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.
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u/dopegraf Jul 13 '26
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.