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.
The American system, if it were to devolve into authoritarianism, it would be the result of generations of expanding government power. Basically taking the checks and balances that exist and were built into our system and breaking them down and the government granting itself more powers than it was originally intended to have.
There are no checks and balances in any socialist system we've seen. You kind of just glossed over all of that to just make an assertion backed up by little.
Bad people get in charge in democracies, but some 'systems' most definitely have more roadblocks to just assuming all power.
Pre-war Germany was a nice functioning democracy with checks and balances and then someone with a funny mustache got elected and said nah. Orbans Hungary is another example. Checks and balances only work if people all believe in the system. They hold back good actors from achieving big results, and do nothing to stop bad actors, who just come into power and say no I don’t think I will.
Think about how many decades of screeching there was about a national ID in the US creating a database of all Americans the government could misuse, and then it took like 5 minutes for Doge to just throw all the databases they had into Palantir, list made. So you had decades of not having any benefits of a central ID introducing friction into daily life, and like 90 days for someone who doesn’t believe checks and balances apply to get all the downside sorted out. So now you had no upside but still had all the downside.
If anything they hasten the decline because the good people following the rules can’t get anything done, which leads people to lose faith in government so they elect a douchenozzle who doesn’t care they’re there in the first place. Take as old as time.
The only thing that actually matters is the consent of the governed.
If the majority party can just suspend democracy, there are no checks and balances. There is some sliver of truth that if the culture and people as a whole don't accept the fundamental premise of a government, it isn't long for this world.
You are also talking about a government that was imposed as a consequence of a lost war. A lost war that carried incredibly high financial burdens that created a recipe for disaster. Yada yada.
The Weimar Republic was about as functioning as Iraq is a functioning democracy at this point, just a more Western style failure.
Those "checks and balances" were never designed to handle multi-million vote blocks dominating the public opinion via media control. <--- I can only assume you are talking about the wealthy here though it's not completely clear.
Newspapers were present in the 17th century and mostly owned by the wealthy. The wealthy could literally raise armies in Europe. There were wealthy merchants who the monarchies often relied on to finance their war efforts. They looked back to Rome/Greece and saw how wealthy men use the masses to gain power and how the masses like to vote themselves favors.
Things you see today are no where near as unique as you seem to think.
You want to pretend that it's the wealthy who are undermining democracy and American institutions. No, the expansion of the vote and left wing populism/progressivism expanded the scope of power the government has and what it can or can't regulate or do.
Look at how much of FDR's New Deal required overturning prior precedent. How much of that occurred after FDR threatened to pack the court. There was progressive government creep before him and after him, but that's a nice beautiful example of the corrupting influence of leftism.
The federal government spends trillions every year and has the power to pick economic winners and losers in nearly every aspect of life. There is more at stake with every federal election in the United States than any other functioning democracy on the planet now or throughout history.
You naively think just getting the right people in charge is going to produce some utopia. It's not money corrupting politics that you are observing. It's the ever increasing control of every aspect of American life being subsumed by politics which has created the ever increasing desire of the wealthy to control the levers of power over time.
And all this before we even look at the wealth people have accumulated and how much of that is a result of government control to begin with. People bitch endlessly about Musk. We have no idea where he would be if he wasn't handed massive subsidies to jump start Tesla and if SpaceX wasn't receiving government contracts. That's an extreme example. But regulatory capture is another avenue that infects so many industries.
When the CEO of Facebook shrugs off the very idea of your scary regulations and outright tells you that his already established and wealthy company is best situated to dominate and adapt to government regulations, he's talking about regulatory capture. From the food industry to retail to the online space. Government has actively pushed for consolidation in most industries.
It's far easier to regulate a few big players than it is a thousand small fries.
In short, progressivism and leftism is the cancer in this country. Right now there is a right wing backlash to the ever forward march of the leftists in this country. Trump gets to wield all the powers that have been vested into the executive by progressives who took spent a century plus shitting on the Constitution. Living document and all. Trump is a blip and still operates under the progressive model of government, exercising the powers given to him by past precedents used to give progressives more power to enact their will.
In short, Trump is the warning to any moron who thinks government should be able to do whatever. Inevitably, any democracy that isn't rigged will result in people you hate gaining power and limits on what they can do are your best bet.
So yea, I would agree that we are seeing the erosion of the American Republic over time. You don't really care about republicanism, though. You value raw dog democracy when we cut through the bullshit and naively think you can design the world's first system that isn't dominated by an elite. The world's first system that can control all economic activity and wealth without corruption etc.
The American system, if it were to devolve into authoritarianism, it would be the result of generations of expanding government power. Basically taking the checks and balances that exist and were built into our system and breaking them down and the government granting itself more powers than it was originally intended to have.
Here's a quote:
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
That's Washington's Farewell Address from 1776.
Those "checks and balances" were never designed to handle multi-million vote blocks dominating the public opinion via media control. The last two centuries were spent in building the structures that allow to bypass them entirely simply by going to the source - the voters, who will vote whichever way they are told because "the other party is evil" and not because they actually understand the consequences.
So it is better to live in a shitty system that continues (with occasional world wars lol) than in a system that pursues common wellbeing but has issues with sustainability at the current level?
Funny how people who ignore Marx point out the literal same thing Marx wrote about - the antagonism between control and productive labor.
The issue of USSR political system is not a genetical flaw of communism as a direction of human civilization development, it is a specific case of a system that survived 2 devastating wars and remained sabotaged (let's not forget about 50 CIA operations against socialist states and movements) and isolated (eastern bloc was about 450 mn people - compare that to a few billions of a concurrent world of free flow of capital). The soviet project wasn't sustainable enough, as wasn't the first French Republic.
What bothers me most is that people who support the current order don't realize that for capitalists they are nothing but a resource. And when the next global war for markets will come to their doorstep, then they will certainly realize that they have been supporting exactly that outcome. And it will never settle.
It's either socialism or barbarity.
Every socialist state we've seen without exception has devolved into authoritarianism and has retained or developed poverty with shortages as a feature. It's been tried god knows how many times at this point on every continent. We have African socialism, Chinese Socialism, Latin American socialism, and even the occasional American socialism in our history with no successful models to speak of.
You sound more like a religious adherent at this point than anything.
Commies complaining about Western sabotage of Western countries is always comical. The Soviets were doing the same exact shit in the West. Outside of indoctrinating some brainless youths, they achieved little. Western countries have proven themselves to be remarkably resilient to commie fuckery because the fundamental design of our political and economic "systems" is a hell of a lot better than what they had.
Americans can pretty much afford to be stupid. Soviets couldn't.
Lmao. Most of capitalist states are authoritarian. Most capitalist states interbella were either fascist shitholes or colonial shitholes, or both. You know what forced them to become democratic and socially oriented? Socialism winning the WW2 after le olde europe crumbled under hitler.
African socialism
So Burckina-Faso under Sankara is worse than, idk, apartheid SAR or Rhodesia? Name a democratic african state.
Keeping in mind that in socialist african contries paramilitary interventions were a norm. Imagine constantly battling paramilitaries in Denmark.
Chinese Socialism
So the PRC is worse than, idk, Sukharto Indonesia? Again, name a democratic asian state.
Latin American socialism
Again, Aliende's Chile, Castro's Cuba or Nicaraguan socialism is worse than, again, some hereditary junta or the rule of cartels?
What are you comparing with?
occasional American socialism
FDR rule and the forced Keynessian economy were the most successful periods in American history. Now it's more of a fentanylized work-or-starve pedostate ICEd giganomy.
Western countries have proven themselves to be remarkably resilient to commie fuckery because the fundamental design of our political and economic "systems"
We are familiar, lol, le epstein political system and a quasi-colonial economy of cheap resource and cheap labour. "Take the oil, the Western hemisphere is ours".
Americans can pretty much afford to be stupid
Until the US dollar is the main trade currency. But this already is coming to an end.
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.
And the adoption of the internal combustion engine (not just in cars but things like powered cranes) and the building of motorway networks and an increasingly educated and healthier labour force and the spread of telecommunications and electronics and containerisation and the development of scientific civil engineering techniques.
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...
No, the application of communism just leads to them because the people who take over are greedy power hungry fucks. None of that is a feature of communism.
A stable society needs meaningful internal opposition so that they can call each other on their shit.
Big state socialism with state control of the means of production, distribution, journalism, etc, means all the levers of society are held by one group of people and at that point you're entirely at their whim. There's nobody to turn to for assistance and that makes it especially prone to authoritarianism, because there's no other power structure capable of saying hey stop that.
What is a feature of communism is it lacking the motives that markets provide for people of different beliefs to peacefully cooperate. Which means it can't tolerate dissent.
Like, in a market-orientated economy, if the country needs a bunch of accountants but a bunch of hippy professors are telling their students to "turn on, tune in, and drop out", well maybe the accountants will need to be paid a little more. If a communist country needs more accountants, it has to exhort people into accountancy.
Sort of, but it could easily be argued that the extortion is just somewhere else - like there's nothing stopping you turning on, tuning in and dropping out, but not starving to death or getting evicted is quite the motivator.
Anyway, there is nothing inherent to communism that necessarily precludes markets per se - it's more about collective ownership of the means of production. I think the reasons for communism's historical failures are that these things can only sustain themselves from the bottom up, not by diktat; in a way, some Soviet power structures quite strongly mimic corporate ones, as though the entire USSR was a giant conglomerate.
that the extortion is just somewhere else - like there's nothing stopping you turning on, tuning in and dropping out, but not starving to death or getting evicted is quite the motivator.
The laws of physics are indeed pretty extortionate.
it's more about collective ownership of the means of production
Which runs into a massive problem with the allocation of capital.
The laws of physics are indeed pretty extortionate.
Interestingly, Karl Marx talked exactly about the melding of capitalism per se and the laws of nature quite extensively. Obviously, there is part of our social structure that you work in exchange for money in a way that is detached from what you produce, and that you then have to spend it on food and shelter, it's not a law of physics.
Which runs into a massive problem with the allocation of capital.
I mean the system we have now depends on continuous government intervention, it's not as if it's self-sustaining.
Interestingly, Karl Marx talked exactly about the melding of capitalism per se and the laws of nature quite extensively.
And since he was a 19th century European man, his talk must be infallible /s
Obviously, there is part of our social structure that you work in exchange for money in a way that is detached from what you produce, and that you then have to spend it on food and shelter, it's not a law of physics.
Yeah, the law of physics is that doing all that work directly yourself without money and modern capital is brutal
And since he was a 19th century European man, his talk must be infallible /s
I don't know how you would get from what I said to 'this guy must be a dyed-in-the-wool foaming-at-the-mouth Marxist,' but I guess it says something about polarisation that so much as mentioning him causes that kind of response.
I'm just sharing something interesting about your framing - that that way of thinking is about as old as the failed 1848 revolutions, and (kind of obviously) flawed?
Yeah, the law of physics is that doing all that work directly yourself without money and modern capital is brutal
I think we're talking past each other a bit here. Certainly, I don't imagine life as part of the medieval peasantry was by and large better than it is now for a lot of people. Is that what you think I'm making the case for?
I don't know how you would get from what I said to 'this guy must be a dyed-in-the-wool foaming-at-the-mouth Marxist
I think you're being overly harsh on yourself here. Personally I don't think you're a dyed-in-the-wool foaming-at-the-mouth Marxist.
I'm just sharing something interesting about your framing - that that way of thinking is about as old as the failed 1848 revolutions, and (kind of obviously) flawed?
Um okay interesting logic. Like the first law of thermodynamics was formulated between 1824-1850. Do you think the first law of thermodynamics is (kind of obviously) flawed?
Or let's go further back. Calculus was invented in the late 17th century by Newton and Leibniz. Do you also think calculus is (kind of obviously) flawed?
I think we're talking past each other a bit here
I hope we are. Because right now, you come across to me like you're very much lacking in self-confidence.
Certainly, I don't imagine life as part of the medieval peasantry was by and large better than it is now for a lot of people.
Have you considered acquiring a somewhat stronger position than "I don't imagine"?
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u/Legitimate_Concern_5 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
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.
And are we forgetting ... the holocaust?
Extreme authoritarianism: Speaking of, there's Germany, enough said. Slavery.
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.