Imagine if the Russian Revolution didn't turn out horrifically in the end. Imagine if the Soviet Union was an actual Marxist polity in something other than nomenclature.
God. History is so full of disappointments.
I should take up drinking.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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Try opium, ive heard opium is the opium of the masses
Imagine if Lenin could handle being in second place after elections
Woah, SECOND place?! With a paltry 75% supermajority of socialist parties in the legislature!? I'm pretty sure Lenin HAD to reject those so-called 'results', clearly the reactionaries were ready to take back control at any moment.
Imagine if a socialist revolution actually took place in an industrialised country like Marx predicted.
Communism works on paper. But in reality it’s impossible for humans to not be greedy, put themselves above others and not take power. You think the guys running the government are gonna give themselves an equal share to what a lower class person is getting?? Pffft.
Humans are too flawed for it to work. I like socialism but Socialism has to be snuck in there, cause even saying it’s socialism freaks out Americans
There's... a lot to unpack here. But the end goal of communism is that there isn't a hierarchical government of professional bureaucrats in the final stage of communist society.
But the end goal of communism is that there isn’t a hierarchical government of professional bureaucrats in the final stage of communist society.
Sure, but what the other poster is saying is that getting there is nearly impossible because a significant number of people are always going to manipulate things so that they end up with authority. The people who go on to become psychopathic CEOS aren't simply going to stop being born. The people who innately seek "more" aren't going to stop being born either.
So you need a solid plan to deal with those kinds of people because they aren't going to stop existing.
Sure, but what the other poster is saying is that getting there is nearly impossible because a significant number of people are always going to manipulate things so that they end up with authority.
You can, and groups regularly do, get there, in mostly stable communities.
It requires an active citizenry, but it is very much possible. The question is whether it is desirable, and whether it is competitive with other forms of communities. And I raise this question as someone who regards himself as communist and anarchist-sympathetic, but still skeptical of the desirability of the end-state.
In any case, anarchism and communism are not as utopian as they're being presented here. There's a considerable amount of writing on libertarian socialist dynamics and conflict resolution, including numerous real-world examples. The issue isn't as simple as "It's not possible" or "No one has thought of a solution yet", but questions of relative efficacy, development material conditions, the circumstances for stability, etc etc etc.
Eh, small communes are a very different thing. First, they are much smaller than a country. And the most important part: they're voluntary and pretty much consist of people who want to be there.
Unlike a country where millions of people want different things. So unless you want to go tribes again, it simply can't ever work.
Check historically anarchist regions during the height of non-ML leftism in the first half of the 20th century AD, like Ukraine and Anarchist Catalonia.
It's not that they are born psychopaths. You're not born a psychopath, you become one because of abuse during your formative years (aka childhood).
What communists, libertarians, and anarchists never seem to grasp is that their "end goal" would be a highly temporary state. Tribes will form. Somebody will start gathering power of one form or another, and then the cycle starts anew.
Yeah, for that reason I really struggle to imagine an actually stable communist state. It's like balancing a top without spinning it, and even if you manage that, expecting that to be a permanent solution.
I wrap my head around that by thinking of communism as the limit of socialism. It doesn't/can't actually exist because greedy people will always exist to steal power from their neighbors, but a socialist society can approach it.
Yes... but the "how you get there" stage never actualizes which means maybe there's something more fundemenally wrong with the theory.
To overthrow the resting state of a government you need power. That power generally doesn't work if it isn't organized so like it or not the efficiency of hierarchy ends up being key to creating the resistance able to take over and have the ability to enforce the set of ideals.
Now Communism wants a society that is laterally structured as possible which means that any new hierarchy that attempts to assemble itself is antithetical to the whole idea. The minute a hierarchy appears it is more structured and more efficient in disseminating it's directives because it works off of deffering the stages of debate and arriving at concensus... So the first hierarchy that forms in a lateral system has game advantage right off the bat unless it is stopped.
Now humans in a lateral power structure don't always agree. You can't count on all of them being conditioned to unilaterally and naturally oppose these hierarchies as they emerge. People are generally unhappy if government is slow and doesn't appear to be addressing their concerns - which is basically a problem with every Government because the allocation of resources and expertise is finite. Dissidents are going to happen and they are going to organize.
...But in a political landscape weak against emerging hierarchy and dependent on hierarchy not appearing how do you stop an emerging hierarchy from upsetting the apple cart? You have a standing force in place. Every attempt thusfar has either been capitalism with a red coat of paint or whatever revolutionary force overthrew the standing power remaining in place and exerting force against a population to keep the power of the masses atomized in the name of a system "without hierarchy" ignoring the hierarchy of the standing power because they are supposed to hand over the power at some point.
That point never actualizing is the bit Communist writers never really address. If the former revolutionaries let up the force used to keep people from organizing themselves Communism as it works in practice falls apart and the things they do to keep themselves in power are authoritarian because it is directed to stop the political will of others outside of their official hierarchy. Once you remove personal wealth from individual hands you also lock people inside the system because they have to accept that to move outside the boundaries they to leave to pursue life under other systems they will need do so with virtually nothing.
I’ve lived under a communist regime. Doesn’t work. Many countries have tried, doesn’t work. The people running things will always be the rich and all you do is create an even bigger divide between the haves and have nots
No, you haven't
Racist prick
Weird response to pointing out correctly that you never lived under communism
So they say. It is impossible, though.
You can definitely trust those same people to run a capitalist system instead.
Y'know it's possible to dislike 2 things at once?
Classic whataboutism.
Why does saying one thing doesn’t work, mean I’m a lover of the thing you hate? Why are you an extremist?
That's a false dichotomy, there are other options than textbook communism and unregulated capitalism
The problem with communism is the requirement for an intermediary despotic stage. There is no way that anyone involved ever intended it to get beyond that (with the possible exception of Marx himself). That's just not how humans work.
Marx's "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was envisaged as democracy though.
Bourgeois democracy (ie what we largely live in today) is "Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie".
It's in reference to what class holds power, not an actual autocratic or oligarchic power structure.
I think the main issue has been how people try to implement Marx's ideas without the full context of his work. Marx wrote while sociology and economics were in their early stages. The idea that society could be rationalized, studied and planned was a brand new idea in the Enlightenment Era.
His work builds well off of his economic axioms, but that doesn't make it a universal truth. We're quick to recognize this in many other fields of study; for example, Newtonian physics is outmoded even though it's logically consistent with our daily life. However, the mix of philosophy and socioeconomics in Marxism makes it harder for people to see that.
Since it's a description of how society should progress, it makes any deviation antithetical to the end state. To maintain the logical and materialist foundations, a new theory must be constructed and thus a new -ism is born.
The other important factor is that revolutionary periods are times of incredible change. People in the 18th - early 20th century were lurching from crumbling bedrock institutions. Things like burgeoning atheism, urbanization and mechanization left a void in identity.
So revolutionary theory started doing the lifting for all of those. It became religious dogma, career, and the core of their social life. Similar to modern religious fundamentalism, that breeds a mindset where any criticism is a personal assault and a ready acceptance for ends-justify-means public policy.
All of this means that the old truism "it doesn't work in practice" is valid but completely misses the point. Marx wrote his theory assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum, and revolutionaries started chopping cows into spheres to fit the theory.
You can see the legacy of this today. It's why the left has strict acid tests for ideological purity while the right doesn't. I don't think that a radical left utopia is currently possible, not because it runs counter to human nature but because the left can't move beyond academic theory.
Society isn't an equation that can be solved, it's a living organism adapting to its environment. Theory should form the foundation but can't be prescriptive; a doctor cures the ills that need curing because perfect health is impossible
You guys just haven't read enough theory
Don’t forget Castro
Honestly, I give more leeway to Castro, who was in a bad position and didn't pretend to be an original theorist, over Lenin or Stalin who fucked up their governments in new and exciting ways.
It doesn't justify the authoritarianism of the Cuban regime, but I see Castro in a much more tragic light than Lenin or Stalin, who created most of their own problems and made those problems the rest of the world's as well.
The Cubans have done pretty goddamn well considering. Among other things they have never had a higher percentage of their population in prison or subject to systemic racism than America.
What's going to be interesting is what happens when Trump finishes expelling 500k+ Cuban refugees.
Among other things they have never had a higher percentage of their population in prison or subject to systemic racism than America.
"So what you had was that the world's two major propaganda agencies, for their own quite different reasons were claiming that this destruction of socialism is socialism. And it's very hard to break out of the control of the world's two major propaganda agencies when they agree, and they agreed for different reasons, but they agreed, and then that becomes doctrine and dogma."