Comments like this make it painfully obvious that someone has not engaged with the actual history, because guess who agreed with you that lip service is not enough? The communists. Life expectancy, infant mortality, nutrition, medical outcomes, literacy, addiction rates, poverty, all of this shit immediately improves drastically in every time and place communists have ever seized power. Often these improvements have come despite nightmarish wartime conditions, such as during the Chinese Revolution when life expectancy shot up despite being in active combat with Imperial Japan after 20 years of civil war. The people of Cuba have created one of the most advanced medical systems on earth despite sixty years of strangulation. The people of the USSR risked their safety to send weapons to uprisings across the world despite needing every bullet themselves for the near century of fascist invasion and expansion that ultimately took thirty million of their lives.
The idea that communists are secretly only pretending to care about other people is the single biggest piece of capitalist projection, and the one most foundational to holding up other myths about communists. Every abuser in history has said all the same things the white empire drills into our heads: this is just how the world is, everyone else is just like me or worse, so there’s no point in looking for better. But in reality, Cuba has no Gates Foundation. Laos has no Mr Beast. Our economic system is the one set up to reward and incentivize exploiting people you pretend to care about, not theirs. To look around at the very specific, grotesque circumstances created by capitalism and attribute it to some universal axiom of human society is what having an imagination trapped by capitalist “realism” looks like.
This attitude of “well everyone is shit” is one of the last layers of refuge before you get to the truth: that we, westerners raised in a culture of advanced imperialism, are specifically and deeply sick, that we have forcibly exported this sickness across our planet and we desperately need drastic mass change and healing before it kills us all.
Comments like this make it painfully obvious that someone has not engaged with the actual history, because guess who agreed with you that lip service is not enough? The communists. Life expectancy, infant mortality, nutrition, medical outcomes, literacy, addiction rates, poverty, all of this shit immediately improves drastically in every time and place communists have ever seized power. Often these improvements have come despite nightmarish wartime conditions, such as during the Chinese Revolution when life expectancy shot up despite being in active combat with Imperial Japan after 20 years of civil war. The people of Cuba have created one of the most advanced medical systems on earth despite sixty years of strangulation. The people of the USSR risked their safety to send weapons to uprisings across the world despite needing every bullet themselves for the near century of fascist invasion and expansion that ultimately took thirty million of their lives.
The idea that communists are secretly only pretending to care about other people is the single biggest piece of capitalist projection, and the one most foundational to holding up other myths about communists. Every abuser in history has said all the same things the white empire drills into our heads: this is just how the world is, everyone else is just like me or worse, so there’s no point in looking for better. But in reality, Cuba has no Gates Foundation. Laos has no Mr Beast. Our economic system is the one set up to reward and incentivize exploiting people you pretend to care about, not theirs. To look around at the very specific, grotesque circumstances created by capitalism and attribute it to some universal axiom of human society is what having an imagination trapped by capitalist “realism” looks like.
This attitude of “well everyone is shit” is one of the last layers of refuge before you get to the truth: that we, westerners raised in a culture of advanced imperialism, are specifically and deeply sick, that we have forcibly exported this sickness across our planet and we desperately need drastic mass change and healing before it kills us all.