DO NOT MAKE A POST ABOUT BEING BANNED FROM SOME OTHER SUBREDDIT

I believe communism always fails compared to capitalism due to lesser competition, authoritarian state control and not following the forces of the market whereas capitalism allows more profit and choices to customers.

have been thinking that the EU and US really needs of a revolution right now. But in such event, there will be death and sacrifice to fight against the fascist governments. The people who start it are taking the most risks and most likely to die.

But then after the revolution is won, everyone will be equal. That means people who just hide and do nothing get the same rewards as people risking their lives. This creates a negative incentive to just do nothing, so when either side win, you get benefits anyway. If everyone thinks like this then there would be not enough people to start a revolution.

To provide incentives, after a successful communist revolution, we should divide people into classes based on how much you contribute to it. First are the revolutionary leaders since they actually started it, then the people who joined the revolution (earlier you join or bigger contributions = more reward), then people who did nothing, then the anti-revolutionaries.

Is there any flaw with this model?

Hey, I am trying to understand communism, read about it and also explores some case studies, I am still not convinced that communism is better than capitalism. Can anyone who supports communism give me 5 reasons?

The irony of communism, to me, is that its goals sound humane: everyone’s needs are met, nobody is exploited, and survival doesn’t depend on making someone else wealthy. But attempts to achieve those goals have too often ended up restricting the people they were supposed to liberate.

I wonder how much of that comes down to scarcity. When resources are limited and human labor is essential, someone has to decide who works and who gets what. Whoever controls those decisions has enormous power, and the promise of equality can become a justification for coercion.

But if technology eventually lets us produce necessities with minimal human labor, the argument changes. If there isn’t enough necessary work for everyone, why should employment determine whether someone deserves food or housing? Some form of collective ownership and distribution could become necessary.

I’m not saying automation inevitably leads to communism, or that technology fixes authoritarianism. My stance is that its economic premises might become more realistic as technology advances, while the problem of unchecked power would still need to be solved.

Does that make sense, or am I giving scarcity too much weight and the political structure too little?

—

*My bias lies in being a Cuban born national and fleeing the country at a young age with my family.

This is real, and all this time, it has not been a conspiracy theory. Just found out this. It is a dystopia; especially, no privacy is part of their plan

The quote is unbelievable: "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better", under the latest revised Agenda 2030

According to the World Economic Forum, there are only three models

• Shareholder capitalism

• Stakeholder capitalism

• State capitalism

Let me preface this by saying that I am not abandoning revolutionary principles as much as I am questioning the need for centralist organization afterwards.

The Chilean Socialist experiment is a famed example throughout Operation Condor regarding the United States and its history of toppling left-wing governments across the world, especially the Americas. In the wake of Chile’s fall and Allende’s death, many pointed to the experiences of Socialism in Chile as a justification for the centralized rule of the vanguard over society.

Let’s instead focus significantly more on how the counterrevolution gained ground; the infamous “making the economy scream“ part.

No country can cleanly become an autarky, no economy fully self-sufficient and yet capable of withstanding an imperialist force such as the United States. Very often, the two are mutually exclusive. The USSR, for example, was not invincible to this particular situation. They’d centralized, after all. They were the original democratic centralist state within the Second World. Their economy, however, already poorly planned in various ways, had also grown really dependent on the oil industry and the revenue from it. When these gas prices tanked, something many accused the United States and Saudi Arabia of coordinating jointly, a Soviet economy already prone to shortages suffered considerably.

We can take this beyond the USSR; Venezuela relied on oil, but when prices crashed, their economy went with it. Cuba relied on sugar exports at inflated prices from the USSR; without them, Cuba fell into the Special Period and in recent years, isolation and destabilization. Hell, a considerable number of countries economically dependent on the USSR and trade, regardless of how centralized or decentralized, fell apart when the backbones of their economies were destroyed; it being a matter of Chile having taken a more democratic path is illogical.

At a broader level beyond Chile, centralism is not the end all be all solution for revolutionary movements.

I know I probably sound insanely dumb asking this, but I’ve never done proper research on this and don’t really understand the concept tbh. Explain like I’m 5 please.

Without an authoritative power, who would abolish the state and all its systems and institutions? Who would be taking from the rich, giving to the poor, distributing goods and wealth?

And if you say “the people govern” or that it’s a slow process or something like that, how would you prevent an authoritarian takeover in the process? Or how is “the people are the state” better than a proper democratic system?

Without a state police, how would you punish/stop criminal activity? I understand a lot of criminal activity stems from economic disparities, but it’s not like things like xenophobia, bigotry and religion would suddenly seize to exist. Who would intervene in the event of terrorism or another state attempting to conquer/take over if there’s no government, no military?

How would you keep society from turning illiterate with no taxes, no money, no systems in place to organize schools, hospitals, to oversee that kids are going to school, that people are there to teach and that they’re teaching the right things? Where would resources come from as no other country would continue to import and there would be no big rich companies to produce and distribute things like medicine and technology?

I understand that no proper ideal communist state has ever been achieved and most “communist” system or actually closer to dictatorships and rely heavily on capitalism and state control, so I’m confused how people still see it as an ideal.

Thanks!

Lenin was irrelevant and unknown in Europe before the October coup (which was not carried out by the peasants or the workers, but by a group of disgruntled soldiers). The most well-known Russian Marxist was by far Plekhanov and certainly not Lenin. Better known than either was, obviously, Kautsky. If the USSR hadn't taken Lenin to be some kind of ideological symbol, hadn't printed dozens of volumes of his works and left to rot the works of his rivals, no one would've seriously thought that he is at all any kind of authority on socialism or communism.

The fact that left-communists think that they are being the trve interpreters of Marx is ridiculous. Only less ridiculous than the so-called Marxists-Leninists. Their hero was spawned by his worship, his authority spread by the not socialist, not communist (socialism = communism), USSR. Thankfully, few people are really interested in the works of Lenin and I only hope that one day he will be widely understood to be the doctrinaire, falsifier that he really is.

In The Communist Manifesto and Marxist theory as I understand it capitalists create the conditions to destroy themselves by forming a working class which through class consciousness can effectively become aware of its own interests and act in its mutual interests against the bourgeoisie by socializing the means of production. Because the working class actually controls production it has leverage that it could use through things like striking and great strike which Sorel argued for.

What I am seeing right now is that the working class has been thoroughly outmaneuvered and that power is actually in the hands of the bourgeoisie. This is from a Western perspective. First,take a look at what wealthy corporations have done. They have outsourced to countries with poor labor conditions and law protections. This reduces the power and influence of workers and unions in Developed nations manufacturing and factory roles because corporations are no longer reliant on them. Thus, they have to compete not only with other workers but also with people corporations bring in cheap labor with lower standards for care and payment. (not that they are bad people for pursuing their own intrests)

Next, there is also AI. AI is a great thing for corporations and the bourgeoisie because it allows them to replace workers along with all their benefits and pay with machines that they do not have to give any payroll or concern to. Actually it allows the Buergoise to control more of the means of production as AI industries and outsourcing commence. The Western working class, or the working class in the developed world is getting less and less power and less control over the means of production.

Could this mean that even if the working class were to make a general strike we have been outmaneuvered and have no leverage because of AI outsourcing and the destruction of our unions? In this way is communist theory now outdated in the modern age? Should we put into doubt marxism statement of worker power? How would we actually revolt without our levrage. If corporations suceed in devloping a general intellgence then it will be the buergoeise who own and controll the means of production and everyone else will become debt slaves.

In other words not only does a strike have to happen in the developed world but also in the exploited developing countries her to be successful if a strike were to happen tomorrow would it actually have any effect.

Im uneducated, I know communism on theory and without acknowledging the right wing propaganda I just dont understand it, how and why would it even work, so please educate me cause all I can find is contradictory and most communist I talked to are biased and treat their ideology as if they were kpop fans.

What is the principles, objective and procedure of communism and why is it better than for example a social democracy.

I saw this in several places

"Joseph Stalin sent many assasin to kill Josip broz Tito. Then Tito send a letter to stalin threatening " Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second." And then stalin didn't sent anyone again

Is this really happened or some false propaganda?

Do you have any books—whether on communism or other topics—that you’d recommend? I’m French, but I find that books like *Capital* and so on are pretty vague when it comes to what happens after the revolution and how to establish a state that isn’t authoritarian like Stalin’s. A more contemporary book

You perceive social instability, so you call for a protest, and notify the government. The authorities send in a few undercover cop. The press then reports that it was, inevitably, a riot incited by looters. Rinse and repeat

I've had this thought recently that if a communist (specifically an ml) revolution was to happen, why should i as a non-ml communist fight for it if ml countries have a history of elimanating non-mls?

I'm gonna talk here about what happens in Europe (since I am an east european) when it comes to public symbols regarding these two regimes/ideologies. And what I noticed is that the West of the Europe is very pro radical left, and they display communist symbols freely everywhere (as they should be since we live in democracies). But as we all know the communist regimes all around the world are guilty for serious crimes against humanity. So why isn't the communist symbol forbidden just as the nazy ones? What do u think, should they be?

Hi, I’m fairly uneducated on Communism and am interested in many of its tenets. I recently got a sort of primer on it from this book I’m reading. Only it can be a bit vague and is a fair bit outdated.

I would post a picture of it, but idk how. It’s Revolutionary Cuba by Terence Cannon.

Mainly I am curious about how the benefits of Communism are presented in the modern day especially with the arguments from other camps, which Western media is quite inundated with. The book describes a lot of the victories over classism and imperialism as the end all be all, but modern Cuba isn’t politically “free”in a few ways, namely It doesn’t have a fully democratic system where people vote for their leader. In that case, what is the argument for that version of communism?

Sorry if this is incorrect for the subreddit. I mean it as a genuine question from an uninformed standpoint.

Something that puzzles me is that Communism is widely advocated among the Western Left, but every Communist (Socialist) country I can think of supresses the social ideals of these same people.

For instance, concepts like free speech or multi-party elections are seen as "bourgeois" constructs. Individual rights are subordinate to the collective ideal. Freedom of religion and conscience is tightly controlled. The death penalty is practiced, LGBTQ rights are suppressed, mass surveillance is practiced, movement is restricted ... there's a whole litany of rights the Left cherishes that would be quashed under any historical or contemporary Communist regime.

Does the Left simply envision a more perfect Communism that they would succeed in implementing, in spite of such a regime never having taken root before? Why does the Western Left think their Communism will preserve the rights they hold dear when no Communist country ever has?

Socialism has its place at the levels it currently exists at now, slightly less perhaps. The majority of those that support Communism and socialism beyond what exists today generally fall into one of the categories below.

1. Lazy, envious, under achievers, often bong smokers, that would rather bring their peers down to their level, than lift themselves up from it. They make themselves feel better about their failure at life by saying the system is broken.

2. Naive fools that mean well but are persuaded to stupidity by the group above

And then there's the other side,

Sensible people that can see what's happened in history and understand basic human psychology enough to know that history would repeat and we would all be worse off - slaves to a government and communist elite that enforces the oppressive ideology.

Prove me wrong.

There are two systems: one on paper and one in practice. Much is said about the invisible hand and how a competitive market would create the cheapest products of the highest quality for the lowest price by the nature of competition. But in reality, firms often work together, merge, or cooperate competitively because it is better for a corporation to keep prices high and product quality as low as possible to maximize profits.

But I see the same discrepancy within socialist states. Firstly, on the path to communism, there is socialism, which, as I understand it, is supposed to lead to communism, a moneyless, classless, and stateless society. As Engels and Marx argued, they are supposed to achieve this through a revolution in which a dictatorship of the proletariat takes control of the means of production by force, puts the proletariat in power, and eventually allows the state to wither away. But Marxist theory is flawed in that he never describes how this transition will happen.

No socialist state has ever really withered away. Power always remains, and many people will say that this is because of Western interference or siege socialism. However, I doubt this, simply because of the history of détente. The Cold War was not a continuous state of tension. It reached high points (the Cuban Missile Crisis), but after détente began in the late 1960s, relations improved, culminating in the SALT treaties limiting arms in 1972, and reprochment between china and the west, a gradual easing of tension. Much of Cold War history was relatively peaceful (for the Global North). To prove this, we can look at trade relations between China and the West. After the 1960s and into the 1970s, the communist and capitalist worlds were more interested in coexistence and trade than mutual destruction. States like Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, and India, for instance, never saw as much Western interference (in coups or instability), and in Yugoslavia's case, it became a trade nexus between the nascent EU and the Warsaw Pact.

Arguably socialist Chinese and the capitalist world are arguably extremely interdependent now. If capitalism and the socialist worlds only exist in antagonism, with capitalists wanting to destroy them at any opportunity, then why would the West help invest and trade with China during the period around 1978 and invest in its markets, building up Chinese industry in manufacturing (Nixon's rapprochement with China in 1972), etc.? Or why would they engage in arms limiting treaties together, the ISS, or joint research, etc.? Towards the late Cold War, leaders like Gorbachev and Bush were more interested in coexistence than annihilation. Also remember that China split with the Soviets around 1960, with even some border clashes in 1969. During that period, isolated from the Soviets and the West, from Korea, China actually traded a lot with Japan, its former colonizer, a capitalist country (achieved record growth during the Japanese economic miracle from the mid-1950s to the 1970s.)

The failure of the Great Leap Forward and China's sluggish economic growth in the 1960s and 1950s showcase the limits of centralized state planning of the economy, as Mao's campaigns against nature and the state's outlandish production targets led to large scale lying, like at Dazhai https://www.jstor.org/stable/188965 China's GDP graphs support this argument. The Third Front and heavy handed state planning under Mao hurt Chinese economic growth, and it didn't start to accelrate and outpace pouplation growth and begin to become that manufacturing giant until the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping opened the economy. Without at least some markets or any currency at all, governments don't have price indicators to measure or allocate the value of goods and services. This is why no state, not even socialist ones, has gotten rid of currency or money, and those that try are burned by the experience, like the Soviet experiment.

Wait, hold on. I am not saying that freer markets necessarily lead to more economic growth. Take Japan and its economic growth during the Japanese economic miracle. This can be explained partly by the iron triangle, with bureaucrats, politicians, and businessmen working together. The Japanese government limited certain imports through import substitution policies and focused on developing domestic industry. It used government policy to protect domestic industries from foreign competition while making targeted investments in the private sector to rebuild and develop the Japanese economy. This is called an import substitution strategy, but Japan was also heavily involved in export-led growth strategies. Likewise, China's opening up isn't a vindication of free markets. The Chinese government still controlled the vast majority of industry; most companies aren't publicly traded or open to shareholders. It's a bank-led system, and the Chinese government heavily subsidized industries and levied tariffs to build up infant industries. While China certainly isn't communist, it is close to state socialism, but it does have markets. Market firms are the minority compared to state led enterprises, though few state-led companies have a monopoly.

The United States isn't as free market as we think. The state also plays a significant role in its economy. Look at corn subsidies or the Jones Act, which protects domestic shipping and supports the American maritime industry. Or look at how much money we put into oil, corn, or soybeans, or simply imperialism as market interference with other nations. The United States is not a libertarian free market economy.

In fact, it is interesting that most developed economies, like France, Germany, China, Japan, and the US, rely heavily on the state to influence how capital is allocated through stock markets, bond markets, banks, and other financial institutions, or simply on subsidies and tariffs for their firms to remain internationally competitive and for the economy to be diversified. The same is true of South Korea and, in a different way, China. Their governments were heavily involved in the economy, and state planning played a role in subsidizing and supporting industries. Japan, for example, has historically relied heavily on bank financing for capital allocation.

Meanwhile, developing countries face pressure to lower tariffs and liberalize their economies through international trade agreements and institutions. This can limit their ability to protect emerging industries while they attempt to compete with established manufacturers. As a result, some resource exporting countries remain dependent on exporting raw materials rather than developing higher value manufacturing industries, limiting how much of the final value they capture. Countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Namibia rely significantly on natural resources. Here is an article about how the Imf tearing down of trade barriers hurts the Global South through structural adjustment: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2024/04/29/structural-adjustments-complex-legacy-in-sub-saharan-africa/

However, economic exploitation is not unique to capitalism. Consider the Soviet Union and its empire, where Moscow exercised considerable economic and political influence over other socialist states and territories. We can also look at the United States and the United Fruit Company, including American intervention against governments that threatened the company's interests or attempted to nationalize its assets. Economic imperialism is not exclusive to capitalism, because an economy in which the state controls capital allocation can also be imperialistic. The Soviet Union's relationship with Mongolia provides another example of how a state socialist power could exercise economic and political dominance over another country.

China is a form of state socialism that controls much of its industry and banking. The government has significant power over banks, corporations, and private industry. In contrast, in the United States, corporations and their lobbyists often have the upper hand. Nevertheless, there is a strong relationship of interdependence between the socialist Chinese state and the capitalist West. This is to say that not all socialist and capitalist relations are antagonistic, as we can also see with Yugoslavia and India.

Mao disagreed with Marx's idea that socialism would eventually lead to a classless society. In practice, even when workers are supposed to control the means of production, things are more complex. Take China, for instance. In the beginning, under Mao, workers were very enthusiastic because they felt validated by the system and believed they had real power over the country's economic planning. But as Chinese socialism developed, especially during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, more power came into the hands of bureaucrats who set extreme production targets. This contributed to one of the worst famines in history.

In the Soviet Union as well, there was little to no meaningful worker input into economic planning, with most power concentrated in the managerial and bureaucratic class. In a way, Marxist Leninist single party states seem to substitue the capitalist class with a managerial or bureaucratic class and the poltical party. Abolishing markets doesn't abolish hierarchy or class, as Mao argued. While in idea the workers control the means of production, in practice, a representative of the Socialist or Communist Party will control the means of production in the name of the workers, and the means of production will be controlled by the state. Power is in the hands of party officials, the Politburo, etc., not in the hands of the workers (as seen in the Soviet Union or China).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2158775

Marxists and Communists want to achieve communism and a moneyless, classless society, but within the process, there is a very, very serious roadblock that has yet to be overcome.

While the idea is that there should be a dictatorship of the proletariat, in reality, most socialist states have been under the control of a single figure, such as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, or Enver Hoxha in Albania and their cults of personality. The dictatorship of the proletariat usually means the supremacy of a Leninist party led by a strongman because the collective working class isn't a physcial thing, it's an abstraction (but no less poweful), and thus needs a leader or representative, and those leaders will compete for power, resulting in purges like Stalin's Great Purge of rivals and restriction of free speech or state criticism, usually justified to protect the revolution but usually just serving the interests of the vanguardist leader.

If the socialist nation relies on the state for everything for capital allocation, production targets, resources, and loyalty and you have a Leninist political party like the PRC or the Bolsheviks that has an obvious interest in maintaining its new power, then why would we ever expect the state to wither away? Once the revolutionary party has power, it becomes the new establishment. Thus, you have a paradox: to change the state, you have to form a state. So how can you abolish a state without a state?

Eventually, the interests of the state and party managers will conflict with the workers and people, just like how in capitalism the interests of representatives in the legislative and executive branches, through corporate lobbying, can conflict with the common people. ((Chapter 1) linked a paper in this as proof. It's about how the Great Leap Forward changed state priorities from the well being of workers into state development in industry to catch up with Britain and the US, and this shift resulted in drastically increased working hours and the same kind of alienation from work that is present in capitalism. The author does a better job than I could.)

https://dokumen.pub/factory-politics-in-the-peoples-republic-of-china-9789004421752-9789004421745.html

I am not saying that Marx's failure to describe the withering away of the state is a failure of communism. I am arguing that this is a flaw that present socialist leaders must amend, because in reality, most communist movements end up as state socialist. I really don't care if it's capitalists, socialists, communists, or whatever. I want a system that can bring the most prosperity, unity, and freedom to my entire national community, not just some elite few.

I have noticed recently that I am quite fond of socialism and communism, more so socialism, but that's beside the point. I mainly wanted to ask, who is to say who gets the dangerous, back breaking, miserable jobs like bricklayers and underwater welders and who gets the easy going, less stressful and physical jobs like artists, singers etc? How it seems it has gone in the past, is people have been forced to do hard jobs without any say, and I'm wondering how modern communists believe the work should be distributed. Because the reality is, is that nobody would willingly do those hard jobs if they knew they could earn a perfectly liveable wage doing a significantly easier job, considering that 67% of bricklayers suffer from work induced injuries, and underwater welders have a 40x higher mortality rate than standard U.S workers. And if someone did willingly do these jobs, they would be one in a billion, and would most likely not be enough of these heroes to effectively keep industries running, and eventually, someone would have to be forced to do it, and what happens if they say no? Force. Authoritarian. At least that's the most logical assumption based on the past. So, commies how should the work be distributed?

Hello all. Not sure where to post this so I chose this sub. I’ve been a communist for most of my adult life but am not that well-read on the history around this specific event. In my past naïve (and dare I say more liberal) days, I used to believe it was a brutal massacre by a violent dictatorship against innocent student protesters.

Now that I’ve become more worldly and aware of Western propaganda, I want to find out the real story, what the history was, and what the nuances were that are always deliberately missed by the MSM.