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> he was asked by tankie friends to keep quiet about the USSR's crimes because they were the best chance for Communism. I have a lot of empathy for the tankies

> he was asked by tankie friends to keep quiet about the USSR's crimes because they were the best chance for Communism. I have a lot of empathy for the tankies of that era. It was clear that people like Stalin were truly evil, but it was also clear from centuries of evidence that capitalism was exploitative and needed upheaval. On PAPER, Communism sounds great. I do think people genuinely believed there were simply growing pains and once through them something what today's generation thinks of as the "Star Trek The Next Generation Utopia" could be achievable. There are still people that think it might have succeeded if given a genuine chance, and not undermined by the rich in the west. In retrospect we now know they were wrong, and probably Russia was the worst place for communism to succeed. A society like China is probably the one in which it has the best chance, and even there we see that successful communism requires some free market economics and some pretty heinous repression.

iraqmtpizza 3y ago
Everything sounds great until you ask, what if someone wants to opt out?
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  Yeah, but that's not unique to communism. You can't really opt out of current capitalistic economic system either
- harimau777 3y ago
  That applies to capitalism as well. For example, if you opt out of recognizing private property (in this case, by private property I mean things like land as opposed to personal property like someone's house or car) people with guns will come and destroy your personal property and/or throw you in jail.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    In capitalist systems, you and your buddies are free to opt out and sign over all your property to a commune. What you aren't free to do is rob other people who don't consent to your commune of their stuff. Because they have the right to not join you, this is the fundamental sticking point that makes communists (literally) murderously mad.
    - harimau777 3y ago
      I don't think that's quite accurate. The sticking point is whether people have the right to own or exclude others from private property (again as separate from personal property), to what degree it is legitimate for individuals to profit from private property, and whether that private property was legitimately acquired. If individuals don't have the right to own or exclude others from private property, then other people using it isn't theft. If the bounty that comes from natural resources on private property should benefit society as a whole (because no individual created them). Then it is unjust for their extraction to be monopolized by someone who claims to own them. If land was unjustly acquired such as through enclosure of common land or colonialism, then it is the owners who are the thieves. It's important to recognize that different branches of socialism are going to see the specifics of these sorts of issues differently.
      - lupusreal 3y ago
        The fact of the matter is that under capitalism, you can choose to pool your resources with other people and start your own little communist society embedded in the capitalist society. As long as all of your participants are consenting, that's allowed. On the flipside, in a nominally communist society (or more accurately, a socialist society which is striving to achieve communism in the future, supposedly a scientifically inevitable outcome which has never panned out...), you're not allowed to create an embedded capitalist society of consenting members. People still do it of course, but it is officially forbidden and all the consenting participants are risking state violence. The reason the commune of consenting members embedded in a capitalist society doesn't satisfy you is because you think that "real communism" can only be done if you can force unconsenting people to comply; if you are allowed to steal and murder anybody who isn't with you. But the truth is that even when people striving for communism have free reign to force compliance of the unwilling, they still inevitability fail to achieve communism. It's a utopian ideology which will never be realized, which is good only for giving the bitter and resentful a license to murder.
        harimau777 3y ago
        Please don't resort to personal attacks. The issue with creating a communist society inside a capitalist society is that it is only possible for people who already have access to capital. People without access to capital do not have that option. If it is unjust to exclude others from private property or if the person who owns the private property gained in unjustly, then it is unjust if only those who own private property can opt out of capitalism.
qwytw 3y ago
> A society like China Why? China was even more poor and rural that pre-revolutionary Russia. I'm pretty sure Marx himself was thinking about France, Britain, Germany etc. you couldn't just jump from a pre-capitalist system to a communist one.
hnbad 3y ago
The thing many people overlook is that the USSR was less interested in achieving communism than in co-opting any other attempts at achieving communism. This, in part, led to the Sino-Soviet split and the split with Yugoslavia. But even before that the USSR was literally founded on the Bolsheviks eliminating all other communist movements in its sphere of influence: starting with the actual soviets (bottom-up worker councils and worker cooperatives dissolved in favor of the central Bolshevik bureaucracy), the massacre of the anarchist movement in Ukraine under Makhno (which prior to that point had fought alongside the Bolsheviks against the White Army) and of course the betrayal of Spanish anarchists that led to the fascist dictatorship of Franco - the latter being something Orwell experienced himself and forever soured him on the USSR. The Bolsheviks' (and their ideological offsprings' in China, Yugoslavia and the various countries whose movements they co-opted) idea of establishing communism was to do so with the iron fist of the vanguard party that would do all the work of preparing for communism until the unwashed masses of the entire world are sufficiently educated and enlightened to spontaneously erupt into global communism and the state would just voluntarily wither away after having served its function. Anarchists argue that the fundamental mistake of this approach was to assume centralizing all the power previously held by a capitalist (or proto-capitalist/monarchist) state in a vanguard party is the antithesis of communism and creates perverse incentives for the party given all that power while also being told their function is to give up all that power eventually. To paraphrase anarchist thinker Bakunin: if you're beaten with a stick it doesn't change anything if it is called The People's Stick, there needs to be no stick. If power corrupts (and absolute power... you know the drill) then we can't expect to pass the power previously held by those we despire to another group and expect them not to become equally despicable. Instead anarchists believe in building bottom-up power structures and abolishing hierarchical power structures. > [in China] we see that successful communism requires To be clear as this is a common misunderstanding: just like the USSR, China has always been careful to identify its politics as ideologically communist but not its system as communism. Communism is a class-less, state-less society so "communist state" in Leninist parlance should always be understood as aspirational rather than descriptive. China hasn't achieved communism, China wants to achieve communism, or so its vanguard party says. Marx was fairly explicit about what communism is and neither the USSR, nor any of its ideological offspring were that. Arguably prehistoric societies existed in a form of "primitive communism" but except for anarcho-primitivists few people think abandoning all human accomplishments is necessary or helpful in achieving communism.

iraqmtpizza 3y ago

Everything sounds great until you ask, what if someone wants to opt out?

pi-e-sigma 3y ago
Yeah, but that's not unique to communism. You can't really opt out of current capitalistic economic system either
harimau777 3y ago
That applies to capitalism as well. For example, if you opt out of recognizing private property (in this case, by private property I mean things like land as opposed to personal property like someone's house or car) people with guns will come and destroy your personal property and/or throw you in jail.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  In capitalist systems, you and your buddies are free to opt out and sign over all your property to a commune. What you aren't free to do is rob other people who don't consent to your commune of their stuff. Because they have the right to not join you, this is the fundamental sticking point that makes communists (literally) murderously mad.
  - harimau777 3y ago
    I don't think that's quite accurate. The sticking point is whether people have the right to own or exclude others from private property (again as separate from personal property), to what degree it is legitimate for individuals to profit from private property, and whether that private property was legitimately acquired. If individuals don't have the right to own or exclude others from private property, then other people using it isn't theft. If the bounty that comes from natural resources on private property should benefit society as a whole (because no individual created them). Then it is unjust for their extraction to be monopolized by someone who claims to own them. If land was unjustly acquired such as through enclosure of common land or colonialism, then it is the owners who are the thieves. It's important to recognize that different branches of socialism are going to see the specifics of these sorts of issues differently.
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      The fact of the matter is that under capitalism, you can choose to pool your resources with other people and start your own little communist society embedded in the capitalist society. As long as all of your participants are consenting, that's allowed. On the flipside, in a nominally communist society (or more accurately, a socialist society which is striving to achieve communism in the future, supposedly a scientifically inevitable outcome which has never panned out...), you're not allowed to create an embedded capitalist society of consenting members. People still do it of course, but it is officially forbidden and all the consenting participants are risking state violence. The reason the commune of consenting members embedded in a capitalist society doesn't satisfy you is because you think that "real communism" can only be done if you can force unconsenting people to comply; if you are allowed to steal and murder anybody who isn't with you. But the truth is that even when people striving for communism have free reign to force compliance of the unwilling, they still inevitability fail to achieve communism. It's a utopian ideology which will never be realized, which is good only for giving the bitter and resentful a license to murder.
      - harimau777 3y ago
        Please don't resort to personal attacks. The issue with creating a communist society inside a capitalist society is that it is only possible for people who already have access to capital. People without access to capital do not have that option. If it is unjust to exclude others from private property or if the person who owns the private property gained in unjustly, then it is unjust if only those who own private property can opt out of capitalism.

qwytw 3y ago

> A society like China Why? China was even more poor and rural that pre-revolutionary Russia. I'm pretty sure Marx himself was thinking about France, Britain, Germany etc. you couldn't just jump from a pre-capitalist system to a communist one.

hnbad 3y ago

The thing many people overlook is that the USSR was less interested in achieving communism than in co-opting any other attempts at achieving communism. This, in part, led to the Sino-Soviet split and the split with Yugoslavia. But even before that the USSR was literally founded on the Bolsheviks eliminating all other communist movements in its sphere of influence: starting with the actual soviets (bottom-up worker councils and worker cooperatives dissolved in favor of the central Bolshevik bureaucracy), the massacre of the anarchist movement in Ukraine under Makhno (which prior to that point had fought alongside the Bolsheviks against the White Army) and of course the betrayal of Spanish anarchists that led to the fascist dictatorship of Franco - the latter being something Orwell experienced himself and forever soured him on the USSR. The Bolsheviks' (and their ideological offsprings' in China, Yugoslavia and the various countries whose movements they co-opted) idea of establishing communism was to do so with the iron fist of the vanguard party that would do all the work of preparing for communism until the unwashed masses of the entire world are sufficiently educated and enlightened to spontaneously erupt into global communism and the state would just voluntarily wither away after having served its function. Anarchists argue that the fundamental mistake of this approach was to assume centralizing all the power previously held by a capitalist (or proto-capitalist/monarchist) state in a vanguard party is the antithesis of communism and creates perverse incentives for the party given all that power while also being told their function is to give up all that power eventually. To paraphrase anarchist thinker Bakunin: if you're beaten with a stick it doesn't change anything if it is called The People's Stick, there needs to be no stick. If power corrupts (and absolute power... you know the drill) then we can't expect to pass the power previously held by those we despire to another group and expect them not to become equally despicable. Instead anarchists believe in building bottom-up power structures and abolishing hierarchical power structures. > [in China] we see that successful communism requires To be clear as this is a common misunderstanding: just like the USSR, China has always been careful to identify its politics as ideologically communist but not its system as communism. Communism is a class-less, state-less society so "communist state" in Leninist parlance should always be understood as aspirational rather than descriptive. China hasn't achieved communism, China wants to achieve communism, or so its vanguard party says. Marx was fairly explicit about what communism is and neither the USSR, nor any of its ideological offspring were that. Arguably prehistoric societies existed in a form of "primitive communism" but except for anarcho-primitivists few people think abandoning all human accomplishments is necessary or helpful in achieving communism.