You know what's great for getting Cuban votes in Miami? Supporting sanctions and starving out Cuba.
The gusano voting bloc is mutually exclusive with people who don't like starving foreign countries.
There may be hope for Cubans who fled in the 90s due to famine, but the social relations and economic and cultural history of the ones who fled either fearing the wrath of the people they'd exploited or seeking to restore the privilege they had pre-revolution are always going to vote for the fascists.
The gusano
You know there's a way to make your point politically without using literal slurs right?
This one confuses me, what's the basis for this being a slur? It's based in ideology, not race (given that it was invented by cubans for use on other cubans) or sexuality.
That would make Tankie a slur too, wouldn't it?
Yes but they're okay with that one :/
what's the basis for this being a slur?
It's a slur just like "Uncle Tom" would be for conservative black Americans, it's not exclusively racial, but it has a nationalist and racialist element, that's added onto by ideology.
That would make Tankie a slur too, wouldn't it?
If Tankie was used like Gusano is, to justify violence and to persecute, then I would be against using it too.
The term was also prevalent in hate crimes against anti-revolutionary Cubans. In September or October 1961, over the course of a week, 12 deceased bodies were discovered over Havana with notes attached to them that said "gusanos with pro-revolutionary [ideologies], CIA agents
During the 1962 wildfires that destroyed sugarcane plantations, locals in Cubas were reported saying that "gusanos have infiltrated the canefields."[28] This led to quick military tribunals resulting in death by firing squad for "gusanos"
But no use of Tankie has ever neared how the Cuban government used Gusano to justify mass persecution of those unfriendly to the regime.
During the 1962 wildfires that destroyed sugarcane plantations, locals in Cubas were reported saying that “gusanos have infiltrated the canefields.”[28] This led to quick military tribunals resulting in death by firing squad for “gusanos”
You mean when the CIA was bombing sugar plantations in Cuba?
Calling someone a gusano is more like calling them a confederate traitor; it implies they want to return to a social order where most of the people were forced to work the fields and unable to leave.
It's not a hate crime to punch a nazi, same with someone advocating a return to slavery.
Man, it's almost like their government gave land for a missile launch base or something at the end of a very long, cold war.
So weird someone would mistreat a neighbor innocently trying to provide a nuclear Holocaust.
Edit: here is the /s you weren't looking for. Be better lmao
That has nothing at all to do with the US supporting terrorism against random civilians.
the end of a very long, cold war.
The cuban missile crisis was in 1962, near the start of the cold war.
But regarding the cuban missile crisis, the soviets stationed missiles in Cuba in response to the US stationing missiles in Turkey. The USSR agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba when the US agreed to remove their missiles from Turkey.
But sure the US had to bomb fields and machinery in Cuba, Cuba was coming right for them. Same reason they have to sanction them today, in case Cuba gets nuclear missiles again /s
They gave them a missile base after the US had already been sabotaging their fields, food, and electrical grids for years and sponsoring random terrorist attacks. Also, they had already attempted an invasion of Cuba by that point with the Bay of Pigs. Of course they freaking wanted help defending themselves. Or does that only apply to the US helping Israel but not the USSR helping other non-settler colonialist countries?
it blows my mind how much gusanos and evangelical chicanos & tejanos hold in common and i’m convinced that if they listened to the same music and spoke with the same accent; that they would be indistinguishable from each other.
Cubans tend to vote conservative. They vote that way because the Republicans have done their usual job of non-stop messaging on Democrat = Commie Socialist.
Many fled Cuba because of castro’s communism, and they understandably don’t want that again. There’s the religious factor, as many of them are catholic and of course the republicans call the Dems “godless” or whatever too.
There’s also this perverse psychology where people from authoritarian and repressed countries move out to democratic countries and then suddenly miss “the good old days” where reductionist messaging and “strong man” leaders just told them they were strong and flexed at every opportunity, but blamed everyone else when that strength wasn’t effective. Beat those protesters and jail them, send the military to the borders, arrest anyone who doesn’t conform. They want the authoritarian back. And the republicans offer that populist messaging of the strong man who is going to kick everyone’s ass, including the ones in your own country who don’t fit “the norm”. I’ve worked with emigrées (?sp) from both Cuba and Russia and it never ceases to both anger and baffle me that they ran away from shitty, awful dictators and then turn around and want the same thing here in the US.
I think what's missing from your analysis is that they tend to be socially conservative. As in, they don't like the gays and the atheists.
This was also left out of the discussion with Palestinian voters in Michigan at the peak of the blowback for Biden's support of Israel a few months ago.
Are you implying that Palestinians aren't going to vote Biden because they're too socially conservative?
Well, it's not really relevant when children are getting killed.by potshots and indiscriminate bombing right?
Just because someone's parents are hypothetically massively homophobic, doesn't mean kids deserve to die.
(Im not suggesting you are saying that)
so, are they voting for republicans because they hate gay people? I don't understand the point of this comment.
Why would Palestinian voters care about an LGBTQ issue during the "Biden blowback" as relates to Israel? Wouldn't they care about dead family more, and therefore not vote for anything around Biden, on that reason primarily?
maybe? Middle eastern people aren't exactly known for liking gay people either. I was mostly just trying to figure out what you meant with that clusterfuck of a comment.
"Socially conservative" wraps up their position pretty tidily.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say in context. Which part is communism?
Sorry dude, my bad, that image is a "miami thing" where anything from libraries to taxes used to level the playing field are received with that phrase from Cuban/Nicaraguan/Venezuelan diaspora even clean initiatives and all in between with the exception of Parking and tolls.
Can confirm, it's fuckin obnoxious.
Yeah, gotcha. That certainly follows.
I’ve worked with emigrées (?sp) from both Cuba and Russia and it never ceases to both anger and baffle me that they ran away from shitty, awful dictators and then turn around and want the same thing here in the US.
smells to me like it's probably related to the psychology behind prolonged abusive relationships, or people continually getting into abusive relationships.
There’s the religious factor, as many of them are catholic and of course the republicans call the Dems “godless”
As if the Republican evangelicals actually had anything to do with christianism.
It's not about what they actually do, it's about how they make you feel about what they say.
It just surprises me that this messaging is so effective when Trump would love nothing more than to send every brown person living in Florida straight to Cuba, American citizen or otherwise. It's a very strange sort of political climate where people who fear being deported back to Cuba are voting for the party promising mass deportations because... they don't like abortion? I can't quite wrap my head around it.
When the axe came into the woods, many of the trees said, "At least the handle is one of us.”
You understand that Castro went after than more than just slave owners right? It's super disingenuous to pretend that most of the 1.5 million people who have fled Cuba were slave owners.
If they were fine with Batista being a military dictator, but drew the line at someone trying to upend his stint as one, I'm going to ask, why the military dictatorship didn't cause them to flee every time.
You understand people fled Cuba not only because Castro was trying to take their plantation or Casino, but because the US has spent over have a century carrying out terrorist attacks and engineered a famine right?
carrying out terrorist attacks and engineered a famine right?
Citation needed
BTW: You mean that time when Cuba was soviet ally and had on their territory soviet nukes aimed at US?
Fuck you and your revisionism.
Take a listen to Blowback season 2.
They're cultists. If you talk to them in neutral sub, You'll find horribly defective logic and broken definitions ("Your definition of Anarchy is wRoNg, anarchy is an organised system!!!").
If you try talking to them in one of their sub, you'll get banned instantly. Socialists/communists are pro censorship and therefore pro coercion. No wonder, every communist state turned into dictatorship.
I agree with most of what you've said, you should read more from anarchist philosophers like Tolstoy or Goldman though.
Socialists
However I would subtract the socialist from you comment and just keep it at communist, there's plenty of democratic socialist parties that never devolved into rampant totalitarianism like the leninist parties did.
plenty of democratic socialist parties that never devolved into rampant totalitarianism like the leninist parties did
I guess you're right there, still, they tend to be authoritarian - socialism in the soviet controlled republics was rather ugly - centrally planned economy, rationing of everything from meat and sugar to cars and housing, censorship of any political subject in media, ever present corruption, berlin wall to keep people from escaping...
Not a place you'd want to live in.
Not a place you'd want to live in.
Of course not, which is why it's unfair to lump in welfare state creators like the demsoc parties of western Europe, and the brutal leninist parties of Asia and Eastern Europe.
the demsoc parties of western Europe
They often have socialism in their name, but I don't really consider them socialist, as you said - they're welfare state supporters, which is really, really far away from socialism in soviet controlled eastern europe
which is really, really far away from socialism in soviet controlled eastern europe
In that it's democratic and they want to expand rights from just being political to also being economic? Yes I agree, they're severely different from the Soviet style parties, but that doesn't make them not socialist, their left wing members will usually still argue for the ownership of the means of production by workers, usually they just argue for cooperatives rather than mass nationalization nowadays.
No, of course. Only the bad things are socialist! The good ones clearly are not true socialist! /s
You're pretty fucking stupid my man. Leftism is as broad as anything else, and socialism can take a wide variety of forms and positions. Authoritarianism is the thing that causes issues, and that can be anywhere on the left, right, and center. In the traditional political compass (which isn't worth much, but whatever) there's left/right as liberal/conservative, but there's also up/down as authority/liberty.
No, of course. Only the bad things are socialist!
Well it happens it's a shitty system.
You're pretty fucking stupid my man
That's pretty rich coming from a person who probably cant even define socialism, not to mention applying that definition in real life
That's pretty rich coming from a person who probably cant even define socialism, not to mention applying that definition in real life
Projection. Your previous comment pretty much just said it has to be USSR countries, which is absolutely wrong.
Capitalism is a shitty system. So many capitalist countries have horrible living conditions and/or have collapsed. You just don't hear about them because the capitalists want you to support capitalism and hate alternatives.
So many socialist countries have failed because of the intervention of capitalist countries. We can't know what would have happened if they were left alone. If socialism was such a shitty system it wouldn't require intervention everywhere it appears to ensure it fails. It'd be left to fail on it's own. Instead we (the US mostly, with other countries assistance) support coups, replace elected leaders with dictators, assassinate legitimately elected officials, support genocides, undermine labor movements, enact embargos, and all kinds of other things.
Again, if socialism was doomed to failure none of this would be required. There would be no reason to fear it spreading. Instead capitalist countries see it as as an existential threat. Why is that so if it's such a bad system? Could you have been mislead?
Capitalism is a shitty system. So many capitalist countries have horrible living conditions and/or have collapsed
You have no idea what are you talking about. I happen to be born in one of those post socialist countries, and had to grow up in the shit left after that failed system.
Do you know how did it fail? After USSR lost it's grip on the eastern Europe, the governments in these countries for the first time organized free, untampered elections, and the socialists system lost by the vote of the people in every single one of them. Everyone hated it, even the governments that were previously tasked by USSR to enforce it.
And you know what happened next? Decades of rebuilding of the broken economy, EU accesion, access to the common EU market, and the greatest wealth creation in the history of these republics.
Your argument is invalid.
Again, if socialism was doomed to failure none of this would be required
Are you joking? Do you know how many lives were ruined or lost before that cursed thing fell apart??? All the poverty all the repression, it's all fucked up, and you want this pathology to be tolerated around the world?
You bought into a toxic cult. Face it.
Yeah man, I didn't defend the USSR. It was pretty shit. It was designed to funnel wealth out of all the other USSR countries into Russia, specifically into the hands of the elite. It was pretty fucked up and exploitative. I don't know what that has to do with the exact same thing happening in capitalist countries though. Socialism wasn't the issue. It was authoritarianism and imperialism.
You're only talking about USSR countries. That is where you're entire breadth of knowledge is coming from seemingly. There's a whole world out there. Just because the USSR fucked over so many people doesn't mean socialism must. Again, capitalist countries fuck over a ton of people too. Is it also evil by requirement?
If you try talking to them in one of their sub, you’ll get banned instantly. Socialists/communists are pro censorship and therefore pro coercion. No wonder, every communist state turned into dictatorship.
are we talking about hexbear? The sub that is insufferably boring?
Anticommunists are right-wingers, more news at 11.
That's a nice part of accepting refugees from a state like Cuba. You pretty much get to selectively import the right-wing elements of their population.
Similar effect happens with Venezuelans. The ones who can afford to uproot their lives are also more likely to align ideologically with US politics.
I used to work with a lot of Cubans. My favorites were the old ones. They would tell me stories about living in Cuba under Castro back in the day. One thing that I always found interesting is how they said they were happier. It might just be nostalgia but I've heard from older people from Soviet areas too.
Life was slower and as long as you did your job certain things were guaranteed to you. In a capitalist system you have infinitely more purchasing power but they would make the analogy of addiction. In the US you are addicted to money so you need to work a lot more to pay the bills.
Whereas in Cuba you spend a lot more time idle and just living life, even if you're not able to purchase common items we consider essential. (Some days you go to store and there's no shoes, next day there's no bread, etc)
My least favorite were the 2nd generation ones. Like Marco Rubio. They don't understand the struggle but feel intensely like they do. Very strong opinions with very little nuance. I've met my fair share.
Like the people escaping islamist hell holes only to be pro sharia in Europe. And people escaping violence stricken African countries and then end up in gang Fights against their countrymen in Europe.
These people are just as much part of the problem in their old home country as they are in their new home country. But where probably affluent enough to buy a (very dangerous) trip out of their previous hell and want to make their new home into a nightmare.
This is not all of them btw.. this is a minority of the minority. The problem is, these people fuel the far right as if they are pooring liquid oxygen on the fire.
If trump ends up elected, I wish these people all the luck in the world. They will need it.
Yeah, it seems many didn't have an issue with the evil shit just that they weren't on the top and/or were poor
These people aren't trying to create communism in America, the older generation fled because communism was making society more equal, and they stood to lose, and are the most right-wing mfs you'll ever meet.
This applies a little less to the ones who fled after Reagan offered US citizenship and were mostly criminals who chose America over prison.
And not at all to the ones who fled during the 90s, fleeing famine after the USSR collapsed and the US wanted to make an example out of Cuba.
Democrats are not creating communism in the U.S.
Correct, but Rubber Duck was implying the people fleeing Cuba were communists trying to recreate conditions of Cuba.
But no, they're absolutely not trying to get everyone healthcare and housing and a constitutional amendment securing LGBT+ rights.
WatchMojo's Top 10 gusano moments
It's weird to me how many various Hispanic voters are pro-Trump. A lot of them are Catholic and anti-abortion, and single issue voters are nothing new, but still. I just cannot comprehend such a limited perspective.
It's a combination of things -- Trump's agressive, chauvinistic persona maps well onto Latin concepts of machismo, and there's also a surprising strain of pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you thinking amongst established Hispanic families aimed at the current wave of migrants.
"Fuck you got mine" is the most American thing
Many Chinese Americans are also conservatives, not just second or third generation but also first generation when they were the ones that fled China.
The Democratic candidates are not even leftist.
If you break it down on a policy by policy basis (is this policy leftist?) like dems are certainly not leftist. People conflate being "left of republicans" with being "leftist" even though a lot of their positions are quite centrist.
Citizens and immigrants need to be provided mandatory civics education, especially adults
tfw petty burgeois are mad that communism took their oligopolies
Hmm maybe these things are connected!
It's not like Bautista wasn't a dictator, so the question becomes why didn't they flee the dictator that allowed you to have slaves instead of the one that wanted every Cuban to have a house and be able to read.
Do they also support ending the embargo?
I am terrified to talk to mine about politics. Even though the Suarez's are cool as shit, when it comes to Trump it is like I am talking to a bunch of terrified children.
i hope for most people who fled, that they would be able to vote. This is why america exists after all.
on a sidenote, i would be curious to ask maga people about what they think people moving from authoritarian or dictator type governments would think about trump. But then again they have such aggressive cognitive dissonance they'd be confused why they aren't voting for trump.
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That’s not good enough. Threads like this show up in the comment count and give the appearance of activity on a post even when there is none.
Well Socialists/communists from lemmy.ml will tell you that you're wrong - you escaped from heaven on earth into capitalist exploitation grinder, and actually Cuba is perfect equal economy, destroyed by evil western sanctions.
I wish that was sarcasm, but it isn't
That doesn't sound right, but I don't know enough about strawmen to dispute it.
No no.. you see that is not "real communism (tm)". So your argument is false.
Real communism can't fail, ergo all failed communist states weren't truly communist. Check mate!
Are there any examples of it working though, or only examples of poverty, famine and crime stricken totalitarian end results?
Thing is, regardless of what anyone says, you'll probably not be moved to consider a state you fundamentally disagree with as "successful". My following two paragraphs are mostly based on data collected and published by western studies, and compiled in a book called "Human Rights in the Soviet Union", by Albert Szymanski, which I highly encourage reading to anyone interested in socialism.
By the 70s, the USSR had eliminated homelessness and unemployment. It guaranteed free healthcare to every citizen, free education up to university level, men retired at 60 and women at 55. It drastically improved the material conditions of hundreds of millions of people, lifting them from feudal agrarian societies like the Russian Empire or the central-asian countries, to industralized societies with welfare state. They progressed the rights of women to the point that there were more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined. There were widely available and affordable canteens and food at the workplace so that women wouldn't have to cook at home if they didn't desire to do so, as well as affordable childcare and kindergartens to prevent women from being tied home by children. Free abortions were available for every woman. In most republics, including Kazakhstan, Latvia, Uzbekistan, Lithuania... there were more publications in the local official language (in which people could study at schools and take university exams in) than in Russian. The vast majority of the population was content with the government, except possibly in Estonia and Georgia due to the strong and long-lasting nationalist movements in those countries.
The USSR went from being a feudal backwater country in Eastern Europe, to extremely rapid industrialization that enabled the defeat of the Nazis, and to eventually become the second world power for the latter half of the 20th century. All of this was achieved without the exploitation of 3rd world countries' resources and labor, the USSR never engaged in colonialism and, since it was mostly a self-sufficient country, it didn't partake in unequal exchange either. In the past of the country, mainly in the Stalin period, there was massive and unjustified repression with terrible consequences for millions of people, but that was a phenomenon that exclusively took place in the paranoia between 1935 and 1945 approximately, afterwards this level of repression was never seen again. We should condemn this for what it was, but does it invalidate all the achievements of the USSR? Should the UK, for example, be dismantled as a state, because all the benefits that it generated for its population were at the expense of the oppression and murder of tens if not hundreds of millions across the British Empire? Would you classify the UK as a failed state as a consequence? Is the USA a failed state because it developed under the premise of the Manifest Destiny doctrine, which implied ans turned into the genocide of practically the entirety of the native population?
Many people in the world saw such a country as the USSR and decided to follow its steps, that's why there were plenty of leftist movements in many developing countries such as Iran (Mossadegh), Congo (Lumumba), Chile (Allende), Cuba... Most of these movements didn't "fail", but were eliminated by elaborate western-country ploys to do so, as is the case of the three former that I mentioned.
My point is, you probably disagree with the point of what I'm saying, but what metrics would you actually use to consider whether a country is a success or a failure?
Well I'd at least state that the countries absorbed into the Soviet union where not free to do so. So stating that the Soviet union did not partake in colonialism is only part of the story. They conquered their neighbors and with all the people and resources of these countries managed a lot of that. Also many countries in the world where aligned with the Soviet union so they where also part of the international market.
To be honest I can't really speak to how these relationships where forged and maintained, but a lot of these USSR aligned countries had ruling classes that where also not the nicest people to put it mildly.
So maybe some aspects where good, there is plenty of bad to be found as well. As this was the world back then.
The western block where by no means holy, but I'd argue better for most of their people overall. How the American system ended up in its current form I don't know but I tend to see a lot of similarities between the wealthy elite of either system abusing the workers in an unsustainable way.
Edit: I had the privilege to discuss old vs new with my east German grandparents in law. And they had a lot of good to say about their communist days. Especially the labor market, equal rights, and access to goods. It took time but everything was available. But when asked if they preferred then or now they said now.. when asked why. The answer got to me. "Because now if someone rings your doorbell unexpectedly you don't have to worry about dissapearing". They told me they knew multiple families that where all arrested and never heard from again.
Well I'd at least state that the countries absorbed into the Soviet union where not free to do so
While what you say is partly true (although the reality is more complicated for many countries such as Ukraine or Belarus or Armenia or most of Central Asia), when you say "the countries" were not free to do so, what do you mean exactly? Because I don't think anyone is really free to belong to a country or to other for the most part. I'm Spanish and I didn't choose to be so, and there are plenty of people in my country who don't feel Spanish but are forced to be so, especially in Basque areas and Catalonia. I've never been asked what nationality I want to belong to, or what country I wish to be born in.
This is especially true for regimes in the 1920s (countries that annexed during the Russian Civil war) and the 1940s (countries that annexed during and after WW2). Polish citizens themselves, or Ukrainian, or Finnish, when in 1917 the first Bolshevik constitution declared the unilateral right of self-determination and secession for all peoples of the former Russian Empire, didn't get to choose democratically whether they wanted to become independent. The local powerful authorities simply declared so, and afaik there was never any referendum about the topic in these countries. In some places this was very short-lasting, as for example in Ukraine when they were immediately invaded by Poland because of nationalist expansionism in the Polish-Ukrainian war. So, can you argue that these peoples of Ukraine were incorporated into the USSR against their will after the expulsion of the Polish forces from Ukraine by the Soviets, any more than they became independent against their will since there was no referendum?
I didn't get to vote the constitution of my country since I was born too late for that. I didn't get to choose the parliamentary form of it, I didn't get to choose to have a fucking king, I didn't get to choose whether I wanted to join the EU and abandon our previous currency. If my decision power is consistently ignored, can you argue that my national identity and my belonging to a state is good just because it's by default? Second-generation Latvians, Uzbeks, or Georgians, didn't get to choose what country they were born in and belonged to, any less than I do currently. In fact, most citizens of the USSR got to vote in 1991 in a referendum whether they wanted to maintain the USSR, and the overwhelming majority of citizens voted affirmatively... which was promptly ignored as the state was dissolved from the top-down, and plunged into the worst humanitarian crisis in Eastern Europe since WW2 with the application of Neoliberal shock therapy.
I had the privilege to discuss old vs new with my east German grandparents in law. And they had a lot of good to say about their communist days. Especially the labor market, equal rights, and access to goods. It took time but everything was available. But when asked if they preferred then or now they said now.. when asked why. The answer got to me. "Because now if someone rings your doorbell unexpectedly you don't have to worry about dissapearing". They told me they knew multiple families that where all arrested and never heard from again.
As for this, I'm not familiar with the history of repression in Eastern Germany. I'd dare to say that your grandparents in law were "lucky", in the sense that they got to have an employment for the most part after the dissolution of the country and the reunification with western Germany (which forced the deindustrialization of Eastern Germany in favour of western one, big part of the reason why there are so many inequality differences between the two afaik). Is the risk of unemployment and misery less serious than the risk of political oppression? We tend to think so, but for many people who don't enjoy the most basic material rights, the answer isn't that simple. I agree that oppression to those levels is something inherently negative, but it's the common response of systems when there are sectors of the population that go against the system itself. In my country, Spain, cases of lawfare manufactured by the state and police apparatus and coordinated with mass media, destroyed the leftist party Podemos which used to be the 3rd biggest force in the parliament after the 2008 crisis. In the USA, the Black Panthers movement was eliminated by the CIA despite committing no real crime.
My point isn't anything other than "let's question the metrics that we use to compare one country to another". To me, as a young person who may never be able to afford a house, who's only seen the welfare state eroded further and further in his lifetime and maybe won't have a public pension like my grandparents and parents enjoy/will enjoy, who's seen the political oppression through lawfare and manufactured consent of progressive politicians, who doesn't have a right to decide whether to eliminate the literal monarchy from his country, and who has seen Catalonian politicians jailed for wanting to make a referendum on the HUMAN RIGHT of self-determination, it's hard for me to see the innumerable advantages of the capitalism that ravages the third world and destroys the climate of the planet I inhabit. Young people don't unionize because they're afraid that the hidden profiles that companies make of them and share with each other thanks to the internet will brand them as undesirable to be employed. If they're unionized, they're liable of getting arrested and getting a sentence to jail as happened to "las seis de la suiza". How the fuck is this more democratic and less oppressive?
Ill leave arguing history. Smarter people than me can do that.
And just say that your last paragraph I agree to. I'm in my 40s and understand the sentiment all too well. I have the luxury that I own a house.. but this was only possible because of the economic crash and subsequent fuckery with the interest rates which opened up a window for me and my wife where we where able to buy at the lowest house prices and with an interest rate equally low. For the rest I see everything you say and agree. I worry for people my age and younger as it seems to be getting worse.
Ill leave arguing history
That's actually a wise position
And just say that your last paragraph I agree to
Ok, that's nice. My proposal is to have strong worker movements, and by nature worker movements are very leftist. Wanting to lower working hours, higher pay, higher vacation, higher working conditions... all of those are conditions of the left. I also think that a majority of the population wants extended healthcare and education for free, public pensions, and access to affordable, quality housing. From what I see and what I read, the people pushing for that the strongest are the ones on the leftmost side of the political spectrum. Would you agree with that?
Absolutely. I think the billionaire class has been hoarding all the wealth at the expense of everyone else and that needs to be adressed.
Rutger Bergmans said it best at Davos. All these rich people doing philanthropy with a fraction of their wealth, paying big salaries from their charities to the people that run them, helping people they think are worhy. While systems to reach those most in need are already in place. Pay your taxes! Then we can finance social services like healthcare, education, psychological help, addiction treatment, housing, emergency services, social services, childcare and more.. much more. We could even invest in poorer countries to help them get over the hump that they are stuck behind.. and not in a "white man knows best" way, or let's transfer a large sum of money to the dictator of the day.. actual help (how and what I'll leave to smarter people yet again).
The market can take case of all things people can choose, but stuff everyone needs or you cannot choose should be handled by the government or at the very least be very very well regulated. Also the free market needs to be regulated to make sure they don't end up poisoning us or something.
I fully agree with all you're saying in your second paragraph. My whole point is that, historically, this sort of progress isn't achieved by voting, but by organized worker action through unionizing and strikes.
As far as I know, no, there aren't any - every single example of "working socialism" they give you, are basically welfare states - capitalist countries with high taxation going towards social benefits - like free health care, free education, social security and so on.
i think fundamentally, no. The reason is simple, planned economies simply cannot feasibly work, semi planned economies, maybe? Free market and heavily regulated economies, absolutely will work.
Planning and running something as big as a national economy effectively is an impossible task. Even with modern computers, it's simply impossible, the free market is quite literally the decentralized network of goods and services.
I think the only realistic "variant" of communism is going to be the modern western concept of socialism, it's a little out there, but theoretically, it's not that far off of capitalism either. It essentially just removes the capitalist middleman, although even that is a bit of a bear to deal with, because now you have to deal with decentralized ownership and authority, which is known to be quite a tough problem to solve.
There's also the whole, humans aren't generally a fan of being put into a box and forced to do X problem also, but i feel like that goes without saying.
You know what's great for getting Cuban votes in Miami? Supporting sanctions and starving out Cuba.
The gusano voting bloc is mutually exclusive with people who don't like starving foreign countries.
There may be hope for Cubans who fled in the 90s due to famine, but the social relations and economic and cultural history of the ones who fled either fearing the wrath of the people they'd exploited or seeking to restore the privilege they had pre-revolution are always going to vote for the fascists.
You know there's a way to make your point politically without using literal slurs right?
This one confuses me, what's the basis for this being a slur? It's based in ideology, not race (given that it was invented by cubans for use on other cubans) or sexuality.
That would make Tankie a slur too, wouldn't it?
Yes but they're okay with that one :/
It's a slur just like "Uncle Tom" would be for conservative black Americans, it's not exclusively racial, but it has a nationalist and racialist element, that's added onto by ideology.
If Tankie was used like Gusano is, to justify violence and to persecute, then I would be against using it too.
But no use of Tankie has ever neared how the Cuban government used Gusano to justify mass persecution of those unfriendly to the regime.
You mean when the CIA was bombing sugar plantations in Cuba?
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=MT19600310&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------
Calling someone a gusano is more like calling them a confederate traitor; it implies they want to return to a social order where most of the people were forced to work the fields and unable to leave.
It's not a hate crime to punch a nazi, same with someone advocating a return to slavery.
Man, it's almost like their government gave land for a missile launch base or something at the end of a very long, cold war.
So weird someone would mistreat a neighbor innocently trying to provide a nuclear Holocaust.
Edit: here is the /s you weren't looking for. Be better lmao
That has nothing at all to do with the US supporting terrorism against random civilians.
The cuban missile crisis was in 1962, near the start of the cold war.
But regarding the cuban missile crisis, the soviets stationed missiles in Cuba in response to the US stationing missiles in Turkey. The USSR agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba when the US agreed to remove their missiles from Turkey.
But sure the US had to bomb fields and machinery in Cuba, Cuba was coming right for them. Same reason they have to sanction them today, in case Cuba gets nuclear missiles again /s
They gave them a missile base after the US had already been sabotaging their fields, food, and electrical grids for years and sponsoring random terrorist attacks. Also, they had already attempted an invasion of Cuba by that point with the Bay of Pigs. Of course they freaking wanted help defending themselves. Or does that only apply to the US helping Israel but not the USSR helping other non-settler colonialist countries?
it blows my mind how much gusanos and evangelical chicanos & tejanos hold in common and i’m convinced that if they listened to the same music and spoke with the same accent; that they would be indistinguishable from each other.
Cubans tend to vote conservative. They vote that way because the Republicans have done their usual job of non-stop messaging on Democrat = Commie Socialist.
Many fled Cuba because of castro’s communism, and they understandably don’t want that again. There’s the religious factor, as many of them are catholic and of course the republicans call the Dems “godless” or whatever too.
There’s also this perverse psychology where people from authoritarian and repressed countries move out to democratic countries and then suddenly miss “the good old days” where reductionist messaging and “strong man” leaders just told them they were strong and flexed at every opportunity, but blamed everyone else when that strength wasn’t effective. Beat those protesters and jail them, send the military to the borders, arrest anyone who doesn’t conform. They want the authoritarian back. And the republicans offer that populist messaging of the strong man who is going to kick everyone’s ass, including the ones in your own country who don’t fit “the norm”. I’ve worked with emigrées (?sp) from both Cuba and Russia and it never ceases to both anger and baffle me that they ran away from shitty, awful dictators and then turn around and want the same thing here in the US.
I think what's missing from your analysis is that they tend to be socially conservative. As in, they don't like the gays and the atheists.
This was also left out of the discussion with Palestinian voters in Michigan at the peak of the blowback for Biden's support of Israel a few months ago.
Are you implying that Palestinians aren't going to vote Biden because they're too socially conservative?
Well, it's not really relevant when children are getting killed.by potshots and indiscriminate bombing right?
Just because someone's parents are hypothetically massively homophobic, doesn't mean kids deserve to die.
(Im not suggesting you are saying that)
so, are they voting for republicans because they hate gay people? I don't understand the point of this comment.
Why would Palestinian voters care about an LGBTQ issue during the "Biden blowback" as relates to Israel? Wouldn't they care about dead family more, and therefore not vote for anything around Biden, on that reason primarily?
maybe? Middle eastern people aren't exactly known for liking gay people either. I was mostly just trying to figure out what you meant with that clusterfuck of a comment.
"Socially conservative" wraps up their position pretty tidily.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say in context. Which part is communism?
Sorry dude, my bad, that image is a "miami thing" where anything from libraries to taxes used to level the playing field are received with that phrase from Cuban/Nicaraguan/Venezuelan diaspora even clean initiatives and all in between with the exception of Parking and tolls.
Can confirm, it's fuckin obnoxious.
Yeah, gotcha. That certainly follows.
smells to me like it's probably related to the psychology behind prolonged abusive relationships, or people continually getting into abusive relationships.
As if the Republican evangelicals actually had anything to do with christianism.
It's not about what they actually do, it's about how they make you feel about what they say.
It just surprises me that this messaging is so effective when Trump would love nothing more than to send every brown person living in Florida straight to Cuba, American citizen or otherwise. It's a very strange sort of political climate where people who fear being deported back to Cuba are voting for the party promising mass deportations because... they don't like abortion? I can't quite wrap my head around it.
When the axe came into the woods, many of the trees said, "At least the handle is one of us.”
You understand that Castro went after than more than just slave owners right? It's super disingenuous to pretend that most of the 1.5 million people who have fled Cuba were slave owners.
If they were fine with Batista being a military dictator, but drew the line at someone trying to upend his stint as one, I'm going to ask, why the military dictatorship didn't cause them to flee every time.
You understand people fled Cuba not only because Castro was trying to take their plantation or Casino, but because the US has spent over have a century carrying out terrorist attacks and engineered a famine right?
Citation needed
BTW: You mean that time when Cuba was soviet ally and had on their territory soviet nukes aimed at US?
Fuck you and your revisionism.
Take a listen to Blowback season 2.
They're cultists. If you talk to them in neutral sub, You'll find horribly defective logic and broken definitions ("Your definition of Anarchy is wRoNg, anarchy is an organised system!!!").
If you try talking to them in one of their sub, you'll get banned instantly. Socialists/communists are pro censorship and therefore pro coercion. No wonder, every communist state turned into dictatorship.
I agree with most of what you've said, you should read more from anarchist philosophers like Tolstoy or Goldman though.
However I would subtract the socialist from you comment and just keep it at communist, there's plenty of democratic socialist parties that never devolved into rampant totalitarianism like the leninist parties did.
I guess you're right there, still, they tend to be authoritarian - socialism in the soviet controlled republics was rather ugly - centrally planned economy, rationing of everything from meat and sugar to cars and housing, censorship of any political subject in media, ever present corruption, berlin wall to keep people from escaping...
Not a place you'd want to live in.
Of course not, which is why it's unfair to lump in welfare state creators like the demsoc parties of western Europe, and the brutal leninist parties of Asia and Eastern Europe.
They often have socialism in their name, but I don't really consider them socialist, as you said - they're welfare state supporters, which is really, really far away from socialism in soviet controlled eastern europe
In that it's democratic and they want to expand rights from just being political to also being economic? Yes I agree, they're severely different from the Soviet style parties, but that doesn't make them not socialist, their left wing members will usually still argue for the ownership of the means of production by workers, usually they just argue for cooperatives rather than mass nationalization nowadays.
No, of course. Only the bad things are socialist! The good ones clearly are not true socialist! /s
You're pretty fucking stupid my man. Leftism is as broad as anything else, and socialism can take a wide variety of forms and positions. Authoritarianism is the thing that causes issues, and that can be anywhere on the left, right, and center. In the traditional political compass (which isn't worth much, but whatever) there's left/right as liberal/conservative, but there's also up/down as authority/liberty.
Well it happens it's a shitty system.
That's pretty rich coming from a person who probably cant even define socialism, not to mention applying that definition in real life
Projection. Your previous comment pretty much just said it has to be USSR countries, which is absolutely wrong.
Capitalism is a shitty system. So many capitalist countries have horrible living conditions and/or have collapsed. You just don't hear about them because the capitalists want you to support capitalism and hate alternatives.
So many socialist countries have failed because of the intervention of capitalist countries. We can't know what would have happened if they were left alone. If socialism was such a shitty system it wouldn't require intervention everywhere it appears to ensure it fails. It'd be left to fail on it's own. Instead we (the US mostly, with other countries assistance) support coups, replace elected leaders with dictators, assassinate legitimately elected officials, support genocides, undermine labor movements, enact embargos, and all kinds of other things.
Again, if socialism was doomed to failure none of this would be required. There would be no reason to fear it spreading. Instead capitalist countries see it as as an existential threat. Why is that so if it's such a bad system? Could you have been mislead?
You have no idea what are you talking about. I happen to be born in one of those post socialist countries, and had to grow up in the shit left after that failed system.
Do you know how did it fail? After USSR lost it's grip on the eastern Europe, the governments in these countries for the first time organized free, untampered elections, and the socialists system lost by the vote of the people in every single one of them. Everyone hated it, even the governments that were previously tasked by USSR to enforce it.
And you know what happened next? Decades of rebuilding of the broken economy, EU accesion, access to the common EU market, and the greatest wealth creation in the history of these republics.
Your argument is invalid.
Are you joking? Do you know how many lives were ruined or lost before that cursed thing fell apart??? All the poverty all the repression, it's all fucked up, and you want this pathology to be tolerated around the world?
You bought into a toxic cult. Face it.
Yeah man, I didn't defend the USSR. It was pretty shit. It was designed to funnel wealth out of all the other USSR countries into Russia, specifically into the hands of the elite. It was pretty fucked up and exploitative. I don't know what that has to do with the exact same thing happening in capitalist countries though. Socialism wasn't the issue. It was authoritarianism and imperialism.
You're only talking about USSR countries. That is where you're entire breadth of knowledge is coming from seemingly. There's a whole world out there. Just because the USSR fucked over so many people doesn't mean socialism must. Again, capitalist countries fuck over a ton of people too. Is it also evil by requirement?
are we talking about hexbear? The sub that is insufferably boring?
Anticommunists are right-wingers, more news at 11.
That's a nice part of accepting refugees from a state like Cuba. You pretty much get to selectively import the right-wing elements of their population.
Similar effect happens with Venezuelans. The ones who can afford to uproot their lives are also more likely to align ideologically with US politics.
I used to work with a lot of Cubans. My favorites were the old ones. They would tell me stories about living in Cuba under Castro back in the day. One thing that I always found interesting is how they said they were happier. It might just be nostalgia but I've heard from older people from Soviet areas too.
Life was slower and as long as you did your job certain things were guaranteed to you. In a capitalist system you have infinitely more purchasing power but they would make the analogy of addiction. In the US you are addicted to money so you need to work a lot more to pay the bills.
Whereas in Cuba you spend a lot more time idle and just living life, even if you're not able to purchase common items we consider essential. (Some days you go to store and there's no shoes, next day there's no bread, etc)
My least favorite were the 2nd generation ones. Like Marco Rubio. They don't understand the struggle but feel intensely like they do. Very strong opinions with very little nuance. I've met my fair share.
Like the people escaping islamist hell holes only to be pro sharia in Europe. And people escaping violence stricken African countries and then end up in gang Fights against their countrymen in Europe.
These people are just as much part of the problem in their old home country as they are in their new home country. But where probably affluent enough to buy a (very dangerous) trip out of their previous hell and want to make their new home into a nightmare.
This is not all of them btw.. this is a minority of the minority. The problem is, these people fuel the far right as if they are pooring liquid oxygen on the fire.
If trump ends up elected, I wish these people all the luck in the world. They will need it.
Yeah, it seems many didn't have an issue with the evil shit just that they weren't on the top and/or were poor
These people aren't trying to create communism in America, the older generation fled because communism was making society more equal, and they stood to lose, and are the most right-wing mfs you'll ever meet.
This applies a little less to the ones who fled after Reagan offered US citizenship and were mostly criminals who chose America over prison.
And not at all to the ones who fled during the 90s, fleeing famine after the USSR collapsed and the US wanted to make an example out of Cuba.
Democrats are not creating communism in the U.S.
Correct, but Rubber Duck was implying the people fleeing Cuba were communists trying to recreate conditions of Cuba.
But no, they're absolutely not trying to get everyone healthcare and housing and a constitutional amendment securing LGBT+ rights.
WatchMojo's Top 10 gusano moments
It's weird to me how many various Hispanic voters are pro-Trump. A lot of them are Catholic and anti-abortion, and single issue voters are nothing new, but still. I just cannot comprehend such a limited perspective.
It's a combination of things -- Trump's agressive, chauvinistic persona maps well onto Latin concepts of machismo, and there's also a surprising strain of pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you thinking amongst established Hispanic families aimed at the current wave of migrants.
"Fuck you got mine" is the most American thing
Many Chinese Americans are also conservatives, not just second or third generation but also first generation when they were the ones that fled China.
The Democratic candidates are not even leftist.
If you break it down on a policy by policy basis (is this policy leftist?) like dems are certainly not leftist. People conflate being "left of republicans" with being "leftist" even though a lot of their positions are quite centrist.
Citizens and immigrants need to be provided mandatory civics education, especially adults
tfw petty burgeois are mad that communism took their oligopolies
Hmm maybe these things are connected!
It's not like Bautista wasn't a dictator, so the question becomes why didn't they flee the dictator that allowed you to have slaves instead of the one that wanted every Cuban to have a house and be able to read.
Do they also support ending the embargo?
I am terrified to talk to mine about politics. Even though the Suarez's are cool as shit, when it comes to Trump it is like I am talking to a bunch of terrified children.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Reminder.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/02/most-cuban-american-voters-identify-as-republican-in-2020/
The calls are coming from inside the house.
i hope for most people who fled, that they would be able to vote. This is why america exists after all.
on a sidenote, i would be curious to ask maga people about what they think people moving from authoritarian or dictator type governments would think about trump. But then again they have such aggressive cognitive dissonance they'd be confused why they aren't voting for trump.
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Can we get rid of this shitty bot?
Just block it
That’s not good enough. Threads like this show up in the comment count and give the appearance of activity on a post even when there is none.
Well Socialists/communists from lemmy.ml will tell you that you're wrong - you escaped from heaven on earth into capitalist exploitation grinder, and actually Cuba is perfect equal economy, destroyed by evil western sanctions.
I wish that was sarcasm, but it isn't
That doesn't sound right, but I don't know enough about strawmen to dispute it.
No no.. you see that is not "real communism (tm)". So your argument is false.
Real communism can't fail, ergo all failed communist states weren't truly communist. Check mate!
Are there any examples of it working though, or only examples of poverty, famine and crime stricken totalitarian end results?
Thing is, regardless of what anyone says, you'll probably not be moved to consider a state you fundamentally disagree with as "successful". My following two paragraphs are mostly based on data collected and published by western studies, and compiled in a book called "Human Rights in the Soviet Union", by Albert Szymanski, which I highly encourage reading to anyone interested in socialism.
By the 70s, the USSR had eliminated homelessness and unemployment. It guaranteed free healthcare to every citizen, free education up to university level, men retired at 60 and women at 55. It drastically improved the material conditions of hundreds of millions of people, lifting them from feudal agrarian societies like the Russian Empire or the central-asian countries, to industralized societies with welfare state. They progressed the rights of women to the point that there were more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined. There were widely available and affordable canteens and food at the workplace so that women wouldn't have to cook at home if they didn't desire to do so, as well as affordable childcare and kindergartens to prevent women from being tied home by children. Free abortions were available for every woman. In most republics, including Kazakhstan, Latvia, Uzbekistan, Lithuania... there were more publications in the local official language (in which people could study at schools and take university exams in) than in Russian. The vast majority of the population was content with the government, except possibly in Estonia and Georgia due to the strong and long-lasting nationalist movements in those countries.
The USSR went from being a feudal backwater country in Eastern Europe, to extremely rapid industrialization that enabled the defeat of the Nazis, and to eventually become the second world power for the latter half of the 20th century. All of this was achieved without the exploitation of 3rd world countries' resources and labor, the USSR never engaged in colonialism and, since it was mostly a self-sufficient country, it didn't partake in unequal exchange either. In the past of the country, mainly in the Stalin period, there was massive and unjustified repression with terrible consequences for millions of people, but that was a phenomenon that exclusively took place in the paranoia between 1935 and 1945 approximately, afterwards this level of repression was never seen again. We should condemn this for what it was, but does it invalidate all the achievements of the USSR? Should the UK, for example, be dismantled as a state, because all the benefits that it generated for its population were at the expense of the oppression and murder of tens if not hundreds of millions across the British Empire? Would you classify the UK as a failed state as a consequence? Is the USA a failed state because it developed under the premise of the Manifest Destiny doctrine, which implied ans turned into the genocide of practically the entirety of the native population?
Many people in the world saw such a country as the USSR and decided to follow its steps, that's why there were plenty of leftist movements in many developing countries such as Iran (Mossadegh), Congo (Lumumba), Chile (Allende), Cuba... Most of these movements didn't "fail", but were eliminated by elaborate western-country ploys to do so, as is the case of the three former that I mentioned.
My point is, you probably disagree with the point of what I'm saying, but what metrics would you actually use to consider whether a country is a success or a failure?
Well I'd at least state that the countries absorbed into the Soviet union where not free to do so. So stating that the Soviet union did not partake in colonialism is only part of the story. They conquered their neighbors and with all the people and resources of these countries managed a lot of that. Also many countries in the world where aligned with the Soviet union so they where also part of the international market.
To be honest I can't really speak to how these relationships where forged and maintained, but a lot of these USSR aligned countries had ruling classes that where also not the nicest people to put it mildly.
So maybe some aspects where good, there is plenty of bad to be found as well. As this was the world back then.
The western block where by no means holy, but I'd argue better for most of their people overall. How the American system ended up in its current form I don't know but I tend to see a lot of similarities between the wealthy elite of either system abusing the workers in an unsustainable way.
Edit: I had the privilege to discuss old vs new with my east German grandparents in law. And they had a lot of good to say about their communist days. Especially the labor market, equal rights, and access to goods. It took time but everything was available. But when asked if they preferred then or now they said now.. when asked why. The answer got to me. "Because now if someone rings your doorbell unexpectedly you don't have to worry about dissapearing". They told me they knew multiple families that where all arrested and never heard from again.
While what you say is partly true (although the reality is more complicated for many countries such as Ukraine or Belarus or Armenia or most of Central Asia), when you say "the countries" were not free to do so, what do you mean exactly? Because I don't think anyone is really free to belong to a country or to other for the most part. I'm Spanish and I didn't choose to be so, and there are plenty of people in my country who don't feel Spanish but are forced to be so, especially in Basque areas and Catalonia. I've never been asked what nationality I want to belong to, or what country I wish to be born in.
This is especially true for regimes in the 1920s (countries that annexed during the Russian Civil war) and the 1940s (countries that annexed during and after WW2). Polish citizens themselves, or Ukrainian, or Finnish, when in 1917 the first Bolshevik constitution declared the unilateral right of self-determination and secession for all peoples of the former Russian Empire, didn't get to choose democratically whether they wanted to become independent. The local powerful authorities simply declared so, and afaik there was never any referendum about the topic in these countries. In some places this was very short-lasting, as for example in Ukraine when they were immediately invaded by Poland because of nationalist expansionism in the Polish-Ukrainian war. So, can you argue that these peoples of Ukraine were incorporated into the USSR against their will after the expulsion of the Polish forces from Ukraine by the Soviets, any more than they became independent against their will since there was no referendum?
I didn't get to vote the constitution of my country since I was born too late for that. I didn't get to choose the parliamentary form of it, I didn't get to choose to have a fucking king, I didn't get to choose whether I wanted to join the EU and abandon our previous currency. If my decision power is consistently ignored, can you argue that my national identity and my belonging to a state is good just because it's by default? Second-generation Latvians, Uzbeks, or Georgians, didn't get to choose what country they were born in and belonged to, any less than I do currently. In fact, most citizens of the USSR got to vote in 1991 in a referendum whether they wanted to maintain the USSR, and the overwhelming majority of citizens voted affirmatively... which was promptly ignored as the state was dissolved from the top-down, and plunged into the worst humanitarian crisis in Eastern Europe since WW2 with the application of Neoliberal shock therapy.
As for this, I'm not familiar with the history of repression in Eastern Germany. I'd dare to say that your grandparents in law were "lucky", in the sense that they got to have an employment for the most part after the dissolution of the country and the reunification with western Germany (which forced the deindustrialization of Eastern Germany in favour of western one, big part of the reason why there are so many inequality differences between the two afaik). Is the risk of unemployment and misery less serious than the risk of political oppression? We tend to think so, but for many people who don't enjoy the most basic material rights, the answer isn't that simple. I agree that oppression to those levels is something inherently negative, but it's the common response of systems when there are sectors of the population that go against the system itself. In my country, Spain, cases of lawfare manufactured by the state and police apparatus and coordinated with mass media, destroyed the leftist party Podemos which used to be the 3rd biggest force in the parliament after the 2008 crisis. In the USA, the Black Panthers movement was eliminated by the CIA despite committing no real crime.
My point isn't anything other than "let's question the metrics that we use to compare one country to another". To me, as a young person who may never be able to afford a house, who's only seen the welfare state eroded further and further in his lifetime and maybe won't have a public pension like my grandparents and parents enjoy/will enjoy, who's seen the political oppression through lawfare and manufactured consent of progressive politicians, who doesn't have a right to decide whether to eliminate the literal monarchy from his country, and who has seen Catalonian politicians jailed for wanting to make a referendum on the HUMAN RIGHT of self-determination, it's hard for me to see the innumerable advantages of the capitalism that ravages the third world and destroys the climate of the planet I inhabit. Young people don't unionize because they're afraid that the hidden profiles that companies make of them and share with each other thanks to the internet will brand them as undesirable to be employed. If they're unionized, they're liable of getting arrested and getting a sentence to jail as happened to "las seis de la suiza". How the fuck is this more democratic and less oppressive?
Ill leave arguing history. Smarter people than me can do that.
And just say that your last paragraph I agree to. I'm in my 40s and understand the sentiment all too well. I have the luxury that I own a house.. but this was only possible because of the economic crash and subsequent fuckery with the interest rates which opened up a window for me and my wife where we where able to buy at the lowest house prices and with an interest rate equally low. For the rest I see everything you say and agree. I worry for people my age and younger as it seems to be getting worse.
That's actually a wise position
Ok, that's nice. My proposal is to have strong worker movements, and by nature worker movements are very leftist. Wanting to lower working hours, higher pay, higher vacation, higher working conditions... all of those are conditions of the left. I also think that a majority of the population wants extended healthcare and education for free, public pensions, and access to affordable, quality housing. From what I see and what I read, the people pushing for that the strongest are the ones on the leftmost side of the political spectrum. Would you agree with that?
Absolutely. I think the billionaire class has been hoarding all the wealth at the expense of everyone else and that needs to be adressed.
Rutger Bergmans said it best at Davos. All these rich people doing philanthropy with a fraction of their wealth, paying big salaries from their charities to the people that run them, helping people they think are worhy. While systems to reach those most in need are already in place. Pay your taxes! Then we can finance social services like healthcare, education, psychological help, addiction treatment, housing, emergency services, social services, childcare and more.. much more. We could even invest in poorer countries to help them get over the hump that they are stuck behind.. and not in a "white man knows best" way, or let's transfer a large sum of money to the dictator of the day.. actual help (how and what I'll leave to smarter people yet again).
The market can take case of all things people can choose, but stuff everyone needs or you cannot choose should be handled by the government or at the very least be very very well regulated. Also the free market needs to be regulated to make sure they don't end up poisoning us or something.
I fully agree with all you're saying in your second paragraph. My whole point is that, historically, this sort of progress isn't achieved by voting, but by organized worker action through unionizing and strikes.
As far as I know, no, there aren't any - every single example of "working socialism" they give you, are basically welfare states - capitalist countries with high taxation going towards social benefits - like free health care, free education, social security and so on.
i think fundamentally, no. The reason is simple, planned economies simply cannot feasibly work, semi planned economies, maybe? Free market and heavily regulated economies, absolutely will work.
Planning and running something as big as a national economy effectively is an impossible task. Even with modern computers, it's simply impossible, the free market is quite literally the decentralized network of goods and services.
I think the only realistic "variant" of communism is going to be the modern western concept of socialism, it's a little out there, but theoretically, it's not that far off of capitalism either. It essentially just removes the capitalist middleman, although even that is a bit of a bear to deal with, because now you have to deal with decentralized ownership and authority, which is known to be quite a tough problem to solve.
There's also the whole, humans aren't generally a fan of being put into a box and forced to do X problem also, but i feel like that goes without saying.