Him calling himself that for political points is extremely different than being one. Lula is not a communist, he hasn't been since his first 2 terms between 2002-2010. He embraced completely the "Third Way" of social-democracy, which means it is completely enveloped by the frame of neoliberalism.
Banks made a killing during 2002-2010, how would a communist be supportive of the finance industry?
It's shocking to me you are Brazilian and don't know this, it's shocking you parrot red-scare tactics as if Lula is about to start a Communist Revolution in Brazil. He isn't, he is not a communist.
I really apreciate the time you're taking to argue with this guy, but I must tell you that it is a lost battle (if you already know this, sorry). Here in Brazil, the red-scare tactics are the far right's bread and butter (like anywere on the world). So, judging by his response pattern so far, there is a high chance that he is a hardcore Bolsonaro supporter. While some can be reasoned with, most are cannot be. Well, at least other readers can see a couterpoint.
Lol, a "we're so high and mighty the other guy's a lost cause" response here on HN. Feels like I'm on Instagram.
Dude, you literally cannot refute the fact that Lula is a communist. His own words say so. His own actions say so. Don't bullshit me about "red-scare tactics" when you have exactly zero arguments. If you don't think these people being communists is a problem, you should educate yourself on the massive damage, misery and loss of life they caused in any country where they achieved power. I'd rather be ruled by literal nazis.
Also I couldn't care less about Bolsonaro. He's irrelevant now, forget about him. I criticized him a lot during his mandate, especially his needlessly inept handling of the pandemic but I do prefer him over literal communists any day. That about sums up my opinion of that guy.
"Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal')[1][2] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement"
> Lula is not a communist, he hasn't been since his first 2 terms between 2002-2010.
He is communist, because his political articulation and the structure assembled to stay in Power, is communist. Is his Doctrine Communism? He never read a book his whole Life, so I guess he has no clue about theory. His thing is money and power. Like any other communist.
Let's see... Relativization of private property, media censorship, taxes on accumulated capital, religious persecution. Wow, literally the same talking points that surfaced in last year's elections.
Yeah, you're seriously mistaken if you think this guy isn't a communist. And that article is from 2010, the media wasn't so friendly to him back then. Now that same media backs him and he also has supreme court judges backing his every move...
Let's just say I'm glad you were able to leave this place. I'm genuinely happy for you. I would have left too but my family refused to come with me and I didn't have the heart to leave them behind.
> Let's see... Relativization of private property, media censorship, taxes on accumulated capital, religious persecution.
This is red-scare rhetoric, not communism.
> Who cares?
Anyone trying to have a discussion/debate about ideologies, like what you are trying to do. Words have meaning, in a discussion this meaning matters. If you don't care, then you don't care for the discussion, you are just soapboxing.
It's not "rhetoric" at all, it's literally what he's doing. His strategy has always been to slowly install socialism small bits at a time so that nobody notices. Therefore it's obvious what his objective is when he starts saying you should have to "mediate" with someone who invades your private property instead of having access to the justice system or the right to use force. Why can't you see?
> Anyone trying to have a discussion/debate about ideologies
It's the 21st century, we don't "debate" communism anymore. I'm not at all interested in the academic difference between these terms. They're history. The whole problem is we got these fools trying to install this cancer in my country in the first place.
Why do you throw the word socialism about as if it is exactly the same as communism? The Nordic nations are socialist democracies and they’re regarded as some of the best run and happiest places on earth, with a business friendly environment that allows for entrepreneurs to take risks because they know there is a social safety net to fall back on if it doesn’t work out.
The left and right can be both right and wrong simultaneously. You’re meant to adapt policies for the contextual situation. In fact, this is the entire point of a democracy, to oscillate between opposing ideologies throughout time as the flaws of one become apparent to such an extent that the incumbent system starts showing weakness, disgruntling the populace to such an extent that they course correct the system by electing the opposing ideology.
> Why do you throw the word socialism about as if it is exactly the same as communism?
Because I don't respect them enough to even make the distinction. I feel bad even saying the words "communist" and "socialist". I really don't want to give any legitimacy to ideas that caused misery, famine, oppression, genocide every time they were put in practice anywhere. I want those ideas to literally fade from people's minds instead of being studied as if they were serious subjects.
I've had the privilege of reading posts written by citizens of formerly communist states here on HN. That's all the evidence I need. It's not pretty.
> The Nordic nations are socialist democracies and they’re regarded as some of the best run and happiest places on earth, with a business friendly environment that allows for entrepreneurs to take risks because they know there is a social safety net to fall back on if it doesn’t work out.
So what you're telling me is there's supposedly socialist nations in Europe right now that allow businesses to accumulate capital. Doesn't make any sense.
> So what you're telling me is there's supposedly socialist nations in Europe right now that allow businesses to accumulate capital. Doesn't make any sense.
Yes. You're welcome to put your HN contrarian hat on but that is the generally agreed upon consensus.
Left unchecked, free market capitalism turns into authoritarian feudalism which is pretty much what is happening around the world in Western nations right now. Left unchecked, socialism turns into communism and all the horrors that entails. Both are bad outcomes. When you are veering toward the extremes, you counter with policies from the opposing ideology. If not, you get a selfish, complacent and corrupt ruling class that ends up sliding into authoritarianism accompanied by "misery, famine, oppression and genocide" regardless of the ideological label you started out with.
It is a frequent occurrence for Conservative governments across the globe to temporarily nationalise companies and/or industries, often times for years, if the private sector have been found to run them into the ground. Case in point: the UK conservatives nationalised several banks in the financial crisis and recently nationalised a substantial amount (almost half) of the UK rail network. The stance you are subscribing to is an extreme one.
I doubt you have ever been to a Nordic country otherwise you would know they are some of the most free market capitalist nations on earth with strong social safety nets which has nothing in common with socialism or communism.
I don't believe you want to be enlightened by me. I suggest you try to live for a while in a country that calls itself a socialist country and then move for a while to a country which calls it self a free market capitalist country with strong social safety net. I can promise you we'll see the difference after doing this.
I lived in the UK from 1997 - 2010 when the Labour Party was in power. Guess what, the world didn't end. People were pretty happy. It was good times.
As I have said in previous comments, I believe that there should be a natural oscillation between socialist policies, which involve tax and nationalisation, and capitalist policies, which involve tax cuts and privatisation. Everything should be context dependent.
I think the UK is a bit of a sham democracy because of FPTP but we have historically had a pretty decent mixture of the capitalist and the socialist. In fact, people are pretty pissed off here right now, precisely because the socialist element (nhs, transport, education) has been eroded in quality so much by the encumbent capitalist element that they are no longer functioning properly. As a result it is highly likely the Labour Party will win the next general election.
If that were to happen, the world will not end and things will carry on as normal, just as it did in 1997. After a few terms pass, the ideological flaws of the Labour Party will manifest in their own problems, the populace will become angry with them and go on to re-elect the Conservative Party again. I will be happy when both of these things happen (the re-election of Labour and the re-election of the Conservative Party after that) because that is the natural way of things and means that the system is course correcting properly.
If you have lived in a more extreme country that does not have proper democratic protections and has had an authoritarian socialist government then I'm sorry you've had to experience that. But there is not much difference between that and the horrors of an authoritarian capitalist society such as the Arabian nations which used slave labour to build its football stadiums.
The problem is not the ideology. The ideology is simply a model that can be applied to a problem to see if it fits. The real problem is twofold. The first part being people who take ideologies to their extremes and refuse to compromise or adapt to context or, possibly even worse, those who don't care an iota about the ideology but will twist it (and anything else) for their own ends, abusing their positions simply for personal gain. The second part of the problem is weak political systems that do not have sufficient checks and balances to contain these zealots and/or self serving individuals.
>>If you have lived in a more extreme country that does not have proper democratic protections and has had an authoritarian socialist government then I'm sorry you've had to experience that.
I have and I kind of see where you coming from now. Because I would never use the word socialist for what you have in the UK, the word I would use is social. You make it sound socialist invented healthcare, transportation and education when all those things existed long before the first socialist was born. And yes ideology does matter a lot. There is a good reason why there wasn't a single successful socialist country in the world and there also a good reason why a lot of ex-socialist countries still have so many problems even after they nominally became capitalist. Value set and the ideology behind it really do matter.
> You make it sound socialist invented healthcare, transportation and education when all those things existed long before the first socialist was born.
The UK NHS was invented by the UK Labour Party (socialists) after WW2. It was the first healthcare system in the world that provided free healthcare services to its citizens on the basis of citizenship rather than fee payment or insurance. So yes, in a way, they did invent the modern health care system. Before it, working class people could not afford to see doctors because everything was private like the mess they have over in America. There is a reason the British people are very, very attached to the NHS.
Roads are another example. If all roads were private they would all have tolls and you would have to pay for every single one you used, including the minor ones from your house to the main road. Instead we pool our taxes and maintain them collectively because everyone can see that doing otherwise would be madness. But in a completely free market capitalist society with no opposing ideology, the landowners would happily charge you for each individual road, just as they happily charge you for parking a car.
And education only used to be available to those whose parents could afford it. Collectively we decided this was a bad idea, so we created a school system where every child would receive an education, paid for out of taxes. In a free market capitalist society, this would not exist, and half the country would be illiterate, having received no education because their parents could not afford it.
You can’t remove the “ist” from the end of “social” and claim it is a different thing. These are socialist policies, that are paid for by collect taxes and redistributing them to those in need. Most of us agree that these are for the greater good and preferable to the free market equivalent. But we can also agree that we don’t need to nationalise the production of cars, or clothes or any number of other things because the free market capitalist ideologies do a good job in those industries.
The problem is not the ideology. The problem is applying the wrong model (ideology) to the wrong problem due to being overly attached to the model as well as bad actors exploiting loopholes in models and systems for their own gain.
I prefer to look at these ideologies as percentages. I don’t know what the numbers would truly be but for the sake of example you could say that 70-80% of scenarios call for capitalist solutions and 20-30% of scenarios call for socialist solutions. In the UK this tracks, as we tend to have more/longer periods of Conservative government than we do Labour. It also tracks with the folk wisdom of sticking with what has been proven to work for the majority of the time rather than trying something new.
> and there also a good reason why a lot of ex-socialist countries still have so many problems even after they nominally became capitalist.
Yes, because they have not developed the checks and balances in their political systems to contain extremists and exploiters so they become corrupted. For example, this is one of the reasons why Ukraine was not allowed to join the EU. According to Wikipedia, it still needs to reform its system in the following areas:
Brussels Requirements
reform of the Constitutional Court
continuation of judicial reform
anti-corruption
anti-money laundering
implementation of the anti-oligarchic law
harmonization of audiovisual legislation
change in legislation on national minorities
For what it’s worth, I do think some of that is a bit hypocritical, especially as until very recently the UK was a member of the EU and London probably launders more dirty money than anywhere else on the planet but that’s another discussion in itself.
Words have meanings and socialism doesn't mean what you think it means and also free market capitalism doesn't mean what you are making it to be. You are trying to assign everything that is a about common good or state's good as socialist, which is absurd and completely ahistorical thing to say.
The roads example is so silly that just let me say the Romans already build roads around Britain and I wouldn't call them socialist.
Socialism is a political philosophy and movement encompassing a wide range of economic and social systems[1] which are characterised by social ownership of the means of production,[2][3][4] as opposed to private ownership.[5][6][4] As a term, it describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems.[7] Social ownership can be public, community, collective, cooperative,[8][9][10] or employee.[11][12] While no single definition encapsulates the many types of socialism,[13] social ownership is the one common element,[6][14] and is considered left-wing.
If the state owns the roads rather than an individual or company, and they are maintained via taxes rather than tolls, then that is a socialist system. It may be part of a wider system that is mainly capitalist (which it is) but that subset of the system follows socialist principles. You can’t get around it just because you don’t like it. You want to label everything black and white, good or bad, but the world doesn’t work that way.
Just follow through with your logic. Were Romans 2000 years ago socialist (Roman state build roads)? Were middle age European kings (they were the state) socialist for building roads? I mean did you read what you copy pasted from wikipedia, it doesn't support what you claim at all.
The copy and pasted definition supports my argument exactly.
> Romans 2000 years ago socialist (Roman state build roads)?
No because Roman roads were built for military purposes and with military funds.
> Were middle age European kings (they were the state) socialist for building roads?
No, because there was no government that represented the people. All the land was owned by the royals and aristocracy.
The roads today are owned by the state, which represents the citizens of the country, not an individual, family or military. The roads are funded by direct allocation of the taxes of citizens and not from any single individual’s bank account or military war spoils.
Banks made a killing during 2002-2010, how would a communist be supportive of the finance industry?
It's shocking to me you are Brazilian and don't know this, it's shocking you parrot red-scare tactics as if Lula is about to start a Communist Revolution in Brazil. He isn't, he is not a communist.
And socialism is not communism.