Sandy Petersen πͺ on X - "A group of city leaders organized and saved Leningrad when it was sieged by the Germans for 800 days. They rationed food & medicine, set up a submachinegun factory (which made better SMGs than the Red Army’s), kept morale high. They were true national heroes. After the war, Stalin had these harmless old men all executed lest anyone steal his spotlight. This is Communism’s legacy."
Konstantin Sonin on X - "88 years ago, on February 3, 1938, Stalin's henchmen executed 32 members of the Skatuve Latvian Theatrical Company in Moscow. All of them - 22 actors and actresses, five stage hands, two directors, one stage director, one general director and a secretary. Just because they were Latvians, just because this was culture."
Meme - "THE USSR MURDERED MY FAMILY
CHINA PUT MY WHOLE FAMILY IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS
Yerba Mate Girl with Mao, Antifa, Stalin and one more Communist badge: NICE TRY CIA!"
Meme - Swann Marcus @SwannMarcus89: "I'm sorry, but leftists are low-IQ mental defectives. I don't even know what else to say at this point. Your plan is to eliminate labor specialization. That's literally what you're arguing here. Are you motherfuckers brain damaged"
"But a shared labor socialist society would change the character of the necessary labor, because necessary labor would be shared; everyone would do some, so that nobody had to spend their whole life doing all of it. And it would be work that everyone has a reason to do, therefore, because it means they are not contributing their efforts to a society that just uses them. They're contributing their efforts to a society that has their freedom as its aim. You start that by sharing the necessary labor; that reduces the amount that anyone has to do to a relatively small amount. It does create real free time then to use as you like, including to go and develop and contribute your talents if you want. But that would then mean that work has been transformed from something merely necessary into something that is an expression of human solidarity."
Jacobin @jacobin: "Some leftists imagine a postcapitalist society will free everyone from the need to work. But the only realistic and fair way to manage production under socialism is to democratically distribute and share in the burdens of labor."
The Forsaken Road: Reassessing Living Standards Following the Cuban Revolution and the American Embargo - "We investigate the causal effects of the 1959 Cuban Revolution on income using a synthetic control approach. We employ a novel dataset with revised GDP estimates that do not rely on the regime's self-reported statistics. We also analyze GDP estimates net of aid coming from the Soviet Union. Our identification strategy allows us to separate the direct effects of the revolution from the diplomatic events that ensued. By overcoming concerns that Cuban GDP statistics are inflated either by the regime's direct manipulation or by Soviet aid, we identify a large decline in Cuban GDP per-capita relative to its counterfactual. The decline is larger when accounting for Soviet aid. The embargo only accounts for a minor share of Cuba's under-performance relative to the counterfactual. Our results hold after being subjected to multiple robustness checks and lead to the conclusion that the Revolution was the main driver of the inferior economic path Cuba has followed since 1959."
Clearly, the US embargo made Cuba carry out the 1959 San Juan Hill massacre
Creative Deduction on X - "In the 1970s, Labour minister Tony Benn came up with a bold socialist plan to rescue failing British factories: hand them over to the workers. The results were equal parts tragic and farcical. One factory on Merseyside began producing washing machines, car radiators, storage heaters - and, bizarrely, orange juice. Another tried to save the iconic Triumph motorcycle brand. A third launched a worker-run newspaper in Glasgow. All three experiments - Kirkby Manufacturing, Meriden Motorcycle Co-operative and the Scottish Daily News - received generous government support and quickly collapsed in spectacular fashion. The Scottish Daily News lasted just six months, Meriden limped on until 1983, and Kirkby became a national joke for its chaotic mismanagement and bizarre product lines. The entire episode is a perfect illustration of the gap between socialist theory and economic reality. Without the discipline of private ownership and market competition, workers’ cooperatives suffered from the same problems that plagued nationalised industries: weak incentives, political interference and an inability to allocate resources efficiently. The fundamental realities of economics remain undefeated."
ππα΅ ππππ on X - "Religious people will describe heaven as a classless, stateless, moneyless society with no private property, no suffering, and everyone’s needs met, then turn around and call communism evil. It will never stop being funny."
When communists admit communism runs on magical-religious logic, which is why it could never work in the real world
Octavian πͺπΊ on X - "Marx struggled quite a bit with this. The basic assumption of communism is that there's a single, identical, collective interest of the global proletariat by virtue of their relation to capital (as propertyless individuals). The big question for communists then is why isn't the proletariat realising this collective international interest and why aren't they organising as such to pursue their interests as workers. In other words, why aren't they just thinking Rationally Enough to realise it? One problem for Marx was that the English and the Irish proletariat didn't unite or work together, mainly because the English proletariat sided with the empire and wasn't too keen to accept Irish nationalism and saw the Irish as competitors, and the Irish proletariat was on the other hand not too keen about being part of the British Empire. He outright says he expected them to work together, which then didn't happen. Look how he describes in a letter (first pic) to Engels that Irish needs to emancipate itself from the working class, so that the working class focuses on its struggle as the working class, but that he "cannot tell the working class" themselves. Basically, he, Marx, as the great intellectual, knows better than the working class themselves what's good for them, and his job now is to manipulate things in a way that is good for the working class themselves, even if they themselves are not aware of it. Basically he wants to be the catalyst for Hegel's Cunning of Reason. There's constantly all these factors that supposedly prevent the working class from thinking Rationally and doing what's Right (according to Marx). The classic "billionaires tell the English to hate the Irish to divide them" trope was actually thought of by Marx all the way in 1870. The history of communism is just a long, very long list of copes to try to explain why the proletariat is not thinking rationally and isn't coming to the "correct" conclusion of communist revolution. From Stalinist purges and de-kulakisation, to the Maoist cultural revolution, to Adorno and Horkheimer's Culture Industry, to Gramsci's "cultural hegemony"... it's all this. Over and over and over. They simply do not want to accept that there could be genuinely rational and legitimate reasons to not do communist revolutions and build "international solidarity"."
Handre on X - "The Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales between 1948 and 1973, delivering rotten carcasses that nobody wanted to eat. Soviet citizens had zero demand for whale meat. The ships hunted anyway, fulfilling quotas handed down from central planners who counted tons of dead whale as economic output. This was bureaucratic box-checking that nearly drove multiple whale species to extinction. Soviet whalers targeted endangered right whales and humpbacks specifically because they were larger, helping them hit tonnage targets faster. The meat rotted on deck during long voyages back to port, where officials dutifully recorded the numbers and sent reports to Moscow declaring another successful harvest. Central planners measured success in tons harvested, not consumer satisfaction or long-term sustainability. Factory managers got promoted for exceeding whale quotas, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted whale meat (they didn't). The feedback mechanism that normally connects production to human needs had been severed entirely. When bureaucrats replace market prices with administrative targets, you get mass slaughter with zero purpose. You still see this today every time politicians promise to "create jobs" in industries that lose money year after year. When government agencies measure their success by dollars spent rather than problems solved. When university administrators chase enrollment numbers instead of student outcomes. Remove the profit motive and price signals, and you get 180,000 dead whales rotting in the sun while commissars celebrate meeting their targets. You don't get rational planning. Socialism is fundamentally destructive to the environment and inevitably leads to ecological disasters."
Proof that capitalism destroys the planet
Alice Smith on X - "“Capitalists are obsessed with money,” says the socialists whose entire vision of life is built around seizing and redistributing the money made by others."
Rothmus π΄ on X - "National socialism IS a form of socialism. In “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius” (1941), Orwell wrote: “Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and - this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize with Fascism - generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly.” In this system, the State exercises direct control over virtually every aspect of the economy, wages, investments, raw materials, and the means of production themselves. “Everyone is in effect a State employee.” It is not Marxist. It is not internationalist. But it is socialism. And this is precisely why authoritarian socialist regimes have so often flipped from one variant to the other with relative ease. Far from being opposites, they are two sides of the same coin. Rival authoritarian gangs competing for control over the same centralized power structure and the same conquered territory."
Left wingers need to dismiss George Orwell, a dedicated Socialist, as someone who was stupid and had no idea what he was talking about
Handre on X - "When People's Democratic Republic of Yemen declared itself a Marxist-Leninist state in 1967, it promised to transform the Arabian Peninsula's poorest region into a socialist paradise. By 1990, South Yemen had achieved something remarkable: it remained the poorest Arab state while managing to make its already dire economic situation substantially worse. You can trace the socialist experiment's failures through the numbers. Per capita GDP stagnated at roughly $500 throughout the 1980s while North Yemen's market-oriented economy grew. South Yemen's government employed 75% of the formal workforce by 1989, creating a massive bureaucracy that produced virtually nothing of value. The state controlled all major industries, from fishing to agriculture, and predictably drove productivity into the ground. The human cost tells the real story. Over 300,000 South Yemenis fled to North Yemen and Saudi Arabia during the socialist period, voting with their feet against central planning. Those who stayed endured chronic shortages of basic goods while party officials lived comfortably in Aden's government quarters. The state's agricultural collectives destroyed traditional farming methods that had sustained communities for centuries, replacing local knowledge with Soviet advisors who knew nothing about Arabian Peninsula agriculture. Compare this disaster to the Gulf states' experience during the same period. While Kuwait, UAE, and Saudi Arabia built modern economies through market mechanisms (however imperfect), South Yemen's planners allocated resources according to ideological fashion rather than economic reality. They built a steel plant in a country with no iron ore, subsidized unprofitable fishing cooperatives, and maintained a bloated military that consumed 20% of GDP. The 1990 reunification wasn't a merger of equals. North Yemen absorbed a failed state whose currency had become worthless and whose infrastructure had crumbled under central planning. Socialism doesn't eliminate scarcity. It ensures that scarce resources flow to politically connected bureaucrats instead of productive entrepreneurs."
Meme - Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith: "Communists in the U.S. *obese woman*
Communists in North Korea *starving woman*"
BlueBerry! @BlueLynxCat: "considering north korea is a democracy and not a communist, this image is more western propagranda."
Commies insist that China is communist, but North Korea is not communist. Also that the Nordic countries are socialist. Clearly, communism and socialism are defined by outcomes
Daniel Priestley on X - "John Lennon wrote a beautiful song about socialism. “Imagine no possessions” he told us. He also:
– helped write his band’s anti-tax anthem, Taxman
– incorporated his IP holdings
– moved to a lower-tax country
– fiercely protected his royalties
- drove two Rolls Royce’s and had multiple luxury homes.
– made sure even the royalty cheques for Imagine were kept safe for his estate so his family would remain wealthy in perpetuity.
If he believed it, he’d have lived it. The trouble with socialism is that even the people who love the idea won’t run the experiment on themselves. John Lennon writing Imagine while owning two Rolls Royce Phantoms and later having a law suit to protect his royalties tells you all you need to know about socialism in practice. It doesn’t work outside of the imagination."
Creative Deduction on X - "The most dangerous thing in politics is not malice. It's arrogance: the belief that a small group of experts can redesign society better than the countless individuals who actually live in it. Friedrich Hayek had a name for this mistake: The Fatal Conceit. In his final book, Friedrich Hayek delivered his most pointed critique of socialism and central planning. The book’s title refers to the fatal intellectual error at the heart of socialist thought: the arrogant belief that human reason is capable of deliberately designing and controlling the complex order of society. Hayek called this “constructivist rationalism” - the idea that we can scrap inherited institutions and traditions and rebuild society according to a rational blueprint. Hayek argued that this conceit is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how civilisation actually works. The extended order of the market - our system of prices, division of labour, property rights and moral traditions - was not invented or designed by anyone. It emerged through a long process of cultural evolution. No single mind, and certainly no central planning board, possesses the knowledge required to coordinate millions of individuals with constantly changing needs, preferences, and local circumstances. The price system, Hayek explained, is a remarkable mechanism that communicates dispersed knowledge far more effectively than any planner ever could. When socialists attempt to replace this spontaneous order with conscious direction, they do not merely cause inefficiency. They destroy the very foundations that make advanced civilisation possible. The Fatal Conceit goes beyond economics to defend the moral and cultural foundations of a free society. Hayek showed that the socialist project is not just impractical - it is based on a dangerous overestimation of human reason and ability, and an arrogant dismissal of evolved wisdom. The fatal conceit is still very much alive today in every attempt to centrally engineer society, the economy, or human behaviour. Hayek’s warning endures: civilisation is fragile, and those who believe they are wise enough to redesign it are usually the ones who end up destroying it."
Daniel Priestley on X - "Karl Marx wrote the communist manifesto 7 years before the creation of Limited Liability Companies. Before then, if you wanted to set up a business you have to be seriously rich because anything the business did could impact your entire net worth. If your business got sued, you could lose your entire estate. Only the very rich had businesses and they ran their businesses like every decision could be financially catastrophic. Then in 1855, the Limited Liabilities Companies Act was passed into British Law and the game changed. Suddenly anyone could set up a business, raise investment and trade. There was separation between ownership and control. This wasn’t lost on Karl Marx either. He wrote good things about this change. He was even a company director at one point. Essentially, it means that under capitalism you can be a socialist if you want to. A socialist can set up a company, give shares to all the workers, put workers on the board, pay executives the same as everyone else and if there’s any profit remaining they can freely donate it to the government. There is absolutely nothing stopping any socialist from living according to these values under a capitalist system. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world and most of the employees own shares. Many are millionaires. In the UK, John Lewis and Waitrose are owned by their workers and are much loved successful businesses. Capitalism has no problem with workers owning the means of production. Under capitalism, anyone with an idea can set up a company, pitch to investors and launch it. Starting with nothing, they can be a millionaire (on paper) within a month. Socialists can lead by example; the fact that they almost never do this tells you a lot about socialists and human nature. The same is not true under socialism. It is not possible for a capitalist to live according to their values. Under socialism, if I believe in small government, self-sufficiency, low regulations I must leave the country - if it’s even possible to do so. It’s not enough for a socialist to live their values, they need everyone to do it too."
Ilektra Mercury π on X - "Read Marx. Read Engels. Read Lenin. Read Stalin. Please, I’m begging you, just read the theory."
Possum Reviews on X - "I don't care what communism is in theory because I know what it is in practice."
Charles Murray on X - "My daughter's friend in grad school, upon being asked by a member of her dissertation committee why she didn't include a Marxist perspective. "I grew up in the Soviet Union. I don't practice recreational Marxism.""
RedWave Press on X - "WOW: CNN’s statistician Harry Enten BREAKS DOWN the “stunning” rise of socialism in the Democratic Party. “Capitalism has absolutely fallen through the floor. Look at this: it’s now just 42% of Democrats who have a favorable view of capitalism. Socialism, on the other hand, has risen like a rocket…” “You mention New York, you mentioned Vermont, obviously, there’s the D.C. mayor. We’ve seen it in Pennsylvania as well. The Democratic Socialists seem to be doing considerably better than they used to be, and they have the chance to knock off, in fact, Democratic incumbents in Congress.” “And part of the reason for that, why we’re seeing these Democratic Socialists having such good chances, or downright outright winning nominations, is — take a look here. Net favorability among Dems, Democratic Socialists of America — look at that, a plus-17-point net favorability rating among Democrats.”"
Handre on X - "While Western intellectuals spent the 1970s and 80s gushing over Soviet "achievements," Ludwig von Mises had already written the empire's obituary decades earlier. In 1920, he published his devastating critique of socialist calculation, proving that rational economic planning becomes impossible without market prices. The academic establishment ignored him. The Soviets dismissed him as a capitalist propagandist. You cannot allocate resources efficiently when you have destroyed the price mechanism. When the state owns all means of production, it eliminates the very market signals that coordinate human action. No central planner, regardless of intelligence or computing power, can substitute for the decentralized knowledge that emerges from voluntary exchange. The proof arrived exactly as Mises predicted. By the 1980s, Soviet grocery stores sat empty while millions of bureaucrats shuffled paper in Moscow offices. Factory managers produced worthless goods because they responded to arbitrary quotas rather than consumer demand. The entire system collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions in 1991, stunning the same Western economists who had spent decades praising Soviet growth statistics. Meanwhile, Paul Samuelson was still teaching students in 1989 that the Soviet economy might overtake America's. The New York Times continued publishing editorials about the resilience of socialist planning. Mises got it right because he understood human action and the impossibility of calculation without private property. The establishment economists got it wrong because they confused mathematical models with economic reality. They treated human beings as equations instead of purposeful actors making choices under uncertainty."
Thread by @sfliberty on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 1960, newly independent African leaders had a choice: capitalism or socialism. Almost all of them picked socialism. A Ghanaian economist named George Ayittey spent forty years documenting what happened next. His findings are in print, and almost nobody outside Africa wants to hear them. π§΅
The reasoning in 1960 looked airtight. Colonialism had been run by Western capitalists. So capitalism was a tool of oppression. Socialism, its opposite, would be the path to liberation. Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, SΓ©kou TourΓ© in Guinea, Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia, and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe all reached the same conclusion through the same logic. The logic was tidy. The results were catastrophic.
In Ghana, Nkrumah's government built 64 state enterprises before his overthrow in February 1966. Only three or four were profitable. By 1970, the Ghanaian state was setting prices on nearly 6,000 items across more than 700 product groups. In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere called the program ujamaa, a Swahili word for familyhood. By 1976, the state had relocated more than 11 million peasants into roughly 8,000 collective villages. Much of the relocation was done at gunpoint. Government bulldozers flattened old houses so families could not return. Tanzania exported 540,000 tons of maize in 1970. By 1974 it was importing 300,000 tons. Within a few years a country that had been able to feed itself was depending on Western grain shipments to survive. In Guinea, SΓ©kou TourΓ© made unauthorized trade a criminal offense. Smuggling could be punished by death. Out of a population of 5.5 million, about 2 million Guineans fled the country. The richest territory in French West Africa ended up importing food it once exported.
Ayittey then asked the question he considered most important. How do the rich get rich in the United States compared to Africa? In the United States, the wealthiest people are builders. Elon Musk built Tesla and SpaceX. Jeff Bezos built Amazon. Roughly two thirds of American billionaires founded the company that made them rich. In socialist-era Africa, the wealthiest people were heads of state and their ministers.
- Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo): estimates of stolen wealth ranged from 1 to 5 billion dollars.
- Sani Abacha of Nigeria: around 5 billion.
- Ibrahim Babangida of Nigeria: roughly 12 billion.
- Hosni Mubarak of Egypt: estimates ran as high as 40 billion.
- Muammar Gaddafi of Libya: estimates reached 200 billion.
Ayittey put it plainly. The combined net worth of every American president from George Washington through Barack Obama, all 43 of them, was about 2.7 billion dollars in 2010 figures. Sani Abacha alone stole more than that in five years in office. African socialism built a ruling class that created nothing and extracted everything. The argument Ayittey most wanted Africans to hear, and the one almost nobody quotes, is that socialism was never African. Pre-colonial Africa had open markets, long-distance trade, and private enterprise. Cloth-weaving, iron and gold smelting, regional commerce. Property was held by extended families and clans, not by the state. Nyerere and his peers took kinship-based property and relabeled it communism. They confused village solidarity with state ownership. They imported a nineteenth-century European industrial ideology and applied it to agricultural societies that already had functioning markets older than the modern European state. Shortages, political prisons, and a parasitic ruling class followed.
South Africa in 2026 is preparing the same policies. The Expropriation Act was signed in January 2025. The MK Party introduced a constitutional amendment bill this April to push land restitution claims back to 1652 and remove compensation from the property clause. Zimbabwe ran this experiment in 2000. Tobacco export earnings fell from 600 million dollars to 175 million by 2009. Maize production did not return to pre-seizure levels until 2017. Ayittey warned about this for thirty years. He died in January 2022. South Africa is doing it anyway."
Damn legacy of colonialism keeping Africa poor! White people need to send even more trillions over!
