Ah yes, communism and democracy, directly comparable and not at all describing totally different things in different categories
It’s actually disheartening that all communist countries become authoritarian. Theoretically with flat power structure, they should all become democracies. Maybe they ARE not communists.
Everything we’ve seen thus far is socialism with a siege mentality. Every socialist revolution in the world has been attacked by capitalism through espionage, sabotage, embargoes, sanctions leading to resistance groups, assassinations and coups. Michael Parenti explains it quite well.
I mean, what we call “communist countries” were really founded with communism as an ideal and authoritarianism as the means to supposedly achieve that ideal. turns out the people they put in power to liberate them didn’t want to give up that power willingly. shocker.
Good thing that under the words communism and democracy, there are pictures that give you the context. Which allows you to understand that the actual comparison is between Marxism-Leninism (which are the majority of communist states) and representative democratic constitutional republic (which are the majority of democracies).
Those two things don’t get along very well.
Okay, quick question: In your meme, would you say the picture description on the right is something advocating for democracy? (Although democracy in of itself has basically nothing to do with that wall imo)
I guess I agree that this wall has nothing to do with any form of democracy or communism. Just wanted to be edgy and post something against ML.
The idea that the USSR and East Germany were anywhere close to communism is a joke. There were so many offshoots of communism that were just autocracies where the state owned all property that its meaning is pointless now. It’s better to describe then as dictatorships.
ITT: Tankies not realising they are in a shitposting community.
Communism is an economic system, democracy is a political system. There are examples of democratic socialism and of capitalist dictatorships. Also, the word here is in fact socialism and not communism.
Those words can mean those things, but communism is also used to describe a political system. After all, part of the definition of communism is statelessness which is entirely about the politics and not the economics (source).
Also, just as democracy might be used to describe a political system, it commonly taken to mean liberal democracy, and thus in most contemporary contexts implies an economic system of capitalism.
So I just think it depends on the context what people mean by these terms. Of course you can try to define communism only in economic terms, but since the term is so abused and “inflated” it’s hard to claim it has any singular or absolute meaning.
Depending on who you are talking to, communism has practically opposite meanings, for example, in public schools in the U.S. they teach that communism is when all economic activity is controlled by a centralized state, which is ironically the exact opposite of how Marx defined communism.
The same can be said of democracy.
I replied to a similar comment in here. From the context of images, you can understand that the comparison is between Marxism-Leninism and representative democratic constitutional republic. These systems represent the majority of real world implementations of communism and democracy.
The majority of people in this comment section understand this words in the way they like and argue against something that in my opinion has very little in common with the actual meme’s point (that sounds funny, “meme’s point” 😅).
Communism is when Mexico.
Mexico has lower democracy index, so the point still holds. People trying to move from less democratic country to more democratic one.