell whether you're extremely confused about Sanders and Mamdani, or extremely confused about Stalin and Mao.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/25/bernie-sande... would have gone very differently if Sanders was Mao, for a start.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s a no-kidding literary tool used throughout history.
Stalin was an ideological authoritarian that executed political rivals and used lethal force, price controls, and other governmental tools to control the economy and the general working population. The idea that Sanders and Mambani advocate anything close to that is laughable.
The rhetoric on both the right and left that liken today's politics to extremism in the 20th century is a ridiculous anachronism that needs to be called out more often.
I could follow an argument that Jacobin is naive, but it seems silly to make the direct comparison to someone who thinks we're approaching some predictable end of days and say they're the same.
Ever will? The "capitalists" have already killed far more. Did communists wipe out a continent full of native americans? Did communists killed more people than the Nazi germany, the US, british empire, chinese empire, japanese, etc in ww2? Did communists kill more people during both the vietnam wars?
> Communism only ever exists when paired with an authoritarian government and cannot exist without one. Capitalism can (and does) exist without an authoritarian government.
Fine, that's an actual argument that can be discussed. But why lie outright about reality. But pretty sure the natives would have loved to live under their own authoritarian government rather than being wiped out by the capitalist paradise.
> There is a reason why the only people that defend communism have never lived under it.
Must be why you are so good at lying. Because you grew up under communism?
Then neither did communism. The governments did.
> And even then, the "system" in place at the time was mercantilism, not capitalism.
Sure. Just like the soviet union, china, north korea, etc are not true communists. Idiots on both sides always make the same excuses.
> Once again, growing up under communism implies with 99% certainty that you do not want communism.
If that were the case, a certain percentage of the world wouldn't have had to spent trillions to undermine and overthrow communism.
> It is an implication, not a bi-implication.
Morons on both sides love to throw around logic terms they don't understand to buttress their shitty argument. That and silly statistics. 99% certainty. Good one.
They're both wrong, just in different ways, and observing this is not "bothsidesism."
there's lots of stupid brigading on HN, but sometimes dumb comments get the downvotes they deserve.