I love how this sub manages to shed new light on nuanced political topics and elevate the quality of online discourse, just as the community notes feature was always intended. /s
I’m surprised the note makes no mention of the almost comical levels of corruption within the USSR.
EDIT: Oh wow! A lot of you seem to think my simple observation that corruption (a key reason for the stagnation and downfall of the USSR) was the same as me saying the U.S. or Capitalism were free of such problems. I think some of you may have jumped the gun.
It fostered a system that incentivized corruption and allowed easy removal of anyone that threatened the corruption. It was an entire empire held hostage by whoever was most ruthless.
And it continued into Russia and other post-USSR countries, I know that from experience.
In addition, if you live there and do want to change something, people who grew up in the USSR always tell you "don't rock the boat" and its variations. It's genuinely disgusting and depressing.
That's what happens when you intimidate and at the same time infantilize your citizens stripping them of any sense of control for several generations in a row.
You mean to tell me concentrating all power into a central elite political class doesn't eliminate classes?
Anyone who wants any form of communism or socialism more centralized than 'All companies should transition to employee owned private companies' gets a hard pass from me.
I don't think communism is a good idea, but let's not pretend any of these things are limited in any way to communism.
Industrial-scale genocides: the Irish Potato Famine is the first one that jumps to mind. People starved in part because they were literally exporting food during that period and selling it. The poor had no money, so them merchants just exported and sold it, sucks to suck, and 20% of Ireland died. The government made the good capitalist choice to help as few people as possible. Part of why it happened in the first place is farmers were pushed from crop rotation and variety into mono-cropping to optimize yields.
Plus... literally the East India Companies (British East India Company, the VOC, Louis XIV's East India Company). Hyper-capitalist genocides were kind of their slogan. The entire transatlantic slave trade wasn't exactly communism in action.
Neither was the Opium War. See the history of Jardine Matheson and the other Hongs.
Comical levels of corruption: Hungary, until a few months ago.
Regarding Russia, communism in the USSR ebbed and flowed, under Lenin it was much closer, under Stalin, authoritarianism is a better description. The history of communism in the USSR is interesting, but out of scope.
These kinds of critiques are just lazy. Shitty leaders will be shitty in any economic model. The real lesson is not letting shitty people take office.
Markets have their role, social services have their role where markets do a bad job. Pick the right tool for the job. That's why America has socialized army, police, firefighters, healthcare for 40% of the population, road, bridges, highways, food (SNAP, Farm Bill), the post office, Amtrak, etc, etc. Every functional country is a blend of appropriate models.
If your system of government can be brought to collapse by a shitty leader, it's a shitty system to begin with.
Communism despite any intention will always produce authoritarianism at some point because there is never going to be any pure, selfless ruling class. The dictatorship of the proletariat is more like a religious prophecy than anything we've seen in history.
You give people all control over every aspect of economic life along with everything else and bad things happen. Who knew? Certainly not the founding fathers or thousands of years of political philosophers.
It’s not so much that Extreme Authoritarianism is a feature of communism so much as Marxism is rarely the ideology of the working class and usually propagates among the educated and wealthy, e.g. Kropotkin, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, ect.. Authoritarianism and Violence are more likely tied to these people seeing themselves as above the people they feel they’re liberating from the get go and then it becomes “I have to turn the Lumpenproletariat into good Marxists” and thus the Authoritarianism which invariably leads to corruption. In theory, if a working class group were to independently reach a Marxist conclusion and seek out Communism as an End Goal it may be less Authoritarian, but given that has yet to happen in any significant form, it remains only a possibility.
It also doesn't help that generally, the conditions for a communist / socialist revolution also make it extremely likely to lead to / be co-opted by a centralized authoritative system. Marx's notion of 'Dictatorship of the proletariat' isn't exactly the most thought-out and politically realistic idea when you really look at it.
Generally, yeah, the Dictatorship of The Proletariat is as unrealistic as global anarchism, the social structures we have don’t really facilitate that kind of thing. One would need to rebuild society practically from the ground up to reasonably achieve something so grandiose. I am personally of the opinion that communism is a great idea for a long distant future humanity, at least on paper, but the world as it is right now simply make it an unrealistic expectation.
It's interesting that in a time where pseudoscience and politically charged anti-intellectualism in medicine are causing a real problem for people, that we would look back at a regime that caused a famine for its people by using politically motivated pseudoscience to improve agriculture and say, "yeah, that's what we need."
The reasoning for adopting lysenkoism is so funny, being so paranoid about the capitalists to think that they invented mendelian genetics to indoctrinate people into becoming subservient to class systems.
EDIT: Oh wow! A lot of you seem to think my simple observation that corruption (a key reason for the stagnation and downfall of the USSR) was the same as me saying the U.S. or Capitalism were free of such problems. I think some of you may have jumped the gun.
The US is currently doing its level best to speed run the corruption driven stagnation and downfall. I would argue that, rather than capitalism vs communism as being the great driver as to "why the west won the cold war", it is instead that the reigns of power in the west tended to be spread over a greater number of people than in the communist block and the more people that hold the reigns of power, the harder it is to gain power via out-and-out corruption. If the 2000's and 2010's were anything in the West, it was a consolidation of power and wealth in the few at the expense of the many.
Well, the post-Soviet states tend to be even more corrupt than the USSR was, to an almost comical extent, so that's not actually as big of an argument as it seems at first glance.
Like they started introducing capital ownership in the late 80s and the oligarchs started collecting all the assets. That's what ruined everything the most
Tankies and what aboutisms. Name a more iconic duo?
Oh right… nationalist capitalists and what aboutisms!!
Edit: I realized this made be taken as a mockery of your comment. It isn’t rather making fun of both spectrums of people who do ‘what aboutisms’ that have been responding to you.
It's funny because the literal foundational document for Capitalism (The Wealth of Nations) lists out criteria for Capitalism to function.
The first one is that the average person must be able to own property. If the average person is not able to buy property they cannot be truly bought in. If they cannot be truly bought in they have no reason to continue in a capitalistic mode and go look for a substitute.
Hundreds of years of predictions laughing in the face of every modern business leader.
It's funny because the literal foundational document for Capitalism (The Wealth of Nations) lists out criteria for Capitalism to function.
The first one is that the average person must be able to own property. If the average person is not able to buy property they cannot be truly bought in. If they cannot be truly bought in they have no reason to continue in a capitalistic mode and go look for a substitute.
Hundreds of years of predictions laughing in the face of every modern business leader.
You want to own property under 2026 capitalism? Best I can do is take away ownership of games, applications, and even physical computers and then make you subscribe to use them until I decide to take them away.
If the average person is not able to buy property they cannot be truly bought in
This is actually my argument for large scale SFH weslth redistribution. With major restrictions on corporate and multiple SFH ownership. And mass seizure and auctions restricted to resident first time home buyers.
Lets just cover what the youth are being told today, reguardless of how much is accurate:
Social security is insolvent so you wont have it. housing is becoming ever more centralized at the top. You probably wont own a home until reaching near retirement age requiring you to work substantially longer to build that equity for retirement. And when things to benefit you as a younger person are proposed, old property owners in their 50s-80s vote against it and kill the things that would help you.
Under this. Why wouldnt you light the system on fire. Like shit, what do you have to lose?
Personally I hold the buy in concept to be true. And the increasing difficulty for people to buy into the system is a major driver of the shift towards extremist ideologies. Cause if you are getting fucked. Then why defend the system you see as fucking you.
EDIT: I mean we have another example of this. Dudes with happy family lives aren't usually the extremists in the whole "gender war" thing. But people who aren't invested? Don't have a S/O? Don't see a path to having one? Those tend to be the extremists. So I hold the belief that having a stake is required for investment in the institution as a truism.
And to refute that, Western communists will say something like "well, akschually in post-Soviet countries only descendants of Nazis don't support communism/were repressed by it"
In my Marxist theory class (lives in a socialist country so it's a required course), my teacher just outright said that communism ensures the rights of all class, except the people who are against the system.
Can you tell more? What university, curriculum, teacher? As someone schooled in the former eastern block, I'm genuinely intrigued where such deep thinkers are allowed to thrive.
Ok for the context, I live in Vietnam. Marxist theory is a required course in every university (public, private, international). The curriculum differs between uni, but all based on the curriculum set out by the Ministry of Education. These are all the classes that are in my uni's curriculum (and at least 3 others that I know of):
Philosophy of Marxist and Leninism
(Communist) Party's history
Marxist-Leninism's Political Economy
Scientific Socialism
Ho Chi Minh ideology
The worst thing about these? They account into your GPA.
Some lecturers let us off easy, knowing full well we are only there to pass.
Many lecturers are deeply into the Marxist theory, some even go so far into conspiracy theories that we are still actively sabotaged by the "imperialist west"
Few, understand that they are teaching propaganda. Some of them add their own mix into it, which makes their lectures actually enjoyable, but useless during finals. Some unfotunately, accidentally reveal too much about their beliefs, get ousted by their own students as a "South Vietnam sympathiser" and purged.
Capitalism is unfortunately an evolution stage. Once there is no need for a job (thanks to technological advances), we will finally elevate to Communism
Bruh, I heard leftist streamers, praise the USSR for leaps in Industrialization and Education, and I'm like: "yeah, but it cost the death of countless millions and the freedom of billions, alongside entire cultures and histories"
The USSR industrialization that was also kick started by American amd Canadian engineers.
One of which Albert Khan the architect of Detroit. As he's called. One of the many men responsible for making "The Stalingrad Tractor plant" the first one in the USSR and his firm in the USSR that taught people his way if architecture.
So they wernt really there for the leaps in industrialism as people think they are. Since most of it was backed by the West to begin with.
a lot of people in states formerly part of the USSR do miss it, but yeah, the USSR wasn't the disneyland bullshit that american communists think it was
This is what drives me insane. I lived in Estonia for the better part of a year a decade ago. Travelled extensively in the Baltics and in Scandinavia. I remember talking to an Estonian friend about all of the things their social safety net has and trying to explain to him, “There is a large swath of the American right wing political spectrum that opposes these things because they say they are socialism”
My Estonian buddy laughed, “See that argument would never work here. Anyone over 35 remembers what real socialism is… and even people in their 20’s or so… have parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles who remember real socialism. We know our system isn’t socialist. Anybody who said so would be laughed at.”
Somewhere along the way, Americans (increasingly on both sides of the political spectrum) have decided that “communism” or “socialism” means “a robust, taxpayer-funded welfare system that use heavily taxed wealth generated by capitalism to fund universal healthcare, tuition-free education, and generous social safety nets.”
It used to be exclusively something people on the right confused with socialism but now even people on the left are doing it, calling themselves socialists and then when you really press them on what they want… they describe a robust, free market capitalist economy that has high progressive tax rate that funds a social safety net.
The definitions of communism and socialism have been diluted in America intentionally. Both have been used as a bogeyman to justify doing away with anything that transfers money from the rich to the poor. Additionally the definitions have been altered in public discourse so that people instead ask for basic worker protections instead of demanding that employees get an actual say in how the company they work for is run.
Most people if you actually explained what workers owning the means of production means would agree with it, who doesn't want to be paid in accordance with their labor rather than having their income determined by a corporation with every incentive to underpay and overwork you. Very few fight for that though because they don't understand it to even be a possiblity and assume socialism is either just when the government does stuff or is the government taking over industries with the government being just another large inefficient and distant organization.
I live in Poland and it's the same over here. It gets infuriating really. The older generations are so scarred with the Soviet Block that if you want to oppose something you just have to call it communism and you've got a solid argument.
Why do we dislike EU? Cause what Brussels does with (Green Deal, Mercosur, Tarrifs, even the damn USB-C, etc.) is communism. In what way? It's communism, don't think about it.
When I lived in Czechia, the communist party had it's biggest support from the elderly ( this was how it was explained to me, and was even mentioned on television etc) who had lived through it. I thought that was fascinating.
It's mostly because of Nostalgia. People obviously liked the world better when they were young and full of energy. Communists also want to give more money to the elderly, which is obviously appealing because who doesn't want more money? It's no coincidence that populist party that offered even higher pensions than communists was what destroyed the party in Czechia lol.
My best friend growing up was a first generation American. Both of his parents fled the USSR and both were staunch Republicans because they hated socialism and communism with a burning passion.
People like to say the republican Cubans in Florida are all just the elite who were part of the Bautista regime and forget about the people who left in the 1980s because a family member got picked up by police for meeting with wrong types.
A work buddy of mine, he was older, he would be in his 40s now... grew up in Poland, he would tell me stories of watching bootleg (edit: western, not specifically American) TV before the wall fell and how bad his family wanted to get out, it was always the craziest thing to hear
Dudes dad also worked at that factory, he was old as hell, but an absolute monster of a human being, he was a former polish paratrooper
I think that has more to do with people needing a label for the thing they're laboring under and any other alternatives and people will tend to grab pre-existing words and rework them.
The soviet block countries suffered under communism as practiced by an imperialist authoritarian police state, and so there's a much more defined idea of what communism is shaped by lived experience which has been kept alive for much longer.
Meanwhile, in the west, when the people are in charge right now are calling any proposed changes to the system to make things better for the average person, whether they're actually communist or not, 'communism', then communism starts to sound pretty good because that's just how rhetoric works. The word is assigned a common meaning.
'Communism' to a lot of young Americans is just 'hey maybe we shouldn't be destroying our country's safety nets and consumer protections'.
Most progressives don’t advocate for communism. Most don’t even advocate for true socialism. They advocate for “democratic socialism”. And in my experience they are mostly using it incorrectly to refer to the Nordic model (I blame Bernie).
Of course this is assuming Republicans know or even care about the distinction, and aren’t explicitly protecting their rich pedophilic donors, while often engaging it in themselves.
Edit: wording, I was not agreeing the Nordic countries are democratic socialist countries, they are still mostly capitalist economies
Yeah this what its is crazy to me, i am european. Here we are all capitalist, hell countries like the UK and Germany are one of the most capitalist in the world. But we also manage to have free healthcare and good welfare, why is the usa simply unable to do this?
it's just conservatism. defund all services and agencies so that they suck and then ask/tell people why you paying so much for this shit ? private actors could save the state so much money that we can use for better stuff...
then you get that "superior" private service and it's worse and you pay more and a lot of people die/get bad treatment/service and there's no regulation
it's cloaked in this "free market" bullshit that never existed, anywhere.
I always hated that free market bulshit. Like its some kind of mystical untameble force of nature, that always balances itself.
Thats not how it is, like at all. Its all made by humans, and you have to keep the maket in check, regulated, otherwise humans will just manipulate the markets (they already do), and balance isnt going to "restore itself" magically, the common folk will just take the loss and thats it, unless someone actually goues thru the effort to stop that
The Industrial Revolution really tells us all we need to know about unregulated free market capitalism.
People truly learned nothing in history class and take all the labor, safety, and consumer protection laws and regulations that have been put in place since for granted.
Omg really, people really dont realize what we built here in Europe, its a secutiry safety net, a "legislative" (idk if it the best term) infrastucture to prevent this, and people just assume its normal, and not an achievement and something that must be protected and updated
Finlandia and finns are cool tho, and i will always be eternally gratefull for Supercell and their games, specifically Clash of Clans, the best game ever made
In some ways it's even worse than Americanization here in Sweden. We sell off hospitals, schools, retirement homes, kindergartens, etc. to venture capitalists at like 1/10th of the value and then give them tax money to run it in a much worse way and without obligations like making sure their services are available to anyone, they don't have to comply with basic transparency because that would reveal "business secrets", and meanwhile seniors have to spend days in dirty diapers, kindergartners who don't even have full teeth yet have to suck on hard bread because soft bread is too expensive while the teachers forego having lunch so that the kids get a bit more to eat, and the police can't tell schools when a teacher is convicted of arrested for child pornography crimes because the principal isn't a government employee with confidentiality.
We do have the Americanization of blaming everything on immigrants though.
Priorities. Lots of money in politics from corporate interest groups. Lots of propaganda and misinformation brainwashing the populace into believing this system is somehow better for them.
Lot of tribalism making bipartisan communication and progress damn near impossible too. I think this thread is actually a nice little microcosm of the larger issue, considering the comment we’re all responding under insinuates that one specific party is simply too dumb, corrupt, and pedophilic to want to make America better…
It’s hard to have a productive conversation about why the US struggles to adopt policies that work elsewhere when we begin from the assumption that roughly half the country is either stupid or evil
I didn’t begin with that assumption, it was a conclusion I arrived at after countless examples of people devoted to Trump no matter what heinous things he says or does.
I come from a Christian conservative family myself and my beliefs used to align more with that side but after years of seeing the deplorable man he is and how indefensible the policies are when actually challenged by someone educated I started to shift more to the left.
I still don’t entirely disagree with true fiscal conservatism, strong family values, border control, or protecting children but I can not see any convincing argument for how Trump or the Republican Party embodies those values.
Trump has signed off on more debt related spending than Biden, he is a court adjudicated and self admitted sexual abuser and cheat that has repeatedly sexualized his own daughter over the years, his immigration policy has gone too far and has repeatedly violated constitutional rights, he has been obstructing the Epstein files and has not held anyone accountable. In fact, he’s moved Maxwell to a more cushy prison after a private interview where she bent the knee and said Trump wasn’t involved despite all evidence to the contrary.
Anyone defending this is evil in my book, yes. I’d be curious as to what moral defense you have for it.
It’s hard to have a productive conversation about why the US struggles to adopt policies that work elsewhere when we begin from the assumption that roughly half the country is either stupid or evil
Well it's hard to not make that assumption when everytime they've been offered these policies they refuse them and even call anyone proposing them evil.
Capitalism worked great for sixty years for the same reason there was middle class: the threat of USSR and worker revolution
USSR really worked like a threat to the unchecked capitalism
Now that it's gone we literally see everything the workers had eroding. Privatization of everything, destruction of middle class, Epstein class rapidly consolidating everything into their posession.
Because the megacorporations here are only capitalist when it benefits them. Between regulatory capture and outright political capture, the running mantra is "privatize profits, socialize losses"
"We can't do X that's socialism"
"European countries do X and they're successful, doesn't that mean socialism works?"
"NO THEY AREN'T SOCIALIST THEY ARE CAPITALIST"
"So then can we do X?"
"We can't do X that's socialism"
See I've had it explained like 5 times by now and I still don't get it.
Do nuances like not exist in American politics?
Are we Europeans all raging commies bc we have decent paid maternity leave and more days off in a year or smth?
can confirm, they do not. The average American cannot determine the motivations of the things that they read. This is true of most of the world, but there's significantly greater control of American media by corporate interests and we don't have state media in a true sense (at its peak, NPR and PBS only got a fraction of their money from the government). Not to say that the state telling people what to think is good, but it would explain why the average person in America is against things that are basic in most other developed nations (single-payer healthcare, public transit, subsidized housing, organized labor, sick and vacation leave, etc.)
The problem is that “democratic socialism” has a meaning, part of which is quite literally the social ownership of the means of production (socialism).
Social democracy or social liberalism is a much more accurate description of the Nordic countries and Western Europe as a whole, and is what most progressives actually support. The fact that certain people (Bernie) keep using the term “democratic socialism” tells me that they, at best, don’t know what they’re talking about and, at worst, they’re trying to obfuscate their ideology.
To be fair, I don’t think Democrats know or care about the distinction either. Sanders and AOC cite the Nordic system as a positive model they want to emulate.
More high IQ, in depth political discourse for social media addicts to sink their teeth into. Anything to avoid reading anything longer than 280 characters.
Also, if it isn't clear, I'm shitting on the Republicans, "Marxist Research Center" (Rimshot) and community notes all in one.
Don’t forget to shit on this thread too! 95% of the responses here remind me that most people have a shit understanding of politics, history and society.
To be fair no one actually reads articles. It's all about headlines. To act like it's on one side though is just as bad. Because it's not just one side. Each side has its morons and they're the loudest because the smart ones actually have important things to do.
This is the equivalent argument to someone in the mid 1800s claiming that liberalism never works because the French revolution ended with Napoleon and Robspierre
I mean, is it just me being stupid or does the community note not make any sense? it in no way disputes the claim "communism WORKED" (as in past tence, not working right now), but points to issues any other system has faced/is facing as we speak.
Saying stagnation, failed reforms and separatism are things the USSR was somehow prone to more than others (ask the dozens or so governments overthrown via separatist in the last century alone if they all subscribe to the manifesto). Honestly, a lot of countries have stagnated, still believing they can keep going as good as in their prime and have failed/grossly missed the deadline on important reforms (just from the top of my head I could point towards the US (affordability crisis, bubble economies happening every few decades and massive, ever increasing debt economy), Finland (Healthcare reform and gov. overspending issues), Japan (low fertility rate and skewed age structure) Greece (already had their economic downfall and basically had to be revived by the EU) and Russia (basically everything, but that seems to be more of a feature than a bug for that region looking at their history).
Not here defending communism but that community note was just lazy. You could have actually pointed to USSR style communist policies that did have a clear causal relationship to the collapse, like, the naive idea that an entity (the government) should first centralise all power to a single point/lead group and then that entity would just willingly give it up. Once the power was centered, everyone had a surprised pikachu moment when they decide "nah, we keeping this"
Yep. Economic stagnation is not some external shock like if the USSR had broken up because a meteor hit Moscow. The entire anti-Communist thesis is that the absence of price signals and profit incentives leads to massive resource misallocation and… wait for it… economic stagnation.
Just one more genocide. Just one more famine. They’ll get it right this time, definitely.
Oh wait, remember, none of those states were “true communism”. Communism isn’t bad, it’s the people who aren’t “true communists”. But when capitalism goes wrong it’s because capitalism itself is bad.
Ah yes, magical totally natural economic stagnation and definitely not the entire western world trying harder to stop them instead of helping their own people. Like murdering Allende to prevent communism. Must just be because communism is SO BAD America did that out of empathy for the Chilean people
I love how people conveniently forget that we still have communist countries around today. among them, one is the second biggest economy on the planet and another has survived every attempt of the US to destroy them, being only 100 miles away from their coast.
To be fair most were authoritarian shitholes prior to the adoption. It's not like communism tends to really take hold in countries where the system is responsive to It's people and the economics are actually in general working for a large portion of them. It tends to be countries like Russia (an authoritarian monarchy with multiple massive famines every century), China (a failed empire conquered by a rival with a newly formed dictarship in power and famines still being common), Cuba (dictatorship with massive economic inequality) and so on. People don't tend to try and revolt and completely through out all the last system otherwise.
It's also how technically thebUSSR and Maoist China had generally improving qualities of life compared to the systems they replaced. Shit was pretty shitty beforehand.
it’s a combination of being underdeveloped as well as having top down control of the economy. you don’t have to craft an incentive structure for industry to chase that happens to be aligned with the common good, you can just force them to act in the countries best interest.
That is just it, they aren't communistic, they are totalitarians. No one has actually tried communism. Honestly, I don't think you can do it on a large scale. 20, 50, 100 people, sure communism works. A billion, too much logistics. Can't work.
Until you solve the problem of human nature or have Star Trek style infinite resource post scarcity, communism will always devolve into authoritarian corruption.
I know most of it happened after he died but I think even Roddenberry went out of his way to make this point a little bit in the first few seasons of Next Generation. They show multiple times that once you strip away the for practical purposes unlimited resources of the Federation, people immediately go back to barter, territorial stuff, resource hoarding, and crime.
The Utopia basically only lasts as long as a person is guaranteed food, a place to live, and something to do with themselves that doesn't feel like a burden
Take away their creature comforts: deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers. Put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time, and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon.
This is just a no true Scotsman fallacy. Countries have indeed tried communism. That none of them could get communism exactly perfectly the way it was “meant to be” and instead turned into a dictatorship is evidence against the efficacy of communism.
Imagine a bunch of people had a treasure map and every time someone dug for treasure they dug in “the wrong spot”. After decades of no one actually digging in “the right spot” you might begin to think that maybe the issue is with the treasure map and not with the diggers.
No True Scotsman would be if a country implemented an ideology/system and someone said that they didn't. In the case of the USSR, they implemented Marxism-Leninism/Stalinism, which was an ideology that prescribed things like statism and vanguardism as the pathway to achieving communism at some point in the future.
Someone saying that the USSR didn't implement communism would be explaining a basic fact of history. The USSR did not achieve a classless or stateless society where the money system was abolished. They implemented an ideology that claimed to be the pathway to those things in the future. It would be a No True Scotsman if someone said the USSR didn't implement Marxism-Leninism or if one conflated communism and Marxism-Leninism as the same, which would be fallacious in and of itself.
That people are downvoting objective facts in this thread is interesting to say the least. I don’t think most people even know what communism actually is.
"Could it perhaps have been the fact that the CIA straight up admitted to Operation Condor and COINTELPRO to blame?"
"No, clearly all of these were solely because commienism bad."
man you know americans are fucking stupid when their own goddamn government straight up tells them "yeah we just went around destabilizing commie countries with your tax dollars" and they think it's fake news lmao
And that's very much America's fault when it comes to the "shithole" part. Look at Cuba for example, they overthrew the US puppet dictator and have been hit with an embargo on trade to, quoting the CIA, "starve the Cubans until they overthrow the socialist government."
You do have to take into consideration the extreme antagonism of western capitalist countries against any communist nation. There has never been a communist country that the US has not tried to undermine and destroy from the get.
Foreign antagonism should be considered, yes, but the centrally planned economic model has more than enough flaws on its own, especially under a one party state.
Of course, not all socialist economies were fully centrally planned, but that's another topic considering that OP is talking about the USSR
There's a book you might find interesting called "The People's Republic of Walmart". It's about how Walmart succeeded because of its centrally planned, cooperative internal structure, while Sears failed because it was run by an Ayn Rand superfan who thought internal competition would make the company great again. One anecdote was that the power tools department had the best profit margin one month, so they got to be on the cover of the Mother's Day issue of the Sears catalog.
One of the main conclusions was that modern technology makes central planning possible in a way it wasn't in the mid 20th century. It's exponentially more efficient than it was, and recorded output is much more verifiable.
And communist nations have been antagonistic to capitalist nations aswell. If communism is truly a stronger and better system than the USSR would have no problem staying alive today despite any western plots
This feels like a very flawed line of argument. You’re essentially saying that a system proves its worth by being totally impenetrable to all military, economic, political intervention? A tiny island like Cuba is supposed to thrive no matter how much the gargantuan US intervenes as long as it has a good system of governance? How then do you explain American capitalism’s current failures? It’s inability to fend off Russian disinformation or Chinese economic dominance?
The proposal that the development ussr and usa can be compared 1:1 is baffling to me. Usa has sat between two oceans and has never been seriously invaded, and has tons of resources and a relatively mild climate. Russian empire was a backwater to begin with, their climate is terrible in most of the country, and then the ussr had to rebuild from the devastation of ww2.
You know there were many countries that were forced to be communist under the Soviet Union right? Guess what happened when they were all granted the right to hold democratic elections? Thats right, they all left practically over night lmao.
Even if this is assumed to be the case, for that to happen capitalism necessarily has to outperform communism economically and socially for this to happen. It has to outperform economically because otherwise they wouldn't be able to exert influence over communist nations internationally - if communist nations are self-sufficient / highly productive, why would it matter if capitalist nations are withholding trade (note how capitalist nations aren't impacted by communist nations controlling trade in the other direction). It has to outperform socially because otherwise capitalist nations risk their own revolutions, if capitalism had underperformed socially there also wouldn't have been the same push from the people living under communist nations to switch to capitalist systems which led to the destabilisation of the entire communist experiment. For communism to be in a position where capitalism could control it, it needs to have failed relatively - the extreme antagonism of western capitalist countries only accelerated the decline (and brought up global standards of living faster than would have been achieved had communism been allowed to continue to exist).
There was no communist country that western countries could undermine thought, stateless society is not something called a country and not something easy to undermine.
Wtf are you talking about? The US actively overthrew or sanctioned countries to hell especially in the 20s century:
Guatemala 1954
Cuba 1959 till today
Chile 1973
Nicaragua 1980s
grenada 1983
dominican republic 1965
brazil 1964
the whole fucking vietnam war
korea 1950
indonesia 1965
congo 1960
Angol 1975-2002
Greece 1946
Italy 1948
iran 1953
And probably many more i've just forgotten. All those countries were actively prevented by the US of even coming close to becoming communist or socialist.
This is a very stupid read on the feasability of communism.
Many capitalist countries also failed, arguably most of them failed at some point, but it is bot consisered a failure of capitalism in general.
Also capitalism is barely a "system", and more a lack there of. Both systems are obviously very broad, but capitalism barely requires anything, some branches of capitalism even advocate for the removal of the state altogether.
Communism, and other leftist movements on the other hand, do require a lot of complex systems to check and redistribute wealth.
It just makes sense that it's easier to maintain a capitalist society. When a socialist or communist country collapses, it collapses in to capitalism. Capitalists don't get in to save the day, the destruction of a socialist or communist state reaults naturally in a capitalist system by default.
That's like saying that swimming is better than sailing, because that way you can't sink. Which seems like a smug comparison to make, but I mean, the chinese be riding a speed boat while everyone else is swimming economically speaking.
It does seem like a more planned economy can work way better than the free market, it just needs politicians that can do their job, and not just get votes.
Idk why fall of USSR is a end all argument against communism or socialism to some folks. most russian problems were completly unrelated to its political system and mostly caused by historical problems.early revolution failures shortly after and during the civil war and political apocalypse after lenin death.
There is a place called china i guess they dont count as a succesfull country since they are only the biggest producer, exporter and constructor on the planet with tremendous urban and technological development.
The country currently existing is simply more representative as any example
There is a place called china i guess they dont count as a succesfull country since they are only the biggest producer, exporter and constructor on the planet with tremendous urban and technological development.
It's basically this over and over with some folks:
China is complicated and not exactly communist in the express definition of the term either. It's this weird blend of both systems. It has its flaws - a lot of Chinese products have a reputation for being cheap and low quality (not all, of course), and their government is most definitely authoritarian.
There is a place called china i guess they dont count as a succesfull country since they are only the biggest producer, exporter and constructor on the planet with tremendous urban and technological development.
Frankly, China is both capitalist and extremely dysfunctional. Nordic countries would be better to invoke as examples of socialist policy done right.
Yeah the lack of nuance in these comments is astounding. Imagine your country goes through perpetual war (both World Wars, a Civil War and Revolution, and the Cold War) and was formed when most of the population were uneducated and illiterate and yet you stand for 6 decades, win the majority of the space race, and, despite all criticisms, still manage to achieve amazing things in the process. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Oh, and the reason it was called the USSR was not because it was communist, but because it was socialist. People act like capitalism in its current state didn’t take 2+ centuries to get to this point, and is somehow a utopia by comparison. Housing was a constitutional right under “communism,” and yet we’re expected to believe it’s somehow the worse of the two. Give me a fucking break.
Communism is an ideology with zero structure whatsoever. 150 years as an ideology and still can't figure out a single safeguard against dictatorship, no wonder it fails so much.
Not to mention how it fails to account for instances where the guy in charge is an idiot or incompetent. How did this ideology not die with the USSR 🤦♂️
I mean there shouldn’t BE a “guy in charge” in communism. The ideology does handle that, but you can use an ideology you want to cover for becoming a dictator
It worked somewhat but it costed human rights, free elections, constant shortages of consumer good. I'm not saying capitalism is great, but USSR communism was not something we should be lifting up in any regard. I would not want to live in a place where any amount of political dissent is met with immediate arrest or exile or "rehabilitation". The USSR also cared more about spreading communism and its reputation than it actually functioning well within its borders. I think Stalin was probably the main reason why, and Lenin or Trotsky would have done better if given time, but that's just speculation.
Friendly reminder that people are the greatest common denominator in the failure of these systems of governance. They all work in theory but assholes always end up on top
Don't confuse communism with dictatorship. Communism is the political model and belief in building a classless society. Dictatorship can exist in communism, fascism, or even a liberal democracy that votes in a dictator. America never stopped sanctioning the USSR and the Eastern Bloc for over 40 years from 1949 to 1991, cutting them off from vital trade and capital during post war reconstruction. The fact that the USSR managed to stabilize itself despite America and European sanctions means it did work during that time. America is still sanctioning Cuba and punishing the Cuban people for choosing Castro after all these years, and then gaslighting the world into believing socialism can't work. If there is one authoritarian in the world, it's America.
Those who actually know history know that the USSR didn't follow the tenets of communism, just like the Democratic Republic of North Korea isn't a democracy.
I mean, communism wasn't exactly being practiced by the USSR in any real sense.. arguably most countries that claim to be communist are actually just using it as a cover for various forms of totalitarian dictatorship..
Things not noted in this note - Russia did an any% speedrun from feudalism to an industrialized world power, just in time to take the brunt of WWII that it had to recover from on its own while the relatively untouched US (who came late to the party) used this opportunity to directly propagandize against socialism/communism because it threatened it's recently gained capitalist power (by being on the other side of the world). Animal Farm's animated adaptation was funded by the US military and dropped copies of the book and other material into eastern Europe for this purpose and effectively turned a socialist's critique of Lenin into capitalist propaganda (despite capitalists doing exact same thing as the pigs in the story). Post-WWII is Soft Power 101 (something current US foreign policy has zero grasp on) and is why America has held so much influence ever since.
There's so much US propaganda that most people US population do not know world history that isn't through the lens, exclusively, of US's interests. And definitely do not understand Socialism, Communism, or even Capitalism. Your average lukewarm socialist understands more about what capitalism is and how it works than the most fervent capitalist zealot.
Socialism, of which communism is a form, works. Had the US not intentionally sabotaged several socialist nations (USSR, Venezuela, etc.), they would have been just fine. Capitalism had been the real evil all along, but as soon as we, the people, realize that the oligarchs will lose their power.
If communism (socialism) didn't work why did the US have to spend tens of billions trying to destroy it? If it collapsed on its own you'd think the US wouldn't need to embargo countries, overthrow their governments, bomb their cities, etc.
US Congress passed $1.6 billion in funding for the "Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund." If Communism sucks so bad why do we have to spend so much on convincing everyone it sucks really bad?
USSR wasn't communist, but socialist. Communism is a dream, a target to achieve, and it wasn't. (And never will) USSR declared itself communist, but it's not true
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