Meme - "West German guards stare down East German guards after a woman made it across the line. Berlin, 1960."
"I wonder how embarrassed she was when she found out that wasn't real Communism she was fleeing from."
Meme - Leftist: "Capitalism doesn't work because people are selfish & greedy."
Leftist: "People will selflessly work for the common good in a Socialist country."
Meme - "r/communism
Can someone send me all the researches done by Socialist economists about how the Planned Economy is superior to the Free Market?
i'm trying to find articles about why the planned economy is superior to the free market, but i can't seem to find any."
Meme - "Fight the Patriarchy: "Communism. No state, no military, no police, no force"
Maybe people are communists and feminists for the same reasons
༺♡༻ on Twitter - "je ne fais pas du babysitting pour l'argent mais pour extrêmegauchiser la prochaine génération non Louis on ne va pas regarder peppa pig mais un documentaire sur la révolution bolchevique mets ta chapka"
Bizarrement, iFunny a bloqué cette image
Meme - Zhang Meifang China government official: "Wow, students pay with facial recognition in a school cafeteria in China..."
Socialism for All / Intensify Cla... @SocialismS4A: "Why do they have to pay?"
Meme - "Socialists living in capitalism *Rainbow* This is unbearable.
Socialists living in socialism *Room on fire* This isn't real socialism"
BONOKOSKI: Canada in midst of socialist coup and academics love it | Toronto Sun - "an American professor who was once a Marxist now says after travelling the globe that socialism doesn’t work. After visiting more than 110 countries to pursue various forms of research, notably cultural anthropology, Jack Stauder described his conversion from Marxism as a “process of disillusionment.” “I gradually became disenchanted with Marxism by visiting many of the countries that had tried to shape their societies to conform to its doctrines. I was disillusioned by the realities I saw in … socialist countries — the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, etc,” the University of Massachusetts professor told The College Fix newspaper via email. “I came to recognize that socialism doesn’t work, and that its ‘revolutionary’ imposition inevitably leads to cruelty, injustice and the loss of freedom”... Another professor, Florin Curta, of the University of Florida, was raised in communist-controlled Romania where he grappled with empty stores, power outages, and an oppressive government that frowned on creativity and the concept of free enterprise... Curta, like Stauder, came to despise socialism for different reasons — one by living it, the other by travelling in it. “I could see the same pattern in the many failed left-wing revolutions of Latin America and elsewhere,” said Stauder. “By combining actual travel with the historical study of socialism and revolution, I succeeded in disabusing myself of the utopian notions that fatally attract people to leftist ideas.” According to Curta, one of the world’s most distinguished scholars in medieval history and archaeology, the difference between ideas and fact is lost on leftist scholars, a breed that seems to fill the teaching halls of universities in the U.S. and Canada. “You have to understand, the difference between ideas and facts is what is of major concern here,” Curta told the College Fix. “As my father used to say, it is so much easier to be a Marxist when you sip your coffee in Rive Gauche, left-bank Paris, than when living in an apartment under Ceausescu, especially in the 1980s.”"
Millennials and Zoomers aren't going to lose their hard-Left opinions - "Are those born from 1981 onwards really a bunch of Marxists, ready to dismantle capitalism and enforce woke orthodoxies? We should be careful not to conflate what’s trending on Twitter with the views of whole generations. But a nuanced report by the Institute of Economic Affairs’ Kristian Niemietz suggests that, yes, Left-wing sentiment on economics is increasingly the “default” opinion of Britain’s young adults. While British Teen Vogue readers or Greta Thunberg acolytes don’t speak for all of under-40s, a “skin deep” yet persistent generational sympathy for anti-capitalist ideas is glaringly obvious. Survey after survey shows a hostility to capitalism and sympathy for socialism among both millennials (those born in the 1980s through 1996) and Zoomers (those born from the Blair era onwards). When given word association options, capitalism is linked most often by both to “the rich, corporations, exploitation and unfairness”. Socialism, in contrast, gets most associated with the terms “workers, people, equality, fairness, opportunity, and community,” not “failure” or “Venezuela”. This imbalance in sentiment has long been acknowledged. In a 2018 CapX poll, British adults were asked whether they agreed with the statement “Communism could have worked if it had been better executed”. Just a quarter of the population agreed. That figure, though, was much, much higher – at almost two in five people – for those in their mid-30s or younger. The cliché of “Generation Left” might be overblown, but “Generation Leftish” is a fairly accurate moniker. The new IEA survey of 2,000 16 to 34-year-olds shows that the young are prone to blaming capitalism for many societal ills. A massive 75pc of them agree with the assertion that climate change is a specifically capitalist problem, which will be news to anyone who knows about the Soviet Union’s environmental record. But then 71pc also think that capitalism fuels racism too, while 78pc blame capitalism for our housing crisis. These sentiments feed through into their economic policy instincts. Over 70pc agree with each of the assertions that private sector involvement would put the NHS at risk; that energy, water and railways should be renationalised; and that solving the “housing crisis” requires rent controls and public housing. No wonder exit polling in 2019 found that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour had a 43-point lead among 18 to 24-year-olds and a 24-point lead among voters aged 25-34. The complacent conservative view has always been that these findings are just evidence of youthful indiscretions. Eventually, even 1960s hippies and Maoists saw the light about socialism. When today’s teens start working and paying taxes, so the argument goes, they’ll soon come round to a hard-headed view of the world, just like generations before them. Niemietz’s work suggests this is wishful thinking. Not only do surveys suggest little mitigation of socialist sentiments between those now in their late teens and early-40s, but millennials were actually more socialist than Zoomers in answering many of the IEA’s questions... Thankfully, all is not lost. When presented with stand-alone pro-capitalist statements, majorities of young people are persuaded enough to agree with them too, albeit less strongly and less often than the pro-socialist ones. This suggests that although persistent by age, a lot of the younger cohorts’ Left-wing opinions are weakly held – perhaps reflecting an attachment to the general zeitgeist created by the more aggressive Left-wing activists and influencers. That suggests hearts and minds are still up for grabs, whether through good policy delivering economic prosperity or the age-old art of persuasion"
Meme - "My labor is exploited by capitalists who steal the excess value!!!"
"No."
"WHAT?!"
"The value of your labor is how much you can earn by working for yourself."
"HUH?!"
"You exploit the capital investments of an employer to get higher earnings by working for them instead of working for yourself."
Communism Destroyed Russian Cooking - "Over the course of the '30s, Stalin's government went to great lengths attempting to create, often through Socialist Realist–style propaganda, a cohesive national identity that could bind good Soviets together in service of the party. Part of the aim was to reimagine Russian home cooking via standardized, party-approved recipes... The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food was born. It was the fruit of Mikoyan's grand adventure and an attempt to show comrades just how good they had it. The thick book, filled with glossy, full-page illustrations, was an exhaustive-seeming compendium of recipes organized by category. Its implicit message was that those who were loyal to the party would have access to the abundant delights depicted therein. The food the recipes produced, however, was often neither tasty nor healthy. And for most residents of the USSR, it was not even attainable—a great irony which did not go unnoticed. "The foodways described in this text bore scant resemblance to reality, promising culinary abundance in a land stalked by famine," writes historian Edward Geist in Cooking Bolshevik. Most people didn't have access to the many ingredients needed for a recipe, let alone all of them at the same time... As lovely as this dish might seem on paper, most Soviets in the '30s, '40s, and '50s—plagued by food rationing and unpredictable shortages—would not have been able to make it consistently, if at all. Recipes calling for such large amounts of beef and dairy would not have been realistic... In 2013's Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing, Anya von Bremzen describes her mother's childhood in Russia in the '30s and '40s, her own birth in the '60s, and their subsequent emigration to the United States. "Mom gasped at the trove of fantastical photos" in Mikoyan's book, she writes. "Tables crowded with silver and crystal, of platters of beef decorated with tomato rosettes, of boxes of chocolate and wedges of frilly cake posed amid elaborate tea sets." Von Bremzen contrasts this fare with tales of waiting in bread lines for bread that had been stretched through the addition of mashed peas and with memories of kolbasa or kotleta (basically small hamburger patties, eaten without bread) or eggs for protein... In one sense, bad cuisine was the least of communism's atrocities. In another, the entire arc of communism's failure is visible in its effect on food... Under Stalin, peasants packed their belongings and flooded into urban centers from the countryside. The abolition of private property was an essential part of the Marxist-Leninist agenda, but the government realized another convenient side effect of this mass upheaval: Peasants would be housed in communal apartments, called kommunalkas, where they would share kitchens and bathrooms, allowing comrades to spy on one another in perpetual service of the state. Prior to the revolution, families could speak their minds comfortably while preparing and sharing a meal. But Stalin felt privacy created far too much space for dissent to take root and multiply. His solution was to abolish familial intimacy as much as possible. In his new kommunalkas, you would never be far from the watchful eye of a compatriot who might snitch... Naturally, food suffered during the long decades of Soviet rule. "If you think of the kitchen as the hearth or the center of the home," says Darra Goldstein, food scholar and author of the recent Russian cookbook Beyond the North Wind (Ten Speed Press), kommunalkas "totally destroyed that." With dozens of people sharing a single kitchen, cooking was logistically fraught. Mealtime was reduced to a hasty, unpleasant, politically treacherous affair. For much of the Soviet period, business ownership was verboten; restaurants were possible grounds for political subversion as well. The few restaurants that did exist were controlled by the state and reserved mostly for well-connected party members or those who could pay bribes to get a table. For commoners, eating out was reserved for special occasions, if that. Restaurant meals were hard to afford for many people as well. As researchers Bradford P. Johnson and Evan A. Raynes put it in a November 1984 report for the City University of New York, "Surveys conducted during the 1960s revealed that as many as a quarter or a third of the urban working class lived below the poverty line." The only regular dining that happened outside the home took place in large workplace cafeterias, called stolovayas, which were also managed by the state... 1920s-era stolovayas were "ghastly affairs" where "workers were fed soup with rotten sauerkraut, unidentifiable meat (horse?), gluey millet, and endless vobla, the petrified dried Caspian roach fish." There was a high degree of standardization—meals served in factory canteens, schools, and universities were all supposed to be alike—but that meant the practice of good Russian cooking was almost entirely lost. From Leningrad to Stalingrad, your helping of borscht was meant to look and taste the same as your neighbor's... In later decades, the Soviet Union abandoned the harshest and most deadly of Stalin's policies. Yet poverty and food shortages persisted. Data from the '70s indicate that Soviet dietary composition was miserable: "Soviet consumers obtained 46% of their daily caloric intake from bread and potatoes, and only 8% from meat and fish. The comparable figures for the United States are 22 and 20%, respectively," write Johnson and Raynes. Life in the Soviet Union improved somewhat as the country haltingly opened its borders and extended some economic freedom to its citizens... even as late as the 1980s, the drop-in restaurant culture common in the West didn't exist in the USSR... "In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union, it was just chaos," says Goldstein, the food scholar. "People were initially very excited to have the world open up to them." She says Russians were excited to have access to bananas, oranges, and kiwis—foods they'd heard of but never before tasted, fruits that had been unavailable for decades prior. And in the decades that followed, Russians began making a concerted effort to recover recipes that had disappeared during the Soviet era. In September 1989, future Russian President Boris Yeltsin was in the U.S. to tour space facilities. On the way, he made an unplanned stop at a Randall's grocery store in a southeastern suburb of Houston. He was amazed by the gleaming aisles and bright lights, by the cheese samples and the abundant produce and the selection of fresh fish. And he lingered, grinning, his arms raised in delight, before the Jell-O Pudding Pops in a freezer display. Through an interpreter, he wondered aloud whether it was all a Potemkin grocery store, a staged experience put on just for him. When his interpreter let him know it was all real and, in fact, quite typical, Yeltsin was moved. He wrote later in his autobiography that he felt "sick with despair for the Soviet people" upon seeing the contrast between what they had access to and what everyday Americans could enjoy. He reportedly told other Russians on the trip that if Soviet citizens knew about U.S. grocery stores, "there would be a revolution."... Today, many elderly Russians have a certain wistfulness for Soviet life... though their quality of living was pretty grim, there was a security and stability within the egalitarian experiment. Though there were shortages, average people had "this amazing system of barter" so that "you could always find a way" to get what you wanted, she says. Now in Russia there are a bunch of retro Soviet cafés—kept much cleaner than you'd have found them in their heyday—catering to the elderly nostalgic and a new generation of customers looking for cheap eats. Perhaps this type of nostalgia is only possible now that 30 years have passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union."
C.I.A. SAYS SOVIET CAN ALMOST DO WITHOUT IMPORTS - The New York Times - "the average Soviet citizen consumes about 3,300 calories a day, as against 3,520 for an American. The report showed that the Soviet diet consists of far more grain and potatoes than the American diet, but less fish and meat and less sugar."
The commies love to cite this 1983 report, pretending this was the case throughout the whole of the USSR's existence (and that all calories are equal - e.g. that 1,000 calories from potatoes are just as good as 200 from meat, 200 from potatoes, 200 from onions, 200 from milk and 200 from butter)
Meme - Pretty Woman: "The wealth built by Capitalism"
Socialists, Communists: *hitting on her*
Why Socialism Is the Failed Idea That Never Dies - "What would you say to an amateur chef who baked a cake following a certain recipe only for everyone who ate a slice to fall ill quickly afterward? Being such an enthusiastic baker, they bake the same cake a second time just a few weeks later, again following the same recipe, but this time with one or two slight adjustments. Unfortunately, the result is the same—everyone who eats the cake soon ends up feeling sick. The cake baker repeats this more than two dozen times, always modifying the recipe a little, but the basic ingredients remain more or less the same despite the fact that their guests throw up every time. Of course, there’s no way such a thing would happen. The cake baker would soon realize that there is a major problem with the recipe and throw it away...
'It is because socialists have successfully managed to distance themselves from those examples.'
As soon as you confront socialists with examples of failed experiments, they always offer the following response: “These examples don’t prove anything at all! In fact, none of these are true socialist models.” During the “heyday” of most of these socialist experiments, however, intellectuals held quite a different view, as Niemietz illustrates with many examples. The latest example of socialism’s failings is Venezuela, which just a few years ago was being hailed by leading intellectuals and left-wing politicians as a model for “Socialism of the 21st Century.”... even mass murderers such as Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong were enthusiastically celebrated by leading intellectuals of their time. These intellectuals were not outsiders but renowned writers and scholars, as Niemietz demonstrates with numerous examples. Even the concentration camps in the Soviet Union, the Gulags, were admired... Many Western intellectuals were enthusiastic in their support for Mao Zedong and his cultural revolution despite the 45 million lives lost during socialism’s greatest experiment—the Great Leap Forward—at the end of the 1950s alone. After Mao’s death, when Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies liberated hundreds of millions of Chinese from bitter poverty, these same intellectuals were nowhere near as enthusiastic about China as they had been in Mao’s day... Even the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung and the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia found admirers among Western intellectuals... And that’s not to mention Cuba and Che Guevara, who became a pop icon in the West. In his thorough historical analysis, Niemietz shows every socialist experiment to date has gone through three phases. During the first phase, the honeymoon period (p. 56), intellectuals around the world are enthusiastic about the system and praise it to the heavens. This enthusiasm is always followed by a second phase, disillusionment, or as Niemietz calls it, “the excuses-and-whataboutery period.” (p. 57) During this phase, intellectuals still defend the system and its “achievements” but withdraw their uncritical support and begin to admit deficiencies, although these are often presented as the result of capitalist saboteurs, foreign forces, or boycotts by US imperialists. Finally, the third phase sees intellectuals deny that it was ever truly a form of socialism, the not-real-socialism stage... Nowadays, Western socialists do not even attempt to oppose real-world capitalism with historical examples of socialism. Instead, they put forward arguments based on the vague utopia of a “just” society... Socialists who criticize Stalinism and other forms of real-world, historical socialism always fail to analyze the economic reasons for the failures of these systems. (p. 28) Their analyses attack the paucity of democratic rights and freedoms in these systems, but the alternatives they formulate are based on a vague vision of all-encompassing “democratization of the economy” or “worker control.” Niemietz shows that these are the exact same principles that initially underpinned the failed socialist systems in the Soviet Union and other countries."
Socialism Is Bad for the Environment - "the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were not just economic failures; they were also environmental catastrophes. Economist Jeffrey Sachs noted at the time that the socialist nations had “some of the worst environmental problems in the entire globe.” Air and water pollution abounded. By one estimate, in the late 1980s, particulate air pollution was 13 times higher per unit of GDP in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. Levels of gaseous air pollution were twice as high as this. Wastewater pollution was three times higher. And people’s health was suffering as a result... Consider the destruction of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has been called “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.” Once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, it shrank to less than half its original size because of Soviet economic policies. Fixated on making the USSR self-sufficient in cotton production, central planners mandated industrial agriculture throughout the arid region. Massive water diversions for irrigation reduced the sea’s inflows to a trickle, causing the biggest manmade loss of water in history. Fishing villages became dry and landlocked. Some, such as the former port city of Muynak, now lie more than 75 miles from the sea... “Environmental deterioration was not supposed to occur under socialism,” Cuban-American researchers Sergio Díaz-Briquets and Jorge Pérez-López wrote in a detailed study of Cuba’s environmental legacy. “According to conventional Marxist-Leninist dogma, environmental deterioration was precipitated by the logic of capitalism and its relentless pursuit of profits.” Socialism, on the other hand, would avoid capitalism’s excesses. “Guided by ‘scientific’ principles, socialism’s goal was a classless and bountiful society,” they explained, “populated by men and women living in harmony with each other and the environment.” But this was clearly not the case in the Soviet empire. Nor was it in Cuba, whose environmental record after decades of socialist control was described by Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López as “far different from the utopian view.” The West, meanwhile, had not only the consumer goods that socialist societies lacked but also a cleaner environment. One explanation for the disparity is that central planners, unlike markets, grossly misallocate resources, as a matter of routine. Energy prices, for example, were highly subsidized in the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. As a result, industrial production was far more energy-intensive throughout the socialist world than in Western European economies — five to ten times higher, according to one estimate — leading to more pollution. A 1992 World Bank study found that more than half of the air pollution in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe could be attributed to subsidized energy pricing during this period. A related problem was the fixation of socialist planners on heavy industry at the expense of the environment... industry behind the Iron Curtain was anything but efficient, and central planning caused excessive use of natural resources. A 1991 study by Mikhail Bernstam found that market economies used about one-third as much energy and steel per unit of GDP as did socialist countries. Likewise, Polish economist Tomasz Zylicz found that the non-market economies of Central and Eastern Europe required two to three times more inputs to produce a given output than did Western European economies. (The former Soviet world, as well as China, also emitted several times more carbon per unit of GDP than the United States did — a trend that continues today.) Simply put, market economies make more with less and are therefore better for the environment. Socialist planners, on the other hand, lack the knowledge necessary to rationally coordinate economic activity. Moreover, bureaucratic constraints make accurate price-setting impossible... Whereas a capitalist firm has ample incentive to act on such information to economize on the use of natural resources, socialist planners have no such motivation... Finally, there is the issue of property rights. In a socialist society without them, it is impossible to hold individuals or governments accountable for environmental damages... Socialism’s environmental record is just as bad elsewhere. As Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López document, in Cuba, socialists’ quest to maximize production at all costs has caused extensive air, soil, and water pollution. And in Venezuela, socialist policies have contaminated the nation’s drinking-water supplies, fueled rampant deforestation and unrestrained mining activity, and caused frequent oil spills attributed to neglect and mismanagement by the state-owned energy company."
The Language of Totalitarian Dehumanization - "when she referred to opponents of the regime in Havana as gusanos (“worms”), I felt I had to object. My hostess responded with a puzzled look and then blithely continued with her story. I left shortly after that, still angered. Why do Western radicals, especially those with a romantic interest in Latin America and a strong affinity for the Cuban Revolution, think it’s okay to dehumanize those with whom they disagree? My friend would no doubt be offended to hear communists or Jews described in those terms but believes it’s a perfectly acceptable way to describe those who, after all, are simply agitating for the rights and freedoms she is fortunate enough to enjoy. During my own years as a pro-Cuban communist sympathizer, I am ashamed to admit I used the same pejorative. I rarely gave it a second thought, since I considered those who opposed Castro’s noble project to be diabolical and so it seemed self-evidently appropriate. “Linguistic assaults,” Haig Bosmajian reminds us in his book, The Language of Oppression, “often are used by persons who show no visible evil intent.”... Over the course of that first week of 1994, I met many Cubans on the street with postcards or contraband they’d stolen from their workplaces trying to make a little money from tourists. Or doctors whose monthly wage amounted to less than $50 driving taxis to make enough money to feed their families. And each time one of these people confided in me—invariably in a low murmur for fear of vigilant eyes and ears—about the horrors of life under the regime, I felt humbled. And ashamed. How could I have supported this despotism for so long?... I have often wondered why it took me so long to learn the obvious lessons of my experiences in Cuba that January. But they did prepare me, somewhat, for my experiences with Venezuela 10 years later... I’ve told the story of my growing disillusion with socialist utopianism elsewhere in these pages, how it finally led me to turn to embrace Western liberalism. When vast peaceful post-election protests against the imposition of the new “President” Maduro in April 2013 were met with brutal state violence, I was forced to rethink everything. That process is still ongoing. What I didn’t understand completely on July 4th became clear just seven days later, when thousands—perhaps tens of thousands, we’ll never know, since the Cuban dictatorship has such a powerful stranglehold on media—poured into the streets in a spontaneous rejection of the communist regime. President Miguel Díaz Canel called out his police and paramilitaries to beat people back into their homes. Government agents had been preparing for years and evidently felt no compunction about attacking gusanos who hours before had simply been their neighbors. As Bosmajian observed: “The distance between the linguistic dehumanization of a people and their actual suppression and extermination is not great; it is but a small step.” They have, after all, been purged of their humanity, in the good name of which they can now be repressed without pity."
Report published on attitudes to far left extremism | Goldsmiths, University of London - "Almost half of the British public sympathise with some ideas promoted by extremist far left groups, and nearly a quarter believe capitalism ‘is essentially bad’... A report published by the Commission for Countering Extremism also concludes that young men who support far-left anti-capitalist ideas have a high chance of sympathising with forms of violent extremism. .. The more strongly someone agreed with far left ideas, the more likely they are to sympathise with violent extremism"
Of course, we must pretend that the "far right" are the problem