RED TEAM
RED SQUARE EDITION
1. What are the best pieces of anti-communist propaganda?
2. What is the best argument against Communism IRL?
RED TEAM
William Hernandez
Oliver Collins
1. Pol Pot
2. Probably the argument about how capitalists taking risks advances the economy, but that's more of a bureaucracy vs democracy than a capitalism vs communism thing.
Nolan Morris
garbage argument
capitalist "risk" is failing a business, ie. not making money, and by extension being seen as a failure/unreliable, thus not worthy of future investments. worker risk is being homeless.
Julian Adams
Probably George Orwell books, the big achievement of Animal Farm and 1984 is being simple enough for Americans to read (with help of teachers) but just challenging and boring enough that they later occupy a place as "great literature" in the American's mind. Now they know that great literature has disproven communism, and they can even brag about the achievement of having read and understood the book about talking pigs (back when I was a kid… I had more time to read important stuff). Finally, lots of catchy lines like "more equal than others" "ungood" etc.
That nuclear war or global warming could kill us all before we get to communism.
Jacob Clark
if we're talking about technological advancement making risky successful investments is a huge deal for civilization.
Adrian Morgan
100 BILLION DEAD
For some reason it still works despite being easily disproven. It's failing though since even dipshit prole teens know that capitalism might end the human race in their lifetimes.
"What happens if the guy who takes over is a crook?"
Ryder Cook
Am I going to have more or less stuff than I do now.
Jacob Ramirez
(OP)
Capitalism's dogged persistence and refusal to die seems to contradict Marx's overarching prediction about history to come, unless you retcon it to the extreme long-term (vacuous) or naively insist the collapse is right around the corner. Same with the persistence of the middle class.
new factors like nuclear weapons and impending ecological collapse are significant enough to make 19th century treatises on the political economy obsolete
the economic calculation problem
iphones
6 gorillion
Logan Adams
I'm going to post this every day until you like it.
Luke Nguyen
you did not reply to what I said.
Ethan Allen
Everything you said but le 100 gorillions are fair arguments.
Logan Long
Americans are just too stupid to know anything about what Orwell thought or what he was trying to say in his work.
Zachary Diaz
The best argument against communism is that it places too much faith on the vanguard party to actually do what they promise.
Josiah Collins
Isn't the very worst thing that can happen to a capitalist losing their capital and having to have to resort selling their own labour.
Andrew Miller
That the most fundamental prediction of Marx's theory - the politicization of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject of history, which will move to abolish capitalism - has not happened. The number of politicized, class conscious anti-capitalist workers has always been tiny and has never been able to extend itself beyond social-democratic reformism. The only major 'successes' of the communist movement were in pre-capitalist agrarian societies because they had mass backing from militant, non-proletarian peasant populations, and were fighting feudal nobility and aristocracy rather than industrial capitalists. The exceptions where proletarians drove the movement (Spain and Russia) would have failed spectacularly without the support of the peasantry and rural farmers, but communists treated them with contempt and cruelty, ultimately wrecking attempts at building 'actually existing socialism.'
Matthew Foster
1. No country that wasn't the USSR or Cuba has lasted particularly long.
2. Price signals (inb4 read Cockshott)
Brody Baker
Marx specifically addresses your argument in the German Ideology. He says that even though you can make claims about general trends through materialist analysis, it is impossible to create timetables for the future. In other words, we know some general outlines of what will happen, but we can never know when or how exactly it will occur.
Wyatt Smith
because you missed the point of what I said
Christopher Brown
neoclassical economics is legit retarded user, you should know better than that
Jace Robinson
Even the "worst case scenario" for a capitalist is pretty fucking mild, and it pretty much only happens to wannabe bourgs or incredibly stupid people. FFS, if you have enough money you can just put it all in a hedge fund and be set for life (unless the hedge fund manager gambles it all away like guy in the DOW thread).
The workers spearheaded the Russian Revolution, and they have spearheaded pretty much every socialist uprising in Europe. The fact that most failed does not change that.
Carter Long
they are you fucking anarkiddie, orwell was a snitch and hated communism
Grayson Rivera
The workers at colleges, newspapers, and art galleries for sure.
Carson Kelly
get out of your meme echochamber and read a fucking book
Christopher Torres
They aren't and I'm not an anarchist. Orwell literally said that 1984 was more about Britain than the USSR. He worried that all class societies (including the USSR) were headed down a totalitarian path, and that a more democratic and less authoritarian socialism was the only way to avoid this. Animal Farm was a satirical allegory of the Russian Revolution, the ultimate message of which wasn't that socialism was bad, but that it had been betrayed by Stalin. This is pretty obvious since the pigs aren't portrayed as being any worse than the humans, they're literally exactly the same, ie the USSR was just capitalism under another name. Offensively simple Trotskyist bullshit totally lacking nuance for sure, but not anti-communist.
He was a snitch sure, but don't misrepresent what he actually did. He made a list of suspected Stalinists that he gave to the BBC so they wouldn't hire them. That's it. It didn't result in anybody getting killed or even arrested. Still snitching and still reprehensible, but don't blow it out of proportion. The only way anybody could unironically think Orwell hated communism is if they think that the Soviet Union under Stalin was literally a perfect incarnation of socialism that was above criticism.
Kevin Scott
LE 600 GORILLION YOU SILLY PROLE, MUH STALIN, MUH POL PAHT
I can only really see issues from a late-capitalist/1st world perspective
The idea that most people seriously can only picture the end of the world rather than the end of capitalism is pernicious.
The average person in the developed world can't really picture a world that operates on a socialist paradigm past a succ dem level.
Also, the current prognosis for earth's climate seems very grim that even establishing socialism now might not be enough of a concerted effort to help. At the very most it would only limit the damage.
People would also need to accept that extravagant lives of would be outlawed forever or until at least automated gay luxury space communism memes are established (which may take at least 10+ generations). The ideology of "building your own empire" is entrenched deeply, at least in burgerstan.
Nolan Gutierrez
...
John Hughes
That's among the most creative, but is it emotionally effective?