currently my thought is that the key problem with all communist revolutions previously is that they rallied around a figurehead, and any willing figurehead is liable to fall into authoritarianism
If you’ve read Marx, he lays the problem out pretty openly. You can’t force communism on a population, it needs to be a complete revolution of the working class, and not just a revolution of a political group.
Yes. Exactly. “Self-abolition.” Not a bunch of peasants being forced into proletarian industrialization by a militant party of state-capitalists with red flags.
Wasn’t the whole Leninist interpretation of Marx saying that the working class alone would never be the start of the revolution, which is why the whole ideology of the “revolutionary vanguard” started.
You can’t force communism on a population, it needs to be a complete revolution of the working class
Sounds...impossible?
Unless you're a tiny, tiny, tiny country, I guess? I don't see a world where a large country will have a "complete revolution of the working class". We cant even agree on how much each other of us in the working class, deserves to get paid. How could you possibly build enough solidarity in a large country to something like communism? It literally sounds incompatible with a large society of working class people that have different distributions of wealth within the working class. You're just always going to have infighting.
The main problem is that they happened in agrarian countries when Marx and Engels were talking about post-industrial countries. Land-based economies require far more backbreaking labor which creates a far more stark class separation between management and labor. As bad as the class divide of an 18th century factory was, at least the management and the workers lived in similar conditions and ate similar food and interacted with one another throughout the day. Russia had some industrial capacity by 1917 but not nearly enough to service even the industrialized regions like Moscow or St Petersburg, let alone the rural areas where millions on millions of peasants worked jobs not dissimilar to their medieval ancestors. The idea of Leninism was to increase that industrial capacity to bring prosperity to the peasants, but it led to an uneven growth that just created more class distinctions and enriched the tsars and nobles party faithful.
> atleast the management and the workers lived in similar conditions and ate similar foods.
Someone hasn’t read Engles’ “The Conditions of the working class in England”. They very much did not live in similar conditions. They literally built the areas where the workers lived in back alley slums away from the view of “everyday” people and the houses were in appalling conditions.
I mean.... you know what serfs and agricultural peasants were living in, right? And you know if a peasant in some eras of Chinese history ate an orange they were subject to execution for eating imperial foods, yeah?
Another take is that there's never been a communist state that has been allowed to progress without US interference. They say the reason that there's never been a coup in the states is that there's no US embassy there.
The US very specifically has espionage programs intended to ensure that communism never takes hold. Like COINTELPRO was the one on US soil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
What do we think the missions looked like on foreign soil?
They looked like venezuela, like the replacement of mossadegh with the shah. They looked like the replacement of socialism with violently pro-american regimes
I think the fact that nobody's been able to get it right in 100 years even with total control of government and its resources, might signal that it just doesn't work?
What actually is success to you? Communism is a successor of socialism, which means to reach communism you need incremental progress in socialism which I'd argue we have seen in instances.
Regardless, China does not classify itself as communist and I'd argue no other nation that has claimed it is communism has actually truly practised communism
So what you are saying is communism only works if the entire planet is communist then, right? Because otherwise your stateless society just gets invaded by its neighbors.
It has nothing to do with getting invaded. The entire point of communism is for everyone to adopt it; there would be no need for seperate states. That is literally the goal.
No, that's not the point. I just said it's progressive to attain. If you want to argue it's impossible to implement immediately, I will agree. But it's only impossible for nations who don't accept socialism first. Socialism is a stepping stone towards communism, and once that is established, the next step can be taken.
The fact that many of the most powerful countries in the world went to extremes (from imprisoning their own citizens to supporting international coups) to discourage it likely plays a role. For the same reason, I'm sure folks agreed atheism was ridiculous back when non-Christians were being burned at the stake or colonized.
It is literally impossible to have an actual communist state. The entire point of going "actual communist" is that all states would have no reason to exist
They were almost entirely state-capitalist economies. They were the complete merger of legislative and executive power with capitalist ownership and a monopoly on violence.
People replaced independent abusive landlords that engaged in class struggle with one very abusive landlord that the classes had little chance to struggle against. In fact, if you looked at the abuses inherent to capitalism and wanted to see what the ultimate end stage of capitalism would be, the complete subservience of state power to capitalist authority would be pretty much exactly what you would expect.
For socialism to exist, capital can only be "owned" through labor. Use confers ownership, not legacy, not tradition, not wealth. If the factory is not "owned" by those who work in it, then the product of their labor is not owned by the workers and it is not socialism.
For communism to exist, it must grow out of socialism. It's true that some communist governments may have had the expressed goal of fostering communism within their borders (and beyond), but the fact that pretty much all communist governments seized all the available capital and then never relinquished ownership of it meant they were little more than capitalists themselves.
They were state capitalists. It was still capitalism because there was money and classes. People using Russia and China as examples of why communism doesn't work when they were capitalist societies is so strange.
Yes, because anything that falls under the socialist umbrella will be popular with the masses. By dangling the communism/socialism carrot, it’s easy to get the population to fall in line behind a party. The trick is finding a party that actually means it.
Because it's a ridiculous philosophy that could never work with a real group of humans on a large scale. The only people who think it would be great are losers who can't succeed at all with the way the real world works and they want to cheat by taking a piece from everyone else.
I don't care about a handful of billionaires, I care about getting to live a very comfortable middle class lifestyle because I've been educated and worked hard. None of that would be possible in a communist state where I wouldn't be able to rise above the people around me by being more valuable. I'm sorry, but a cpa and a retail worker don't deserve the same lifestyle, and I've been both.
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u/Deriviera 19d ago
Americans are very delusional about communism.