books similar to state and rev or marx was right by eagleton? need a new read

Trump has seized the means of production, #MAGACommunists won

tl;dr, was having a mental breakdown, got arrested for it after refusing to be taken by the ambulance, got a gnarly scar on my face, and spent 2 months in jail for it

and now I gotta spend almost 2 years in therapy for the charges to get dropped

My father in law grew up in a communist country and he never talks about his childhood because it was so hard

damn.

@OP delete the thread

how many slaves did his family own?

Zero

Half the time I take a piss I think about that scene in The Last Emperor where Pu Yi is in the commie reeducation camp and needs to be told to pee against the side of the bowl at night so he doesn't disturb his cellmates

What country?

Romania

Somebody gotta lock in with some Ceausescu knowledge ITT, I'm not familiar with Romanian history

People will probably clown u because romania but i think it will make for an interesting anecdote and discussion about romania's experience with socialism

Trust me man his life and his parents life were very hard and there was absolutely no economic opportunities. Escaping was very hard. Hearing about his life is nuts.

Idk a lot about who was in charge politically or what the deal is and he is a liberal guy too but communism is not it man no matter how much people want too idealize it

Maybe in theory but never in practice

(Yap Warning: I'm just freestyling in this b****.)

I mean there's no dispute that communism or socialism as a dominant or a force to be reckoned with saw a huge rise and huge fall in the twentieth century and you can look at how each state experimented with it and what their successes were

Like for example in a lot of socialist states and republics take china for example hundreds of millions of people were brought out of poverty, living standards were brought to new places but they also had the general struggle of such quick development and this is why people criticize s*** like the great leap forward and all of that, because really any political programs on such a large scale are vulnerable to human failures just like any other political program in any other political system,

We can look at literacy programs in socialist states and high literacy rates versus more right wing states with falling literacy (like the U.S. having declining public services and literacy and pretty much everything declining as it moves further and further right)

But ultimately socialism and communism's goal (amongst other things, general equality) in my opinion is to bring accessibility to having a much fuller life, much more adequate compensation for the work somebody puts in day in day out as opposed to getting bare minimum and still living under the threat of being evicted and so on

Like think about how in capitalist countries you could work every day of your adult life until retirement for 40-50 years and then the capitalists can still steal from pensions, evict you because they want to, without experiencing consequences, homelessness exists as a vast problem (at least in the US) you don't really place any value on human life other than as something to squeeze profit out of

There's further conversation to have on each states experience with trying their socialist experiments in the 20th century but not every case is the same and you can't really paint it with a broad brush, many people hear communism and just think "state repression" "hivemind" s*** but thats an oversimplification and people don't really weigh it up against the non-communist countries and how they were handling s***. or the sheer force capitalist states laid upon the states self-determining towards socialism. How many assassinations and coups were there of prominent socialist leaders in the 20th century? If socialism doesn't work then why not let it be tried outright and failed? Why wage a full cold war?

Me personally, I'll take the platform of guaranteed housing, healthcare, trade union power and worker power, anti-racism, near 100% literacy, anti-war policy, and so on, instead of all this other bullshit western (and eastern for that matter) states are on any day

This isn't to wash away the failures and the rough edges of what any given states and leaders ended up doing but I think it should be measured up against the capitalist states in an equal manner (what rights were given in either country at any given time)

That being said Romania's not really the shining example for socialism regardless, neoliberalism won out in the 80s and now we're seeing the world deal with that s*** dying out slowly and showing its contradictions even more than ever before

Inb4

Thats my best good faith yap on the subject. I'll get cooked itt if i need to as well

Do you think states that have a lot of wealth (say like the united states for an easy example) should make sure its citizens have access to healthcare, food, shelter, and so on regardless just by way of it being the wealthiest nation on earth or do you think the basic means of survival (food water shelter etc) should be "locked behind a paywall" and so on and people just grind it out and if they miss the mark then they're f***ed

Because when you allow private interests (capital) to dictate whats going on they're going to squeeze as much profit and worth out of a human being without considering them anything but a means to make "number go up"

So inherently when profit is prioritized over human life we're going to run into problems. Profit isn't an organism. u feel me. It's not ur dog or cat or sister or brother. Maybe some sort of social construct that feeds into the power of .1% of people is more important than human wellbeing to you, but i doubt it...

U feel me. I am sure there's plenty of contradictions within society that you can think of off the top of your head right now that are exacerbated by the capitalist mode of production, with the safety net being eroded.

And also forgive me for bringing up the US example if you're not american, it's just the one im most familiar with but I know there are sort of echoes of the same privatization in europe and rightwing ideas as well and it sort of all affects each other

I'm not trying to take away from the actual struggle people went thru under socialist states in the mid 20th century but... there was a lot of s*** going on during that period man. Whether it was decolonization/liberation efforts in Africa or desegregation, people were f***ing struggling.

In 2025 though? I believe capitalism has outlived its usefulness

Not trying to take away from anyones struggle because there were hard times everywhere, S*** was f***ing going down, as it is right now, in different but similar ways.

If my only perspective on communism is what the state ended up like in Romania or something, I probably would be opposed to it as well to some degree

hmmmm

Me too glad we killed that f***er
#FuckCommies