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Communism' biggest enemy was always democratic socialism. It was what stopped European countries joining the Soviet camp.

willcipriano 3y ago
Lenin disagrees: "The goal of socialism is communism."
- wesselbindt 3y ago
  Lenin is not talking about democratic socialism there, but rather the full blown dictatorship of the proletariat, nationalizing all means of production, etc etc kind of socialism. When it comes to democratic socialism, Lenin was not a fan, to put it mildly. He is absolutely scathing of the concept in for example _the State and Revolution_.
- mcv 3y ago
  While a nice quote and possibly even true, Lenin's totalitarian "communism" is not the goal of socialism. Communism was supposed to be a stateless utopia, and Lenin definitely did not get rid of the state. His wasn't even a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's a dictatorship by a small elite. Social democracy is much closer to a "dictatorship" of the proletariat, because there workers actually have a voice. It's important to realise that when Marx wrote his thing, many "democracies" still didn't allow poor people to vote. Marx would have been much happier about western capitalist denocracies than about Soviet communism. Although obviously the next step has to be to get money out of politics. And out of news media. Giving the people a voice doesn't help much if they're easily manipulated by the rich and powerful.
jacquesm 3y ago
That takes a whole bunch of historical shortcuts that I'm not comfortable with. For starters, the communists in Western Europe advocated violent revolution and - no surprise there - the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. If they couldn't get there through an election then it wasn't going to happen. Democratic socialism was the voice of reason next to the bloodlust of the 'true' communists.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  Reform and revolution was an active area of debate between Western European communists. What made Western European communists lean towards revolution were the bans on socialist parties by various countries, and the subsequent repression. This convinced many communists that they would simply never be allowed to get elected and transition out of capitalism. The second thing that ended reformism amongst Western communists was World War 1, which was used as a cudgel against any kind socialism and allowed the state to essentially use wars as a pretext to destroy communist movements and expel antiwar radicals from popular leftwing parties. And the rest of people didn't want nothing to do with it. The SPD, when it was an explicitly Marxist and revolutionary part in Germany for example, got up to 35% of the vote. It's after the expulsion from the SPD and the bans on various communist activities that Western European communists were decided on revolution. It wasn't because they were cartoonish bloodlusting villains.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Germany != Western Europe.
    - DoughnutHole 3y ago
      Germany is just an example, the sentiments are common to many European countries pre-WWII. The statement that "the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it" is true in that most European countries never had majority support for revolutionary socialism. But in many countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) it was a substantial block, in many places on par with support for more moderate socialists/social democrats. Revolutionary socialism is a highly fringe political viewpoint today, but it was much more popular in the inter-war years. It took a long time for people to learn of (and start to believe!) the atrocities that occurred in the revolution in Russia.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        It is true that it was much more popular then than it is today. But it still as far as I know never managed to gain more than a small percentage foothold. That doesn't mean that it was insignificant, it doesn't take a whole country to subscribe to something to change the course of history. But revolutionary socialism/communism did not come even close to being able to subvert the democratic process in those countries that already had a majority or coalition rule in place. Though there definitely were recorded attempts in almost every country they all fizzled out.
gloryjulio 3y ago
We should just treat these so called communism as monarch communism, because every practical communism end up being having a monarch. This is different from ideal communism or let's just call it fantasy communism. Because the ideal form of communism where everyone is equal and nice never happened and will probably never happen
- hnbad 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - bnralt 3y ago
    > In other words, if you tried to "do a communism", you'd either be carpet bombed (or more likely have a fascist coup funded against you) by the US, or you'd be made an offer you can't refuse by the Soviet Union. The inevitable outcome of this was that the only "communist experiments" that were able to grow in that era of history were ones that instantly aligned with the Soviet Union or that were sufficiently non-threatening and irrelevant to both sides (and thus likely never showed up on your radar). This isn't true, and many communist countries were openly hostile to the USSR. Yugoslavia went it's own way, China split with the USSR and had a war, Albania sided with China against the USSR, the Khmer Rouge were hostile to the USSR, North Korea tried to position themselves between the USSR and China. Even many countries that were aligned with the USSR weren't controlled by them (for example, Vietnam and Laos).
    - hnbad 3y ago
      Saying "this isn't true" and then listing a bunch of countries which either explicitly sided with China, were aligned with USSR "but not controlled by them" or that literally have Wikipedia articles called "$Country-Soviet split" is a bit silly. I never said that they were vassal states. I said they instantly aligned with the Soviet Union or had to be irrelevant to both sides. Albania, China and Yugoslavia are "counter-examples" only in that they were initially aligned with the Soviet Union but then deviated from it. The Sino-Soviet split pretty much occurred because the Soviet Union itself deviated from Stalinism and Mao didn't like that. China only got away with that because like the USSR it was extremely large and powerful. It literally split off to become a third superpower and its ideology was functionally indistinguishable from the Soviet Union with regard to its ability to achieve the supposed outcome of communism and its insistence on giving all power to the state in the meantime. Albania initially sided with Mao in order to split from the Soviet Union because much like Mao, Hoxha disagreed with post-Stalinist reviosionism in the USSR. Its split with China in turn was the result of China's embrace of liberal market reforms under Deng, i.e. another round of revisionism. Yugoslavia only survived its break with the Soviet Union because it (like China post-Mao) opened itself up to the US. However Yugoslavia's "communist" origins are directly tied to the Soviet Union, it's still downstream from Marxism-Leninism. The Khmer Rouge were also downstream of Marxism-Leninism and directly funded by China. Vietnam is probably the most ridiculous example you could have thought of given that the entire Vietnam War was a thing (and Ho Chi Minh Thought is also of course downstream from Marxism-Leninism). Likewise North Korea with the Korea War and it nowadays pretty much only existing at the behest of China (its only serious ally). I'm not sure what you were going for but if you wanted to disprove "if you tried to 'do a communism' you had to align with the Soviet Union or be bombed by the United States" the only thing you've accomplished is adding the nuance that you had to either align with the Soviet Union or, post Sino-Soviet split, China. The point remains that unless you were somehow compatible with Marxist-Leninism in one of its many forms, you were on your own against the United States and its economic geopolitical interests.
hnbad 3y ago
The European countries were not and are not democratic socialist countries. They're at best social democracies, and even that is an extreme stretch. They're mixed-market economies with social welfare programs. Cold War era anti-communism did not draw distinctions between Soviet "socialism" and democratic socialism although the Soviets explicitly purged democratic socialist movements and organizations and preferred leaving Spain to the fascists rather than allowing them to come out on top. Soviet "socialism" also isn't communism -- heck, the term "actually existing socialism" was coined to ridicule "utopian" leftists who wanted to achieve communism in Soviet-affiliated countries. Communism, a stateless society without private ownership, was always only considered the stated end goal of these countries, even when they actively took steps to prevent any progression towards that goal. If Orwell's detractors have been right on one thing about Animal Farm it's that people on the right are too ignorant to treat it as anything other than a condemnation of all forms of socialism although he specifically wrote it to condemn the Soviet Union's corrupt bureaucracy and the exploitation perpetuated by all forms of statism, whether under the guise of fascism, Soviet "socialism" or capitalism. The actual morale is fairly straightforward: the pigs get corrupted because they try to replace the humans but the oppression stems from the system affording the humans (and pigs) their position, not their species. You can't replace one state power with another and hope this will result in the abolition of the state because the state exists to perpetuate itself.
- prox 3y ago
  I am wondering now if true communism has ever been tried. I am thinking of the top of my head it might be a Kibbutz you find in Israel?
  - Gud 3y ago
    I mean, I’ve also never seen a real unicorn. The closest we are to real “communism” I would say is in Switzerland, where people vote together on any issue in a direct democratic way. They seem to reject economical communism, where the means of production are owned together.
    - hnben 3y ago
dilap 3y ago
[flagged]
- loudmax 3y ago
  I presume by "National socialists," you mean the Nazis. They weren't particular advocates of the free market, but they weren't socialist in a meaningful economic sense. The Nazis did consider Communists as enemies. Their argument that Communism was an extension of Jewishness would be farcical if it weren't so tragic. But for their part, the Communists would have been perfectly happy to make peace with the Fascists. They (correctly) recognized liberal democracy as a common enemy to their authoritarian dictatorships. Stalin didn't ally with western democracies until Hitler's surprise attack.
  - hackandthink 3y ago
    This is misleading, the popular front started much more early. And the Soviet Union tried to ally with France and Britain before the war. "Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.1458043?journalCode=rinh20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.14... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_front https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_front
  - coopierez 3y ago
    > They weren't particular advocates of the free market The word "privatisation" was coined to describe the actions of Nazi Germany's government in the 1930s.
- hnbad 3y ago
  The only people in the National Socialist German Workers Party who believed in something resembling a form of socialism were those supporting Strasser and he and his ilk were amongst the first killed during the party's purges. There's even a famous political cartoon of Hitler emphasizing the words Socialist and Workers for one crowd (blue collar) and National and German for the other (aristocrats). A more sophisticated quip might have been "what about National Bolshevists?" (aka "nazbols") but the short answer to that too is that if you try and add some red to your brown, it's still just another brown.
nemo44x 3y ago
I’m not certain that’s it. The best theory on why communism never caught on in Western Europe is that they were too developed. You need a lot of people that are in agriculture and Western Europe was beyond that.

willcipriano 3y ago

Lenin disagrees: "The goal of socialism is communism."

wesselbindt 3y ago
Lenin is not talking about democratic socialism there, but rather the full blown dictatorship of the proletariat, nationalizing all means of production, etc etc kind of socialism. When it comes to democratic socialism, Lenin was not a fan, to put it mildly. He is absolutely scathing of the concept in for example _the State and Revolution_.
mcv 3y ago
While a nice quote and possibly even true, Lenin's totalitarian "communism" is not the goal of socialism. Communism was supposed to be a stateless utopia, and Lenin definitely did not get rid of the state. His wasn't even a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's a dictatorship by a small elite. Social democracy is much closer to a "dictatorship" of the proletariat, because there workers actually have a voice. It's important to realise that when Marx wrote his thing, many "democracies" still didn't allow poor people to vote. Marx would have been much happier about western capitalist denocracies than about Soviet communism. Although obviously the next step has to be to get money out of politics. And out of news media. Giving the people a voice doesn't help much if they're easily manipulated by the rich and powerful.

jacquesm 3y ago

That takes a whole bunch of historical shortcuts that I'm not comfortable with. For starters, the communists in Western Europe advocated violent revolution and - no surprise there - the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. If they couldn't get there through an election then it wasn't going to happen. Democratic socialism was the voice of reason next to the bloodlust of the 'true' communists.

sudosysgen 3y ago
Reform and revolution was an active area of debate between Western European communists. What made Western European communists lean towards revolution were the bans on socialist parties by various countries, and the subsequent repression. This convinced many communists that they would simply never be allowed to get elected and transition out of capitalism. The second thing that ended reformism amongst Western communists was World War 1, which was used as a cudgel against any kind socialism and allowed the state to essentially use wars as a pretext to destroy communist movements and expel antiwar radicals from popular leftwing parties. And the rest of people didn't want nothing to do with it. The SPD, when it was an explicitly Marxist and revolutionary part in Germany for example, got up to 35% of the vote. It's after the expulsion from the SPD and the bans on various communist activities that Western European communists were decided on revolution. It wasn't because they were cartoonish bloodlusting villains.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Germany != Western Europe.
  - DoughnutHole 3y ago
    Germany is just an example, the sentiments are common to many European countries pre-WWII. The statement that "the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it" is true in that most European countries never had majority support for revolutionary socialism. But in many countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) it was a substantial block, in many places on par with support for more moderate socialists/social democrats. Revolutionary socialism is a highly fringe political viewpoint today, but it was much more popular in the inter-war years. It took a long time for people to learn of (and start to believe!) the atrocities that occurred in the revolution in Russia.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      It is true that it was much more popular then than it is today. But it still as far as I know never managed to gain more than a small percentage foothold. That doesn't mean that it was insignificant, it doesn't take a whole country to subscribe to something to change the course of history. But revolutionary socialism/communism did not come even close to being able to subvert the democratic process in those countries that already had a majority or coalition rule in place. Though there definitely were recorded attempts in almost every country they all fizzled out.

gloryjulio 3y ago

We should just treat these so called communism as monarch communism, because every practical communism end up being having a monarch. This is different from ideal communism or let's just call it fantasy communism. Because the ideal form of communism where everyone is equal and nice never happened and will probably never happen

hnbad 3y ago
[flagged]
- bnralt 3y ago
  > In other words, if you tried to "do a communism", you'd either be carpet bombed (or more likely have a fascist coup funded against you) by the US, or you'd be made an offer you can't refuse by the Soviet Union. The inevitable outcome of this was that the only "communist experiments" that were able to grow in that era of history were ones that instantly aligned with the Soviet Union or that were sufficiently non-threatening and irrelevant to both sides (and thus likely never showed up on your radar). This isn't true, and many communist countries were openly hostile to the USSR. Yugoslavia went it's own way, China split with the USSR and had a war, Albania sided with China against the USSR, the Khmer Rouge were hostile to the USSR, North Korea tried to position themselves between the USSR and China. Even many countries that were aligned with the USSR weren't controlled by them (for example, Vietnam and Laos).
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Saying "this isn't true" and then listing a bunch of countries which either explicitly sided with China, were aligned with USSR "but not controlled by them" or that literally have Wikipedia articles called "$Country-Soviet split" is a bit silly. I never said that they were vassal states. I said they instantly aligned with the Soviet Union or had to be irrelevant to both sides. Albania, China and Yugoslavia are "counter-examples" only in that they were initially aligned with the Soviet Union but then deviated from it. The Sino-Soviet split pretty much occurred because the Soviet Union itself deviated from Stalinism and Mao didn't like that. China only got away with that because like the USSR it was extremely large and powerful. It literally split off to become a third superpower and its ideology was functionally indistinguishable from the Soviet Union with regard to its ability to achieve the supposed outcome of communism and its insistence on giving all power to the state in the meantime. Albania initially sided with Mao in order to split from the Soviet Union because much like Mao, Hoxha disagreed with post-Stalinist reviosionism in the USSR. Its split with China in turn was the result of China's embrace of liberal market reforms under Deng, i.e. another round of revisionism. Yugoslavia only survived its break with the Soviet Union because it (like China post-Mao) opened itself up to the US. However Yugoslavia's "communist" origins are directly tied to the Soviet Union, it's still downstream from Marxism-Leninism. The Khmer Rouge were also downstream of Marxism-Leninism and directly funded by China. Vietnam is probably the most ridiculous example you could have thought of given that the entire Vietnam War was a thing (and Ho Chi Minh Thought is also of course downstream from Marxism-Leninism). Likewise North Korea with the Korea War and it nowadays pretty much only existing at the behest of China (its only serious ally). I'm not sure what you were going for but if you wanted to disprove "if you tried to 'do a communism' you had to align with the Soviet Union or be bombed by the United States" the only thing you've accomplished is adding the nuance that you had to either align with the Soviet Union or, post Sino-Soviet split, China. The point remains that unless you were somehow compatible with Marxist-Leninism in one of its many forms, you were on your own against the United States and its economic geopolitical interests.

hnbad 3y ago

The European countries were not and are not democratic socialist countries. They're at best social democracies, and even that is an extreme stretch. They're mixed-market economies with social welfare programs. Cold War era anti-communism did not draw distinctions between Soviet "socialism" and democratic socialism although the Soviets explicitly purged democratic socialist movements and organizations and preferred leaving Spain to the fascists rather than allowing them to come out on top. Soviet "socialism" also isn't communism -- heck, the term "actually existing socialism" was coined to ridicule "utopian" leftists who wanted to achieve communism in Soviet-affiliated countries. Communism, a stateless society without private ownership, was always only considered the stated end goal of these countries, even when they actively took steps to prevent any progression towards that goal. If Orwell's detractors have been right on one thing about Animal Farm it's that people on the right are too ignorant to treat it as anything other than a condemnation of all forms of socialism although he specifically wrote it to condemn the Soviet Union's corrupt bureaucracy and the exploitation perpetuated by all forms of statism, whether under the guise of fascism, Soviet "socialism" or capitalism. The actual morale is fairly straightforward: the pigs get corrupted because they try to replace the humans but the oppression stems from the system affording the humans (and pigs) their position, not their species. You can't replace one state power with another and hope this will result in the abolition of the state because the state exists to perpetuate itself.

prox 3y ago
I am wondering now if true communism has ever been tried. I am thinking of the top of my head it might be a Kibbutz you find in Israel?
- Gud 3y ago
  I mean, I’ve also never seen a real unicorn. The closest we are to real “communism” I would say is in Switzerland, where people vote together on any issue in a direct democratic way. They seem to reject economical communism, where the means of production are owned together.
  - hnben 3y ago

dilap 3y ago

[flagged]

loudmax 3y ago
I presume by "National socialists," you mean the Nazis. They weren't particular advocates of the free market, but they weren't socialist in a meaningful economic sense. The Nazis did consider Communists as enemies. Their argument that Communism was an extension of Jewishness would be farcical if it weren't so tragic. But for their part, the Communists would have been perfectly happy to make peace with the Fascists. They (correctly) recognized liberal democracy as a common enemy to their authoritarian dictatorships. Stalin didn't ally with western democracies until Hitler's surprise attack.
- hackandthink 3y ago
  This is misleading, the popular front started much more early. And the Soviet Union tried to ally with France and Britain before the war. "Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.1458043?journalCode=rinh20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.14... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_front https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_front
- coopierez 3y ago
  > They weren't particular advocates of the free market The word "privatisation" was coined to describe the actions of Nazi Germany's government in the 1930s.
hnbad 3y ago
The only people in the National Socialist German Workers Party who believed in something resembling a form of socialism were those supporting Strasser and he and his ilk were amongst the first killed during the party's purges. There's even a famous political cartoon of Hitler emphasizing the words Socialist and Workers for one crowd (blue collar) and National and German for the other (aristocrats). A more sophisticated quip might have been "what about National Bolshevists?" (aka "nazbols") but the short answer to that too is that if you try and add some red to your brown, it's still just another brown.

nemo44x 3y ago

I’m not certain that’s it. The best theory on why communism never caught on in Western Europe is that they were too developed. You need a lot of people that are in agriculture and Western Europe was beyond that.