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There is, in fact, a lot stopping people from forming communes all over the place
Namely, capitalism.
…and if you do, hoooooo boy. I hope you like a coup, because you are going to get a coup.… or sanctions… or a blockade… or all three.
And don’t get too big or the FBI or ATF is on their way
That’s just a shitty thing to say. As if the CIA doesn’t do this work, local business owners and sheriffs won’t form a militia, or any of dozens of other federal agencies don’t put in the work murdering people for trying to share.
Worker unions bad, police unions enforcing corporate-aligned government rules good.
But try!!!, dont use the difficulty as an excuse
Is there? There are hundreds of giant worker co ops here in brazil, and I know multiple people who live in amarchist communities in the wooxds. Most of them don’t last very long, but they do try, and then stop on theirbown accord.
BTW, a giant worker co op named Aurora was responaible for slave like conditions in one of their many grape farms.
I can only really speak for the US it doesn’t seem to go over too well here, and uh, americans making a commune in south america doesn’t have a really good track record either lol
Pass the KoolAid
‘Member when people tried building there own communes outside the US and the CIA intervened.
Pepridge Farm remembers
People holding too much power seem to inevitably decide they need and deserve even more power. Bri’uhn wasn’t the first that enslaved and genocided whole populations, nor the only during that time: Spain was arguably more violent and France was another power and riches hungry evil.
Nothing stopping you. Well, except for the federal government and its military.
“Nothing stopping you” except the government. “Which government?” Most of them.
You want to bind my wrists with the shackles of universal healthcare you monster!
“Nothing” is definitely an interesting way to pronounce “many things”
To them communism is what capitalism is to us
This assigns too much legitimacy to the position. The working class are not capitalists because we have no capital with which to commit legal theft through property law or pay thugs to enforce those laws with violence.
The working class under capitalism are beholden to systems they often do not understand, cannot exercise agency within, and are actively stymied from prospering under.
Capitalism dehumanizes even those who support it. Those who support it are conditioned to reflexively demonize alternative systems. To rise above this culturally ingrained propaganda and advocate for alternatives requires seeing capitalism for what it is.
Alternative systems are to them what the bogeyman is to children.
to us
To all of us including them.
Stop trying to enslave me in a world where my neighbor gets to eat! I wanna live in a world where none of us get to eat, and we work all day to maintain our poverty!
Hello, my name is Marc Parella and I am laughably ignorant of the entirety of human history since roughly 1880.
Remember, the capitalists caused famine all over the place too!
Okay but they weren’t communist about it, so it doesnt count. Stop whining Ireland.
uproar from India, Bangladesh, The Congo, Kenya, and about 100 other countries
Yes but they’re not white so we don’t have to pretend to feel guilty about the atrocities.
The Invisible Doctrine does a good job of explaining how capitalism happened and where we are today. Fairly depressing but informative.
Gonna throw in “Debt: First 5000 Years” by Graeber if anyone wants even more historical perspective on how it came to be.
hey thanks for the suggestion. I also suggest the amazing book Kicking Away The Ladder by Ha Joon Chang.
Nothing is stopping you from forming communes all over the place
The USSR, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam famously forming unopposed. Capitalists and feudalists famously did not try to invade them and overturn their elections.
I would gladly run off and form a commune with a bunch of my like-minded friends, too bad we’re all broke workers and can’t afford even a house between us, let alone a plot of land big enough to support ourselves
Its not the cool communism unless you steal it from capitalists anyway.
True, I was just being snarky about the “just get some friends and make a commune” idea
USSR
I swear, one more time I hear about this shithole being called a good example of a communist country I’m gonna obliterate someone’s crotch.
It was a fucking earth shattering dictaroship without an ounce of actual communal care and cooperation.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…I wonder if they had problems of being constantly under seige by capitalists that affected their situation? Their condition of materials, if you will.
As I said in the earlier post, they were famously never invaded so IDK someone else can figure this shit out.
Shut up tankie, we’re talking about a shithole that remained a shithole despite being extremely fucking rich in resources that could guarantee prosperity in complete isolation.
problems of being constantly under seige by capitalists that affected their situation
boohoo
You’re gonna make me post it, aren’t you?
What about the colonial control and possession of those countries before like in Asia, Africa, and the Americas? The SSRs that made it up before their revolution were just as fucked over and destroyed as Cuba, Vietnam, China, Korea, Angola, Algiers etc due to colonialism. Maybe a world built on colonialism should have been shattered, and those people should be allowed to run their own show. You think revolutions occur because people were happy before? Its the last resort of an annihilated people.
What about the colonial control and possession of those countries before like in Asia, Africa, and the Americas?
What those countries? Because I see nothing in my previous comment this could refer to.
The SSRs that made it up before their revolution were just as fucked over and destroyed as Cuba, Vietnam, China, Korea, Angola, Algiers etc due to colonialism.
Yes, that’s why you can’t just jump from a decaying broken land straight into communist paradise and call it a day. That’s just not gonna work, and that’s what Marx was really precise about. You can’t transition into a communist country without first being a very prosperous socialist country. USSR was a poor, imperialist, corrupt, and deranged authoritarian project that was producing more poor, imperalist, corrupt and deranged authoritarian satellites of big momma rassiya.
Maybe a world built on colonialism should have been shattered, and those people should be allowed to run their own show.
Sure, so what? Because that’s clearly not something USSR was striving for. DEFINITELY not the last part.
You think revolutions occur because people were happy before? Its the last resort of an annihilated people.
Once again, I’ve no idea what you’re getting at if you’re somehow referring to my previous comment
I swear, one more time I hear about this shithole being called a good example of a communist country
it was a pretty good first attempt
I’m gonna obliterate someone’s crotch.
It was a fucking earth shattering dictaroship without an ounce of actual communal care and cooperation.
nah it actually had pretty sick vibes and legit community, lots of bureaucracy doesn’t wipe that out of existence. If you could give me a time machine and a passport fabricator it’s hard to imagine a better time and place to live than this place newly built: The Crowning Gem of Soviet Urban Planning (Lazdynai, Lithuania)
It was so good it left a scar on the entire post-second world sphere, which is now super conservative, America-enthusiastic and exclusively vote on libertarian parties.
Such a great fun they had they now get a PTSD when you say socialism in their vicinity.
But what am I saying, I’m just some Polish guy who now has to deal with this post-soviet national resentiment that makes it impossible to build any lasting socialist structures in my country.
Things being extremely bad when socialism is defeated is only evidence that the structure was not strong enough to last, not that it was bad at delivering for the people. The numbers are endless and clear, but summarized best by one fact: the collapse of the USSR was followed by the worst mortality crisis in human history outside of war time.
The horrors of the post-Soviet world are the horrors of the post-Soviet world. The Soviet union deserves blame for being weak enough to fall and allow therefore allow these things to happen, which is the result of deep structural problems in the USSR and rest of the socialist bloc. The USSR, obviously, was not a perfect utopia or it would not have died and millions of innocent people along with it. It was the first ever large scale attempt to build socialism, under impossibly hostile circumstances, and still achieved enormous, world-historic strides in the improvement of human life and community. To say “there’s nothing to learn, it was the devil’s work, the most evil system of all time” when you, right now, are living under its way worse successor seems ridiculous. There’s nothing contradictory about appreciating the enormous achievements of the USSR and the smaller socialist states around it while carefully studying to avoid its enormous flaws.
If it was so prosperous then please do explain to me how is it that regions that were prosperous before communism, such as Czechia or East Germany, Western Poland etc, ended up being just so extremely under the water compared to The West when the Iron Curtain has fallen?
Why do the older generations keep saying that the communism was a reign of terror with extreme poverty and that right now we’re living in times of great prosperity? Ah, but you probably don’t know those people anyways, the ones that survived the communism.
Why were there so many rebellions in Eastern Bloc countries and why did the USSR had to suppress them with tanks and violence?
I’m a democratic socialist myself (demsoc, not socdem!), and the only thing I genuinely miss from the times of Polish Socialist Republic is the fact that we were able to develop heavy industry and grand projects that are now impossible to go through with the post-soviet libertarian boiling pot politics.
If it was so prosperous then please do explain to me how is it that regions that were prosperous before communism, such as Czechia or East Germany, Western Poland etc, ended up being just so extremely under the water compared to The West when the Iron Curtain has fallen?
Because they got plundered by the West during liberalization. They were not economically behind under socialism, but they are under capitalism. The West was never interested in bringing freedom to these places but dominating them economically and politically, and that’s exactly what happened when socialism fell in Europe. They massively economically developed under socialism, obviously far, far beyond whatever state they were in beforehand.
Why do the older generations keep saying that the communism was a reign of terror with extreme poverty and that right now we’re living in times of great prosperity? Ah, but you probably don’t know those people anyways, the ones that survived the communism.
They generally do not say that. In the post-USSR proper, only the Baltic republics, who got fully integrated into Europe socially and economically, generally say things got better post-dissolution, excluding Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, which caused a huge inversion in opinion there that had been super pro-Soviet. In the non-USSR post-socialist states of the Warsaw Pact, answers are more mixed, but it’s rarely strongly negative and often mildly positive towards socialism.
Why were there so many rebellions in Eastern Bloc countries and why did the USSR had to suppress them with tanks and violence?
Oustide of Hungary in the 50s, what are you referring to? The USSR and the socialist states pretty much all came apart peacefully with no meaningful state violence in reverse, even in places where the dissolution had little to no popular support.
I’m a democratic socialist myself (demsoc, not socdem!), and the only thing I genuinely miss from the times of Polish Socialist Republic is the fact that we were able to develop heavy industry and grand projects that are now impossible to go through with the post-soviet libertarian boiling pot politics.
It’s worth asking why the socialist states were able to do that. I would argue it’s because there was a serious effort to investment in economic independence under socialism while today, the post-socialist states have largely been completely subordinated to the US’s economic interests, with industry sold out to foreign capitalists and eventually deindustrialized to concentrate profits in the imperial core, which would literally never have happened under socialism because of fundamentally different economic objectives.
Fuck that, I’m not doing this, this is some fucking load of bullshit I can’t handle anymore. What are your sources???
hop into your time machine and go back 80 years and say that to my face
People, people, please. You’ll be enslaved no matter what economic system you’re under.
What an utterly shitty take.
“Nothing is stopping you” - actually not true, you need government permission and they will just say no.
Every single attempt at establishing a communist society was fought tooth and nail every step of the way by capitalists. By any means necessary.
Yep. Everything is designed to force individualism. You need to buy a house, illegal to live in a tent even if you own land which is comparably cheap.
So I can legally buy an acre of woodland for under £20k, possibly £10k at a push though they usually charge more per area for small patches, depends on location. I could also build several cabins or put up multiple tents, so far all legal.
The moment someone lives there, illegal. The government can now seize the property. They have done so in the past when people have tried.
The moment someone lives there, illegal. The government can now seize the property. They have done so in the past when people have tried.
Wat? please tell me you are exaggerating
No. You need permission from the (local) government to live anywhere. Houses come with this permission, but if you buy a field or woodland it does not. Fuck all chance of getting it outside of some very special edge cases.
