https://queer-bolshevik.medium.com/the-aes-doctrine-wrong-then-wrong-now-a8666de371da

This is a good read. There is a pretty large socialist movement that seems to have the idea that to reach global socialism we need to defend every self proclaimed socialist state without asking any questions at all and hope they’ll get better over time.

China has the 2nd most billionaires in the world and they are tied to “state owned companies”. And you try to tell me it’s a socialist country. Billionaires should not exist in a socialist country. If the economic gains of labour land in the hands of a few billionaires, this makes them bourgeoisie. Even though they claim to be socialist. But you seem to be as blinded by their propaganda as you claim the western people to be of capitalist propaganda because you can’t seem to grasp what’s wrong with these so called socialist countries.

Funny how you just disregard the information without actually going into it at all.

Coming off as someone blindly following another form of oppression by a bourgeoise elite claiming to be proletarian.

I was hoping for some actual insights.

What are you trying to say with this graph? That distribution of wealth is better when it is distributed amongst less than 1% of the population of they call themselves proletarian? Or that it is somehow better if standard of living goes down for everyone just because the then nonexistent ressources are shared equally?

In a perfect world a whole cake is shared equally by all 8 people. But if you smash half the cake, give a quarter to one person and the remaining quarter to the remaining 7 it is not better than 2 ppl having half a cake and letting the other 6 have the other half. Maybe not the best example but I hope you get my point.

If not having equal but good standard of living, what is it we are strivong for?

I suggest this link as a good read. Because I think just strictly defending the existing socialist countries is actually hindering progress towards a both fair and high quality of life society.

https://queer-bolshevik.medium.com/the-aes-doctrine-wrong-then-wrong-now-a8666de371da

Have you ever visited any of the AES Countries? They have a few rich and powerful families running everything and sucking up to daddy china. I have visited Laos and Vietnam and talked to the working people. They are suffering, barely making ends meed and are fed up with the people in power taking everything for themselves and living in luxury. And if they talk too much about it they get “visitors”. These people in power over there are not working class. There is also absolutely no basic healthcare. If you get sick you die. I am sorry but for me a socialist country does not have an elite living on luxury and it doesn’t have people dying of poverty and lack of healthcare.

I agree with a lot you are saying. No state can stay stable without some form of control and censorship as soon as it starts threatening the stability of the system. Capitalism does this as well. And they have a very effective propaganda machine.

I feel like capitalist propaganda is so effective because it resonates so well with the basic human instincts and the part of humans that wants to be better than others and is greedy. The monkey brain is competitive and hierarchical. Socialism requires a level of empathy and intelligence a lot of people don’t have. They not only reject it because of media but also because they wanna climb that social ladder. No fun, if it doesn’t exist.

The leaders of most socialist countries though, seemed to not stop at the anti socialist critics. Even other socialist voices that they didn’t agree with got silenced (Mao, Pol Port, Xi Jing Ping making all his ministers disappear).

Also please don’t misunderstand me. I am not arguing against socialism. I am trying to find a form of socialist society that relies on as few authority and violence as possible. I always wondered why the socialist countries struggle so much with keeping their people in, while most refugees try to get into the capitalist societies.

In theory yes. In reality all socialist systems had surprisingly few changes of leadership after one guy rose to power of the “socialist” movement or party. And they don’t really seem to trust their citizens to be socialist without a lot of fear, censorship, spying, silencing critics…

It’s almost as if the majority of humans reject socialism. Which is weird but true.

Honestly I think China will be the only country actually reaching their carbon emissionsl targets set in Paris. All these preaching democratic nations are failing theirs year after year.

How do you plan to take power? And if you manage, how do you plan to stay in power long enough? The average voter is a moron being fed propaganda for years. You will not take power democratically. And you will not stay in power democratically.

Imo there is an issue if you do nothing but increase minimum wage. You also need to limit price inflation and make sure the companies don’t just return the increased cost to the consumer. Then you’ll have gained nothing. Example. Burger grill pays their workers 10$/hr - burger costs 4$. Now you force the burger grill to pay workers 15$/hr, a 50% increase and they go, alright, burgers now cost 6$. Most places do this and the worker, even though they now earn 50% more, can’t actually buy more because cost of living has increased equally. We need regulations on how companies operate their profit or actually get back to a point where competition would punish pricing like that. But somehow with only a handful owning everything that is kinda fucked.

He’s also right. The headline is shit.

I don’t understand why you feel the need to be hostile and make this about white men. This is about civilization theory.

If your point was that white civilizations made the world into the mess it is right now, I wholeheartedly agree with you. It is however not the point of my inquiry. I was generally curious about bigger societies that managed to stay relatively non hierarchial which would result in an equal share of ressources (what this whole thread was about) From what I have read, all bigger “successful” civs developed a strong hierarchy which resulted in a big wealth gap as well and/or built their empire through expansion and as a result slaves and POW who granted them free labour to built their infrastructure. Some examples:

Egypt (not white) China (not white) Khmer (not white) Japan (not white) Osman empire (not white) Persian (not white) Babylon (not white) India (not white)

Imo indigenous tribes are not helpful in this discussion because I am interested in examples or solutions for big societies and tribal structures are very different because people usually all know each other over 1 or two axis which strongly discouraged selfish behavior (it got you shunned).

I am very interested in African and ancient American civilizations but there is not a lot of unbiased literature out there (To my knowledge - which is why I asked for more info)

No offense taken. But I am a bit worries sometimes about the hostility towards people asking questions.

Tbh. So far I mostly read about western, Arab and Asian civilizations and there really aren’t many examples when you go bigger in size of small tribal living. In my opinion, tribal life is a lot different and naturally more non hierarchial because mostly everybody knows everyone and if you act too selfish you’ll be shunned. From what I read it becomes problematic as soon as the civ reaches a high number of people. Then they tended to get expansionist and hierarchial which resulted in either slaves or prisoners of war with lower social status or some kind of caste system.

I will read into the dawn of everything and the other link you provided on the other thread and am happy for more fodder. I will be traveling through south America soon and wanna read up upon their ancient history anyway.

Thanks for taking the time to look it up and edit!

Would you care to give an example of a successful society of the past that achieved what you are describing without slaves or other means of super cheap labor. I can’t think of a single one but I am very interested.

The solution is a Multi-Party system with coalition and then compromise out of a position of power. We need to accept that in almost all societies the real left are a minority. Humans don’t like the socialist ideas even if it benefited then Right now because they dream of escaping poverty and to then be better than others. If we destroyed the class system they’d have no chance to some day be better than other people. I believe this drive to get ahead is part of human nature and only few are able to fight it and think in the benefit of the whole.

So there are 2 options:

1. Is a revolution, violent and ends in establishing an authoritarian government forcing your beliefs on the majority of people which kinda goes against my democratic beliefs and the right of freedom

2. Go into politics. In europe it would be voting very left and gain enough votes to join a coalition to make the centrists enable more and more socialist policies. This worked very well in some countries like early Germany, netherlands and a big portion of Scandinavian countries. In America basically the only option would be to join the democratic party and advocate socialist policies from within like Bernie sanders is trying for example. Vote more left in the primaries to try and gain influence.

After that when it comes down to voting either of the 2 parties though you probably need to accept the current majority in the democratic party in order to not enable far right.

The time to go more left is between big elections and from within. In big elections like the upcoming its time to set differences aside and unify for the lesser evil.

Never forget that a democracy is a rule of the majority of the population and not a rule of the best policies from your perspective. If you think: Fuck the majority, this is how the country should be run, you are not democratic.

This of course disregards the influence powerful people take in politics which is another topic and way more complicated.

Delete because better response already written in meantime

Radiator Springs is the name of the city in Pixar movie ‘cars’

That kind of thinking is exactly what caused the genocide under Pol pot in Cambodia. For the working class utopia cleanse everything like treating cancer (they used the weeds and roots analogy, but is more or less the same). It killed more than 20% of the population