GarbageShoot

Such a pathetic thing to say. Even if what they were saying was true, why does the show need to be about the election? Isn't it, like, a political comedy show? Aren't there other political issues to talk about? idk, I hate South Park anyway, but it seems like a remarkably stupid thing to say.

They absolutely are, and many people would be excited to answer questions you have (including me, depending on the question). You just need to be careful not to come across as combative, because they'll meet you in kind and it'll be a dogpile.

c/askchapo , depending on the question

You must not merely criticize, but offer a positive alternative. Capitalism has not coopted communism except it the most superficial sense (selling books, merchandise, and so on). It is all those works that bemoan capitalist conditions but offer no solution which are used to enforce capitalist realism.

This is the sort of thing where the only thing you can possibly be getting from it is a sense of moral superiority, since you aren't actually making things better even if you were more persuasive (because you'd still be acting apart from any sort of organized boycott), and you are not even being persuasive.

Consumer ethics is a diversion from systemic critique of the platforms enabling this shit

My point is that convincing people is not enough, because the system at base being plutocratic does not just mean the poorer suffer, but that the levers of power are controlled by the rich, so democratic efforts at revolutionary reform (such as would make the system not plutocratic) are doomed to fail from the outset.

I'm not the person you asked and they surely have a better answer, but I thought I'd throw some things out there:

A lot of what are understandably called "one party states" are not technically one party. The DPRK has like three other parties and I'm pretty sure there are countless parties all over the PRC. It's still reasonable to refer to these countries as one party states because they have some kind of constitutional provision preventing any other party from taking power at the highest levels, but they still use multiple parties as a means of representing diverse interests.

Our comrade VI evidently knows way more about Cuba than I, but something I happen to know is that, when you run for office in Cuba, you are not the candidate of any party, you are effectively independent. I think that they conceptualize what a party is in a very different way. In America, the political parties are literally private entities, with all the legal ramifications that entails, and are effectively companies pushing brands in order to get money from donors via held seats (that's a crude generalization, but I think it works well enough). In the "one party states" I know of, the "one party" is considered to be part of the governing apparatus itself, rather than something that exists outside it seeking to influence it. It's all a conjoined project that way.

I personally think that, assuming there is actual democracy in terms of the government needing to enact the popular will, a one party state is probably a more coherent way of having society united in its various projects, even if the proverbial ship needs to change course now and then for whatever reason. That's just my feeling though, and it's mainly informed by the overwhelming sense one gets if they follow American elections that they are engineered at every level to be anti-democratic.

Thanks for posting the link!

This particular string of replies was you doing a stupendously poor job of explaining anything or accomplishing anything but looking like a snob. It would be better to say nothing than to be an asshole to someone who has done nothing worse than be a slightly frustrating liberal in their own thread on a non-communist instance.

The problem is that capitalists will not tolerate a system that is made to remove them over time, and they will fight you to the death to keep you from passing reforms like that, as seen by Corbyn's campaign being sabotaged from all angles.

I'm not claiming anything I said is facts, just the way I understand it to be/how it had been explained to me quite a while ago. I could absolutely be wrong, if that's the case I'll gladly retract my comment based on new (to me) information. I'm far from qualified to give an authoritative answer on this topic.

I apologize for being coarse, it's a bad habit of mine.

The way I understand it is "the government decides to build a factory because the country needs a factory" vs "the people of a region get together and build a factory because they want one". Well, in either case nobody really owns the factory (compared to capitalism), but rather who's in charge of it, who decides who works on what and how it comes to be.

If the government is democratic, there's very little substantive difference here as-described, because "the government decides X" is an entity with the popular mandate doing it, and if that decision loses it the popular mandate, the people can oppose it. Likewise, if "the people" of a locality decided to build a factory in this hypothetical and a minority opposed it, if the minority cannot sway the majority, they are simply ignored.

The problem comes in when you realize that the goods produced by factories mostly aren't for the use of the local community, they are for a much more expansive group of people. There need to be systems to coordinate production at the full scale of society so that people have some idea of who needs what. It's compounded by the fact that the machines in the factory will themselves probably need to be imported from elsewhere.

Unfortunately the only examples of communism we've seen are authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, and currently North Korea and China (sort of). I don't think we have a true socialist community that's not some form of capitalist hybrid, let alone post-scarcity communism or socialism without massive corruption tainting it.

Depending on your definitions, you left out Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. In any case, I don't think most people are able to maintain the "real communism has never been tried" stance. Eventually, you either come down on the side that "No, they were real communism and communism is therefore evil" or "I was lied to about at least some of these countries and should give them credit". For an anglophone, societal gravity is very much on the side of the first option, but it's possible to reach the second conclusion if you have a strong enough motivation to dig through information. Cuba is probably the route of least resistance.