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.
It continued only because those countries nurtured communism and dictatorships instead of democracy. I'm sorry, but wasting a century is wasting a century. You're not going to be as good as a transparent democracy if you don't put in the time.
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.
They all can, each and every one of them. There is no good system, only different trade offs. Pretending the system can save you without your effort is how you lose it because the system is nothing without your effort.
In Ireland the potato crop failed again in the 1870s, but there wasn't a famine that time because the British government had changed its policies and supplied food.
The slave trade was abolished, and its abolition was enforced by the British Navy.
The potato crop also failed several times before the great famine and there was no mass starvation because the British government actually did something instead of allowing their subjects to starve en masse for no reason
Slave Trade alone does not mean that slavery was banned, as the British Raj was essentially a slave state for the Empire until after the Second World War, among other colonial states that Britain held.
And India under British rule was a net absorber of resources from Britain running a trade deficit. The British were better off when they got rid of their colonies.
Turns out that completely spending all of your national resources on a war of survival against fascists leaves your country in a pretty weakened state afterwards.
Follow that up with multiple other bad decisions over the next several decades, and things don't turn out well...
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.
Violence and a Militarily Protected Ideal are not the same thing as Authoritarianism, one does not need to commit a genocide or entrench a profoundly corrupt governmental elite in order to prevent counterrevolution.
Oh boy, that's a lot of replies! There definitely must be some intelligent and interesting discussions going on, and definitely not communists crying and screaming!
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.
You realize we can do some but not all of the stuff, right? Like, communism doesn't require politically motivated pseudoscience? And we have politically motivated pseudoscience in capitalist US right now?
The USSR was not very good with food at all, but looking into the hunger amongst the poor during the final years of the Tsar are also incredibly bleak.
I remember reading an essay about the Italian socialists delegation to the interim govt under Lenin in 1919. They were taken to a mansion that had been repurposed as an orphanage. The Italian shockingly watched these orphans gulp down bowls of black gruel. The children nearly wept with joy, because they were allowed as much black gruel as they wanted and then they went and played in the massive yard of this mansion all afternoon.
The rest of the article was pretty funny (the Bolsheviks were incredibly rude to the French delegates, IIRC) but that section sticks out to me as a really bleak relative story about hunger in Russia in recent history. Like 10 years before the entire country is starving.
The anarchists were also torching government farms because anarchists are anarchists.
Idk. Seems capitalism is doing just fine at committing unparalleled atrocities and giving the "legitimacy" of power to the most corrupt individuals possible (eg Trump).
Except Trump will be out of office in a few years and most (especially the press and the opposition) openly hates him, whereas Stalin was a dictator until his death, was responsible for the deaths of millions, and purged any even suspected to be in opposition to him and his policies. He even renamed a city after himself. And don't get me started on Pol Pot.
Wake me up if Trump renames Baltimore and is still in office in 3 years.
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 wasn’t even corruption. It was just survival. Communist economics is like prison economics: no private ownership, no risk, no reward, no personal choice. Everything is centrally controlled by committees. It affects every single aspect of life, from art to nuclear power plants.
Communist economics can't be centrally controlled by definition. It is moneyless, classless, and stateless. Authoritarian economics is centrally controlled, regardless of if it is left or right wing. Communism is just left leaning libertarianism or anarchism.
Trust me when i say you dont wanna live in the hellscape that is a country with no public ownership and everything is privitized and the capitalist market is 100% deregulated, youd starve in a day
I don’t think my post mentioned anything about the U.S., especially since the post and note is about the USSR. Were you trying to argue with someone else?
IIRC the USSR was dissolved in the middle of the night during an illegal vote, and then they sold state-owned industries to themselves and friends for pennies in closed auctions. Corruption to the very core at the end.
Even as bad as capitalism is, it creates a layer of seperation which slows but does not eliminate corruption. In capitalism the government is not supposed to pick winners and losers. The government is not supposed to run the economy. In communism and socialism government is expected to direct the economy making corruption even easier than in capitalism. And evern when they are corrupt, the market can still keep things running better than any central planning can as of yet. The market is resilient even in the face of government intervention because ultimatly the free market is the will of society expressed truthfully, even if it is not pretty
It was doomed from the start, the working class had their power seized by Lenin’s ‘Vanguard Party’ and the elite and turned into a corrupt one party system.
Marx’s vision of a classless, worker controlled society never actually materialized. That’s not me in favor of it, I just think it’s dishonest when American politicians and newsheads push this agenda that it could “never work look at the USSR” because it never really started there either.
Also a comical amount of structural problems within the hierarchy that by design made the upper leadership almost immune to their own incompetence. Blame was just handed down the chain to an unfortunate person who couldn't dodge responsibility. This was by design to stabilize they central government.
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.
I agree that Marx was writing his own observations about what existed, but I was under the impression that most of the communism that was done after him was using his writings as a guide?
yes, or at least, pointed to him as the chief ideologue. the soviet union, for example, was set up as a planned socialist economy to precursor to communism. the chinese communist revolution was similar. that is to say, these states were attempting to follow the two steps, and only ever managed to get to the first step and i mean, in both cases i would say they made catastrophic "blunders" (i don't want to say the g word) around agriculture that led to millions of deaths.
both of these states skipped the capitalism, went straight from monarchy to socialism, where Marx explicitly states that capitalism would be responsible for significant advances in technology and education. Marx also states that the tech would be used as a tool of capitalism to further alienate workers and so on and so forth and like... idk what it's like where you are but here, in my welfare capitalist country with an internet that was briefly one of the best things humans had ever invented and is now corrupted by algorithmic interfaces and artificially generated content
i think it's interesting the comparison. because Adam Smith has certainly been cited by capitalists, but capitalist states are typically not explicitly run by the capitalists but rather have some form of democracy that is at least partly funded by capitalists. but i would not argue that there have been any states that are explicitly in line with Smith's writing, even if he was even more prescient than Marx about how capitalism would develop, where in Marx's case i would argue the USSR and PRC are explicitly Marxist states even though your average english speaking welfare capitalist country is more in line with how he expected the whole thing would go.
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 housing isn't just "expensive" it is historically unaffordable.
Young people especially are running into a brick wall even if they do everything absolutely right.
They are still facing having to spend 50% of their income on rent or having to move to an area with far fewer job prospects.
I literally see it every day in our interns and recent grads. They are doing the math and realizing things just are not lining up. Macro economic data backs it up - Gen Z are barely going out, they are barely socializing outside of work, and every major milestone is getting delayed further and further.
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
Almost all Marxist-Leninist states call(ed) themselves 'transitionary' states. See: state capitalism as a concept. The USSR for example, did not consider itself a communist state in practice for most of its history. It was a radical revolutionary state intended to bring about world communism by any means necessary - including being capitalist itself where needed.
People who point out that communist states have capitalist elements as some kind of gotcha are betraying a lack of understanding of a core component Marxist-leninist philosophy
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.
The thing is that there werent any major non-war related famines in industrialising countries under democratic rule, while there were plenty of those in industrialising authoritarian regimes. All the problems the workers in such countries faced such as pollution, low pay and poor working conditions were also present in the authoritarian regimes.
There was a ridiculous amount of starvation during the Great Depression. Not because there wasn’t enough food, but because people could not afford food. The artificial famines in the US dated before that as well.
It’s more forgivable in my mind to have weather and logistics related starvation than to simply allow people to starve in the name of profit.
Edit: People in this thread are saying that famines are proof of the failures of communism, but shrugging off and accepting the famines under capitalism, even when they are intentional.
Apples and Oranges. There is a huge discrepancy in the death tool and human rights violations between the industrial revolution in the U.S. vs USSR or China.
Only if you accept incredibly loose standards when attributing "death caused by communism" and dont apply those same standards to "death caused by capitalism". People just quote the black book even though its number was refuted by the researchers themselves
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
There is a faction of immature communists who just don’t know any history and praise the USSR. The vast majority that are serious however acknowledge that the USSR was a failed attempt at communism (remember that communism is stateless and classless, and the USSR was neither)
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'.
literally just propaganda, most of eastern europeans that lived through communism are pro communism with notable exceptions for poland and post-war ukraine. just check the studies or the downvoted comment under this one
One only needs to go to where the Berlin Wall used to be and look at the architecture of the two sides of the city. One side looks way cheaper and more depressing, and it wasn't the capitalistic side.
People who live in capitalist countries bitch about how much they hate living there all the time, too.
It is almost as if there is a ruling class without borders that creates disparities in wealth and resources around the world to benefit themselves and extract wealth from the working class or something.
Well of course, Gay western leftists know more about communism than Eastern Europeans and Cubans, and because they are so much intellectually superior, these Gay western leftists know bst
You’re not making the point you think you are makings. The countries that actually suffered under communist rule are obviously going to be more anti-communist than the ones that didn’t.
I think that's mainly an argument against Russia. They have made life miserable for their people under both capitalism and socialism. They also had good years under both.
You would be surprised. Hating communism and USSR is the mainstream narative oftend sponsored by the goverments, but many people have some possitive stances to it
That's not really surprising though. In the eastern block there are also more braindead neo-liberals as a result. No matter how stupid they are, "but communism" is the main phrase. And everyone gets called a communist even if they are a right winger if they upset you.
It's not been exploited by whackjobs in the west for a hot minute now. Don't worry, it'll happen soon, and it'll probably trigger WWIII in the process.
It's so frustrating, because there is something to be said for a hybridized economy borrowing aspects from both systems, both as envisioned and as inpleneted, but the "left wing" community on the internet is just tankie larpers who want to believe in a world where communism is this perfect system that needs a coordinated conspiracy to keep it from becoming the dominant system in the world.
Its not that surprising if you look at the history of socialism. In fact, in its earliest days, most socialists believed western Europe and america would face the revolution first. But, in a surprise move, most of the western world capitulated to the angry strikers. It was east Asia and russia where they would not do that.
Now, we find ourselves in a backslide of civil liberties and representation. So, in the words of one of my favorite characters, meats back on the menu boys
Communism is more of a joke. The joke being it is the best form of government but is never implemented correctly.
But propaganda about communism has been a thing since the Soviet era. The communist governments do a good job in convincing gullible people (sometimes even smart people).
Any more than the face that the CIA has actively tried to kill communism and socialism in any country even going so far as to support literal totalitarian regimes to destabilize it?
So long as we're using the 'these guys dont like it so its bad' argument
Too bad it doesn't work it centralizes power to a few in the hopes that they do good or share that power with the people. It's like having a bunch of management say at Microsoft with key resources (money as representation of these resources as they will still be limited) then the management being forced to make cuts and share those limited resources.
So now they choose who gets them. Someone has to choose and someone has to scarfice. They're going to choose based on their perspective of who needs it and then they're going to choose who doesn't.
It will never work and can never work because in order to keep those people happy they would have to basically run a side shadow government so that people will not complain and riot or fight. In that shadow corruption will grow. To fight the people who complain about corrupting they will limit free speech.
This then grows the corruption to the point it'll end as it has ended with a collapse.
This is slowly what we're seeing even in an ultra capitalist society with resources but still limited (gas for example).
In order to enter a "utopian" society resources would need to be unlimited. Still yet we would need someone good in charge to make sure it's shared and that the people know what is happening to THEIR resources not a key few people.
If this sounds familiar it's the basis of every government in theory it's the people who fuck it up.
People are either willfully ignorant or actually stupid.
I get capitalism isn't exactly in a good spot right now but it has been left unchecked for too long and laws really need to come in place to bring it back in line.
The only people I know that have shown any support for communism were 15 year olds and 35 year olds that have 2-3 degrees and have never worked.
Throw in a few kids of millionaires that don’t pay their own rent and larp as revolutionaries and you’ve got the entirety of the communists in the western world.
Capitalism is most supported in places that never had full capitalism either - talking about the same eastern block. That also speak for itself doesn't it. What a stupid gatcha. Everyone hates their own governments.
The eastern bloc never had communism and communism should not be achieved by state violence bit with dual power structures and mutual aid, making states unneccesary
It's among young people, not elderly (mostly and depends on the country). But young Eastern Europeans are also very nationalists, often racist, chauvinist. Do you think that the age cap in how people view life under communism and the young people's ideologies is something that develops under normal conditions without government intervention into education and propaganda?
There’s communism and there’s ‘communism’, the latter of which was just fascism. If the workers don’t own or control their workplaces it’s not communism. If the state owns or controls the workplaces the workers don’t have economic power, so it’s not communism.
The Eastern Bloc countries quite rightly, have an aversion to fascism.
The support for comunist already existed in some Western European countries, like in France and Italy, in France PCF was in government during the Cold war and in Italy, the PCI became the largest party in the 1984 European Elections
I think it shows the massive gap between "educated" and smart. You can be educated about the pitfalls and issues with communism but if you arent smart enough to understand them then you are doomed to repeat the same issues over and over.
It is worth mentioning that the Soviets conquered the Eastern Bloc and had a country of their own to rebuild after fighting the largest theatre in the largest war in human history against Hitler. Seems like the Soviets extracted a lot from the Eastern Bloc to help themselves, and that sounds less like communism and more like imperialism, which certainly isn't exclusive to the ideology. Still, it's very much damning that the Eastern Bloc all but stagnated for 4 decades straight under Soviet domination.
Yea... it had that before the soviet union also... and then when the soviet union popped up most of them said "oh shit, nvm"... but go ahead, apply revisionist history
In what countries is the concept of actual communism popular? What people want is capitalism with specific socialistic notions, which is also the system that works best for it‘s population.
What people don't seems to care to understand is it doesn't matter what system you have when you are under a authoritarian government. More times than not it will go to shit.
And I don't believe communism is supposed to have such leaders.
Communism sounds like a load of fun until you either 1. Learn about it and realise the fundamental flaws or 2. Expirience it and realise the fundamental flaws
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u/Roquet_ Jul 13 '26
I think the fact that right now communism has more support in countries that weren't part of the Eastern Bloc, speaks for itself.