Comradeship // Freechat

2159 readers

28 users here now

Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.

A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

felipeforte@lemmygrad.ml

Can someone debunk the stupid “communism only works on paper” argument? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Beam@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I vaguely remember a user debunking this claim but I cannot find that comment and I don’t remember what post it was on.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] CarlMarks@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 1 year ago

There's nothing to debunk because the claim itself is based on an absurd level of ignorance, they don't even know what they mean by the word communism, and it makes no sense for it to be "tried". The only consistent references that could almost make sense are these

Communism as a theoretical state of being (classless etc society) posed by ~~me~~ Marx (and some others) as the eventual project and outcome of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As such, it has never been "tried", it can't be "tried", it is more of a goal or state of being rather than a strategy you can adopt. Plus, that project requires that the capitalist class be deposed by the working class such that efforts in that direction could be enacted, which unfortunately has been limited by the extreme and violent reactions of imperialists. It's difficult to do that project when you're just trying to survive the sanctions and wars.
Communism as in a country run by a communist party. This has been tried, and to great success, with fantastic improvements in quality of life for those living there. What failures we do identify largely fall into two buckets: (1) targeted for destruction by imperialists and they were forced to succumb or (2) fell apart through the former and internal failures to build a robust political system, e.g. someone like Gorbachev should never have even been near the reins of power. Both can be criticized, but neither can be chalked up to, "oh dang commies can't run countries". Alsi, the largest real economy on the planet is run by a communist party and overcame over a century of colonialism and then industrialization to do it.

But really, someone saying this isn't even speaking the same language as us. It's really a conversation between two clueless liberals: one that simplistically craps on "communism" and it "failing" (without pointing to anything concrete) and the other liberal trying to say things like, "well real communism has never been tried".

In both cases, they're in need of a basic education, starting with, "what is a communist?"