“liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.’ Mikhail Bakunin
The bottom text comes originally from the new testament and Lenin was aiming the sentiment at upper class people who had passive incomes. He was saying that everyone would have to contribute meaningfully to society instead of just leeching off it like landlords do. He wasn’t talking about the disabled, children, or elderly
But if you don’t take the quote out of context, it doesn’t support the narrative they’re imagining up!
The first one: “Work and starve.”
Capitalists tell you to work and starve
Communists tell you to stop farming and instead produce steel in your backyard, causing tens of millions of your people to starve.
That sure was messed up. Let’s not do that again.
I once tried to ride a bike and fell over and skinned my knee. Now I walk everywhere.
It’s almost like all the engineers and scientists were killed by Japan during WW2.
Nah you give what you are able and recieve what you need.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
Who decides what a person needs?
On the face, I think the idea “from each according to their needs, to each according to their ability” sounds reasonable. But if you have ever done any logistics work, then you know it is a childishly simplistic fantasy.
There is no way you could possibly keep track of the many resources and services that are needed in a modern, complex society and distribute them usefully before the people who need them die of old age (or starvation). As you try to centralize tracking of everything the administrative problems grow exponentially, and never mind building the actual distribution network. No government-managed system could ever keep up with the needs of a growing, changing society.
Just the highly centralised power structure and the single party consisting entirely of nepotism.
Yes, but you see, this is true freedom. You can only have real economic freedom, political choice and self-determination in a system where there’s only one party and they control aspects of your life you didn’t need controlling, such as how much food you’re allowed to buy.
To be fair, yes, there were times in the soviet union were rationing of specific foods was a good idea, because there just wasn’t enough for everyone otherwise. But still the thought that a single party can unilaterally decide how much you can eat is pretty damn scary.
Yeah, there’s no person or group of people on this planet I would trust to equitably distribute resources like food and water, or decide what medical services count as needs for me or my family.
It is widely believed that while the Soviet Union may have produced these benefits, in the end, Soviet public ownership and planning proved to be unworkable. Otherwise, how to account for the country’s demise? Yet, when the Soviet economy was publicly owned and planned, from 1928 to 1989, it reliably expanded from year to year, except during the war years. To be clear, while capitalist economies plunged into a major depression and reliably lapsed into recessions every few years, the Soviet economy just as unfailingly did not, expanding unremittingly and always providing jobs for all
https://gowans.blog/2012/12/21/do-publicly-owned-planned-economies-work/
Yet, when the Soviet economy was publicly owned and planned, from 1928 to 1989, it reliably expanded from year to year
This claim is laughable considering that the vast majority of Soviet citizens lived in abject poverty during that period, and the whole system collapsed due to lack of money. If the economy was “reliably expanding” then why were their bread lines?
The infamous bread lines, people queuing up before dawn to get milk, scarce produce, bare shelves at supermarkets and empty clothing stores became an everyday reality. We didn’t have connections to The Party, nor veteran benefits—as both sets of my grandparents were too young to fight in the war—so we lined up like everyone else. Often, the distribution of food was limited to a certain number of pieces per person. I was frequently dragged to stores by grownups in my family so we could get two packs of detergent instead of one. Or two loaves of white bread instead of one. Or two pea coats. Whatever appeared in stores nearby.
There was nothing economically successful about the USSR, it brought poverty to its entire population, aside from a handful of powerful political figures who enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else.
A random biased unknown blogger is your evidence that socialism works?
Yeah, but ðere are people who cannot give at all, and ð quote from ð Stalinists makes no allowance for ð mentally or physically incapable of labor.
A society is only as good as how it treats its least able to treat for ðemselves.
I think your keyboard is broken
ωнคт đΘ уσน мєคи?
Nah, it’s just set to Old Norse
The current productive apparatus already produces much more than is necessary to take care of everybody’s needs. Which means we could do degrowth, egalitarianism, and improve standard of living for everybody at a fraction of our current output. The free market is a kind of planning, its an inefficient one that delivers profits to owners and corporations and stockholders. While creating monumental amounts of waste.
The means of production are ripe, maybe beyond ripe, but the class of workers has to seize them for mutual benefit.
i too make broad generalizations based off of misunderstandings and false assumptions
To be fair. Everyone who is able to work should do its proportional part of work needed for the sustain and improvement of the society they live in.
Keywords:
Able to: as its truest meaning with the understanding that the vast majority of the population can work, one way or the other.
Proportionality in the work should not mean proportionality on the perceived benefits, but it should feel fair for everyone. Including the option to chose different ways of living that may mean different levels of work/benefits, all within reason.
Improvement of society: notice how society is not spelled “billonaire” or “bussiness” or “investors”.
In other words From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, one of the most basic tenets of communism (and anarchism).
I’d like to add that if someone does something to improve society so everyone can work less, we should respect that. Instead what happens is that people take those labour-hours and instead of refunding it to the worker, ask for more since you’re so much more productive now.
Good time to mention [email protected]
a.k.a intelligent communism
Or really just internally consistent communism.
Not pictured here: people who study history, political and social history, organizes IRL, cares about democracy, tries to understand and communicate with others the need for revolutionary political, social, democratic, and economic changes while acknowledging the challenges of that necessity
Lenin is pictured, what are you on about?
It appears you’ve discovered the flaw in my post
But since its a misrepresentation of Lenin I’m still right
Oh yeah, he cared about democracy very much, not in a way we would thought.
I agree with the meme, but correct me if I’m wrong: didn’t Bakunin himself argue in favour of a work voucher system?
I don’t think so. I never saw it mentioned in his work.
edit: hmmm I faintly remeber something about “labour notes” as compensation. His does argue strongly for mutual aid and solidarity. Though I do tend to side more with Kropotkin than Bakunin. (Ignoring the fact their ideologies are 99% similar).
I faintly remember Bakunin’s utopian vision from the revolutions podcast and I thought that he didn’t really have an answer to the “what-if-someone-doesn’t-work-conondrum”.
Yeah, Kropotkin is a little bit more refined and based on science.
Kropotkin’s rebuttal in Conquest of Bread is in chapter 12: objections. He expands on it quite a bit in section 12.3, but his conclusion is:
Take, for example, an association stipulating that each of its members should carry out the following contract: “We undertake to give you the use of our houses, stores, streets, means of transport, schools, museums, etc., on condition that, from twenty to forty-five or fifty years of age, you consecrate four or five hours a day to some work recognized as necessary to existence. Choose yourself the producing groups which you wish to join, or organize a new group, provided that it will undertake to produce necessaries. And as for the remainder of your time, combine together with whomsoever you like, for recreation, art, or science, according to the bent of your taste.
“Twelve or fifteen hundred hours of work a year, in one of the groups producing food, clothes, or houses, or employed in public sanitation, transport, and so on, is all we ask of you. For this amount of work we guarantee to you the free use of all that these groups produce, or will produce. But if not one, of the thousands of groups of our federation, will receive you, whatever be their motive; if you are absolutely incapable of producing anything useful, or if you refuse to do it, then live like an isolated man or like an invalid. If we are rich enough to give you the necessaries of life we shall be delighted to give them to you. You are a man, and you have the right to live. But as you wish to live under special conditions, and leave the ranks, it is more than probable that you will suffer for it in your daily relations with other citizens. You will be looked upon as a ghost of bourgeois society, unless some friends of yours, discovering you to be a talent, kindly free you from all moral obligation towards society by doing all the necessary work for you.
“And finally, if it does not please you, go and look for other conditions elsewhere in the wide world, or else seek adherents and organize with them on novel principles. We prefer our own.”
This is what could be done in a communal society in order to turn away sluggards if they became too numerous.
i meant Bakunin’s vision, sorry. 🙈
Ah, no worries! I haven’t read Bakunin yet, so I’m not sure what his stance was either 😅
When you’re in front of the MAGA firing squad, take comfort before your last breath that you’re not a “TANKIE.”
If I get executed by an authoritarian state. You bet you I will be proud I stood up to authoritarians during my life.
I didn’t realize Trump is a Tankie. You’re so off base, you’re not even in the game. You’re fighting the wrong battle, at the wrong time.
Trump isn’t a tankie. But both Tankies and Trump are authoritarians who oppress the masses.
And I have 400 volunteer hours for Dems the past two election cycles. I think the democratic party is very far from ideal, but I’m a pragmaticist, so I believe we would be far better off with them than the alternative. Don’t accuse me of fighting the wrong battles before you know anything about me.
Maybe if you spent 400 volunteer hours canvassing against tankies instead of Republicans, the threat of Trump and fascism wouldn’t be on the voting ballot. /s
You are weirdly offended by this meme? Do you see yourself in it?
You do realise US politics and who wins the presidential election is not the end all be all of everything right? The world is large. It would be very closed minded to assume Trump is the only threat on this earth.
Red-Baiting is weird. As a Marxist, of course I see myself in it. With two weeks before an election where Trump is threatening the enemy within, I find this kind of thinking quixotic and slapdash.
You really think my meme criticising hypocrisy in people supporting authoritarian capitalism (like China) which calls itself communism, is going to convince people not to vote for Harris.
Not everything is about the US and the US election. We are one of hundreds of countries. Stop acting like everything is about america.
I will
The idea of work under socialism is very different to the idea under capitalism. Work becomes a social activities, you do it for your community and you do a lot less as we are working only to support our community and not to net a few billion for the greedy few.
The idea of work under soviet regime so much beloved by tankies, however, is “do useless and inefficient work that you didn’t chose and you don’t have any say in, or be thrown in jail” which hits way different
In the political context of where I live, this reminds me of those in the socialist party that are against a Universal Basic Income.
Tankies love Elon now though.
Do they actually? I know a lot of tankies either implicitly or explicitly support Trump and most seem to worship a capitalist kleptocracy that’s pretty much worse than the US economically, but I’ve never seen one outright declare their love for the poster child of capitalism in particular.
Nailed it!
“Tankie” means supporting Russian invasion into Ukraine, not “a communist”
Tankie is authoritarian “communism”. Tankies tend to support the brutal regimes of Stalin, Mao, and more recent Russian imperialism such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Needless to say these regimes supported by tankies are far from the communism envisioned by people like Marx, which was achieved much more closesly in anarcho-communist revolutions, such as the Ukraine’s anarchist territories and the Paris Commune.
Yep. Left wing + authoritarianism = tankie, right wing + authoritarianism = fascie
I still believe you are needlessly reducing the scope of that word to only communists. Many blood thristy supporters are “tankies”, while being fascist, or simply dumb
A communist would believe in “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Karl Marx).
However Lenin, and to a greater degree his authoritarian successors acted according to the slogan, “To each according to his contribution”, which even they admitted was not in accordance with true communism. Lenin even used the slogan, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat“.
From Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917
The socialist principle, “He who does not work shall not eat”, is already realized; the other socialist principle, “An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor”, is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish “bourgeois law”, which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products. This is a “defect” according to Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of communism
Unfortunately their “first phase” evolved into an authoritarian regime instead of the stateless heirarchyless utopia Marx envisioned.
Not like North American kids even know what the hell communism is.
