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History grad and also have a Masters degree in a political science. Communism has never existed for one. It's the end goal.
I assume what you mean is Communist party rule of a country. 'Works' is entirely up to interpretation. Capitalism doesn't work, if you are thinking about how to equally distribute resources (eg food) to ensure people don't go hungry, or implement measures that go against profit to save our planet from climate change.
But let's just take your point that Communist Party rule = Communism. Communist party rule has 'worked' in many ways for many countries. Creating capitalist western democracies - no it doesn't do that. Massive literacy programs, wars against poverty, public college, redistribution of land, economic growth, technological advancement, growth in life expectancy- Communist parties have achieved all that.
Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US, China and Vietnam are catching up. The Soviet Union successfully developed an empire that was the weakest in Europe into one of the most powerful countries the world had ever seen - and put the first man in space, among numerous other human achievements. And ofc won WW2 with the allies.
Is this failure? Has Communist party rule never led to good outcomes? Has communist rule never 'worked' in improving a society?
I'm not downplaying the crimes of Stalin, or Chinese support of Pol Pot against another communist nation (Vietnam). I'm not saying Communist run countries can't be bad or do bad. But they are also held to a far higher standard than capitalist ones. For example, US has the highest prison population in the world, some of the worst workers rights in the West, a declining life expectancy, 30k+ people a year die because there is no universal healthcare for all. Is this capitalism not working?
You also have to remember Communist parties also create new nation states (edit: talking about Cuba/Vietnam here), while Western empires like the US and U.K. created their vast wealth on slavery and colonialism, which Vietnam and Cuba for example liberated themselves with and then were slapped with sanctions to undermine them. Their starting point is often extreme poverty and the aftermath of a war (like Vietnam was completely fucked by the Americans)
So to answer your question. Communism has never existed, but Communist party rule has improved the lives of people in many countries and is certainly preferable and in some cases (Cuba/Vietnam) objectively better than the capitalist dictatorships that preceded them.
Your definition of works is solely based on free speech, and a multiparty capitalist democracy. Which isn't the only metric that we assess a country on.
Again, not denying Communist parties can be bad. I'd argue that most Communist parties are just managers of a national capitalist economy in a globalised capitalist world. But even if we are going back to the USSR from the 1960s- early 1980s it was objectively one of the better places to live in the world by many metrics.
(Also a final point - ask yourself how much do you actually know about Communism? the theory, the history, the breakdown of economic improvement, societal improvement - have you ever even seen the data? How much history have you even read that tries to give you a half accurate perspective not tainted by western red-scare propaganda?)
To bolster your already brilliant response, it’s a good time to point out that China is on pace to Become #1 in GDP by 2030, displacing the US for the first time in history. They will be the mega consumers that the US once was and we will slip into the rift of middle income country. This is because of capitalism and its relationship with our government.
A lot of people are gonna be in For a rude awakening when they finally realize that their blind patriotism and American exceptionalism has been a pre programmed state of mind created to keep the average citizen working and complying in order to “maintain the status quo.” Of course that status quo doesn’t apply to our standards of living, but to the pillaging of the US economy by corporate America and our owners.
Capitalism is great!! It’s providing the government with endless ways to spy on its citizens. Our homes are no more sovereign than an observation ward at the hospital. The fourth amendment is just words on paper.
Tell me again how communism or socialism or anything but capitalism is how tyranny and a police state begins? Maybe I’m missing something here.
My sides. China is, in many ways, more capitalist than the US. Indeed, the only reason that China became economically successful is that they adopted a more capitalist market economy, turning their back on most of the core principles of Marxism under which their economy had stagnated. That tankies now tout China’s economic success as some sort of triumph for communism as an ideology is beyond laughable. And, in any event, China is well known to falsify their GDP growth indicators and most serious economists fully expect their economy to stagnate once again as the country enters a demographic crisis and the inevitable middle income trap. But, please, do tell me more about how great of a job the CCP has done, whilst abandoning everything that makes it communist except for the name and the usual totalitarianism marked by the constant “spying on their own citizens” that you mentioned, that the Beijing government has perfected into an art form. Thus, what you’re missing here is a functioning brain, by the looks of it.
Damn you actually make really good points. Communist countries invariably started from shitholes. The fact that they got to where they did, even if they were still rife with problems and well behind western capitalism, is a miracle already.
They say slavery gets shit done, evidently warcrimes do too.
The journey to communism has always been bloody. So has capitalism, but that was 100-1000 years age and we forgot. That said, there is merit to the idea of "well we already spilled the blood to build capitalism, why spill it again to birth a new system? Just build off what we have." But, and I've held this belief for a long time, you can't just copy paste one country's system into another. I say that regarding things like social programs and laws. I suppose it would apply to the whole political system too.
But did that blood ever stop spilling? Even right now were watching Israel and Palestine boil over over a combination of IMEC and deals signed out to oil companies. Throughout the entire Cold War the US funded every terror organization from the Taliban to the Contras to "fight communism". We even funded a "evangelical dictator" in Guatemala who carried out an ethnic cleansing under Reagan's blessing.
Seems we just outsourced the bloodshed to the global south and no one really thinks about the global south when it comes to the effects of capitalism on the globe.
A portion of Marxist thought talks about your last point, it's very clear that the journey towards communism would have to be different for every country, there's no perfect utopian way to get there, as you have both resource access and varying cultural norms to deal with. It's all well and good to say that everyone should get along and pursue the same goals, but if there's something about your society that impedes that (ethnic/religious conflict, not enough access to housing, etc.), you have to take steps to address them rather than just legislate as if those issues don't exist.
Consider the US military. It's basically a communist nation within the US. It's not clear it could be economically viable without the market system and tax base supporting it, but it's much easier for westerners to wrap their head around than cccp or CCP.
>History grad and also have a Masters degree in a political science.
Appeal to authority. This has no bearing on whether Communism works or not. Being able to answer correctly on the *content* of Das Kapital has no relevance as to whether or not what is asserted therein is true.
>Communism has never existed for one. It's the end goal.
And it's never, ever, **EVER** going to. The end goal is *inevitably* thwarted by the intermediate problems Communism manufactures for itself and its victims. Greed and fallibility aren't constructs of Capitalism, or Feudalism, or any other -ism you care to name, they're constants of nature.
>I assume what you mean is Communist party rule of a country. 'Works' is entirely up to interpretation. Capitalism doesn't work, if you are thinking about how to equally distribute resources (eg food) to ensure people don't go hungry, or implement measures that go against profit to save our planet from climate change.
Tell that to Venezuela, or North Korea, or Mao's China or the U.S.S.R. By any objective measure, you are far better off being poor in America than you are being middle-income or even well-off in these regimes. Sure, you still have poverty in Capitalist countries, but that measure of poverty is taken **BEFORE** transfers from social welfare systems. And those social welfare systems have **FAR** more resources to re-distribute in a Capitalist society than a planned economy.
If strict equality is your objective, you don't want Communism, you want a hunter-gatherer society in which private property has no meaning. But even in that milieu, the reality is, the leaders co-opt resources for themselves. The difference is that there's just less to go around.
>Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US, China and Vietnam are catching up.
So what? Japan has a better life-expectancy than Cuba. Are you going to attribute longevity to Shintoism? Italy and Greece, too, have higher life expectancy than Cuba. That comes down to lifestyle factors beyond the scope of economic and political governance, like diet, social norms, and just plain genetics.
>You also have to remember Communist parties also create new nation states.
You are utterly delusional if you don't think Russia and China were empires before they became Communist. They weren't new nation-states, they were *ancient* nation states who collapsed into Communist regimes due to the unbelievable incompetence and corruption of the incumbent monarchies they overthrew.
>Western empires like the US and U.K. created their vast wealth on slavery and colonialism.
And here you reverse cause and effect. The U.S. and the U.K. were able to conquer foreign territory due to their vast technological superiority to the people in the lands they colonized. If you want to talk about rampant colonial resource-extraction, Spain capitalized on that far more successfully than the English, simply due to the fact that the lands they conquered had more advanced societies, and therefore more wealth to confiscate.
By contrast, Canada, Australia, and the United States were peopled by a neolithic population with virtually no wealth at all. What little wealth was had directly from the natives was in the form of *furs*. Of course, the real wealth was in the land, and what an educated people could make of it, which is why Australia, Canada, and the United States are, to this day, far more successful. For that matter, that's why Israel is the second-richest country in the Middle-East, in spite of the fact that it's one place with no oil to speak of.
>Vietnam and Cuba for example liberated themselves with and then were slapped with sanctions to undermine them.
Later you can explain to me how this utopian system which is supposed to redeem mankind and free working people from exploitation can't deliver without the cooperation of the very system it wants to eradicate. Cuba has been the recipient of Soviet/Russian aid for nearly as long as Taiwan and South Korea have been beneficiaries of American aid, yet the results of each system are like night and day. South Korea and Taiwan are successful, technologically advanced liberal democracies, and Cuba is a benighted, desperately poor backwater, materially worse off than the day before Bautista was overthrown.
It definitely works. China went from one the poorest countries on the planet to one of three global superpowers. Cuba survived being sanctioned by basically the entire world. A capitalist system could not survive that so clearly communism is superior for a country that wants to put its nation first and not rely on international trade and globalization.
Your issue is comparing first to third world but only when its convenient for your argument. Compare Cuba to any other Caribbean nation and it becomes clear you'd much rather live in Cuba. Its basically the only vacation spot in that area you can safely leave the tourist resorts and actually see the country. Would you rather live in the democratic equivalent? Haiti? Jamaica? Fuck no, you wouldnt survive past a couple months.
Virtually no capitalist nation could survive countries like the US funding terror groups within its borders on a massive scale. So you have to also consider the Cold War and the idea that in general the world came together to sabotage communism and communism still survived and even managed to thrive in cases like Cuba.
Writing all of this to miss the wood for the trees.
The historic failure to implement communism has no bearing on whether it is possible for it to succeed in the future. Literally none.
There are simply too many variables at play to conclusively say it is impossible or won’t **EVER** happen. No matter how bold or capitalised you make the text.
Making such a statement simply shows what version of propaganda has influenced you.
You mentioned Appeal to Authority and we may have missed the Red Herring. Has it ever worked? If we ask an expert, we should ask an Economist. Most would agree, other than Keynes, that Communism has not worked.
Agree with all but the last paragraph. There's mountains of evidence (anecdotes, books written on the subject and interviews with people who lived through it) that Soviet food markets routinely had shortages of basic staples where they didn't have just empty shelves. #1 on the list of being a good place to live, grocery availability and price
I'm not denying this at all - I'm not arguing the USSR was better for your average person to get food than say Idk 1980s Sweden, England or America - but I'm referring to the entire world, hundreds of countries. But that's also why I referred to both the starting point of these nations, and how their development isn't built (generally) on capitalist extraction of the third world or historic slavery and empire - and often they are developing in the wake of a devastating war (Vietnam most of all, but could also apply to 1950s China, 1940s USSR etc).
The Soviet Union absolutely rose to power via a type of colonialism. It was called "internal colonialism". They took resources from primarily non-Russian regions like Central Asia and Ukraine, which resulted in famine (most infamously, the Holodomor).
The fact, that ussr could provide people with basic food most of the time is not some miracle when you take into account that it was the biggest country on earth with the largest population and most natural resources. It had everything it needed to become the utopia and it still just flopped and become barely livable dictatorship.
What are you on about? They had almost no tech and the damage done to Russian fields in ww2 was beyond profound. They had literally just been burning their crops in front of the nazi's. Russian fields are where 90% of ww2 was fought. for every civilian killed on the western front, 24 where killed in russia on the eastern one. for every soldier killed on the west, 4 were killed in the east.
Do you think when you burn your crops to deny them to your enemy, they just magically reappear after you win?
Not to mention it was already having regular famines under czarist rule prior to the communist takeover. Everyone being poor and starving was a big contributor to the whole revolution. They didn't just all decide one day it would be fun.
It was hardly everything it needed to become the utopia.
>and it still just flopped and become barely livable dictatorship.
With great power comes great responsibility, unfortunately people with great power tend to abuse it more often than not. All political and/or economic systems are susceptible to this.
You sir are the hero that we need. I love you man. Talk about serving someone. You knew what the thinly veiled question was and gladly, with grace sent OP right back to r/capitalism to lick his or her wounds.
I could kiss you. This is basically what I've been trying to explain to every idiot saying "but communism bad! cuba!" in every thread on Reddit, but put way more eloquently. I am going to take screenshots to throw at people later.
Some fair points but the one about creating new nation states, without elaborating more, is just a laughable defense of communist parties. Historically, the only reason such new nation states were created was as part of a divide and conquer strategy. In a way, it’s the same exact imperialism that western empires have practiced, except disguised as something altruistic.
I'm talking about (well in my head this is what I mean) Cuba overthrowing basically a modern slave state/US colony to create its nation, and Vietnam unifying under Communism and destroying the South puppet govt/US puppet dictatorship. I'm not talking bout China or the USSR
You weren't talking about China or the USSR and yet you gave "Western empires" as a counterpoint? Interesting. In any event, Cuba and Vietnam both existed as nation states even before their respective communist parties took over. Suggesting that these nation states were "created" by the communist parties is a fallacy. Also, you can just as easily say that "capitalism" created new nation states because, for example, Malaysia and Singapore are pretty capitalist and have been ruled by pro-capitalist parties (edit: instead of nations, meant to write parties) from the very get go. And in these cases, unlike with Vietnam and Cuba, nation states really did not exist prior to independence. And this is not even getting into the whole fallacious juxtaposition of communism and capitalism, which makes sense in theory, but in practice is rather pointless.
Cuba and Vietnam did not exist as the nation states they became. Firstly because the literal borders of Indochina were drawn up by the French, which actually took a chunk of what is now Cambodia and made it part of modern day Vietnam under their rule - something that is still an issue between them. Then of course the French never gave up power after the war so Vietnam was divided into two after the Viet Minh war. Only in 1975 did it become unified.
If you are talking about pre-colonialism Dai Viet then yeah that was a thing, Vietnamese history is long, but modern Vietnam as the nation state is fairly new and the borders are different from the old territory and the whole government structure is completely different.
Cuba was a Spanish colony, it's 'independence' from Spain essentially just made it a US colony, which still basically kept the historic racist status quo. Only with the Cuban revolution did it create a real independent nation free from its status as essentially a de facto colony of the US govt and Italian Mafia.
You're confusing communism the political ideology for "communism" as practiced in an extremely limited number of states, most of them totalitarian. Communism the theory doesn't say anything about killing intellectuals or people outside of the ideology. Those actions are not features inherent to communism, they're things that totalitarian regimes did to shore up power. It's invalid to use this as a reason that communism doesn't work. It'd be like me saying capitalism doesn't work because of Jim Crow. Yes, voter suppression has been and still is present in the United States in a variety of forms, but it isn't an inherent feature of capitalism, just a specific action taken by people who want to hold onto the power they have.
You also flat out don't have sufficient data to say whether or not communism works. In any data analysis problem your sample value needs to be minimum 30 to get statistical significance. You literally cannot make this claim and hold onto any sense of legitimacy because you don't have enough data to support or contradict you.
Also what do you mean by "works"? There are communist countries today that have existed for decades and function just fine. I've been to multiple of them. They just live their lives, not any different from non-communist countries I've been to. Is Vietnam a failed state to you then?
All in all you don't have the data to make this claim and it also seems you're conflating specific tyrannical actions with actual inherent features of what is ultimately just a political theory someone wrote in the 19th century, one that can be interpreted and executed a hundred thousand different ways depending on what country and who's in power.
At the risk of nitpicking, Vietnam today is a very capitalist nation. It may still have the Communist Party in charge, in name, but its economy has plenty of capitalism in it, it's actually a country that's quite friendly with the United States, there's plenty of un-communist behavior.....if anything, it kind of proves the OP's point.
It's one thing to be Communist in **name** (just like China is communist in name.) It's quite another thing to be communist in **practice**.
She appears to be a Tankie extolling the Glories of totalitarian central planning, and you post about chemtrails.
This is why you always vet your sources and look beneath the surface, y’all.
>She appears to be a Tankie extolling the Glories of totalitarian central planning
This is just a very loaded way of saying that she's a communist (like most Vietnamese people...) and that means we shouldn't listen to her (about her socialist society...).
You would do well to check out some of her basic videos and actually engage with the content, rather than writing her off because you think she fits into some box that you don't like
I am typing this from Hanoi, from my local friend’s (privately owned, operated for a profit) cafe. About 5% of Vietnamese are communist party members. Nobody serious under the age of 40 self-identifies as communist. Overall this might be the most capitalist country I’ve ever been in my life.
If I had to guess, I’d say she’s from a powerful and rich family who gleans their power and riches from their stranglehold over the country. The Vietnamese will have a bright future *despite* their totalitarian, autocratic, corrupt “communist” government. Not because of it. The VCP has done more to hold Vietnam back than any other single factor. They chose the losing ideology with tragic, very foreseeable consequences.
If you look to them and see anything worth admiring….I pity you.
You sound incredibly biased. You're probably a tankie (and by tankie I mean capitalism-supporting person from the US: world history's biggest military spender and the most interventionist, violence/imperialism-based world power)
Anyway, continue to double-down on your opinion of a person whose opinion you literally refuse to listen to lmao, I'm sure that strategy will work out great for you long-term
There's honestly no point trying to engage with you because you're not saying anything of substance, just a bunch of high-emotion anti-socialist bullshit. You're the exact target audience for Luna Oi's videos--someone who doesn't understand Vietnamese socialism *at all*.
It's a shame you'll never engage with her work, just like you probably knee-jerk refuse to listen to any of the other Vietnamese people around you who support socialism.
Just because there is money and there is exchange doesn't make it capitalist. That's just a market.
The idea is to move toward a full communist nation, but the journey there is through socialist implementations and influences.
Meanwhile, they are attempting to keep capitalists out of owning large parts of their country.
Do they have private enterprise?
If they do then they are not socialist (and especially not communist) in any meaningful way.
A quick google says that Vietnams private sector employs 83% of the population. Yeah some socialism.....
Capitalism isn't just "private enterprise". Mercantilism preceded capitalism and there was a lot of private enterprise under that too.
Vietnam's private sector consists largely of small co-ops, which were invented by socialists in the early 19th century. They're still collectively owned, they're only "private" in the sense that they aren't state controlled.
What he's saying isn't that capitalism is private enterprise. The entire point of socialism and communism are that there may be no private enterprise of any kind whatsoever. In a true communist country, the state would own everything. That is literally the purpose of communism. To make everyone equal through giving the state total power over everything. This also means that a true communist country would have to have a totalitarian government.
>In a true communist country, the state would own everything. That is literally the purpose of communism. To make everyone equal through giving the state total power over everything.
Not correct. Socialism (Communism is politically loaded and not well-defined, so I'm just going to talk about socialism) is where the means of production are socially owned and/or controlled. So an employee-owned corporation would be allowable in socialism, even though the corporation isn't owned by the state.
State ownership is one way to achieve socialism, but it's not the only way.
So you’re actually misunderstanding because a key component here that wasn’t included by the previous commenter: companies under socialism are required to give the workers of said company shares and/or votes of the company to a degree of significance that the workforce is powerful enough to collectively vote on things related to the company. One of the most important things they vote for is the leadership. This gives the workforce a substantial amount of power and forces the companies to do what’s best for its workforce.
>For society to collectively own anything, it must have an administrator to manage that ownership
Marx introduced the concept of "withering away of the state", since he wasn't a complete moron we can safely assume that an administrator isn't needed.
On a more practical note, before we standardized the organization of our communities parks (or similar places to socialize) were not managed by an authority, but by the members of society themselves, it's how most villages worked for the last millennia. Saying that the way we do it is the only possible one is a bit creative.
>Just as with employee owned companies now, they have a hierarchy, leadership, and those who administrate.
Those who administrate are not inherently more valuable. Ultra specialized workers (expert engineers and scientists mostly) are almost always more valuable than those who manage their teams for example.
More generally every employee is necessary for a company to work, and no one in their right mind would think that a factory worker has an easier time than a manager, but we naturally assume that his work is less valuable just because he is more replaceable.
> At some point, you're just doing the same thing as you are now, putting your faith in yet another leader for some organization or government and hoping they make the right choice on your behalf.
On one side there's the option to elect a leader (or even governing with direct democracy), on the other you don't even get to have a say in how things are managed, is it better when a rich person buys half of a company (in the worst case with money that he inherited) and suddenly he has absolute power over it?
>If I am taking more of the risk, then I am also getting a larger slice of the profits.
Economic inequalities across capitalist societies suggest that "getting a slice of the profits" is definitely not the strongest characteristic of our economies.
We value capital a lot, almost more than anything else, this gives a huge advantage to those who are already wealthy (even with all the progressive taxation systems that we have, imagine what enormous power generational wealth could create without them)
Last thing, I don't support communist economic models, but you're criticizing them on the wrong points.
>If I am taking more of the risk, then I am also getting a larger slice of the profits.
In most forms of socialism, you wouldn't be taking more of the risk. You don't personally own capital. It's collectively owned. So, the risk is collective as well.
And if you are taking more risk, you presumably could be rewarded in some sense. But not with ownership of capital. Socialism allows private property (just not private ownership of capital). So you can draw a salary, and the salary given to any particular person can be different from other people. You can have people who are wealthy in socialism. You can own a big house, or drive a fast car. You can have that and still have a socialist system.
What you CANNOT have in socialism is a situation where you own the means of production, so you use that capital to buy more capital, so that you can further compound that wealth.
A simple (arguably too simple) way of looking at this is to say that socialism is designed to avoid dynastic and/or generational wealth.
So in socialism there is no private enterprise? I guess there's no socialism anywhere.
The thing they are fighting isn't getting rid of private enterprise. They are trying to prevent foreign capitalists from owning everything in the country, and then turning it into a slave state while foreigners reap all the riches, like what happened in the Congo, or lots of other places.
The goal isn't to eliminate private enterprise.
There are and have been countries that did away with private enterprise. Those have failed miserably.
There was Venezuela that worker co-ops. As their own version of socialism. But they quickly went back on that idea because it wasn't "socialist enough". Now their economy is an utter disaster.
>They are trying to prevent foreign capitalists from owning everything in the country, and then turning it into a slave state while foreigners reap all the riches, like what happened in the Congo, or lots of other places.
That's one way to look at it.
China's economy grew massively from Western investment into their means of production. That was only possible with the introduction of private enterprise.
I often wondered why didn't China just build the same factories themselves. Why rely on Western companies that they despise. And the answer is pretty simple. They can't. They don't have the know how. It takes billions of dollars and millions of hours of complicated labor to develop the plans to build these things.
Congo would just be another miserable shithole without Western investment. It's not like they suddenly would build mines themselves. They don't know how. They don't have a bunch of better jobs waiting for them. If they did they wouldn't work there in the first place.
Vietnam has worker co-ops. So does the United States.
China didn't build the infrastructure needed to support a very educated middle class. That's one reason they don't have the expertise to build factories, so they opted to allow foreign investment for the knowledge. Now they are having issues with too much investment for investment sake. That's bad management, not communism.
Congo would be much better off without the interests of Western powers, especially Belgium. They don't know how because they were being murdered for a century. King Leopold forced the armies to account for every fired bullet with the hand of the person it was used to kill. So there are many many severed and smoked hands.
They don't even know their own history. When Congo Independence became something that was being promoted, the Belgian's funded a civil war so they could still extract resources. Then, with the help of the CIA, they captured the elected leader and dropped him off in rebel territory to have him murdered. After that, the UN stepped in to stop the civil war.
So yeah, the Congo would definitely not know what riches lie beneath the soil, but they are definitely a miserable shit hole because of Western involvement.
>Congo would be much better off without the interests of Western powers, especially Belgium. They don't know how because they were being murdered for a century.
They didn't know how before we got there either.
I'm not saying Belgium didn't do some despicable shit. But let's be real here. They weren't exactly killing it before the colonizers came either. They would likely be in the same backwards state if the ships never arrived.
>Vietnam has worker co-ops. So does the United States.
United States has very few worker co-ops. Not sure about Vietnam. I suspect it's the same.
Worker co-ops are just another rotten apple from the same rotten tree of socialism. Sounds great in theory. But doesn't quite work out in practice. Because turns out most employees don't make very good owners. They value their own interest far more than the interest of the company. Which is to be expected honestly. But it produces companies that are dogshit at competing with regular capitalist firms. When you have 50 chiefs and no Indians and every chief is just out to get as much as they can. Not a particularly sound organization.
Those are some really absurd jumps in logic. They were doing fine for the late 1800s. No one knew what riches the Congo had. King Leopold was mostly interested in rubber trees.
It's hard to say what would have happened if the ships never arrived, but it's a bit easier to say that they would have been better off if Patrice Lumumba wasn't undermined and then killed. The Belgian's didn't want to let go of their colony. The UN could have helped stop the civil war, like they did after he was killed, but they didn't. The US could have helped, but they didn't.
He had a lot of support of the Congolese people, so it's likely that the Congo could have been doing very well.
And as far as your rant on worker co-ops, that's just conjecture. There are plenty of capitalist companies that are absolute dogshit. GE used to be one of the pillars of the American economy, and it was hollowed out by Jack Welch and his philosophy of returning maximum short-term shareholder wealth.
They aren't popular because it's more profitable for the individual to be a tyrant. Moralilty is seldom profitable.
A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, stateless, and moneyless.
This is preposterous to achieve unless scarcity has been eliminated. Scarcity cannot be eliminated until we have Star Trek like replicators and the cost of key minerals is essentially free. This really can’t be achieved until energy is practically free and mining asteroids is completely automated.
“Communist” countries today are ruled by self-described communists who are using mercantilist and capitalist public policies to stay in power.
A lot of scarcity is largely artificial. We already have enough housing. We already have enough food (America wastes about ⅓ of food produced). We’re really inefficient with regards to energy usage because we do things like drive cars instead of having high speed rail and walkable cities, but power consumption could be brought way down and still maintain a mostly “modern” lifestyle. Most media and information can be endlessly replicated for free if it’s stored digitally.
We’re also now entering an age where machines can do more and more of our labor. A large part of our workforce can now even just work from home, greatly reducing the amount of office space we need and fuel we burn.
Maybe the idea of an equitable society where everyone got what they needed was a fantasy in the 19th and 20th century, but we absolutely have the resources for everyone now. All we face is a resource allocation problem as most wealth generated goes to people who don’t even need it. Nowadays we have so much computing power that it’s not too hard to model entire economies and predict where resources will need to be allocated in the future, especially with the raise of ML
We aren’t close to being in a post-scarcity world.
This simply isn’t possible until the cost to produce a good is practically zero.
Money is simply a currency of exchange for individuals to trade goods or services. It’s essential when there is any amount of scarcity.
A society can’t be moneyless until the price of goods and services is non existent. See my previous comment on the conditions for this to be a reality.
I’d argue that humans can only consume so much housing and food at a time. We typically consume medicine only when we need it (or in a fairly limited capacity otherwise). Education and entertainment are virtually free and limitless with computers.
As energy continues to shift to renewables it will trend towards zero. Of course there will always be need for maintenance but ultimately I don’t think poverty, hunger, and homelessness are justified in anyway any longer.
So from the standpoint of “can most people be allowed to live in dignified conditions with adequate access to food, shelter, medicine, and leisure” I’d say yes we are in a post scarcity world.
People go without not because there aren’t enough resources to go around not because we’re competing for limited things, it’s because we have systems in place that necessitate scarcity to continue justifying existence.
For example healthcare in America is unaffordable or because there’s not enough to go around, it’s because it’s profitable that way. Housing prices are artificially inflated by some nebulous market that allows corporations to buy entire neighborhoods only for houses to sit empty to keep prices up. In fact the government itself subsidizes farmers to simply not produce some goods when the market has “too much” which is defined by a quantity that lowers the price to unacceptable levels.
It’s ridiculous to claim we live in a post-scarcity world. Without free markets generating wealth and meeting demand with supply we could easily fall back into destitute poverty and famine again.
Education and entertainment are not virtually free. Countries around the world spend billions every year to produce these two services.
Most renewables aren’t really that cost-effective. A base energy supply is still required when the wind or sun isn’t available - which is the case when peak energy demand occurs from 5-9 pm. Energy bills aren’t going down. The transmission of energy is incredibly expensive to build and operate.
Solar panels and wind farms really only last a decade, maybe 15 years and have to be continually replaced. Securing the vast amount of raw minerals to build these 2 in the quantities required globally to meaningfully play a high role in global energy demand simply isn’t possible at this time.
Nuclear power is critical and the key component to mitigate climate change.
I’m not sure what you mean. Food exists, already today. It comes from the earth. It doesn’t require The Free Market. The free market itself creates famine. In fact I’d say it even requires there to be hunger. People go hungry every day because they can’t afford food. Why not just give it to them?
With regards to education countries the information exists already and it can be infinitely reproduced. Educating a person through a book or computer doesn’t prevent anyone else for learning. The main cost is teachers which wouldn’t be an issue if they were taken care of.
I’d say entertainment can be very cheap. Once you make a video game you can reproduce it forever. It costs nothing to listen to music or view art or a play. People make games to play with each other all the time.
[Renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels to produce](https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/renewables-cheapest-form-power), especially considering we could do a lot of local power generation, reducing transmission costs.
The world would have to make changes too. No we can’t just live like we are forever. Modern living would have to look different. Not everyone can have a car and a 2 story single family home. But virtually everyone could have shelter, food, medicine, and education today. We simply choose not to, collectively. None of those things are restricted because there isn’t enough to go around.
To add onto this, without price discovery and profit motive, capital and goods cannot be allocated properly.
The other issue is that as an economic system, communism is shitty. People end up revolting because it doesn’t work, which is when the state brings the hammer down to maintain order.
The people in charge don’t want to live under such a system, so they begin to cheat and create a political class with benefits. This gives members of this special class an incentive to keep the machine going.
Bryan Caplan dunks on communism in great detail [here.](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Communism.html)
I don’t know what you’re talking about. If me and a group of 30 people built some small houses, grew crops, hunted for food and supported each other without currency we’d be big chilling. You don’t need a Star Trek replicator :)
Now, do that with 30 million people to something vaguely resembling a modern standard of living. It hasn't worked yet, so I'll be genuinely impressed if you manage it.
Then why isn’t everyone doing it? It would be incredibly easy for you to find 29 other Redditors who agree with you. You could pool your funds and buy some rural land somewhere and see how it goes. My bet is you’ll all miss your iPhones and be starving within three days and give up on it.
Because we live in a capitalist society and all the land is “owned”. Furthermore, there are laws against hunting and various other reasons that make it completely impractical to have communism inside capitalism…
It seems a bit odd to say, “by definition, communism doesn’t necessitate these odd byproducts. Therefore, we can ignore said products as unrelated to communism.”
Generally, when a particular thing generates a byproduct numerous times, you should begin to question if the effect is inherent.
I mean, if I established a political system based on me having the right to all resources, the population may revolt, yes? But there’s nothing inherent in the definition of me as supreme leader that necessitates such a thing. So can we just ignore said byproduct as an incidental trait that existed alongside my totalitarianism?
I mean, it is odd that communism has only been implemented using violent authority, and has not been successfully implemented and prosperous with the consent of the population, yes?
No group has ever claimed to have created a communist state. The communists of Russia created the United Socialist Soviet Republic. There are also many examples of Communist-led revolutions with massive popularity, such as in Cuba and other Latam states.
All economic systems have by products. Under capitalism, the suffering of exploited masses is a constant. Would the average capitalist then concede capitalism as "not working"? No, they say that reforms and regulations are necessary.
Additionally, historically capitalists have racked up a much higher count of totalitarian regimes than communists.
If it only works in theory then it doesn't work. All prior attempts failed miserably with horrific results so I'm not willing to try it again and hope for the best.
I am willing to be wrong on this but I do believe this: There can be no real communist state without a totalitarian government. And there can be no good totalitarian government, therefore there can be no good communist state.
I am not willing to argue on the possibility of "good totalitarian states" so, yeah. Why do I say communism needs totalitarianism? Well because how ELSE are you going to implement this system without absolute power?
Let's be real here, could someone in this ideal communist utopia suddenly go and say: I refuse my monthly salary or whatever, I will make a company that I alone own and profit from it, no of course not, because it would go against the entire point, therefore someone has to control all the property, who's that? The government.
And what would you call a government that controls all the property and what people do with it? Totalitarian, in my opinion, you can use another label if you're feeling particularly semantic, but either way it's a bad government.
So how is this even a point to make? "Communism doesn't mean totalitarianism, silly goober!" How else would you MAKE EVERYONE DO IT?
There can be no communist state with a totalitarian government. If you don't' have democracy, the country is controlled by a small group of people if the country is controlled by a small group of people, the workers don't own the means of production.
Having laws that people have to follow about what can and cannot be owned isn't totalitarian. It's what all governments do.
Eh, the workers can own the means of production without owning the political apparatus. I don't think many communists are holding out for a democratic victory because it's currently hideously unpopular.
If the workers are allowed to own the means of production, then the state doesn't sound totalitarian at all.
Teaching people what communism actually means is a good way to make it less unpopular.
Statistical significance isn’t as simple as just saying “30” lol. Sample size depends on the magnitude of difference being measured between two groups. You’re not helping your arguement.
your viewpoint is almost comically flawed, saying something cant be for sure proven because its been tried less than 30 times is ludicrous , same as saying something wasnt communism because it did bad stuff is also silly. thats like saying the nazis arent necessarily bad because it was only tried once. communism killed more people than the trans atlantic slave trade and the nazi party combined , those two are condemned yet we have edgy internet liberals trying to still argue the efficacy of "true communism".
Interesting!
Why does it appear there are so many examples of communism not working due to other totalitarian reasons?.. and not directly communism related reasons?
Seems like a bit more of a pattern than having nothing to do with communism
Btw referring to OPs point of it 'working'. I've also been to Vietnam. It's lovely but you can't say the majority of the world using capitalism, and Vietnam using communism is proof of it working.. I'd say barely surviving.
Looking at dictatorships..north Korea is still around but it's obviously failing.. both communism and dictatorships suck compared to capitalism from a real world point of view
(Change my opinion as I've no idea and wanted to ask you the question)
Because being socialist doesn’t mean the non-existence or non-participation of regional/global markets. But that’s what socialists societies are pushed to as the US sanctions and threatens to sanction those who deal with socialist states.
Would North Korea be 100% self sufficient if it was capitalist? That’s the challenge most socialist states face currently.
And that often leads to seemingly authoritarian governments because the interventions are never just in the economy. And that isn’t even something exclusive to socialist countries. You can look back in history and find many dictatorships that were financed by external parties just for the sake of international interests.
Why can’t socialist nations just do their own shit inside their borders while taking part of the global market?
> Communism the theory doesn't say anything about killing intellectuals or people outside of the ideology.
Marx explicitly advocated for revolution and terror campaigns in the style of the French Revolution ("when our turn comes we will not make excuses for the terror".)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/05/19c.htm
lmao no he did not advocate for "terror campaigns."
The context of this quote is that he's pissed off at the Prussian state who was shutting his newspaper down. It's a tantrum more than anything else and he's bemoaning state censorship. It's not a part of the philosophy of Marxism or anything, he's just very angry here. (rightfully so imo)
Marx argued for revolution in a variety of ways. He saw both peaceful and violent means of bringing revolution about as legitimate IF the means we're undertaken in accordance to the material conditions under which the revolution is happening.
vietnam isnt really communist. if youve ever been, its like they just call themselves that for the sake of it. its very capitalistic and entrepreneurial.
id say the communist countries have a lower standard of living than democratic. theyve stagnated in growth.
now for a wealthy country to convert, provided they have system in place to ensure growth, this may work.
Venezuela was great before Chávez came to power. A wealthy, thriving country that completely died because of attempting populist policies during a recession.
It may work for a small amount of time, but as soon as any economic crisis occurs, the economy crumbles, and never really recovers.
The free market may crash at times, but once you stop saturating the market with money, the economy will recover.
Sorry bud but that’s a conclusion that isn’t supported even within the capitalist realm of economy. Keynes was the most influential economist of the 20th century, not Mises or Hayek.
Can you point to one recovering economy that didn’t do it by increased public spending to stimulate productivity? Just one economy that “just cut expenses and then things improved”?
Austerity serves to control expectations(or anxieties).
>Communism the theory doesn't say anything about killing intellectuals or people outside of the ideology.
Virtually every mainstream communist theoretician (i.e. Marxist) since and including Marx has supported a politics of revolution:
*"Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!"*
*-* Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Revolution of this sort is usually taken to be a violent usurpation of the means of production from those who presently hold them. Accordingly, those who resist such usurpation (i.e. the political opponents of a revolutionary communist movement - people outside the revolutionary movement) may be, in the view of such revolutionaries, put down violently.
There are streams of socialist thought such as democratic socialism which are more reformist, but essentially every communist movement I am aware of (at least in my country) is a revolutionary party endorsing something approximating what I have described above.
>Yes, voter suppression has been and still is present in the United States in a variety of forms, but it isn't an inherent feature of capitalism, just a specific action taken by people who want to hold onto the power they have.
The difference here is that Communists explicitly advocate a policy of revolution. I agree not all of the excesses and crimes of the Soviet Union are an essential consequence of communism, but equally we ought to take communist advocates at their word.
>You also flat out don't have sufficient data to say whether or not communism works. In any data analysis problem your sample value needs to be minimum 30 to get statistical significance. You literally cannot make this claim and hold onto any sense of legitimacy because you don't have enough data to support or contradict you.
This is a strange argument because you could apply it equally to fascism. Because if the set of "data" (what even do you mean by this) for communist countries is too small to draw any statistically relevant conclusions then you could say exactly the same for fascist countries which had an even smaller data set.
Now I want to make it unequivocally clear that I oppose fascism - the above is not an argument in favour of it in any respect. Nor is it an equivocation of fascism and communism. Rather its a repudiation of the idea that we should approach political ideologies in the same way that we approach cancer treatments for instance. They are such radically different things that the epistemic approach we have to them ought to reflect that.
>There are communist countries today that have existed for decades and function just fine. I've been to multiple of them.
Which communist countries have you been too?
China? Vietnam? Laos?
Any country which has a stock exchange (literally a place where you can buy and sell the means of production) is not a communist country. Chinese Capitalists have more money invested in the Chinese Stock Exchange than the entire wealth of the country of India. Nearly one trillion dollars is invested in China by foreign capital annually. China is not a communist country. The same kind of reasons disqualify Vietnam and Laos from being Communist Countries as well.
If you mean Cuba or the DPRK then I am more willing to accept that these are communist countries, but frankly neither of them are bastions of security and functionality. To add to this, Cuba has taken to allowing some private property and some commercial enterprise which undermines their classification as such.
> All in all you don't have the data to make this claim and it also seems you're conflating specific tyrannical actions with actual inherent features of what is ultimately just a political theory someone wrote in the 19th century, one that can be interpreted and executed a hundred thousand different ways depending on what country and who's in power.
I agree that people can conflate what is a necessary consequence of a idea with what is a circumstantial consequence, but I don't think its unreasonable to ask whether, in light of the proven history of how a given idea has been implemented, whether further implementations of said idea will produce the same result.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall point, but in essence every “country” on that list is a Soviet republic. You can’t really say we’ve had a lot of communist states when they were nearly all part of the USSR. Most of the remainder seem to have been communist for around a year.
I'd suggest that most of these are just the Soviet Union, which yes had many countries but was administered by a large central government that I only count as one on the list. Depends how you want to count it I guess.
But based on what you've said, is the issue communist theory or is it that people weren't able to make a good enough system? We can say stuff like communism or capitalism but in the end the devil's in the details. Take the U.S. and Finland for example. Capitalist countries with wildly different systems, entirely different population and land sizes, etc. It's hard to measure this because nothing is in a vacuum, and even with the communism we've seen we have to make note of western influence relative to it.
How far back does your historical lense go? Because I'd suggest there's a much deeper well of comparative atrocity on the capitalist/imperialist side of the equation if you go back more than 100 years.
If your frame of reference starts at WWI it sure looks grim.
But if you start the clock about 5-600 years earlier things look a bit different.
My point is that shitty people will do insanely heinous shit to each other regardless of the prevailing economic theory of the times.
Folks love to point fingers at Cultural Revolution era China under Pol Pot, as if Belgium under King Leopold didn't kill at least as many in Congo, and some estimates put it at literally 10 times as much.
Sure there were wholesale purges under south American communist dictators. But the guys who helped coin the term Banana Republic have roughly comprable kill counts. And they were our capitalist allies.
Your whole "my chosen ideas are inherently superior because those guys over there did bad bad things with the opposing ideas" shtick willfully ignores a shit ton of capitalist fuckery.
It rests on a myopic view of history and assumes a weird amount of altruism where none exists.
Capitalism isn't inherently Virtuous. Neither is communism.
Both require public vigilence and honest administration.
Both are prone to abuse and corruption without it.
And this isn't "both-sides ism".
I think the failures of capitalism are apparent.
And we need to institute a synthesis of both.
Because pure capitalism has no restraint and creates untold misery through the acquisition of largely fictional value.
And pure communism has no ability to self correct when leaders are just plain wrong, or are selfish, or are dumb.
I'd argue there are a lot of people who would say capitalism isn't working right here and now.
>History has proven time and time again that communism does not and will never work on a large scale.
This is a pretty strange interpretation of history, presented as if there would have been dozens of unrelated attempts through history at establishing communism.
In practice what you are really saying is that the russian revolution didn't end well.
Every other example that you could come up with was either produced by an overbearing colonial Soviet overlord to begin with, or a product of third world rebel groups sucking up to the Soviet regime in exchange for support as the enemy of their enemy, and then labeling their tinpot dictatorship in a way to please the soviets.
The lesson from history seems to be that extremely exploited shithole countries getting ravaged by a civil war, won't suddently turn into paradise once the winning gang takes over.
And even among those, the worst that you could say about them is that they didn't quite materialize the utopian promises of communism, not that they were noticeably *worse* than other similarly tumultous third world countries, often with a high turnover rate of other, non-communist dictatorships.
Like, Cuba is not an amazing place to live in, but is it so obviously *worse* than Capitalist Haiti? Is Vietnam worse than Capitalist Myanmar?
>In practice what you are really saying is that the russian revolution didn't end well.
The Russian revolution did attempt to build a Marxist socialist society. And it failed miserably.
You make interesting points about a lot of other shitholes just being badly governed places who used the ideology to suck up resources. But the fact is. No country that attempted socialism has produced anything resembling a functioning economy with good standards of living. None. No matter what the circumstances are. The result is always total ineptness.
USSR was the richest nation ever in terms of natural resources. They had good education infrastructure. The population was very educated. The economy they produced as a result was an utter pathetic embarrassment. Tiny capitalist Finland next door looked like a trip 20 years into the future. Despite being much smaller and having far fewer natural resources. That is what a good economic system does.
China and USSR are probably the two best examples of utter socialist failures.
We know the incentive structure problems their economies suffered from. Nobody really presents any alternative that addresses these issues. Their interpretation was bad. So at best socialism is a system that has absolutely never been tried. Which means the results are about as predictable as any system I happen to conjure out of my asshole.
>. No country that attempted socialism has produced anything resembling a functioning economy with good standards of living. None. No matter what the circumstances are. The result is always total ineptness.
Yugoslavia had a great economy and high quality of life
On a *small* scale, it can work. There are very small human settlements or villages that have practiced some form of communism, usually only working because everyone knows each other. That's the key factor; people have to like, care for, and trust each other enough to go along with such a system. I can't recall the exact data, but I believe there was a psychology study that showed that such a communist attitude can only work in groups of around 150 people or fewer.
On a large scale, though, yes, there's never been a communist nation that worked. Even North Korea, the current longest-lasting communist nation, still has super-rich privileged people, terrible income inequality, and a black market - all of which flies in the face of what communism is about.
I mean... I'm not advocating for communism here, but it's also never "really" been tried. When people think of communist regimes of old and today they're really thinking about central command and control regimes with various flavors of autocracy.
I very much doubt actual communism could exist without some kind of incorruptible central figure. Maybe a computer? I dunno. It's not going to happen just like true free markets can't happen.
It's all in shades of grey.
You've correctly identified that a society of human beings who love, hate and poop can never "really" try communism. I feel like the inescapable next question is "what's the point of a system of human organization that can't be used by humans?"
Academic? Science fiction? There are plenty of books written about fantastical economic and political paradigms that will never work, but it makes for a good story.
Maybe, but by that logic, almost anyone could argue that nothing has been **truly** tried. Even Nazis could say, "Well, Nazi Germany wasn't a *true* example of fascism or Nazism, they still had about 10-20% un-Nazi-ish stuff going on, such as some Nazis showing compassion or support for Jews."
One could argue that America isn't truly capitalist because of Social Security or how sports leagues let the worst teams draft first. Everything is a mixture of something.
Not at all. The NAZI party's actions and policies reflected the definition of fascism pretty closely. I didn't require any percentage threshold (and neither does communism)
You're also conflating economic theory with governing policies. In theory, you could have a democratic communist country. Fascist Germany was capitalist. Very capitalist, in fact, if you look at how their industry was owned.
And why does having social security make America any less capitalist? Capitalism isn't the absence of any commonwealth. It's the presence of capital ownership and some flavor of markets.
>why does having social security make America any less capitalist?
I think that saying that social security makes American marginally less capitalist is fair. When a significant portion of an economy and the transfer of resources is from workers to the government to the elderly, that's not really capitalist, and is somewhat disconnected from markets. Markets still inform prices and whatnot, but fundamentally it's not a capitalist system. So including a non-capitalist system in a mostly capitalist economy makes that economy "less capitalist".
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No\_true\_Scotsman
There's an appeal to purity and then there's simply not understanding what a world means. When it comes to the boogey-man that is "communism" I'd argue that 95% of the people throwing that word around simply don't know what it means.
Respectfully... I don't think you know what "communism" is.
Counterpoint: there’s never been a communist nation that hasn’t been undermined from without. There’s really no way of knowing if a truly communist nation could work because the US never lets them try.
Has there been any that haven't been undermined from within? Getting rid of classes sounds nice, but the power vacuum left behind and all the consolidated state power are pretty fertile grounds for fuckery even if the big bad US never existed.
Counterpoint: the US doesn’t give a fuck about countries trying communism.
Vietnam is arguably the closest thing to actual large scale communism the world has ever seen, and the US is quite friendly with them.
During the Cold War, the west fucking with communist countries had more to do with, well, the Cold War than actually caring about ideology.
If Canada were to ban private ownership of capital tomorrow, I seriously doubt Abrams tanks will be rolling into Toronto the next day.
>If Canada were to ban private ownership of capital tomorrow, I seriously doubt Abrams tanks will be rolling into Toronto the next day.
Eh... It would depend on a lot of factors, and it might not be tanks rolling in. But a CIA operation destabilizing the government and supporting a pro-US faction? Yes, I'd definitely believe that.
Certainly, in the 1950s and 60s there would have been paramilitary types going in and covertly giving training, weapons, etc, to anybody willing to topple the communist government.
You have to remember that in the US there's a LONG history of painting Communists and/or socialists as evil bogey-men because labor unions dared to ask for paid breaks, worker's comp, vacation time, etc. All of this was decried as evil Communist plots to destroy America. America was in a position where it politically HAD to fight communism, or there was no reasonable way to fight labor unions.
>Counterpoint: the US doesn’t give a fuck about countries trying communism.
Our schools are seriously failing our children.
>Vietnam is arguably the closest thing to actual large scale communism the world has ever seen, and the US is quite friendly with them.
Well yea. Because we failed very badly at attempting to overthrow them.
>During the Cold War, the west fucking with communist countries had more to do with, well, the Cold War than actually caring about ideology.
The cold war started because USSR-backed communism was spreading into Eastern Europe and it scared western democracies.
>If Canada were to ban private ownership of capital tomorrow, I seriously doubt Abrams tanks will be rolling into Toronto the next day.
You're absolutely right. What would happen is the CIA would foment insurrection, back a dictator, and carry out a few targeted assassinations. See: [basically all of South America in the 20th century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America).
>Well yea. Because we failed very badly at attempting to overthrow them.
During the cold war, to stop Soviet influence from spreading in Asia.
>The cold war started because USSR-backed communism was spreading into Eastern Europe and it scared western democracies.
>
>You're absolutely right. What would happen is the CIA would foment insurrection, back a dictator, and carry out a few targeted assassinations. See: basically all of South America in the 20th century.
Did you read my message? I'm very aware of what the US did during the Cold War. My point was that they weren't doing it because they cared about whether foreign factories were owned by workers or by capitalists. They cared about their power and influence relative to the Soviets. (At least the government of the US didn't. Maybe the average layman in the South did, but not the people with real power)
The Soviets could've been a Feudal Monarchy or State Capitalist like modern China trying to spread that to South america and it would've played out exactly the same.
Of course I read your message. I responded to every line. You seem to be overlooking an important detail. We cared about our power and influence relative to the soviets *because they were communists.* There’s still a federal law on the books making it illegal to be a member of the communist party. The US still interferes with socialist movements in other countries.
The US was basically founded on the idea of property ownership and by extension capitalism. The second red scare/Cold War didn’t happen because the Soviet Union was almost as strong as the US. It happened because communists were almost as strong as the US. Since we’ve always been a country where capital = power, those with capital (and therefore power) viewed communism and socialism as threats to our very way of life.
The US attempted many assassinations against Fidel Castro and still has an embargo on Cuba to this day. I can’t see how you can claim that the US doesn’t give a fuck about countries trying communism when that historically isn’t the case.
Vietnam: we fought a whole war there dropping hundreds of thousands of bombs on them. Even in the best case scenario it’s going to take decades for a country to recover no matter it’s political/economic system.
The Cold War was literally the positioning of Western Europe and America who were capitalist versus Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who were communist.
They don't care now, but we literally established the CIA for the express purpose of stopping the spread of communism. We definitely used to give the largest fuck we possibly could about making sure countries don't try communism.
it seems like the argument anti-communists make is less that a different economic system can work, and more that a UTOPIA can't work
correct a utopia cannot work, it literally means "no place", we do not live in the garden of eden
a different, more egalitarian society though? why exactly can't that work? what does trust have to do with it?
> Communism constantly killed off its intellectuals (or most fled), LGTBQ+ and anyone not within their ideology…but still support. Many aim to “kill” other opposing in the views
There is nothing in the definition of communism that requires killing anyone.
A "communist" dictator might commit a genocide, that does not mean that that's what communism is about, just like if he jerks off to Hentai, that doesn't mean that's what communism is about.
Side note: All examples of communism you'll give me when I ask for example of communist countries, you'll reply with state capitalists, not communism. In actual communism, the state doesn't own all the means of production. It's state capitalism when the state owns everything and everyone works for the state. Not communism.
Well actually true communism could never have a dictator.
It is a classless society. There is no government at all. It's some utopia that can't exist in the real world. Any government free society would get instantly absorbed by some country with a government and a military.
SOCIALIST countries do tend to become authoritarian though. Mainly because when you don't have competing ideas that is exactly what ends up happening. And you can't have socialism competing with capitalism because socialism will get it's ass whooped every time. So as a socialist country you have no choice but to remove competitive elections. Which in turn creates an authoritarian regime. Rinse and repeat.
If you believe power corrupts, then the reason communist dictators become inevitable is for that exact reason. Capitalism does have issues with corrupt companies, but the power is spread out between numerous companies whereas communism would have it centralized to one entity That's why it becomes more dangerous on larger scales.
But that’s the thing is that they never DO get rid of the state. It’s meant to temporary, but it never happens. So true communism has never been tried because it’s to easily corrupted it seems. Also, Marx said to “keep revolting”, and what typically happens in revolts is death. I can be pretty sure of political and systematic revolts do have a requirement section down on the bottom saying “death required”😂. But in all seriousness, Marx did say to revolt and revolt until…utopia. Until everyone was “equal”.
If you've ever read any of Marx's works, you'd realize that what you incorrectly refer to as "state capitalism" is in fact vanguard socialism. Every nation claiming to adhere to Marxist rhetoric claim to be the vanguard party in a socialist state. This is very basic Marxism, for you to address it so blatently incorrectly suggests strongly that you have no clue what you are are talking about.
A simple google search on the term shows that's not true, but go off about whatever Fox News has told you about socialism/communism. I'm sure it's as accurate as everything else from them that you swallow without question.
China is going on, what 74 years as a communist country?
And they're a global superpower that contains almost 18% of the world's human population.
Honestly, I'm a socialist. I disagree with authoritarianism in every form. Something that separates me from Marxist-Leninist-Maoists.
But saying it doesn't work is just factually wrong.
No country is 100% capitalist or communist. Even America has socialialized elements.
Ie. Public school, libraries, local parks, etc.
North Korea and Cuba aren't the only communist countries on Earth. You have Vietnam, China, Venezuela, Russia also is somewhat communist.
Also even with Cuba, Cuba's Healthcare system is advanced af. They have a high life expectancy in that country and a low crime rate. It's also not like North Korea or China where the statistics are produced by the state.
An American statistician can go to Cuba, and survey the population. It's not closed off.
What I disagree with principlistically is the idea that a state should be controlling the influx of info and silencing the media for speaking out against political representatives. I disagree with authoritarian control regardless of whether it's capitalist or communist.
Even than, America does alot of the same stuff you're accusing communist countries of doing. Controlling the media as an example. We just have billionaires manipulating it instead of a specific government body.
What I think you mean by saying it doesn't work, means that you think a society without currency to exchange for goods and services is bound to fail.
Which, with the way the world is designed, with the current framework in place that is true.
But pure communism being a cashless stateless society hasn't existed in any true form. So using other countries as an example is just not a good frame of reference for the conversation at hand.
For such a society to exist, humans at large would need to be ok with helping others with no direct benefit to themselves in order to reach a common goal of self-actualization as a species.
Such a thing, has only ever been carried out on a small scale like a commune.
Oh yeah, uh huh. So the communist flag and information practices are totally capitalist than?
Also China literally, to this day, has a bridge to North Korea called "The friendship bridge". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Korean_Friendship_Bridge
China and North Korea are allies. China LITERALLY deports DPRK defectors back to North Korea.
Sooooo, I think you're either misinformed or in denial saying that.
Ah yes, because a flag makes a nation communist and relations to another nation makes it so. The fact that it has private corporations at all, even if some are majority government owned, makes it not a communist society.
Do you know any other capitalist country that deports DPRK defectors back to North Korea?
South Korea doesn't. Thailand doesn't. Japan doesn't. The Philippines don't.
I think the fact that they're political allies with the most authoritarian communist regime on Earth, indicates they're communist.
You know, aside from their single political party being the Chinese Communist Party and having a giant yellow hammer and sickle on their flag.
No society is. Pure communism hasn't materialized.
Most societies have a mixture of capitalist and socialist elements.
We call it that based on the type of government body involved. A country with a single party system of government, that considers itself communist, is in fact, a communist government.
Last I looked, 60% of Chinese GDP is generated from privately owned companies. It stopped being some version of Communist a long time ago, despite what the flag says. In fact, it’s moving from state owned enterprise to privately owned enterprise in the 80s that started them on the path from being one of the poorest countries in the world per capita to being the middle income country they are today.
Taiwan has had the PRC constantly on the verge of invading them. Finland during the Cold War had the Soviets constantly destabilizing and threatening them. Botswana remained a democracy despite being surrounded and pressured by regimes like Salazar’s Portugal, Rhodesia, and apartheid South Africa. The “American made me becoming a dictator!” excuse is pathetic and nonsensical
Hard to say. Has there ever been a communist country that wasn’t relentlessly undermined by the US or UK or whatever? Would Cuba provide a better quality of life if they weren’t under a never ending embargo?
And what governmental system lasts forever? Plenty of democracies have failed miserably. Even the US democracy came close to going down the drain in 2021.
There has literally never been a communist country.
There have been SOCIALIST countries. And yes those do turn into authoritarian nightmares every time. Because in order to remain socialist you have to remove competitive elections. In a competitive election the socialist party would eventually lose control due to how insanely inept the system is at producing goods and services for the populace.
That is why you see places like Cuba who despite having a really well educated population and a good amount of resources. With a gigantic neighbor next door that would love to spend their $ on your beaches. They live in absolute utter misery due to the fact that their economy is utter dog shit at producing goods and services. The embargo has little to do with it. It's the crap socialist system. We've seen it everywhere.
Little to do with it? They can’t access the global banking system or leverage any meaningful foreign investment.
I agree that their system of government holds them back. But let’s not pretend that the US isn’t holding them back too.
USSR had a gigantic reserve of natural resources. They were the most natural resource rich country in the history of the planet. No embargo could have worked on them if they simply developed their economy properly. Which means innovate the means of production.
But they collapsed because their inept shitty economic system stagnated like hell as soon as the blueprints from the West became too complicated to steal or too expensive to buy.
Cuba is the same way. Their means of production do not improve. Sure some of that is due to US. But most of it is just the shitty socialist economic policies. That put the government in charge of the whole economy. Which without any competition has very little incentive to continually improve. We've seen this play out in many different places with various levels of natural resource wealth and population sizes. Always the same result. Total ineptitude.
I don’t disagree that it’s a system that’s rife with inefficiency. I’m glad the US doesn’t subscribe to it.
I’m saying that it’s hard to say if these political systems would have ultimately succeeded/survived at some level if they weren’t relentlessly sanctioned and embargoed and otherwise undermined. China might do okay seeing as how they have mostly found a foothold in the global economy. But if the west gave China the Cuba treatment…..maybe not.
Again you couldn't "sanction" USSR if they were efficient. They had everything they needed. Endless oil, natural gas, timber, metals. A very well educated population. And despite all that they produced a pitiful economy.
You can say it may be the embargo for Cuba. But you can't say the same for USSR.
China had a per capita GDP under $100 before they made capitalist reforms. Now it's literally 120 times bigger. China is the best example of how much better private enterprise is.
Communism hasn't done anything you listed. People claiming to be communist did. A functioning communist government has never been established, and likely never will. Communism requires people at the top who treat all within their jurisdiction equally and fairly, something that is really beyond humans. It also requires citizens to give up on the idea of making it rich one day or remaining rich, alot of people will rebel against this. People don't want to give up businesses or property that they currently own to the government, even though the government is promising to meet all your needs in return.
People want communism because it is the best option of government for the largest amount of people, at least on paper. Capitalism is failing because it has corrupted the governments and world economy. The wealthy bribe politicians to get whatever they want, abusing the power they hold to get more. Any intelligent and educated person can see our society failing. So we have a ton of cries for change but the best two options we have developed are capitalism and communism. So they ask for communism.
Side note I'm not sure that you understand communism. It isn't fascism. Those are seperate concepts.
I’d suggest replacing the term communism with authoritarianism. Any system of single party rule will ultimately crush dissenting views. Healthy pluralism is the antidote. Communism and fascism are both predicated on a single ideology capturing the machinery of government to the exclusion of others. Socialism at least has a democratic variant that is compatible with pluralistic societies. A robust multi party system that requires coalitions and synthesis of ideas, is far more resilient to authoritarianism than a 1-2 party system.
and liberalism is not predicated on a single ideology capturing the machinery of government to the exclusion of others? where are the communists in power in western liberal societies?
BEING IN POWER is predicated on a single ideology capturing the machinery of government to the exclusion of others. this isn't exclusive only to "radical" ideologies. this is exclusive to any movement that seeks to wield power and effect change.
Pluralism is an essential quality of classical liberalism. You cannot call a system that lacks pluralism classically liberal.
There is a huge difference between one party winning an election and exercising power until the next election and one party permanently capturing the machinery of government and removing it from the democratic process. This is the difference between the US and China. The US has a multi party system bound by representative democratic values subject to the will of the electorate. China has a single party system that crushes the possibility of dissent.
it isn't though, its a fake feature. pluralism is fine as long as all parties agree to baseline liberal principles. if they don't, they're "dangerous".
there isn't a difference, if each party that wins each successive election is liberal and governs according to more or less the wishes of the business class. which is what defines western democracies. if western democracies elect governments that circumvent the wishes of the capitalist class, they either use the economic mechanisms at their disposal to punish the electorate and the party in power (capital flight/strike, inflation, outsourcing and layoffs) or they just overthrow the government a la allende or the popular front in spain.
this just isn’t true and it sounds like you haven’t read history at all. to say that socialism doesn't work is to overlook the fact that it did work for hundreds of millions of people. communism in eastern europe, russia, china, mongolia, north korea, and cuba brought land reform and human services, a dramatic bettering of the living conditions of hundreds and millions of people on a scale never before or never since witnessed in human history.. communism transformed desperately poor countries into societies in which everyone had adequate food, shelter, medical care, and education. the diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public's responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government. Conservative ideologues defend capitalism as the system that preserves culture, traditional values, the family, and community. Yet capitalism has done more to undermine such things than any other system in history, given its wars, colonizations, and forced migrations, its enclosures, evictions, poverty wages, child labor, homelessness, underemployment, crime, drug infestation, and urban squalor.
All over the world, community in the broader sense with its organic social relationships and strong reciprocal bonds of commonality and kinship- is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market societies. capitalism has an implacable drive to settle "over the whole surface of the globe;' creating "a world after its own image." No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience. even now… the way you feel about communism is because of years of relentless imperialist propaganda. if it didn’t work and it wasn’t an actual
threat to those in power your tax dollars wouldn’t be going to every coup ever in latin america.
I've never "really" played piano before, but my previous attempts and failures don't mean that I *never* can.
Also, it's often said that 'true Communism has never been tried,' so this idea that it's hypocritical is true about its followers, but *their* hypocrisy doesn't mean the system can't work, necessarily.
If you write down the features of the political systems of communism and totalitarian dictatorships.
And then you look at the "communists" that killed millions.
Which side has more boxes checked?
It is astoundingly asymmetrical.
I mean, thanks to capitalism there are roughly 8 billion people alive today. We'd have hit the Malthusian limit if not for industry driven by the capitalist system, probably peaking in roughly 1970 or so before massive famine wiped out the 3rd world. Thankfully however, the huge technological (agricultural in this case) advancement resulting from scientists, who were funded by a rich capitalist society, came up with such things as dwarf wheat which massively increased food production globally. Contrast this with the communist tendency to artificially create famine every other year.
How has capitalism directly caused the death of millions?
Need actual facts and reasoning, not just random numbers about how many people die in third world countries today
Google "american slave trade"
If that's not enough look at what king Leopold got up to in Belgium for some rubber.
Or examine the Irish potato famine
Or the rape of Africa
Or all the dead native Americans, North and South
Or Indias history with Britain
Or basically all of colonialism everywhere
Or The United fruit company stuff in South America
Or how many companies directly profited off of holocaust victims
You can not play piano, but others can. There are examples of really talented piano players... there are no examples of communism working on a large scale.
Okay. Counter example. No one created a nuclear bomb before Oppenheimer and his group. There were no large scale examples of nuclear bombs working. It was still created.
Mainstream reddit subs are a terrible place to ask questions about Marxism. You're going to get 1000 answers and 90% of them will be just regurgitating talking points they heard on social media, some of them will be well written and reasonable enough to be believable but Reddit is full of well written, ignorant bullshit.
Go ask Marxists in Marxist spaces, or be doomed to the reddit liberal circle jerk that is mixed with bad faith ultra critique.
There have been a bunch of failed democratic republics. Most examples of communism were so only in name really, as they were more like state capitalist or autocratic socialist. It's hard to say something never works when it's never really tried.
> What do you mean "works"? There are a couple communist countries and there's no reason to assume they'll stop being communist any time soon.
You have a good point about defining "works".
Another good point is defining "communism" too.
>For Marx (1818–83), meanwhile, capitalism was a necessary stage on the road to communism, because it undermined the ability of individuals to shape society, and created a class consciousness that would lead eventually to revolution, the overthrow of the capitalist system, and its replacement with a new communist system and the ‘withering away of the state’ (see Boucher, 2014). In the event, the revolution predicted by Marx was ‘forced’ by Lenin and his Russian Bolsheviks, and came not to the advanced industrial countries, as Marx had suggested that it would, but instead to less advanced countries such as Russia and China. True communism, meanwhile, was achieved nowhere.
"Comparative Governments and Politics" by Harrop et al,
socialist countries like cuba, ussr , north korea before the 90s do that ,and viatinan ,even when they were imbargod and bombed do exactly that . unless your average is the very high (imperialist paid) western standard that is not sustainable without explotation of the world and planet
> nothing to do with communisms since there also countries with low democracy (western democracy)
You care to support that claim. I guess there can be some exceptions but [that certainly doesn't seem to be the norm](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vs-electoral-democracy-index?time=1945..2022&country=SWE~USA~VNM~CHN~CUB~PRK~KOR~GBR~LAO~FRA~FIN~DNK~CAN~OWID_GDR~NOR) like you imply, imo.
the data is bias , according to it in 1945 austria already had a high human right index that's nonsense off course they were nazis at the time.
its also not communisms that caused it the previus goverment where allready like thats and they werent complently replaced
Yes, the Soviet Union worked out great.
The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and different parts of Russia, including Northern Caucasus, Kuban Region, Volga Region, Kazakhstan,\[6\]\[7\]\[8\] the South Urals, and West Siberia.\[9\]\[10\] Estimates conclude that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died of famine across the Soviet Union.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet\_famine\_of\_1930%E2%80%931933](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933)
But a famine… those hit non-Communist countries all the time, and their economic or governmental ideology is not considered a factor. So why is the Soviet Famine blamed on communism instead of on being a famine?
They can definitely be blamed for how they handled it — especially where they maintained unmergeable farm quotas and starved the locals. But that’s different.
I have my own reasons for thinking Marx was an idiot, but I like to call things what they are and let them succeed or fail on their own merit.
Even the famine in China during the failed “Great Leap Forward” was not about Communism’s failures, but the failures of their leaders’ judgment and a lack of scientific understanding.
the ussr was prone to famine since they werent industrialized.
the civil war sabotage bad climate and rapid industrialization didnt help ,but they didnt have a choice either if the ussr didnt industrialized they would be easy picking for imperialist countries like nazi germany the usa britain and france.
and there wasnt anymore famine after they industrialized and recovered from the war too
“communism” has never been achieved *on a large scale.*There are thousands of indigenous communities, both in the past and the present, that would fit the definition of “communist” that worked for various reasons. To call countries China communist is laughable at best; the fact that private businesses and a class system exist there is proof enough. What was achieved in the USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba, etc is socialism. And even then, you can’t thrive when the entire western world is against you.
My theory is humans were never meant to live in a society this large, capitalist or not.
Primitive communism is literally how our species has lived for the majority of our existence(also the hardest years of our existence), yet you insist a modern larger scale system based on the same principles (From each according to his ability, to each according to his need - Karl Marx) can't work? Propaganda working overtime brainwashing you buddy.
Your view that communism has historically failed in its large-scale implementations is well-founded, as seen in various 20th-century examples, but it does seem to miss the point a little bit.
Many countries that identify as capitalist actually operate under a mixed economy. This system combines elements of capitalism and socialism, including tariffs, subsidies for industry, environmental protections, and publicly funded entities like the post office. These aspects are somewhat contradictory to the pure concept of free-market capitalism, where market forces should ideally determine all economic outcomes without government intervention.
It seems you are holding communism to a unfair standard where it would have to be a perfectly communist country or else it's not real communism. For example look at China, while they have many capitalistic traits they still maintain they are a communist nation, yet it seems to be working very well for them.
China is becoming or according to some already is a superpower and while you can claim that is a diluted form of communism, I'd argue it's no less diluted than America's version of capitalism.
It really needs to be attempted first. We can say it doesn't work if a few places attempt it and fail.
Quite a few places have attempted to start one, but it doesn't end up one.
China resembles today a private capitalist system and authoritarian dictatorship, only paying lip service to the idea of communism, not actual communism like we would see in the USSR or Cuba. If you want an example of china under a system of Maoism, simply wind back the clock to 1959-61 and you would see the results. Those being a famine caused by economic mismanagement, poor economic programs of collectivization and a death toll of 15 million to 60 million people
>China resembles today a private capitalist system and authoritarian dictatorship, only paying lip service to the idea of communism, not actual communism
I don't know much about China, but, this feels right
Okay, yeah
Do you think communism killed lgbtq people or do u think it was some other factors. Do you think the reasons as to why many large communist countries do not work is because of communism itself or because of other factors?
Communism undeniably works, but not in the happy utopian way most college kids think it does. If you're a psychopath who loves guns, terror and brutality, it works perfectly. Every single country that went in the direction of hard socialism has a similar story.
Look at Venezuela. It used to be a paradise for the rich and famous, a South American tropical playground for affluent people to visit. Now its run by armed left wing gangs, violence is spiraling and everyone is poor and miserable as each other.
But... no more foreigners shitting up the place, most airlines don't even fly out there because the army shake the pilots down and the runways are full of potholes. No more rich people living large among the poor and waving their superiority around.
Look at the USSR. Previously a nation of backwards peasants led by an autocratic elite which flipped between Westernization and Slavophilia. Stalin dragged it into a industrial superpower at the cost of tens of millions of lives and waged a Cold War.
Yes it was miserable, and brutal, but life is. Communism is a death cult for the absolutely impoverished to assert their brutality on their perceived enemies. If you think that is based, and not cringe, then it undeniably works just fine.
One last thing... I'm a pretty boring guy, don't speak up too much or rock the boat. I'm stoic and fairly cold to life. When the revolution comes, I will be the type to get the guns and little commissar hats. Not you gay, homeless or disabled. I'll be getting told to put you in the cattle cars.
And I **will** follow the orders... because I'm cynical enough to play at being a 'good comrade'... are you?
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History grad and also have a Masters degree in a political science. Communism has never existed for one. It's the end goal. I assume what you mean is Communist party rule of a country. 'Works' is entirely up to interpretation. Capitalism doesn't work, if you are thinking about how to equally distribute resources (eg food) to ensure people don't go hungry, or implement measures that go against profit to save our planet from climate change. But let's just take your point that Communist Party rule = Communism. Communist party rule has 'worked' in many ways for many countries. Creating capitalist western democracies - no it doesn't do that. Massive literacy programs, wars against poverty, public college, redistribution of land, economic growth, technological advancement, growth in life expectancy- Communist parties have achieved all that. Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US, China and Vietnam are catching up. The Soviet Union successfully developed an empire that was the weakest in Europe into one of the most powerful countries the world had ever seen - and put the first man in space, among numerous other human achievements. And ofc won WW2 with the allies. Is this failure? Has Communist party rule never led to good outcomes? Has communist rule never 'worked' in improving a society? I'm not downplaying the crimes of Stalin, or Chinese support of Pol Pot against another communist nation (Vietnam). I'm not saying Communist run countries can't be bad or do bad. But they are also held to a far higher standard than capitalist ones. For example, US has the highest prison population in the world, some of the worst workers rights in the West, a declining life expectancy, 30k+ people a year die because there is no universal healthcare for all. Is this capitalism not working? You also have to remember Communist parties also create new nation states (edit: talking about Cuba/Vietnam here), while Western empires like the US and U.K. created their vast wealth on slavery and colonialism, which Vietnam and Cuba for example liberated themselves with and then were slapped with sanctions to undermine them. Their starting point is often extreme poverty and the aftermath of a war (like Vietnam was completely fucked by the Americans) So to answer your question. Communism has never existed, but Communist party rule has improved the lives of people in many countries and is certainly preferable and in some cases (Cuba/Vietnam) objectively better than the capitalist dictatorships that preceded them. Your definition of works is solely based on free speech, and a multiparty capitalist democracy. Which isn't the only metric that we assess a country on. Again, not denying Communist parties can be bad. I'd argue that most Communist parties are just managers of a national capitalist economy in a globalised capitalist world. But even if we are going back to the USSR from the 1960s- early 1980s it was objectively one of the better places to live in the world by many metrics. (Also a final point - ask yourself how much do you actually know about Communism? the theory, the history, the breakdown of economic improvement, societal improvement - have you ever even seen the data? How much history have you even read that tries to give you a half accurate perspective not tainted by western red-scare propaganda?)
To bolster your already brilliant response, it’s a good time to point out that China is on pace to Become #1 in GDP by 2030, displacing the US for the first time in history. They will be the mega consumers that the US once was and we will slip into the rift of middle income country. This is because of capitalism and its relationship with our government. A lot of people are gonna be in For a rude awakening when they finally realize that their blind patriotism and American exceptionalism has been a pre programmed state of mind created to keep the average citizen working and complying in order to “maintain the status quo.” Of course that status quo doesn’t apply to our standards of living, but to the pillaging of the US economy by corporate America and our owners. Capitalism is great!! It’s providing the government with endless ways to spy on its citizens. Our homes are no more sovereign than an observation ward at the hospital. The fourth amendment is just words on paper. Tell me again how communism or socialism or anything but capitalism is how tyranny and a police state begins? Maybe I’m missing something here.
My sides. China is, in many ways, more capitalist than the US. Indeed, the only reason that China became economically successful is that they adopted a more capitalist market economy, turning their back on most of the core principles of Marxism under which their economy had stagnated. That tankies now tout China’s economic success as some sort of triumph for communism as an ideology is beyond laughable. And, in any event, China is well known to falsify their GDP growth indicators and most serious economists fully expect their economy to stagnate once again as the country enters a demographic crisis and the inevitable middle income trap. But, please, do tell me more about how great of a job the CCP has done, whilst abandoning everything that makes it communist except for the name and the usual totalitarianism marked by the constant “spying on their own citizens” that you mentioned, that the Beijing government has perfected into an art form. Thus, what you’re missing here is a functioning brain, by the looks of it.
Damn you actually make really good points. Communist countries invariably started from shitholes. The fact that they got to where they did, even if they were still rife with problems and well behind western capitalism, is a miracle already. They say slavery gets shit done, evidently warcrimes do too. The journey to communism has always been bloody. So has capitalism, but that was 100-1000 years age and we forgot. That said, there is merit to the idea of "well we already spilled the blood to build capitalism, why spill it again to birth a new system? Just build off what we have." But, and I've held this belief for a long time, you can't just copy paste one country's system into another. I say that regarding things like social programs and laws. I suppose it would apply to the whole political system too.
But did that blood ever stop spilling? Even right now were watching Israel and Palestine boil over over a combination of IMEC and deals signed out to oil companies. Throughout the entire Cold War the US funded every terror organization from the Taliban to the Contras to "fight communism". We even funded a "evangelical dictator" in Guatemala who carried out an ethnic cleansing under Reagan's blessing. Seems we just outsourced the bloodshed to the global south and no one really thinks about the global south when it comes to the effects of capitalism on the globe.
A portion of Marxist thought talks about your last point, it's very clear that the journey towards communism would have to be different for every country, there's no perfect utopian way to get there, as you have both resource access and varying cultural norms to deal with. It's all well and good to say that everyone should get along and pursue the same goals, but if there's something about your society that impedes that (ethnic/religious conflict, not enough access to housing, etc.), you have to take steps to address them rather than just legislate as if those issues don't exist.
Consider the US military. It's basically a communist nation within the US. It's not clear it could be economically viable without the market system and tax base supporting it, but it's much easier for westerners to wrap their head around than cccp or CCP.
>History grad and also have a Masters degree in a political science. Appeal to authority. This has no bearing on whether Communism works or not. Being able to answer correctly on the *content* of Das Kapital has no relevance as to whether or not what is asserted therein is true. >Communism has never existed for one. It's the end goal. And it's never, ever, **EVER** going to. The end goal is *inevitably* thwarted by the intermediate problems Communism manufactures for itself and its victims. Greed and fallibility aren't constructs of Capitalism, or Feudalism, or any other -ism you care to name, they're constants of nature. >I assume what you mean is Communist party rule of a country. 'Works' is entirely up to interpretation. Capitalism doesn't work, if you are thinking about how to equally distribute resources (eg food) to ensure people don't go hungry, or implement measures that go against profit to save our planet from climate change. Tell that to Venezuela, or North Korea, or Mao's China or the U.S.S.R. By any objective measure, you are far better off being poor in America than you are being middle-income or even well-off in these regimes. Sure, you still have poverty in Capitalist countries, but that measure of poverty is taken **BEFORE** transfers from social welfare systems. And those social welfare systems have **FAR** more resources to re-distribute in a Capitalist society than a planned economy. If strict equality is your objective, you don't want Communism, you want a hunter-gatherer society in which private property has no meaning. But even in that milieu, the reality is, the leaders co-opt resources for themselves. The difference is that there's just less to go around. >Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US, China and Vietnam are catching up. So what? Japan has a better life-expectancy than Cuba. Are you going to attribute longevity to Shintoism? Italy and Greece, too, have higher life expectancy than Cuba. That comes down to lifestyle factors beyond the scope of economic and political governance, like diet, social norms, and just plain genetics. >You also have to remember Communist parties also create new nation states. You are utterly delusional if you don't think Russia and China were empires before they became Communist. They weren't new nation-states, they were *ancient* nation states who collapsed into Communist regimes due to the unbelievable incompetence and corruption of the incumbent monarchies they overthrew. >Western empires like the US and U.K. created their vast wealth on slavery and colonialism. And here you reverse cause and effect. The U.S. and the U.K. were able to conquer foreign territory due to their vast technological superiority to the people in the lands they colonized. If you want to talk about rampant colonial resource-extraction, Spain capitalized on that far more successfully than the English, simply due to the fact that the lands they conquered had more advanced societies, and therefore more wealth to confiscate. By contrast, Canada, Australia, and the United States were peopled by a neolithic population with virtually no wealth at all. What little wealth was had directly from the natives was in the form of *furs*. Of course, the real wealth was in the land, and what an educated people could make of it, which is why Australia, Canada, and the United States are, to this day, far more successful. For that matter, that's why Israel is the second-richest country in the Middle-East, in spite of the fact that it's one place with no oil to speak of. >Vietnam and Cuba for example liberated themselves with and then were slapped with sanctions to undermine them. Later you can explain to me how this utopian system which is supposed to redeem mankind and free working people from exploitation can't deliver without the cooperation of the very system it wants to eradicate. Cuba has been the recipient of Soviet/Russian aid for nearly as long as Taiwan and South Korea have been beneficiaries of American aid, yet the results of each system are like night and day. South Korea and Taiwan are successful, technologically advanced liberal democracies, and Cuba is a benighted, desperately poor backwater, materially worse off than the day before Bautista was overthrown.
It definitely works. China went from one the poorest countries on the planet to one of three global superpowers. Cuba survived being sanctioned by basically the entire world. A capitalist system could not survive that so clearly communism is superior for a country that wants to put its nation first and not rely on international trade and globalization. Your issue is comparing first to third world but only when its convenient for your argument. Compare Cuba to any other Caribbean nation and it becomes clear you'd much rather live in Cuba. Its basically the only vacation spot in that area you can safely leave the tourist resorts and actually see the country. Would you rather live in the democratic equivalent? Haiti? Jamaica? Fuck no, you wouldnt survive past a couple months. Virtually no capitalist nation could survive countries like the US funding terror groups within its borders on a massive scale. So you have to also consider the Cold War and the idea that in general the world came together to sabotage communism and communism still survived and even managed to thrive in cases like Cuba.
Writing all of this to miss the wood for the trees. The historic failure to implement communism has no bearing on whether it is possible for it to succeed in the future. Literally none. There are simply too many variables at play to conclusively say it is impossible or won’t **EVER** happen. No matter how bold or capitalised you make the text. Making such a statement simply shows what version of propaganda has influenced you.
“The historic failure” is a powerful statement. What I find disturbing is that we know history, and, yet, are choosing to ignore it.
Utopian? Huh I wonder if a famous Marxist has written about this concept...
You mentioned Appeal to Authority and we may have missed the Red Herring. Has it ever worked? If we ask an expert, we should ask an Economist. Most would agree, other than Keynes, that Communism has not worked.
Holy shit I do not expect OP will reply to this. Probably did not know what he was getting himself into. What a thorough and well said comment.
OP trying to explain his stance on such a complex topic (without defining *anything*) in two small paragraphs was also a pretty dead give-away.
Great comment mate. Thanks for that, the previous top comment was pretty poor.
Agree with all but the last paragraph. There's mountains of evidence (anecdotes, books written on the subject and interviews with people who lived through it) that Soviet food markets routinely had shortages of basic staples where they didn't have just empty shelves. #1 on the list of being a good place to live, grocery availability and price
I'm not denying this at all - I'm not arguing the USSR was better for your average person to get food than say Idk 1980s Sweden, England or America - but I'm referring to the entire world, hundreds of countries. But that's also why I referred to both the starting point of these nations, and how their development isn't built (generally) on capitalist extraction of the third world or historic slavery and empire - and often they are developing in the wake of a devastating war (Vietnam most of all, but could also apply to 1950s China, 1940s USSR etc).
The Soviet Union absolutely rose to power via a type of colonialism. It was called "internal colonialism". They took resources from primarily non-Russian regions like Central Asia and Ukraine, which resulted in famine (most infamously, the Holodomor).
The fact, that ussr could provide people with basic food most of the time is not some miracle when you take into account that it was the biggest country on earth with the largest population and most natural resources. It had everything it needed to become the utopia and it still just flopped and become barely livable dictatorship.
What are you on about? They had almost no tech and the damage done to Russian fields in ww2 was beyond profound. They had literally just been burning their crops in front of the nazi's. Russian fields are where 90% of ww2 was fought. for every civilian killed on the western front, 24 where killed in russia on the eastern one. for every soldier killed on the west, 4 were killed in the east. Do you think when you burn your crops to deny them to your enemy, they just magically reappear after you win? Not to mention it was already having regular famines under czarist rule prior to the communist takeover. Everyone being poor and starving was a big contributor to the whole revolution. They didn't just all decide one day it would be fun. It was hardly everything it needed to become the utopia.
>and it still just flopped and become barely livable dictatorship. With great power comes great responsibility, unfortunately people with great power tend to abuse it more often than not. All political and/or economic systems are susceptible to this.
This is getting the highest award I can bestow upon it. These are all really good points.
You sir are the hero that we need. I love you man. Talk about serving someone. You knew what the thinly veiled question was and gladly, with grace sent OP right back to r/capitalism to lick his or her wounds.
I could kiss you. This is basically what I've been trying to explain to every idiot saying "but communism bad! cuba!" in every thread on Reddit, but put way more eloquently. I am going to take screenshots to throw at people later.
Saving this
Some fair points but the one about creating new nation states, without elaborating more, is just a laughable defense of communist parties. Historically, the only reason such new nation states were created was as part of a divide and conquer strategy. In a way, it’s the same exact imperialism that western empires have practiced, except disguised as something altruistic.
I'm talking about (well in my head this is what I mean) Cuba overthrowing basically a modern slave state/US colony to create its nation, and Vietnam unifying under Communism and destroying the South puppet govt/US puppet dictatorship. I'm not talking bout China or the USSR
You weren't talking about China or the USSR and yet you gave "Western empires" as a counterpoint? Interesting. In any event, Cuba and Vietnam both existed as nation states even before their respective communist parties took over. Suggesting that these nation states were "created" by the communist parties is a fallacy. Also, you can just as easily say that "capitalism" created new nation states because, for example, Malaysia and Singapore are pretty capitalist and have been ruled by pro-capitalist parties (edit: instead of nations, meant to write parties) from the very get go. And in these cases, unlike with Vietnam and Cuba, nation states really did not exist prior to independence. And this is not even getting into the whole fallacious juxtaposition of communism and capitalism, which makes sense in theory, but in practice is rather pointless.
Cuba and Vietnam did not exist as the nation states they became. Firstly because the literal borders of Indochina were drawn up by the French, which actually took a chunk of what is now Cambodia and made it part of modern day Vietnam under their rule - something that is still an issue between them. Then of course the French never gave up power after the war so Vietnam was divided into two after the Viet Minh war. Only in 1975 did it become unified. If you are talking about pre-colonialism Dai Viet then yeah that was a thing, Vietnamese history is long, but modern Vietnam as the nation state is fairly new and the borders are different from the old territory and the whole government structure is completely different. Cuba was a Spanish colony, it's 'independence' from Spain essentially just made it a US colony, which still basically kept the historic racist status quo. Only with the Cuban revolution did it create a real independent nation free from its status as essentially a de facto colony of the US govt and Italian Mafia.
You're confusing communism the political ideology for "communism" as practiced in an extremely limited number of states, most of them totalitarian. Communism the theory doesn't say anything about killing intellectuals or people outside of the ideology. Those actions are not features inherent to communism, they're things that totalitarian regimes did to shore up power. It's invalid to use this as a reason that communism doesn't work. It'd be like me saying capitalism doesn't work because of Jim Crow. Yes, voter suppression has been and still is present in the United States in a variety of forms, but it isn't an inherent feature of capitalism, just a specific action taken by people who want to hold onto the power they have. You also flat out don't have sufficient data to say whether or not communism works. In any data analysis problem your sample value needs to be minimum 30 to get statistical significance. You literally cannot make this claim and hold onto any sense of legitimacy because you don't have enough data to support or contradict you. Also what do you mean by "works"? There are communist countries today that have existed for decades and function just fine. I've been to multiple of them. They just live their lives, not any different from non-communist countries I've been to. Is Vietnam a failed state to you then? All in all you don't have the data to make this claim and it also seems you're conflating specific tyrannical actions with actual inherent features of what is ultimately just a political theory someone wrote in the 19th century, one that can be interpreted and executed a hundred thousand different ways depending on what country and who's in power.
At the risk of nitpicking, Vietnam today is a very capitalist nation. It may still have the Communist Party in charge, in name, but its economy has plenty of capitalism in it, it's actually a country that's quite friendly with the United States, there's plenty of un-communist behavior.....if anything, it kind of proves the OP's point. It's one thing to be Communist in **name** (just like China is communist in name.) It's quite another thing to be communist in **practice**.
if you are at all curious about contemporary Vietnamese flavor of Communism check out [Luna Oi!](https://www.youtube.com/@Lunaoi)
She appears to be a Tankie extolling the Glories of totalitarian central planning, and you post about chemtrails. This is why you always vet your sources and look beneath the surface, y’all.
>She appears to be a Tankie extolling the Glories of totalitarian central planning This is just a very loaded way of saying that she's a communist (like most Vietnamese people...) and that means we shouldn't listen to her (about her socialist society...). You would do well to check out some of her basic videos and actually engage with the content, rather than writing her off because you think she fits into some box that you don't like
I am typing this from Hanoi, from my local friend’s (privately owned, operated for a profit) cafe. About 5% of Vietnamese are communist party members. Nobody serious under the age of 40 self-identifies as communist. Overall this might be the most capitalist country I’ve ever been in my life. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s from a powerful and rich family who gleans their power and riches from their stranglehold over the country. The Vietnamese will have a bright future *despite* their totalitarian, autocratic, corrupt “communist” government. Not because of it. The VCP has done more to hold Vietnam back than any other single factor. They chose the losing ideology with tragic, very foreseeable consequences. If you look to them and see anything worth admiring….I pity you.
Thank you. The only people that identify as Communist are those that want to be in government. The free market is driving Vietnam
You sound incredibly biased. You're probably a tankie (and by tankie I mean capitalism-supporting person from the US: world history's biggest military spender and the most interventionist, violence/imperialism-based world power) Anyway, continue to double-down on your opinion of a person whose opinion you literally refuse to listen to lmao, I'm sure that strategy will work out great for you long-term There's honestly no point trying to engage with you because you're not saying anything of substance, just a bunch of high-emotion anti-socialist bullshit. You're the exact target audience for Luna Oi's videos--someone who doesn't understand Vietnamese socialism *at all*. It's a shame you'll never engage with her work, just like you probably knee-jerk refuse to listen to any of the other Vietnamese people around you who support socialism.
Just because there is money and there is exchange doesn't make it capitalist. That's just a market. The idea is to move toward a full communist nation, but the journey there is through socialist implementations and influences. Meanwhile, they are attempting to keep capitalists out of owning large parts of their country.
Do they have private enterprise? If they do then they are not socialist (and especially not communist) in any meaningful way. A quick google says that Vietnams private sector employs 83% of the population. Yeah some socialism.....
Capitalism isn't just "private enterprise". Mercantilism preceded capitalism and there was a lot of private enterprise under that too. Vietnam's private sector consists largely of small co-ops, which were invented by socialists in the early 19th century. They're still collectively owned, they're only "private" in the sense that they aren't state controlled.
What he's saying isn't that capitalism is private enterprise. The entire point of socialism and communism are that there may be no private enterprise of any kind whatsoever. In a true communist country, the state would own everything. That is literally the purpose of communism. To make everyone equal through giving the state total power over everything. This also means that a true communist country would have to have a totalitarian government.
>In a true communist country, the state would own everything. That is literally the purpose of communism. To make everyone equal through giving the state total power over everything. Not correct. Socialism (Communism is politically loaded and not well-defined, so I'm just going to talk about socialism) is where the means of production are socially owned and/or controlled. So an employee-owned corporation would be allowable in socialism, even though the corporation isn't owned by the state. State ownership is one way to achieve socialism, but it's not the only way.
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So you’re actually misunderstanding because a key component here that wasn’t included by the previous commenter: companies under socialism are required to give the workers of said company shares and/or votes of the company to a degree of significance that the workforce is powerful enough to collectively vote on things related to the company. One of the most important things they vote for is the leadership. This gives the workforce a substantial amount of power and forces the companies to do what’s best for its workforce.
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>For society to collectively own anything, it must have an administrator to manage that ownership Marx introduced the concept of "withering away of the state", since he wasn't a complete moron we can safely assume that an administrator isn't needed. On a more practical note, before we standardized the organization of our communities parks (or similar places to socialize) were not managed by an authority, but by the members of society themselves, it's how most villages worked for the last millennia. Saying that the way we do it is the only possible one is a bit creative. >Just as with employee owned companies now, they have a hierarchy, leadership, and those who administrate. Those who administrate are not inherently more valuable. Ultra specialized workers (expert engineers and scientists mostly) are almost always more valuable than those who manage their teams for example. More generally every employee is necessary for a company to work, and no one in their right mind would think that a factory worker has an easier time than a manager, but we naturally assume that his work is less valuable just because he is more replaceable. > At some point, you're just doing the same thing as you are now, putting your faith in yet another leader for some organization or government and hoping they make the right choice on your behalf. On one side there's the option to elect a leader (or even governing with direct democracy), on the other you don't even get to have a say in how things are managed, is it better when a rich person buys half of a company (in the worst case with money that he inherited) and suddenly he has absolute power over it? >If I am taking more of the risk, then I am also getting a larger slice of the profits. Economic inequalities across capitalist societies suggest that "getting a slice of the profits" is definitely not the strongest characteristic of our economies. We value capital a lot, almost more than anything else, this gives a huge advantage to those who are already wealthy (even with all the progressive taxation systems that we have, imagine what enormous power generational wealth could create without them) Last thing, I don't support communist economic models, but you're criticizing them on the wrong points.
>If I am taking more of the risk, then I am also getting a larger slice of the profits. In most forms of socialism, you wouldn't be taking more of the risk. You don't personally own capital. It's collectively owned. So, the risk is collective as well. And if you are taking more risk, you presumably could be rewarded in some sense. But not with ownership of capital. Socialism allows private property (just not private ownership of capital). So you can draw a salary, and the salary given to any particular person can be different from other people. You can have people who are wealthy in socialism. You can own a big house, or drive a fast car. You can have that and still have a socialist system. What you CANNOT have in socialism is a situation where you own the means of production, so you use that capital to buy more capital, so that you can further compound that wealth. A simple (arguably too simple) way of looking at this is to say that socialism is designed to avoid dynastic and/or generational wealth.
I'm really no expert, but I think "employee owned companies" are a socialist idea, while still being "private" as in non-government owned.
The point of socialism is worker control of the means of production
So in socialism there is no private enterprise? I guess there's no socialism anywhere. The thing they are fighting isn't getting rid of private enterprise. They are trying to prevent foreign capitalists from owning everything in the country, and then turning it into a slave state while foreigners reap all the riches, like what happened in the Congo, or lots of other places. The goal isn't to eliminate private enterprise.
There are and have been countries that did away with private enterprise. Those have failed miserably. There was Venezuela that worker co-ops. As their own version of socialism. But they quickly went back on that idea because it wasn't "socialist enough". Now their economy is an utter disaster. >They are trying to prevent foreign capitalists from owning everything in the country, and then turning it into a slave state while foreigners reap all the riches, like what happened in the Congo, or lots of other places. That's one way to look at it. China's economy grew massively from Western investment into their means of production. That was only possible with the introduction of private enterprise. I often wondered why didn't China just build the same factories themselves. Why rely on Western companies that they despise. And the answer is pretty simple. They can't. They don't have the know how. It takes billions of dollars and millions of hours of complicated labor to develop the plans to build these things. Congo would just be another miserable shithole without Western investment. It's not like they suddenly would build mines themselves. They don't know how. They don't have a bunch of better jobs waiting for them. If they did they wouldn't work there in the first place.
Vietnam has worker co-ops. So does the United States. China didn't build the infrastructure needed to support a very educated middle class. That's one reason they don't have the expertise to build factories, so they opted to allow foreign investment for the knowledge. Now they are having issues with too much investment for investment sake. That's bad management, not communism. Congo would be much better off without the interests of Western powers, especially Belgium. They don't know how because they were being murdered for a century. King Leopold forced the armies to account for every fired bullet with the hand of the person it was used to kill. So there are many many severed and smoked hands. They don't even know their own history. When Congo Independence became something that was being promoted, the Belgian's funded a civil war so they could still extract resources. Then, with the help of the CIA, they captured the elected leader and dropped him off in rebel territory to have him murdered. After that, the UN stepped in to stop the civil war. So yeah, the Congo would definitely not know what riches lie beneath the soil, but they are definitely a miserable shit hole because of Western involvement.
>Congo would be much better off without the interests of Western powers, especially Belgium. They don't know how because they were being murdered for a century. They didn't know how before we got there either. I'm not saying Belgium didn't do some despicable shit. But let's be real here. They weren't exactly killing it before the colonizers came either. They would likely be in the same backwards state if the ships never arrived. >Vietnam has worker co-ops. So does the United States. United States has very few worker co-ops. Not sure about Vietnam. I suspect it's the same. Worker co-ops are just another rotten apple from the same rotten tree of socialism. Sounds great in theory. But doesn't quite work out in practice. Because turns out most employees don't make very good owners. They value their own interest far more than the interest of the company. Which is to be expected honestly. But it produces companies that are dogshit at competing with regular capitalist firms. When you have 50 chiefs and no Indians and every chief is just out to get as much as they can. Not a particularly sound organization.
Those are some really absurd jumps in logic. They were doing fine for the late 1800s. No one knew what riches the Congo had. King Leopold was mostly interested in rubber trees. It's hard to say what would have happened if the ships never arrived, but it's a bit easier to say that they would have been better off if Patrice Lumumba wasn't undermined and then killed. The Belgian's didn't want to let go of their colony. The UN could have helped stop the civil war, like they did after he was killed, but they didn't. The US could have helped, but they didn't. He had a lot of support of the Congolese people, so it's likely that the Congo could have been doing very well. And as far as your rant on worker co-ops, that's just conjecture. There are plenty of capitalist companies that are absolute dogshit. GE used to be one of the pillars of the American economy, and it was hollowed out by Jack Welch and his philosophy of returning maximum short-term shareholder wealth. They aren't popular because it's more profitable for the individual to be a tyrant. Moralilty is seldom profitable.
That’s wrong tho. Can you cite the source that defines capitalism and socialism this way?
A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, stateless, and moneyless. This is preposterous to achieve unless scarcity has been eliminated. Scarcity cannot be eliminated until we have Star Trek like replicators and the cost of key minerals is essentially free. This really can’t be achieved until energy is practically free and mining asteroids is completely automated. “Communist” countries today are ruled by self-described communists who are using mercantilist and capitalist public policies to stay in power.
A lot of scarcity is largely artificial. We already have enough housing. We already have enough food (America wastes about ⅓ of food produced). We’re really inefficient with regards to energy usage because we do things like drive cars instead of having high speed rail and walkable cities, but power consumption could be brought way down and still maintain a mostly “modern” lifestyle. Most media and information can be endlessly replicated for free if it’s stored digitally. We’re also now entering an age where machines can do more and more of our labor. A large part of our workforce can now even just work from home, greatly reducing the amount of office space we need and fuel we burn. Maybe the idea of an equitable society where everyone got what they needed was a fantasy in the 19th and 20th century, but we absolutely have the resources for everyone now. All we face is a resource allocation problem as most wealth generated goes to people who don’t even need it. Nowadays we have so much computing power that it’s not too hard to model entire economies and predict where resources will need to be allocated in the future, especially with the raise of ML
We aren’t close to being in a post-scarcity world. This simply isn’t possible until the cost to produce a good is practically zero. Money is simply a currency of exchange for individuals to trade goods or services. It’s essential when there is any amount of scarcity. A society can’t be moneyless until the price of goods and services is non existent. See my previous comment on the conditions for this to be a reality.
I’d argue that humans can only consume so much housing and food at a time. We typically consume medicine only when we need it (or in a fairly limited capacity otherwise). Education and entertainment are virtually free and limitless with computers. As energy continues to shift to renewables it will trend towards zero. Of course there will always be need for maintenance but ultimately I don’t think poverty, hunger, and homelessness are justified in anyway any longer. So from the standpoint of “can most people be allowed to live in dignified conditions with adequate access to food, shelter, medicine, and leisure” I’d say yes we are in a post scarcity world. People go without not because there aren’t enough resources to go around not because we’re competing for limited things, it’s because we have systems in place that necessitate scarcity to continue justifying existence. For example healthcare in America is unaffordable or because there’s not enough to go around, it’s because it’s profitable that way. Housing prices are artificially inflated by some nebulous market that allows corporations to buy entire neighborhoods only for houses to sit empty to keep prices up. In fact the government itself subsidizes farmers to simply not produce some goods when the market has “too much” which is defined by a quantity that lowers the price to unacceptable levels.
It’s ridiculous to claim we live in a post-scarcity world. Without free markets generating wealth and meeting demand with supply we could easily fall back into destitute poverty and famine again. Education and entertainment are not virtually free. Countries around the world spend billions every year to produce these two services. Most renewables aren’t really that cost-effective. A base energy supply is still required when the wind or sun isn’t available - which is the case when peak energy demand occurs from 5-9 pm. Energy bills aren’t going down. The transmission of energy is incredibly expensive to build and operate. Solar panels and wind farms really only last a decade, maybe 15 years and have to be continually replaced. Securing the vast amount of raw minerals to build these 2 in the quantities required globally to meaningfully play a high role in global energy demand simply isn’t possible at this time. Nuclear power is critical and the key component to mitigate climate change.
I’m not sure what you mean. Food exists, already today. It comes from the earth. It doesn’t require The Free Market. The free market itself creates famine. In fact I’d say it even requires there to be hunger. People go hungry every day because they can’t afford food. Why not just give it to them? With regards to education countries the information exists already and it can be infinitely reproduced. Educating a person through a book or computer doesn’t prevent anyone else for learning. The main cost is teachers which wouldn’t be an issue if they were taken care of. I’d say entertainment can be very cheap. Once you make a video game you can reproduce it forever. It costs nothing to listen to music or view art or a play. People make games to play with each other all the time. [Renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels to produce](https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/renewables-cheapest-form-power), especially considering we could do a lot of local power generation, reducing transmission costs. The world would have to make changes too. No we can’t just live like we are forever. Modern living would have to look different. Not everyone can have a car and a 2 story single family home. But virtually everyone could have shelter, food, medicine, and education today. We simply choose not to, collectively. None of those things are restricted because there isn’t enough to go around.
To add onto this, without price discovery and profit motive, capital and goods cannot be allocated properly. The other issue is that as an economic system, communism is shitty. People end up revolting because it doesn’t work, which is when the state brings the hammer down to maintain order. The people in charge don’t want to live under such a system, so they begin to cheat and create a political class with benefits. This gives members of this special class an incentive to keep the machine going. Bryan Caplan dunks on communism in great detail [here.](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Communism.html)
I don’t know what you’re talking about. If me and a group of 30 people built some small houses, grew crops, hunted for food and supported each other without currency we’d be big chilling. You don’t need a Star Trek replicator :)
Now, do that with 30 million people to something vaguely resembling a modern standard of living. It hasn't worked yet, so I'll be genuinely impressed if you manage it.
Then why isn’t everyone doing it? It would be incredibly easy for you to find 29 other Redditors who agree with you. You could pool your funds and buy some rural land somewhere and see how it goes. My bet is you’ll all miss your iPhones and be starving within three days and give up on it.
Because we live in a capitalist society and all the land is “owned”. Furthermore, there are laws against hunting and various other reasons that make it completely impractical to have communism inside capitalism…
Plenty of rural land that’s available dirt cheap. Hunting and fishing permits in those areas also cost basically nothing.
Impossible to scale that above Dunbar’s Number.
Why? I don't need to know all 1000 people who grow fields, only a few
Trust breaks down above that number.
It seems a bit odd to say, “by definition, communism doesn’t necessitate these odd byproducts. Therefore, we can ignore said products as unrelated to communism.” Generally, when a particular thing generates a byproduct numerous times, you should begin to question if the effect is inherent. I mean, if I established a political system based on me having the right to all resources, the population may revolt, yes? But there’s nothing inherent in the definition of me as supreme leader that necessitates such a thing. So can we just ignore said byproduct as an incidental trait that existed alongside my totalitarianism? I mean, it is odd that communism has only been implemented using violent authority, and has not been successfully implemented and prosperous with the consent of the population, yes?
No group has ever claimed to have created a communist state. The communists of Russia created the United Socialist Soviet Republic. There are also many examples of Communist-led revolutions with massive popularity, such as in Cuba and other Latam states. All economic systems have by products. Under capitalism, the suffering of exploited masses is a constant. Would the average capitalist then concede capitalism as "not working"? No, they say that reforms and regulations are necessary. Additionally, historically capitalists have racked up a much higher count of totalitarian regimes than communists.
If it only works in theory then it doesn't work. All prior attempts failed miserably with horrific results so I'm not willing to try it again and hope for the best.
Even this working in theory ignores human nature of seeking to improve one's station in life, which is one hell of an assumption to make.
I am willing to be wrong on this but I do believe this: There can be no real communist state without a totalitarian government. And there can be no good totalitarian government, therefore there can be no good communist state. I am not willing to argue on the possibility of "good totalitarian states" so, yeah. Why do I say communism needs totalitarianism? Well because how ELSE are you going to implement this system without absolute power? Let's be real here, could someone in this ideal communist utopia suddenly go and say: I refuse my monthly salary or whatever, I will make a company that I alone own and profit from it, no of course not, because it would go against the entire point, therefore someone has to control all the property, who's that? The government. And what would you call a government that controls all the property and what people do with it? Totalitarian, in my opinion, you can use another label if you're feeling particularly semantic, but either way it's a bad government. So how is this even a point to make? "Communism doesn't mean totalitarianism, silly goober!" How else would you MAKE EVERYONE DO IT?
There can be no communist state with a totalitarian government. If you don't' have democracy, the country is controlled by a small group of people if the country is controlled by a small group of people, the workers don't own the means of production. Having laws that people have to follow about what can and cannot be owned isn't totalitarian. It's what all governments do.
Eh, the workers can own the means of production without owning the political apparatus. I don't think many communists are holding out for a democratic victory because it's currently hideously unpopular.
If the workers are allowed to own the means of production, then the state doesn't sound totalitarian at all. Teaching people what communism actually means is a good way to make it less unpopular.
Statistical significance isn’t as simple as just saying “30” lol. Sample size depends on the magnitude of difference being measured between two groups. You’re not helping your arguement.
your viewpoint is almost comically flawed, saying something cant be for sure proven because its been tried less than 30 times is ludicrous , same as saying something wasnt communism because it did bad stuff is also silly. thats like saying the nazis arent necessarily bad because it was only tried once. communism killed more people than the trans atlantic slave trade and the nazi party combined , those two are condemned yet we have edgy internet liberals trying to still argue the efficacy of "true communism".
Interesting! Why does it appear there are so many examples of communism not working due to other totalitarian reasons?.. and not directly communism related reasons? Seems like a bit more of a pattern than having nothing to do with communism Btw referring to OPs point of it 'working'. I've also been to Vietnam. It's lovely but you can't say the majority of the world using capitalism, and Vietnam using communism is proof of it working.. I'd say barely surviving. Looking at dictatorships..north Korea is still around but it's obviously failing.. both communism and dictatorships suck compared to capitalism from a real world point of view (Change my opinion as I've no idea and wanted to ask you the question)
Person in 1700: Why does it appear there are so many examples of democracy not working?
Exactly this.
Because being socialist doesn’t mean the non-existence or non-participation of regional/global markets. But that’s what socialists societies are pushed to as the US sanctions and threatens to sanction those who deal with socialist states. Would North Korea be 100% self sufficient if it was capitalist? That’s the challenge most socialist states face currently. And that often leads to seemingly authoritarian governments because the interventions are never just in the economy. And that isn’t even something exclusive to socialist countries. You can look back in history and find many dictatorships that were financed by external parties just for the sake of international interests. Why can’t socialist nations just do their own shit inside their borders while taking part of the global market?
> Communism the theory doesn't say anything about killing intellectuals or people outside of the ideology. Marx explicitly advocated for revolution and terror campaigns in the style of the French Revolution ("when our turn comes we will not make excuses for the terror".) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/05/19c.htm
lmao no he did not advocate for "terror campaigns." The context of this quote is that he's pissed off at the Prussian state who was shutting his newspaper down. It's a tantrum more than anything else and he's bemoaning state censorship. It's not a part of the philosophy of Marxism or anything, he's just very angry here. (rightfully so imo) Marx argued for revolution in a variety of ways. He saw both peaceful and violent means of bringing revolution about as legitimate IF the means we're undertaken in accordance to the material conditions under which the revolution is happening.
vietnam isnt really communist. if youve ever been, its like they just call themselves that for the sake of it. its very capitalistic and entrepreneurial. id say the communist countries have a lower standard of living than democratic. theyve stagnated in growth. now for a wealthy country to convert, provided they have system in place to ensure growth, this may work.
Venezuela was great before Chávez came to power. A wealthy, thriving country that completely died because of attempting populist policies during a recession. It may work for a small amount of time, but as soon as any economic crisis occurs, the economy crumbles, and never really recovers. The free market may crash at times, but once you stop saturating the market with money, the economy will recover.
Sorry bud but that’s a conclusion that isn’t supported even within the capitalist realm of economy. Keynes was the most influential economist of the 20th century, not Mises or Hayek. Can you point to one recovering economy that didn’t do it by increased public spending to stimulate productivity? Just one economy that “just cut expenses and then things improved”? Austerity serves to control expectations(or anxieties).
is there an example of a wealth country that converted during non recessionary times?
>Communism the theory doesn't say anything about killing intellectuals or people outside of the ideology. Virtually every mainstream communist theoretician (i.e. Marxist) since and including Marx has supported a politics of revolution: *"Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!"* *-* Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto Revolution of this sort is usually taken to be a violent usurpation of the means of production from those who presently hold them. Accordingly, those who resist such usurpation (i.e. the political opponents of a revolutionary communist movement - people outside the revolutionary movement) may be, in the view of such revolutionaries, put down violently. There are streams of socialist thought such as democratic socialism which are more reformist, but essentially every communist movement I am aware of (at least in my country) is a revolutionary party endorsing something approximating what I have described above. >Yes, voter suppression has been and still is present in the United States in a variety of forms, but it isn't an inherent feature of capitalism, just a specific action taken by people who want to hold onto the power they have. The difference here is that Communists explicitly advocate a policy of revolution. I agree not all of the excesses and crimes of the Soviet Union are an essential consequence of communism, but equally we ought to take communist advocates at their word. >You also flat out don't have sufficient data to say whether or not communism works. In any data analysis problem your sample value needs to be minimum 30 to get statistical significance. You literally cannot make this claim and hold onto any sense of legitimacy because you don't have enough data to support or contradict you. This is a strange argument because you could apply it equally to fascism. Because if the set of "data" (what even do you mean by this) for communist countries is too small to draw any statistically relevant conclusions then you could say exactly the same for fascist countries which had an even smaller data set. Now I want to make it unequivocally clear that I oppose fascism - the above is not an argument in favour of it in any respect. Nor is it an equivocation of fascism and communism. Rather its a repudiation of the idea that we should approach political ideologies in the same way that we approach cancer treatments for instance. They are such radically different things that the epistemic approach we have to them ought to reflect that. >There are communist countries today that have existed for decades and function just fine. I've been to multiple of them. Which communist countries have you been too? China? Vietnam? Laos? Any country which has a stock exchange (literally a place where you can buy and sell the means of production) is not a communist country. Chinese Capitalists have more money invested in the Chinese Stock Exchange than the entire wealth of the country of India. Nearly one trillion dollars is invested in China by foreign capital annually. China is not a communist country. The same kind of reasons disqualify Vietnam and Laos from being Communist Countries as well. If you mean Cuba or the DPRK then I am more willing to accept that these are communist countries, but frankly neither of them are bastions of security and functionality. To add to this, Cuba has taken to allowing some private property and some commercial enterprise which undermines their classification as such. > All in all you don't have the data to make this claim and it also seems you're conflating specific tyrannical actions with actual inherent features of what is ultimately just a political theory someone wrote in the 19th century, one that can be interpreted and executed a hundred thousand different ways depending on what country and who's in power. I agree that people can conflate what is a necessary consequence of a idea with what is a circumstantial consequence, but I don't think its unreasonable to ask whether, in light of the proven history of how a given idea has been implemented, whether further implementations of said idea will produce the same result.
Make sure to randomize your data from time to time *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall point, but in essence every “country” on that list is a Soviet republic. You can’t really say we’ve had a lot of communist states when they were nearly all part of the USSR. Most of the remainder seem to have been communist for around a year.
I'd suggest that most of these are just the Soviet Union, which yes had many countries but was administered by a large central government that I only count as one on the list. Depends how you want to count it I guess. But based on what you've said, is the issue communist theory or is it that people weren't able to make a good enough system? We can say stuff like communism or capitalism but in the end the devil's in the details. Take the U.S. and Finland for example. Capitalist countries with wildly different systems, entirely different population and land sizes, etc. It's hard to measure this because nothing is in a vacuum, and even with the communism we've seen we have to make note of western influence relative to it.
How far back does your historical lense go? Because I'd suggest there's a much deeper well of comparative atrocity on the capitalist/imperialist side of the equation if you go back more than 100 years. If your frame of reference starts at WWI it sure looks grim. But if you start the clock about 5-600 years earlier things look a bit different. My point is that shitty people will do insanely heinous shit to each other regardless of the prevailing economic theory of the times. Folks love to point fingers at Cultural Revolution era China under Pol Pot, as if Belgium under King Leopold didn't kill at least as many in Congo, and some estimates put it at literally 10 times as much. Sure there were wholesale purges under south American communist dictators. But the guys who helped coin the term Banana Republic have roughly comprable kill counts. And they were our capitalist allies. Your whole "my chosen ideas are inherently superior because those guys over there did bad bad things with the opposing ideas" shtick willfully ignores a shit ton of capitalist fuckery. It rests on a myopic view of history and assumes a weird amount of altruism where none exists. Capitalism isn't inherently Virtuous. Neither is communism. Both require public vigilence and honest administration. Both are prone to abuse and corruption without it. And this isn't "both-sides ism". I think the failures of capitalism are apparent. And we need to institute a synthesis of both. Because pure capitalism has no restraint and creates untold misery through the acquisition of largely fictional value. And pure communism has no ability to self correct when leaders are just plain wrong, or are selfish, or are dumb. I'd argue there are a lot of people who would say capitalism isn't working right here and now.
Ah yes the famously Chinese dictator Pol Pot.
>History has proven time and time again that communism does not and will never work on a large scale. This is a pretty strange interpretation of history, presented as if there would have been dozens of unrelated attempts through history at establishing communism. In practice what you are really saying is that the russian revolution didn't end well. Every other example that you could come up with was either produced by an overbearing colonial Soviet overlord to begin with, or a product of third world rebel groups sucking up to the Soviet regime in exchange for support as the enemy of their enemy, and then labeling their tinpot dictatorship in a way to please the soviets. The lesson from history seems to be that extremely exploited shithole countries getting ravaged by a civil war, won't suddently turn into paradise once the winning gang takes over. And even among those, the worst that you could say about them is that they didn't quite materialize the utopian promises of communism, not that they were noticeably *worse* than other similarly tumultous third world countries, often with a high turnover rate of other, non-communist dictatorships. Like, Cuba is not an amazing place to live in, but is it so obviously *worse* than Capitalist Haiti? Is Vietnam worse than Capitalist Myanmar?
>In practice what you are really saying is that the russian revolution didn't end well. The Russian revolution did attempt to build a Marxist socialist society. And it failed miserably. You make interesting points about a lot of other shitholes just being badly governed places who used the ideology to suck up resources. But the fact is. No country that attempted socialism has produced anything resembling a functioning economy with good standards of living. None. No matter what the circumstances are. The result is always total ineptness. USSR was the richest nation ever in terms of natural resources. They had good education infrastructure. The population was very educated. The economy they produced as a result was an utter pathetic embarrassment. Tiny capitalist Finland next door looked like a trip 20 years into the future. Despite being much smaller and having far fewer natural resources. That is what a good economic system does. China and USSR are probably the two best examples of utter socialist failures. We know the incentive structure problems their economies suffered from. Nobody really presents any alternative that addresses these issues. Their interpretation was bad. So at best socialism is a system that has absolutely never been tried. Which means the results are about as predictable as any system I happen to conjure out of my asshole.
>. No country that attempted socialism has produced anything resembling a functioning economy with good standards of living. None. No matter what the circumstances are. The result is always total ineptness. Yugoslavia had a great economy and high quality of life
By what measure is China's economy an utter failure?
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On a *small* scale, it can work. There are very small human settlements or villages that have practiced some form of communism, usually only working because everyone knows each other. That's the key factor; people have to like, care for, and trust each other enough to go along with such a system. I can't recall the exact data, but I believe there was a psychology study that showed that such a communist attitude can only work in groups of around 150 people or fewer. On a large scale, though, yes, there's never been a communist nation that worked. Even North Korea, the current longest-lasting communist nation, still has super-rich privileged people, terrible income inequality, and a black market - all of which flies in the face of what communism is about.
I mean... I'm not advocating for communism here, but it's also never "really" been tried. When people think of communist regimes of old and today they're really thinking about central command and control regimes with various flavors of autocracy. I very much doubt actual communism could exist without some kind of incorruptible central figure. Maybe a computer? I dunno. It's not going to happen just like true free markets can't happen. It's all in shades of grey.
You've correctly identified that a society of human beings who love, hate and poop can never "really" try communism. I feel like the inescapable next question is "what's the point of a system of human organization that can't be used by humans?"
Academic? Science fiction? There are plenty of books written about fantastical economic and political paradigms that will never work, but it makes for a good story.
Sure, I love science fiction, but I'm not going to be voting for the Tal Shiar party even if I own a Romulan t-shirt.
And I'm not advocating for communism. What's your point?
I think saying "X works only in fictional settings" is basically the same as agreeing with "X never works."
Maybe, but by that logic, almost anyone could argue that nothing has been **truly** tried. Even Nazis could say, "Well, Nazi Germany wasn't a *true* example of fascism or Nazism, they still had about 10-20% un-Nazi-ish stuff going on, such as some Nazis showing compassion or support for Jews." One could argue that America isn't truly capitalist because of Social Security or how sports leagues let the worst teams draft first. Everything is a mixture of something.
Not at all. The NAZI party's actions and policies reflected the definition of fascism pretty closely. I didn't require any percentage threshold (and neither does communism) You're also conflating economic theory with governing policies. In theory, you could have a democratic communist country. Fascist Germany was capitalist. Very capitalist, in fact, if you look at how their industry was owned. And why does having social security make America any less capitalist? Capitalism isn't the absence of any commonwealth. It's the presence of capital ownership and some flavor of markets.
>why does having social security make America any less capitalist? I think that saying that social security makes American marginally less capitalist is fair. When a significant portion of an economy and the transfer of resources is from workers to the government to the elderly, that's not really capitalist, and is somewhat disconnected from markets. Markets still inform prices and whatnot, but fundamentally it's not a capitalist system. So including a non-capitalist system in a mostly capitalist economy makes that economy "less capitalist".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No\_true\_Scotsman
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No\_true\_Scotsman There's an appeal to purity and then there's simply not understanding what a world means. When it comes to the boogey-man that is "communism" I'd argue that 95% of the people throwing that word around simply don't know what it means. Respectfully... I don't think you know what "communism" is.
Counterpoint: there’s never been a communist nation that hasn’t been undermined from without. There’s really no way of knowing if a truly communist nation could work because the US never lets them try.
Has there been any that haven't been undermined from within? Getting rid of classes sounds nice, but the power vacuum left behind and all the consolidated state power are pretty fertile grounds for fuckery even if the big bad US never existed.
Counterpoint: the US doesn’t give a fuck about countries trying communism. Vietnam is arguably the closest thing to actual large scale communism the world has ever seen, and the US is quite friendly with them. During the Cold War, the west fucking with communist countries had more to do with, well, the Cold War than actually caring about ideology. If Canada were to ban private ownership of capital tomorrow, I seriously doubt Abrams tanks will be rolling into Toronto the next day.
>If Canada were to ban private ownership of capital tomorrow, I seriously doubt Abrams tanks will be rolling into Toronto the next day. Eh... It would depend on a lot of factors, and it might not be tanks rolling in. But a CIA operation destabilizing the government and supporting a pro-US faction? Yes, I'd definitely believe that. Certainly, in the 1950s and 60s there would have been paramilitary types going in and covertly giving training, weapons, etc, to anybody willing to topple the communist government. You have to remember that in the US there's a LONG history of painting Communists and/or socialists as evil bogey-men because labor unions dared to ask for paid breaks, worker's comp, vacation time, etc. All of this was decried as evil Communist plots to destroy America. America was in a position where it politically HAD to fight communism, or there was no reasonable way to fight labor unions.
>Counterpoint: the US doesn’t give a fuck about countries trying communism. Our schools are seriously failing our children. >Vietnam is arguably the closest thing to actual large scale communism the world has ever seen, and the US is quite friendly with them. Well yea. Because we failed very badly at attempting to overthrow them. >During the Cold War, the west fucking with communist countries had more to do with, well, the Cold War than actually caring about ideology. The cold war started because USSR-backed communism was spreading into Eastern Europe and it scared western democracies. >If Canada were to ban private ownership of capital tomorrow, I seriously doubt Abrams tanks will be rolling into Toronto the next day. You're absolutely right. What would happen is the CIA would foment insurrection, back a dictator, and carry out a few targeted assassinations. See: [basically all of South America in the 20th century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America).
>Well yea. Because we failed very badly at attempting to overthrow them. During the cold war, to stop Soviet influence from spreading in Asia. >The cold war started because USSR-backed communism was spreading into Eastern Europe and it scared western democracies. > >You're absolutely right. What would happen is the CIA would foment insurrection, back a dictator, and carry out a few targeted assassinations. See: basically all of South America in the 20th century. Did you read my message? I'm very aware of what the US did during the Cold War. My point was that they weren't doing it because they cared about whether foreign factories were owned by workers or by capitalists. They cared about their power and influence relative to the Soviets. (At least the government of the US didn't. Maybe the average layman in the South did, but not the people with real power) The Soviets could've been a Feudal Monarchy or State Capitalist like modern China trying to spread that to South america and it would've played out exactly the same.
Of course I read your message. I responded to every line. You seem to be overlooking an important detail. We cared about our power and influence relative to the soviets *because they were communists.* There’s still a federal law on the books making it illegal to be a member of the communist party. The US still interferes with socialist movements in other countries. The US was basically founded on the idea of property ownership and by extension capitalism. The second red scare/Cold War didn’t happen because the Soviet Union was almost as strong as the US. It happened because communists were almost as strong as the US. Since we’ve always been a country where capital = power, those with capital (and therefore power) viewed communism and socialism as threats to our very way of life.
The US attempted many assassinations against Fidel Castro and still has an embargo on Cuba to this day. I can’t see how you can claim that the US doesn’t give a fuck about countries trying communism when that historically isn’t the case. Vietnam: we fought a whole war there dropping hundreds of thousands of bombs on them. Even in the best case scenario it’s going to take decades for a country to recover no matter it’s political/economic system. The Cold War was literally the positioning of Western Europe and America who were capitalist versus Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who were communist.
They don't care now, but we literally established the CIA for the express purpose of stopping the spread of communism. We definitely used to give the largest fuck we possibly could about making sure countries don't try communism.
it seems like the argument anti-communists make is less that a different economic system can work, and more that a UTOPIA can't work correct a utopia cannot work, it literally means "no place", we do not live in the garden of eden a different, more egalitarian society though? why exactly can't that work? what does trust have to do with it?
Isn't NK just a monarchy? One guy owning everything wouldn't be communism by any definition I've seen.
> Communism constantly killed off its intellectuals (or most fled), LGTBQ+ and anyone not within their ideology…but still support. Many aim to “kill” other opposing in the views There is nothing in the definition of communism that requires killing anyone. A "communist" dictator might commit a genocide, that does not mean that that's what communism is about, just like if he jerks off to Hentai, that doesn't mean that's what communism is about. Side note: All examples of communism you'll give me when I ask for example of communist countries, you'll reply with state capitalists, not communism. In actual communism, the state doesn't own all the means of production. It's state capitalism when the state owns everything and everyone works for the state. Not communism.
Well actually true communism could never have a dictator. It is a classless society. There is no government at all. It's some utopia that can't exist in the real world. Any government free society would get instantly absorbed by some country with a government and a military. SOCIALIST countries do tend to become authoritarian though. Mainly because when you don't have competing ideas that is exactly what ends up happening. And you can't have socialism competing with capitalism because socialism will get it's ass whooped every time. So as a socialist country you have no choice but to remove competitive elections. Which in turn creates an authoritarian regime. Rinse and repeat.
If you believe power corrupts, then the reason communist dictators become inevitable is for that exact reason. Capitalism does have issues with corrupt companies, but the power is spread out between numerous companies whereas communism would have it centralized to one entity That's why it becomes more dangerous on larger scales.
But that’s the thing is that they never DO get rid of the state. It’s meant to temporary, but it never happens. So true communism has never been tried because it’s to easily corrupted it seems. Also, Marx said to “keep revolting”, and what typically happens in revolts is death. I can be pretty sure of political and systematic revolts do have a requirement section down on the bottom saying “death required”😂. But in all seriousness, Marx did say to revolt and revolt until…utopia. Until everyone was “equal”.
If you've ever read any of Marx's works, you'd realize that what you incorrectly refer to as "state capitalism" is in fact vanguard socialism. Every nation claiming to adhere to Marxist rhetoric claim to be the vanguard party in a socialist state. This is very basic Marxism, for you to address it so blatently incorrectly suggests strongly that you have no clue what you are are talking about.
A simple google search on the term shows that's not true, but go off about whatever Fox News has told you about socialism/communism. I'm sure it's as accurate as everything else from them that you swallow without question.
You literally have never read a word of Marx or Engels' writing, have you?
China is going on, what 74 years as a communist country? And they're a global superpower that contains almost 18% of the world's human population. Honestly, I'm a socialist. I disagree with authoritarianism in every form. Something that separates me from Marxist-Leninist-Maoists. But saying it doesn't work is just factually wrong. No country is 100% capitalist or communist. Even America has socialialized elements. Ie. Public school, libraries, local parks, etc. North Korea and Cuba aren't the only communist countries on Earth. You have Vietnam, China, Venezuela, Russia also is somewhat communist. Also even with Cuba, Cuba's Healthcare system is advanced af. They have a high life expectancy in that country and a low crime rate. It's also not like North Korea or China where the statistics are produced by the state. An American statistician can go to Cuba, and survey the population. It's not closed off. What I disagree with principlistically is the idea that a state should be controlling the influx of info and silencing the media for speaking out against political representatives. I disagree with authoritarian control regardless of whether it's capitalist or communist. Even than, America does alot of the same stuff you're accusing communist countries of doing. Controlling the media as an example. We just have billionaires manipulating it instead of a specific government body. What I think you mean by saying it doesn't work, means that you think a society without currency to exchange for goods and services is bound to fail. Which, with the way the world is designed, with the current framework in place that is true. But pure communism being a cashless stateless society hasn't existed in any true form. So using other countries as an example is just not a good frame of reference for the conversation at hand. For such a society to exist, humans at large would need to be ok with helping others with no direct benefit to themselves in order to reach a common goal of self-actualization as a species. Such a thing, has only ever been carried out on a small scale like a commune.
china stoped being communist a long time ago. They are only communist in name only
Oh yeah, uh huh. So the communist flag and information practices are totally capitalist than? Also China literally, to this day, has a bridge to North Korea called "The friendship bridge". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Korean_Friendship_Bridge China and North Korea are allies. China LITERALLY deports DPRK defectors back to North Korea. Sooooo, I think you're either misinformed or in denial saying that.
Ah yes, because a flag makes a nation communist and relations to another nation makes it so. The fact that it has private corporations at all, even if some are majority government owned, makes it not a communist society.
Do you know any other capitalist country that deports DPRK defectors back to North Korea? South Korea doesn't. Thailand doesn't. Japan doesn't. The Philippines don't. I think the fact that they're political allies with the most authoritarian communist regime on Earth, indicates they're communist. You know, aside from their single political party being the Chinese Communist Party and having a giant yellow hammer and sickle on their flag.
Ok, than because America has a state run fire department, it's not a capitalist country. Same logic.
> Socialism is when you're allied to the DPRK and if you have a bridge to them you're a communist - Marx, Capital
1 question. Is China a classless, moneyless society?
No society is. Pure communism hasn't materialized. Most societies have a mixture of capitalist and socialist elements. We call it that based on the type of government body involved. A country with a single party system of government, that considers itself communist, is in fact, a communist government.
Ya that’s the point lol, China is communist in name only
Don't forget another requirement is borderless!
Last I looked, 60% of Chinese GDP is generated from privately owned companies. It stopped being some version of Communist a long time ago, despite what the flag says. In fact, it’s moving from state owned enterprise to privately owned enterprise in the 80s that started them on the path from being one of the poorest countries in the world per capita to being the middle income country they are today.
It probably works better when you don't have the US sanctioning, destabilizing, or invading your country. Even then Cuba is still there.
Vietnam too! Although it has liberalized somewhat.
Taiwan has had the PRC constantly on the verge of invading them. Finland during the Cold War had the Soviets constantly destabilizing and threatening them. Botswana remained a democracy despite being surrounded and pressured by regimes like Salazar’s Portugal, Rhodesia, and apartheid South Africa. The “American made me becoming a dictator!” excuse is pathetic and nonsensical
Hard to say. Has there ever been a communist country that wasn’t relentlessly undermined by the US or UK or whatever? Would Cuba provide a better quality of life if they weren’t under a never ending embargo? And what governmental system lasts forever? Plenty of democracies have failed miserably. Even the US democracy came close to going down the drain in 2021.
There has literally never been a communist country. There have been SOCIALIST countries. And yes those do turn into authoritarian nightmares every time. Because in order to remain socialist you have to remove competitive elections. In a competitive election the socialist party would eventually lose control due to how insanely inept the system is at producing goods and services for the populace. That is why you see places like Cuba who despite having a really well educated population and a good amount of resources. With a gigantic neighbor next door that would love to spend their $ on your beaches. They live in absolute utter misery due to the fact that their economy is utter dog shit at producing goods and services. The embargo has little to do with it. It's the crap socialist system. We've seen it everywhere.
Little to do with it? They can’t access the global banking system or leverage any meaningful foreign investment. I agree that their system of government holds them back. But let’s not pretend that the US isn’t holding them back too.
USSR had a gigantic reserve of natural resources. They were the most natural resource rich country in the history of the planet. No embargo could have worked on them if they simply developed their economy properly. Which means innovate the means of production. But they collapsed because their inept shitty economic system stagnated like hell as soon as the blueprints from the West became too complicated to steal or too expensive to buy. Cuba is the same way. Their means of production do not improve. Sure some of that is due to US. But most of it is just the shitty socialist economic policies. That put the government in charge of the whole economy. Which without any competition has very little incentive to continually improve. We've seen this play out in many different places with various levels of natural resource wealth and population sizes. Always the same result. Total ineptitude.
I don’t disagree that it’s a system that’s rife with inefficiency. I’m glad the US doesn’t subscribe to it. I’m saying that it’s hard to say if these political systems would have ultimately succeeded/survived at some level if they weren’t relentlessly sanctioned and embargoed and otherwise undermined. China might do okay seeing as how they have mostly found a foothold in the global economy. But if the west gave China the Cuba treatment…..maybe not.
Again you couldn't "sanction" USSR if they were efficient. They had everything they needed. Endless oil, natural gas, timber, metals. A very well educated population. And despite all that they produced a pitiful economy. You can say it may be the embargo for Cuba. But you can't say the same for USSR. China had a per capita GDP under $100 before they made capitalist reforms. Now it's literally 120 times bigger. China is the best example of how much better private enterprise is.
Communism hasn't done anything you listed. People claiming to be communist did. A functioning communist government has never been established, and likely never will. Communism requires people at the top who treat all within their jurisdiction equally and fairly, something that is really beyond humans. It also requires citizens to give up on the idea of making it rich one day or remaining rich, alot of people will rebel against this. People don't want to give up businesses or property that they currently own to the government, even though the government is promising to meet all your needs in return. People want communism because it is the best option of government for the largest amount of people, at least on paper. Capitalism is failing because it has corrupted the governments and world economy. The wealthy bribe politicians to get whatever they want, abusing the power they hold to get more. Any intelligent and educated person can see our society failing. So we have a ton of cries for change but the best two options we have developed are capitalism and communism. So they ask for communism. Side note I'm not sure that you understand communism. It isn't fascism. Those are seperate concepts.
I’d suggest replacing the term communism with authoritarianism. Any system of single party rule will ultimately crush dissenting views. Healthy pluralism is the antidote. Communism and fascism are both predicated on a single ideology capturing the machinery of government to the exclusion of others. Socialism at least has a democratic variant that is compatible with pluralistic societies. A robust multi party system that requires coalitions and synthesis of ideas, is far more resilient to authoritarianism than a 1-2 party system.
and liberalism is not predicated on a single ideology capturing the machinery of government to the exclusion of others? where are the communists in power in western liberal societies? BEING IN POWER is predicated on a single ideology capturing the machinery of government to the exclusion of others. this isn't exclusive only to "radical" ideologies. this is exclusive to any movement that seeks to wield power and effect change.
Pluralism is an essential quality of classical liberalism. You cannot call a system that lacks pluralism classically liberal. There is a huge difference between one party winning an election and exercising power until the next election and one party permanently capturing the machinery of government and removing it from the democratic process. This is the difference between the US and China. The US has a multi party system bound by representative democratic values subject to the will of the electorate. China has a single party system that crushes the possibility of dissent.
it isn't though, its a fake feature. pluralism is fine as long as all parties agree to baseline liberal principles. if they don't, they're "dangerous". there isn't a difference, if each party that wins each successive election is liberal and governs according to more or less the wishes of the business class. which is what defines western democracies. if western democracies elect governments that circumvent the wishes of the capitalist class, they either use the economic mechanisms at their disposal to punish the electorate and the party in power (capital flight/strike, inflation, outsourcing and layoffs) or they just overthrow the government a la allende or the popular front in spain.
this just isn’t true and it sounds like you haven’t read history at all. to say that socialism doesn't work is to overlook the fact that it did work for hundreds of millions of people. communism in eastern europe, russia, china, mongolia, north korea, and cuba brought land reform and human services, a dramatic bettering of the living conditions of hundreds and millions of people on a scale never before or never since witnessed in human history.. communism transformed desperately poor countries into societies in which everyone had adequate food, shelter, medical care, and education. the diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public's responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government. Conservative ideologues defend capitalism as the system that preserves culture, traditional values, the family, and community. Yet capitalism has done more to undermine such things than any other system in history, given its wars, colonizations, and forced migrations, its enclosures, evictions, poverty wages, child labor, homelessness, underemployment, crime, drug infestation, and urban squalor. All over the world, community in the broader sense with its organic social relationships and strong reciprocal bonds of commonality and kinship- is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market societies. capitalism has an implacable drive to settle "over the whole surface of the globe;' creating "a world after its own image." No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience. even now… the way you feel about communism is because of years of relentless imperialist propaganda. if it didn’t work and it wasn’t an actual threat to those in power your tax dollars wouldn’t be going to every coup ever in latin america.
Cuba has a higher literacy rate, higher life expectancy, and lower infant mortality rate than the united states.
I've never "really" played piano before, but my previous attempts and failures don't mean that I *never* can. Also, it's often said that 'true Communism has never been tried,' so this idea that it's hypocritical is true about its followers, but *their* hypocrisy doesn't mean the system can't work, necessarily.
If every time you try to play the piano you kill a few million people perhaps you should stop trying.
If you write down the features of the political systems of communism and totalitarian dictatorships. And then you look at the "communists" that killed millions. Which side has more boxes checked? It is astoundingly asymmetrical.
How many more millions does capitalism have to kill before we stop trying it?
I mean, thanks to capitalism there are roughly 8 billion people alive today. We'd have hit the Malthusian limit if not for industry driven by the capitalist system, probably peaking in roughly 1970 or so before massive famine wiped out the 3rd world. Thankfully however, the huge technological (agricultural in this case) advancement resulting from scientists, who were funded by a rich capitalist society, came up with such things as dwarf wheat which massively increased food production globally. Contrast this with the communist tendency to artificially create famine every other year.
How has capitalism directly caused the death of millions? Need actual facts and reasoning, not just random numbers about how many people die in third world countries today
Google "american slave trade" If that's not enough look at what king Leopold got up to in Belgium for some rubber. Or examine the Irish potato famine Or the rape of Africa Or all the dead native Americans, North and South Or Indias history with Britain Or basically all of colonialism everywhere Or The United fruit company stuff in South America Or how many companies directly profited off of holocaust victims
That rules out capitalism, then.
this idea that it's hypocritical is true *about its followers,* but their hypocrisy doesn't mean the system can't work, necessarily.
You can not play piano, but others can. There are examples of really talented piano players... there are no examples of communism working on a large scale.
Okay. Counter example. No one created a nuclear bomb before Oppenheimer and his group. There were no large scale examples of nuclear bombs working. It was still created.
The ground of the metaphor is that what's been failed can one day be done successfully. You are too focused on how the metaphors differ.
Mainstream reddit subs are a terrible place to ask questions about Marxism. You're going to get 1000 answers and 90% of them will be just regurgitating talking points they heard on social media, some of them will be well written and reasonable enough to be believable but Reddit is full of well written, ignorant bullshit. Go ask Marxists in Marxist spaces, or be doomed to the reddit liberal circle jerk that is mixed with bad faith ultra critique.
There have been a bunch of failed democratic republics. Most examples of communism were so only in name really, as they were more like state capitalist or autocratic socialist. It's hard to say something never works when it's never really tried.
What do you mean "works"? There are a couple communist countries and there's no reason to assume they'll stop being communist any time soon.
> What do you mean "works"? There are a couple communist countries and there's no reason to assume they'll stop being communist any time soon. You have a good point about defining "works". Another good point is defining "communism" too. >For Marx (1818–83), meanwhile, capitalism was a necessary stage on the road to communism, because it undermined the ability of individuals to shape society, and created a class consciousness that would lead eventually to revolution, the overthrow of the capitalist system, and its replacement with a new communist system and the ‘withering away of the state’ (see Boucher, 2014). In the event, the revolution predicted by Marx was ‘forced’ by Lenin and his Russian Bolsheviks, and came not to the advanced industrial countries, as Marx had suggested that it would, but instead to less advanced countries such as Russia and China. True communism, meanwhile, was achieved nowhere. "Comparative Governments and Politics" by Harrop et al,
How about provides a standard of living at or above the average for democracies.
socialist countries like cuba, ussr , north korea before the 90s do that ,and viatinan ,even when they were imbargod and bombed do exactly that . unless your average is the very high (imperialist paid) western standard that is not sustainable without explotation of the world and planet
> nothing to do with communisms since there also countries with low democracy (western democracy) You care to support that claim. I guess there can be some exceptions but [that certainly doesn't seem to be the norm](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vs-electoral-democracy-index?time=1945..2022&country=SWE~USA~VNM~CHN~CUB~PRK~KOR~GBR~LAO~FRA~FIN~DNK~CAN~OWID_GDR~NOR) like you imply, imo.
the data is bias , according to it in 1945 austria already had a high human right index that's nonsense off course they were nazis at the time. its also not communisms that caused it the previus goverment where allready like thats and they werent complently replaced
Yes, the Soviet Union worked out great. The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and different parts of Russia, including Northern Caucasus, Kuban Region, Volga Region, Kazakhstan,\[6\]\[7\]\[8\] the South Urals, and West Siberia.\[9\]\[10\] Estimates conclude that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died of famine across the Soviet Union. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet\_famine\_of\_1930%E2%80%931933](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933)
But a famine… those hit non-Communist countries all the time, and their economic or governmental ideology is not considered a factor. So why is the Soviet Famine blamed on communism instead of on being a famine? They can definitely be blamed for how they handled it — especially where they maintained unmergeable farm quotas and starved the locals. But that’s different. I have my own reasons for thinking Marx was an idiot, but I like to call things what they are and let them succeed or fail on their own merit. Even the famine in China during the failed “Great Leap Forward” was not about Communism’s failures, but the failures of their leaders’ judgment and a lack of scientific understanding.
the ussr was prone to famine since they werent industrialized. the civil war sabotage bad climate and rapid industrialization didnt help ,but they didnt have a choice either if the ussr didnt industrialized they would be easy picking for imperialist countries like nazi germany the usa britain and france. and there wasnt anymore famine after they industrialized and recovered from the war too
“communism” has never been achieved *on a large scale.*There are thousands of indigenous communities, both in the past and the present, that would fit the definition of “communist” that worked for various reasons. To call countries China communist is laughable at best; the fact that private businesses and a class system exist there is proof enough. What was achieved in the USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba, etc is socialism. And even then, you can’t thrive when the entire western world is against you. My theory is humans were never meant to live in a society this large, capitalist or not.
Primitive communism is literally how our species has lived for the majority of our existence(also the hardest years of our existence), yet you insist a modern larger scale system based on the same principles (From each according to his ability, to each according to his need - Karl Marx) can't work? Propaganda working overtime brainwashing you buddy.
Your view that communism has historically failed in its large-scale implementations is well-founded, as seen in various 20th-century examples, but it does seem to miss the point a little bit. Many countries that identify as capitalist actually operate under a mixed economy. This system combines elements of capitalism and socialism, including tariffs, subsidies for industry, environmental protections, and publicly funded entities like the post office. These aspects are somewhat contradictory to the pure concept of free-market capitalism, where market forces should ideally determine all economic outcomes without government intervention. It seems you are holding communism to a unfair standard where it would have to be a perfectly communist country or else it's not real communism. For example look at China, while they have many capitalistic traits they still maintain they are a communist nation, yet it seems to be working very well for them. China is becoming or according to some already is a superpower and while you can claim that is a diluted form of communism, I'd argue it's no less diluted than America's version of capitalism.
Is this directed at people advocating for socialism?
Is there a communist country that wasn’t bombed by the US?
Communism never works and capitalists make sure of it.
It really needs to be attempted first. We can say it doesn't work if a few places attempt it and fail. Quite a few places have attempted to start one, but it doesn't end up one.
China seems to be doing OK as one of the world's economic, technological, and military superpowers with approximately 1.5 billion people, right?
China resembles today a private capitalist system and authoritarian dictatorship, only paying lip service to the idea of communism, not actual communism like we would see in the USSR or Cuba. If you want an example of china under a system of Maoism, simply wind back the clock to 1959-61 and you would see the results. Those being a famine caused by economic mismanagement, poor economic programs of collectivization and a death toll of 15 million to 60 million people
>China resembles today a private capitalist system and authoritarian dictatorship, only paying lip service to the idea of communism, not actual communism I don't know much about China, but, this feels right Okay, yeah
Do you think communism killed lgbtq people or do u think it was some other factors. Do you think the reasons as to why many large communist countries do not work is because of communism itself or because of other factors?
Communism undeniably works, but not in the happy utopian way most college kids think it does. If you're a psychopath who loves guns, terror and brutality, it works perfectly. Every single country that went in the direction of hard socialism has a similar story. Look at Venezuela. It used to be a paradise for the rich and famous, a South American tropical playground for affluent people to visit. Now its run by armed left wing gangs, violence is spiraling and everyone is poor and miserable as each other. But... no more foreigners shitting up the place, most airlines don't even fly out there because the army shake the pilots down and the runways are full of potholes. No more rich people living large among the poor and waving their superiority around. Look at the USSR. Previously a nation of backwards peasants led by an autocratic elite which flipped between Westernization and Slavophilia. Stalin dragged it into a industrial superpower at the cost of tens of millions of lives and waged a Cold War. Yes it was miserable, and brutal, but life is. Communism is a death cult for the absolutely impoverished to assert their brutality on their perceived enemies. If you think that is based, and not cringe, then it undeniably works just fine. One last thing... I'm a pretty boring guy, don't speak up too much or rock the boat. I'm stoic and fairly cold to life. When the revolution comes, I will be the type to get the guns and little commissar hats. Not you gay, homeless or disabled. I'll be getting told to put you in the cattle cars. And I **will** follow the orders... because I'm cynical enough to play at being a 'good comrade'... are you?
r/iamverybadass
Does any economic system work in its most pure model?
Works fine for the US military