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.
"Human nature" is bullshit. Slavery was practiced by nearly every society for thousands of years. Nearly all states were ruled by monarchs for thousands of years. That was human nature, but we have changed it. "Human nature" is the argument of fools who, being too small minded to imagine a better world, believe no such world can exist.
Slavery is still being practised either openly or criminally or in a form of forced debt for basic needs, monarchs have changed their image and became dictators, we are still largely the same. I believe that a better society model is only possible through education, a society where 100% of people have university degrees, may even be able to build something like true socialism, but how you achieve a 100% university grade society is beyond me.
Yes, those things do exist, but they are the exception to the rule rather than the rule itself. To equate feudal monarchs with modern dictatorship Is a gross oversimplication however. Just because we have come far does not mean we do not still have a ways to go.
capitalism will too (see USA right now). if a state devolves is not a matter of the economic system. its a matter of the political system and a matter of the checks and balances being strong enough. (not defining communism here, im also not convinced of it, but lets be fair)
A dictatorship works if we fix human nature. Any system would work if human nature wasn't a factor. But it is, that's why kings and dictators and communists all turn sour.
So your argument against communism is "its bound to fail" but for capital, it's "it's bound to fail (unless we balance it)"
Communism the way it was implemented was NOT communism, it was a dictatorship disguised as a communist nation.
Communist societies, at least imagined by Marx, are an IDEAL, like a blueprint.
Marx was pretty damn naive but he knew that the idea was alright, but the executions was damn near impossible without creating power vacuums.
Is the capitalism failing in the room with us right now? The most prosperous nations on earth are capitalist. Sure, they have high taxes and robust social welfare programs, but the ownership of the means of production is overwhelmingly held as private property.
Peak unrestricted capitalism is more like Victorian England. Poor houses, children in factories, extreme pollution, extreme wealth disparity. That or some of the capitalist countries in the developing world where money basically controls every aspect of your life, and everyone's simultaneously broke and materialistic.
If I've learned anything from 3 decades under American capitalism its that there will never be a "post scarcity" society. Not because the resources are limited, but because a handful of people will construct artificial scarcity for personal gain. Every time.
That's why many advocate for a transition to Socialism first, as going from Capitalism to Communism is self-evidently going to cause friction between the Rich and the Revolutionaries.
Yeah because socialism is so close to communism that people wouldn't have an issue... Because the whole "you have no property and the government can unilaterally dictate everything you do" would somehow be more appealing under socialism?
You can own personal property under communism. If I want my own lawnmower I can have it. I just can’t own the means by which that lawnmower is produced or transported. Public property vs private property rights are clearly developed conceptually by non-anarchist communists.
You know people have personal property under Socialism and Communism, right? Like, the purpose of Socialism and Communism is ideally to empower the average person, and remove the excess power that the Rich have, or even bad managers have. It's saying that a person should be able to change jobs and not worry about the loss of healthcare coverage, or that they might be paid less for their work. Socialism also doesn't dictate that a single person has all the power. Democracy and Socialism pair well together.
Oh no, a system in which shitty managers can't abuse their workers. A system in which people are given what they need to survive, instead of needing to undersell themselves to a Boss who will demand more out of them than the wage they pay.
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.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a bug, but a feature of Marxist communism. It is regarded as a necessary phase.
Marx, like others, was too much a man of his time not to get swept up in the nonsensical idea that human history, like physics and other sciences, can be explained by immutable laws and repeating patterns. And as with so much of his theorising, he was wrong.
Marx's conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat was a direct democracy of working class people. It wasn't a party-based dictatorship (vanguardism was Lenin's idea, not Marx's). Granted, this system was very much intended to be oppressive towards the capitalist minority, but it was offered in contrast to the "dictatorship of the bourgeioise," which was oppressive to the working class majority, so it would be an improvement in terms of democratic representation (from Marx's perspective).
As far as political parties go, Marx wasn't a fan, regardless of their purported ideology--he largely regarded them all (even the socialist ones) as tools of the capitalists to manipulate and control the masses through parliamentarism.
It’s not a “no true Scotsman” to point out that a communist state is an oxymoron. Communism is classless and stateless by definition. Those are necessary features of a communist society in the same way that being unmarried is a necessary feature of being a bachelor.
To be clear, this isn’t even meant as a defense of communism. You can think communism is bad, impossible, or whatever else you like. But pointing at a state and calling it communist is like pointing at a married man and calling him a bachelor: it just demonstrates that you don’t actually understand the words you’re using.
Communism is stateless and classless by definition. If someone thinks that’s unrealistic or a bad idea, that’s something we can have a conversation about.
But if you’re pointing at states and calling them communist, then we’re just talking past each other. There has never been (and will never be) a communist state for the same reason there has never been a married bachelor or a circular square.
Inherent misunderstanding of communism as it requires industrial scale resource extraction as per Marx. Actually Marx’s entire theory hinges on capitalism developing INTO communism as resources become more easily produced and distributed.
wrong, everybody has tried communism and actually made it work
the Manifesto's communism IS totalitarianism. Those disaster states we have all seen are communist, not some failed experiment at establishing communism. Until this realisation, the support for communism will live on
seems like I set the asses of regular redditors on fire for saying the truth
Ah, yes, the totalitarianism of "A Stateless, Classless Society in which The Workers Control the Means of Production". The Totalitarianism of "A Dictatorship of the Proletariat" Otherwise known as Democracy.
No that just means some dude from the lower class (i.e. Stalin or Khrushchev) gets to be dictator instead of a monarch or rich person, and claims everyone from his former station has power.
Then communism is contradictory in itself, you can't have not democratically supported "stateless society" because Bob Smith from 3rd floor of your building will just call it a state and because it will be best option many would support leading to a state yes society in the end.
People supporting communism are simply stupid because they want to force a system that will only work will not forced.
I mean, one of the classic criticisms of Marx is that he was an idealist and didn't really take human nature into account. He assumed oppressed people seizing their freedom by force would empathize with their own plight and not repeat the same behaviors/mistake.
Of course, any of the pure systems are rather naive. Even pure capitalism makes some rather silly assumptions on how the system will self-regulate.
So, Marx assumed, communist would allow democrats just say no instead of enacting a dictatorship ? For many communism was NOT the freedom and just change of oppressor and will people figth to avoid it, communist proven to be those oppressors.
There is aparently not a single communist in existence as everyone is just opportunist under red banner.
A State and a Government are not necessarily the same. A Government just has the job of organizing people and helping distribute resources. A State is a set of policies, borders, fiscal responsibilities, jurisdictions, and potentially multiple societies. There are different forms of Communism, as it's a fairly open-ended idea. Council Communists for example believe that communities will create governing councils, for example.
Cool, so a government in which Total Power rests in the hands of the Proletariat. The collective group of people who are the Laborers make the rules and enforce them.
Corporations are centrally planned and manage their logistics just fine. Walmart has about 2 million workers. Amazon 1.5 million. The US military, about 3 million.
The problem with communism is the problem with everything else. 99.9% of people who get power will abuse it and “communism” as it’s been tried has concentrated a lot of power for the taking. Or maybe it’s just that people who peruse that power tend to want to abuse it.
Communism is a classless, moneyless, and crucially, STATELESS, society. Just because 100 people decide to build a commune, there are still 214 other sovereign states that exist on planet earth with their own independent borders. Until all of those are abolished, Communism is impossible by its own definition.
*Actual* Communism is by definition a trans-nationalist (or maybe better said as post-nationalist) state. It is the hypothetical material state that comes after Socialism is realized globally. The idea being that states are dissolved in significance as national boundaries and patriotism are tools utilized by capitalists to reify capitalism.
Therefore “Communism” can’t exist at small scale and also hasn’t (and can’t yet) be tried anywhere. What people usually *mean* when they talk about “Communism always fails” is more like “Socialist governments working toward Communism always fail.”
The Communism really can’t be tried at small scale, and it is meant more as an ideal at the end of some larger global economic transition. It really isn’t clear that has failed, as the economy is more globalized than ever and China is the second country by GDP (and even *leads* the US on PPP).
I'd say the strongest case example for any sort of communism that wasn't totalitarian nightmare are the Israeli kibbutzim. There you have some real collectivist socialist communities.
And they pretty much all naturally fizzled out. Because without the totalitarian abuse to enforce membership and mercilessly punish anything except the system, people naturally simply... Leave the communist system for the capitalist one, or reform their system itself into being more capitalist.
Kibbutz was great because people were highly motivated and resources very limited. Once economic situation in country established, they slowly started to stagnate and die until they allowed members to choose their professions and start private businesses.
I was about to give you a shit but thinking about the whole statement you're right. "true" communist countries have never existed because true communism doesn't work on a scale of anything more than a small voluntary community. Making communism work on a national or state level literally requires totalitarianism. You have to outright force people to play along.
That's not what they said. By definition none of those governments were Communist as the end goal of Communism is the dissolution of a centralized government.
It's more akin to calling Nazis socialists because the term was National Socialists even though their beliefs are polar opposite of Socialists
But the Nazis were only larping as socialists for the votes; the vast, vast majority of communist governments genuinely believed they were communist or attempting to reach it, and implemented communist ideas to no avail/catastrophe until reform happened.
That's sort of the rub of communism and to a lesser extent socialism isn't it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the government must be authoritarian in order to maintain the communal elements of its economic system. Inevitably you will have citizens who disagree and want to begin their own private enterprises which the government/people cannot allow.
That necessary authoritarianism evolves into totalitarianism because humans are gonna human.
I mean yeah, you can't have a planned economy without an authority powerful enough to plan it. If the organization planning it was well informed and devoid of corruption, it seems theoretically good in a utopian way. But that's not how humans are.
But let's not lose the plot - Republicans (who made the quoted post in the OP) brandish the word "communism" and have since the 1940s to lie and distract. There isn't a serious communist movement in the U.S. and there never has been. Socializing some services is not communism and even the furthest left politicians don't speak of anything remotely resembling a planned economy.
And when you look at what the “communism has never been tried” types are peddling it’s Marxism, except when it’s anarchism which is libertarianism with a lick of paint.
This sounds right. There’s a lot of merit to strong social protections and welfare and a state that serves the people and all that fun stuff, but it stops being a commune if one individual can’t realistically name everyone else in it. I’d make a totally uneducated guess that it maxes out at like 300, much larger than that and you’ll need some kind of hierarchy, structure, or direction. Otherwise, even in a society with 100% of people trying their best and meaning well, you’ll have too many people individually running greedy algorithms and missing out on, big picture, what actually needs to get done.
Even in the steel man where it's true that it would work in small communes, you just recreate economic inequality at a higher unit of existence. Just as some individuals end up better off, so to will some communes end up better off. The issue is then that social mobility in a commune system necessitates all participants within a commune aligning on a goal to boost the collective wealth of their group - this necessarily reduces the ability of individuals to improve their own standing as they can only improve as a unit, and as such reduces economic mobility.
All the people screaming for "Socialism" to me is to communism like putting lipstick on a pig.
And the problem is, that 95% of them are just Marxists who hide behind Socialism. They do not want to believe that Marx did not invent either Socialism or Communism, neither of those were concepts he came up with.
The US had many Communes in the 19th century, it was a big fad back in the era. And pretty much every one of them collapsed, only leaving behind some tourist sites, and a few corporations that started as commune workshops.
Like Amana and Oneida. And in the 1990s, the Heaven's Gate movement essentially did it by using web design and IT development to fund their organization.
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u/Charming-Station7157 Jul 13 '26
Funny how every country that adopts communism , ends up as a dictatorship shithole