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I think it's because Communism is such a good idea on paper that intellectuals have a hard time admitting that it has been tested numerous times and the results

I think it's because Communism is such a good idea on paper that intellectuals have a hard time admitting that it has been tested numerous times and the results are definitive: it doesn't work. But looking at the idea on paper now, it seems obvious what the problem is: it requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots with no oversight. What could possibly go wrong?

vidarh 11y ago
No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere. Since you believe it is such a good idea on paper, perhaps you can describe to us what the idea actually is? Because either it will be blatantly obvious you don't know what the idea is, or it will be blatantly obvious it does not match any of the places you might try to claim it has been tried. > it requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots A society with power put in the hands of a few despots by definition is not communism, as a society that concentrates power with one group has class rule, and communism by definition requires the absence of class divisions.
- danharaj 11y ago
  > No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere. I think the experiments in Spain actually showed that it would work. Remember, anarchocommunism in Spain was violently crushed by fascists... after the Stalinists betrayed them. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism wherever you go and its fruits are the same.
  - kinghajj 11y ago
    The interesting part about that episode is that both the West and the USSR acted to bring them down. Authoritarians on either side were scared of the implications of a functional, libertarian socialist society.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Experiments show that anarchocommunism works... in small groups, in larger, non-anarchocommunist contexts. Which is to say it doesn't scale. At all. Rendering it pretty useless at the kind of scale its adherents postulate it at.
    - danharaj 11y ago
      Experiments merely show that anarchocommunism attracts violence seeking to preserve authority. That is nothing new. Violence has always been the root of hierarchy. Whether it is the abolition of hierarchy or contention between old and new hierarchy, violence has always been the preferred cure and preventive. Anarchism need not be seen merely as a state of a society. Anarchism can also be seen as a means, a method of collaborating with people. One can see anarchism everywhere in daily life and in struggles that are not specifically for the abolition of states. The root of the many anarchist political ideologies is the thought that a human being is best when she freely associates with her human beings and acts in collaboration with the world. As a method of being, it is useful even to people who care not to get involved in the grand affairs of the world. Like many ideas and vegetables, the root of anarchism is perhaps its most useful bit.
      - smtucker 11y ago
        If your form of government, or I guess in anarchocommunisms case form of non-government, can't protect and perpetuate itself then it isn't a very good system at all. It seems like that you are saying that anarchocommunisms failures aren't legitimate because they were stopped with violence and treachery. To a lot of people it seems like the entire point of a government is to organize ourselves into some form of hierarchy to protect ourselves against violence and treachery so anarchocommunism having not being able to do this is its ultimate failure.
        kinghajj 11y ago
        First, it's a misconception that anarchists are against governance. They're against the "state," a hierarchical form of government. They didn't have difficulty organizing for defense/violence--in fact, a common criticism of the Spanish anarchist movement was the appropriation of farm land by force. The failure was due to the coordinated efforts of both capitalist democracies and authoritarian communists to impede their efforts at maintaining their society. Most importantly, IIRC, steel shipments from the US were halted, which reduced their fighting ability.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    "Work" until it devolves into a tyrannical dictatorship, because a government you refuse to recognize as a government is the most dangerous form of government of all.
- jerf 11y ago
  "No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere." Then it is condemned by that too. If "psuedo-communism" kills millions, real Communism is so impractical and unhuman that it collapses so fast into tyranny and despotism that one needs specialized equipment from physics to measure its duration. This is not to its credit as a practical system to run a country on.
  - derefr 11y ago
    AFAIK, aren't workers' co-op corporations an example of "Real Communism" existing, and thriving, in the small? I would posit that while central allocation may have been discredited as an economic pursuit (outside, perhaps, of being something a Friendly AI might be capable of), the basic concept of earning the spoils of one's own labor is alive and well. Heck, we're moving toward it—fewer large corporations with layers of capital-suckling management, and more tiny networks of startups where each founder retains decent amounts of equity in (i.e. profits off of) their work.
    - jerf 11y ago
      My last paragraph wasn't extraneous. Many things work in the small that don't work in the large. One of the nice things about capitalism is that unlike ideological Communism, it does not insist that it is The One True System and that not only must the society be run on it but all subcomponents must be run on it. You are free in a properly capitalist society to build a communist commune if you like, or run a company that way, or run a company with competing departments, or anything else, and Capitalism remains pleasingly silent about how to conduct your family affairs. By contrast, Communism sticks its nose in everywhere and insists that it is the answer to everything, from running the entire country to how to raise your child. Unsurprisingly, something that tries to proscribe that much across that many orders of magnitude across that many domains fails miserably. In code terms, Capitalism is an interface; it says how entities interact but doesn't specify the nature of the entities. Communism is a very fragile over-engineered over-implemented "we'll call you" framework that's wrong in numerous ways, but management (literally!) is forcing you to use it.
      - 11y ago
- protonfish 11y ago
  It looks like the "well the USSR isn't _real_ communism!" card is still trying to be played today. And it is just as ridiculous.
  - garrettgrimsley 11y ago
    Why is that ridiculous? The USSR was neither a classless nor stateless society. The means of production were owned by the state, nationalized, rather than owned by the workers, socialized. The USSR was about as communist as the United States Postal Service. A reading of Marx, Engels, or Goldman should make this evident.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    The USSR is, at best, an example of a particular kind of Communism -- Leninism -- from which most attempted implementations of "Communism" have derived. Leninism rejected central structural elements of Marx & Engels Communism, as well as associated environmental prerequisites, in order to come up with something that fit the particular circumstances in Russia at the time -- for which Marx and Engels' model was not a fit. Its an exercise in semantic line drawing as to whether it really counts as "Communism" at all, but its certainly a very different thing than Marx and Engels' Communism. (Leninism is at least as different from Marx and Engels' Communism as modern Western mixed economies are from the same reference point.)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mikearagua 11y ago
  I'm with ya brother but these arguments are way too reminiscent of how Christians console themselves.
adventured 11y ago
It's not a good idea on paper, that's why it fails in practice and always will. It's a horrifically vile idea on paper, and far more so in practice. The results as you note speak for themselves.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  If you wouldn't mind elaborating more, why is it a vile idea on paper? AFAIK, every practical implementation of "communism" falls so short of the description, both ideal and transitionally, in things like The Communist Manifesto as to be blatantly lying when they use the name for themselves. And then you have countries right now like China which blatantly abuse the label. (At the very least: If your country is engaged in capitalism, you are doing it wrong.)
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    >every practical implementation of "communism" falls so short of the description And the same for Christianity or any other religion, but at least they had some positive outcomes.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      The equivalent to your analogy would be a self-professed Christian worshipping an image of a goat and chanting "hail satan". There's a difference between merely failing as an imperfect human being and actively working against the ideology you supposedly support.
      - happyscrappy 11y ago
        In order to say communism is viable it would be nice to have at least one success to reference. Former citizens of communist countries never cite its virtues, quite the opposite, only confused liberals in the West sing its praises.
        Karunamon 11y ago

vidarh 11y ago

No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere. Since you believe it is such a good idea on paper, perhaps you can describe to us what the idea actually is? Because either it will be blatantly obvious you don't know what the idea is, or it will be blatantly obvious it does not match any of the places you might try to claim it has been tried. > it requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots A society with power put in the hands of a few despots by definition is not communism, as a society that concentrates power with one group has class rule, and communism by definition requires the absence of class divisions.

danharaj 11y ago
> No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere. I think the experiments in Spain actually showed that it would work. Remember, anarchocommunism in Spain was violently crushed by fascists... after the Stalinists betrayed them. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism wherever you go and its fruits are the same.
- kinghajj 11y ago
  The interesting part about that episode is that both the West and the USSR acted to bring them down. Authoritarians on either side were scared of the implications of a functional, libertarian socialist society.
- Kalium 11y ago
  Experiments show that anarchocommunism works... in small groups, in larger, non-anarchocommunist contexts. Which is to say it doesn't scale. At all. Rendering it pretty useless at the kind of scale its adherents postulate it at.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    Experiments merely show that anarchocommunism attracts violence seeking to preserve authority. That is nothing new. Violence has always been the root of hierarchy. Whether it is the abolition of hierarchy or contention between old and new hierarchy, violence has always been the preferred cure and preventive. Anarchism need not be seen merely as a state of a society. Anarchism can also be seen as a means, a method of collaborating with people. One can see anarchism everywhere in daily life and in struggles that are not specifically for the abolition of states. The root of the many anarchist political ideologies is the thought that a human being is best when she freely associates with her human beings and acts in collaboration with the world. As a method of being, it is useful even to people who care not to get involved in the grand affairs of the world. Like many ideas and vegetables, the root of anarchism is perhaps its most useful bit.
    - smtucker 11y ago
      If your form of government, or I guess in anarchocommunisms case form of non-government, can't protect and perpetuate itself then it isn't a very good system at all. It seems like that you are saying that anarchocommunisms failures aren't legitimate because they were stopped with violence and treachery. To a lot of people it seems like the entire point of a government is to organize ourselves into some form of hierarchy to protect ourselves against violence and treachery so anarchocommunism having not being able to do this is its ultimate failure.
      - kinghajj 11y ago
        First, it's a misconception that anarchists are against governance. They're against the "state," a hierarchical form of government. They didn't have difficulty organizing for defense/violence--in fact, a common criticism of the Spanish anarchist movement was the appropriation of farm land by force. The failure was due to the coordinated efforts of both capitalist democracies and authoritarian communists to impede their efforts at maintaining their society. Most importantly, IIRC, steel shipments from the US were halted, which reduced their fighting ability.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  "Work" until it devolves into a tyrannical dictatorship, because a government you refuse to recognize as a government is the most dangerous form of government of all.
jerf 11y ago
"No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere." Then it is condemned by that too. If "psuedo-communism" kills millions, real Communism is so impractical and unhuman that it collapses so fast into tyranny and despotism that one needs specialized equipment from physics to measure its duration. This is not to its credit as a practical system to run a country on.
- derefr 11y ago
  AFAIK, aren't workers' co-op corporations an example of "Real Communism" existing, and thriving, in the small? I would posit that while central allocation may have been discredited as an economic pursuit (outside, perhaps, of being something a Friendly AI might be capable of), the basic concept of earning the spoils of one's own labor is alive and well. Heck, we're moving toward it—fewer large corporations with layers of capital-suckling management, and more tiny networks of startups where each founder retains decent amounts of equity in (i.e. profits off of) their work.
  - jerf 11y ago
    My last paragraph wasn't extraneous. Many things work in the small that don't work in the large. One of the nice things about capitalism is that unlike ideological Communism, it does not insist that it is The One True System and that not only must the society be run on it but all subcomponents must be run on it. You are free in a properly capitalist society to build a communist commune if you like, or run a company that way, or run a company with competing departments, or anything else, and Capitalism remains pleasingly silent about how to conduct your family affairs. By contrast, Communism sticks its nose in everywhere and insists that it is the answer to everything, from running the entire country to how to raise your child. Unsurprisingly, something that tries to proscribe that much across that many orders of magnitude across that many domains fails miserably. In code terms, Capitalism is an interface; it says how entities interact but doesn't specify the nature of the entities. Communism is a very fragile over-engineered over-implemented "we'll call you" framework that's wrong in numerous ways, but management (literally!) is forcing you to use it.
    - 11y ago
protonfish 11y ago
It looks like the "well the USSR isn't _real_ communism!" card is still trying to be played today. And it is just as ridiculous.
- garrettgrimsley 11y ago
  Why is that ridiculous? The USSR was neither a classless nor stateless society. The means of production were owned by the state, nationalized, rather than owned by the workers, socialized. The USSR was about as communist as the United States Postal Service. A reading of Marx, Engels, or Goldman should make this evident.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  The USSR is, at best, an example of a particular kind of Communism -- Leninism -- from which most attempted implementations of "Communism" have derived. Leninism rejected central structural elements of Marx & Engels Communism, as well as associated environmental prerequisites, in order to come up with something that fit the particular circumstances in Russia at the time -- for which Marx and Engels' model was not a fit. Its an exercise in semantic line drawing as to whether it really counts as "Communism" at all, but its certainly a very different thing than Marx and Engels' Communism. (Leninism is at least as different from Marx and Engels' Communism as modern Western mixed economies are from the same reference point.)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mikearagua 11y ago
I'm with ya brother but these arguments are way too reminiscent of how Christians console themselves.

adventured 11y ago

It's not a good idea on paper, that's why it fails in practice and always will. It's a horrifically vile idea on paper, and far more so in practice. The results as you note speak for themselves.

Karunamon 11y ago
If you wouldn't mind elaborating more, why is it a vile idea on paper? AFAIK, every practical implementation of "communism" falls so short of the description, both ideal and transitionally, in things like The Communist Manifesto as to be blatantly lying when they use the name for themselves. And then you have countries right now like China which blatantly abuse the label. (At the very least: If your country is engaged in capitalism, you are doing it wrong.)
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  >every practical implementation of "communism" falls so short of the description And the same for Christianity or any other religion, but at least they had some positive outcomes.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    The equivalent to your analogy would be a self-professed Christian worshipping an image of a goat and chanting "hail satan". There's a difference between merely failing as an imperfect human being and actively working against the ideology you supposedly support.
    - happyscrappy 11y ago
      In order to say communism is viable it would be nice to have at least one success to reference. Former citizens of communist countries never cite its virtues, quite the opposite, only confused liberals in the West sing its praises.
      - Karunamon 11y ago