Seriously...why did communism fail

>why didn't capitalist nations turn to communism and why did communism fail?
Soviet communism made socialism taboo for a couple of generations. Populism is starting to swell again now that people from the red scare generation are getting old. Socialism in one country for a developed country doesn't work well because of capital flight and loss of trading blocs. Trading blocs and larger markets tend to be good for economies. Being unable to retain capital because you want to socialize it is bad because suddenly your industry has less capital. Being embargod and losing trading partners if bad for your economy, it doesn't matter if the reason is communism, human rights violations, of because that country doesn't like you. Poor countries embrace capitalism because it encourages foreign investment from rich countries.

Basically, what prevents socialism from occurring on a local scale is the fact that people with capital can threaten to take it to another capitalist country if you stop being capitalist. And even if you aren't socialist, they do so anyways. You have governments and societies racing to the bottom to attract or retain capital from rich and powerful individuals and corporations. As capitalism still has room to grow, this will go on for a while.

I know you can't actually be bothered to read Marx, and you want to assume Marx wrote about reds, which he didn't. But if you want to consider reds true communists, then China is actually doing very well and very successful. The typical response is that China is not true communism, but the USSR was true communism, scottsman etc. Although arguably neither of them are ethnically Scottish, live in Scotland or have Scottish ancestors, they just identify as Scottish because they wear skirts.

>why did it fail
1. But, but, it wasn't real communism. There was money, trade, inheritance, marriage, etc stuff that aren't communist.
2. It was adopted by Russia and China, two utterly destroyed by war states, with a long history of being backwards and ruthless.

>why didn't everyone revolt
1. Because USA, and later NATO, were an anti-communist alliance that toured the world suppressing communists any way possible.
2. Half the world still attempted it.

t. not a communist, but also not an illiterate mongrel

Because the USSR didn't have Dear Leader

youtube.com/watch?v=zmI2yDAyWYI

In his predicitions Marx was a preacher and a philosopher first and foremost. People like that are too far detached from reality to make any accurate predictions about what will, or even about what ought to happen.
As a historian he may have been decent, bringing forth some new ideas, but Marx's stages of history are grade A autism.

states

I bet you can't even articulate what Marx preached or predicted.

Because animals solve problems to attain profits, which is the creature's reward.
Without reward, the beast will try to preserve energy in the most efficient way possible.
Under the reign of Communism, profit is distributed throughout the populace, causing the human animal to medi-to-

You can still have socialism, also known as low level communism.

"To each according to his contribution"

If you don't have from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, you have strayed too far away from the general idea of communism, marxism and even socialism.
Their goal is for everyone to have what they need, and to achieve this by having everyone contribute as much as they can.
The solution you propose is just free market capitalism made to sound like soviet propaganda.

But that's not a problem when you have robots making everything.

'To each according to his contribution'

But that's capitalism user.

Khrushchev assumed Stalin's role by threatening a military coup after his death. After that, DeStalinisation and liberal reforms in '65 started the path to restore capitalism.

>if we lived in utopia things would be different
wow, that really causes you to ponder, doesn't it?

>it's a "communists deny that East Germany existed" episode

Western Europe? Check
Industrialized? Check
High literacy? Check
Communism turned it into shit? Check

>animals solve problems to attain profits
>profits

PURE

IDEOLOGY

One big issue that USSR fans tend to overlook is the failure of the Communist International. The Comintern was intended to facilitate the spread of communism and the success of proletariat uprisings internationally, both of which are essential to communism's ultimate victory, but it essentially became a tool that Moscow used to exert its dominance over the rest of world's communist countries and exploit for its personal advantage.

If you're interested in this I would recommend Archie Brown's "The Rise and Fall of Communism." I'm making my way through it right now and its dank.

Ultimately, I support communism and the aims of the world's communist parties but I don't think it could have gone any other way or could go any other way if we try again. It is unimaginable that party as disciplined, regimented, and all-powerful as a national communist party in any country will ever relinquish power, and I think that the worst rising to the top is a flaw inherent in the communist system.

>Ignoring the method of governance or the economic system, becoming a super power is not an unimpressive feat.

One big advantage of centrally planned economies is that you can very easiy mobilize all your resources towards specific ends. This comes at the cost of consumer goods and kulaks tho. Revisionists like to pretend that the Soviet economic model had no advantage whatsoever, but it definitely did.

>like Stalin who come in and ruin everything

What did Stalin ruin? He was as much of a ML as Lenin.

No, capitalism is

'To each according to his ownership'

The labor only gets compensated for the labor he owns. The capitalist gets compensated for the capital he owns. The really shitty capitalist gets compensated for predatory practices can capitalism allows him to own by right.

But that's what end stage communism is supposed to be. Robot utopia.

But Lenin died before he could do that much communist stuff.

It's not really fair to call it "end stage communism" if the only way to get there is "anything but communism".

What do you mean? Stalin was a true Bolshevik who carried on what Lenin started.

That's questionable. Lenin warned against Stalin achieving power and would have stopped him had he not suffered a debilitating stroke. I think it is beyond unlikely that Lenin would have approved of Stalin's Great Purge or the use of his own rhetoric in its justification.

> It is unimaginable that party as disciplined, regimented, and all-powerful as a national communist party in any country will ever relinquish power
Then don't have a single party system, and have an actual democratic government like Marx anticipated. Ruskies and Chinamen didn't have a culture of democracy, so it's natural that their governments ended up not being representative.

> I think that the worst rising to the top is a flaw inherent in the communist system.
The worst rising to the top is a problem of the capitalist system that allows the worst to profit the most. If people stopped obsessing over stateless moneyless utopian communism, you could implement market socialism.

A capitalism socialism hybrid could simply be one where a elected government on behalf of the people can send dicks like used car salesmen, pharmabros, and bakers to the gulags and seize their profits if they do shitty detrimental things that don't add productivity to the economy.

>One big advantage of centrally planned economies is that you can very easiy mobilize all your resources towards specific ends.
One big disadvantage is if you have 1960's computers and ineffective checks you tend to do a shit job at it.

If you've read Marx, which you haven't, you'd understand there are two stages of communism, one is lower stage communism, also known as socialism. The other is higher stage communism. Higher stage communism comes after lower stage communism.

I'm not a communist, "utopian model" is not a complement.

But I don't think east Germany is really the best example considering the historical context of being half a war-devastated country and being the ideological center of a decades-long cold war, an ideology that was forced upon them no less.

The problem with cold war comparisons is that there's always someone (usually a superpower) tipping the scales one way or the other. There's no perfect test subject.

Stalin turned it into a cult, killed all his political rivals, and started implementing monumentally retarded ideas like Lysenkoism.

>the entrenched bureaucratic party elites will willingly dissolve the state and give up power
How was marx this stupid?

>where a elected government on behalf of the people can send dicks like used car salesmen, pharmabros, and bakers to the gulags and seize their profits if they do shitty detrimental things that don't add productivity to the economy.
The last nation that tried had the capitalist nations of the world turn on it and was brought to heel just over 70 years ago.

>have an actual democratic government like Marx anticipated
>"dictatorship of the proletariat"

You're talking out of your ass. The USSR's repressive, single party politics come directly from Marx.

>implying the bankers in your self-contradictory system won't take control of the government as they tend to do and send their competitors to the gulags
>implying an "elected government on behalf of the people" in the 21st century isn't more utopian than communism

They would have gotten away with it if they had a sensible foreign policy.

Here is the deal.

I'm a Finance major and in a Finance job.

I'm pro-Capitalist as they get.

HOWEVER, capitalism is spending billions trying to automate everything to save money. Labor is expensive, so its a natural movement to automate everything to save money.

But that will have big problems in the long term when 50% of the unskilled labor is out of work.

How are we going to deal with that?

They already have a self driving taxi in Signapore.

What will the 6 million truck drivers do when they are replaced by self driving trucks?

East Germany was in a poor position though since it was plundered by the soviets after the war

When the USSR started with an agrarian peasant population that was almost wholly illiterate and was able to become an industrial superpower and achieve nearly universal literacy in two decades.

Of course I haven't. After he's been proven wrong by history I don't think there is much to gain from reading it.
We can already see that socialism doesn't follow from capitalism so why would communism follow from socialism?

All these niggaz in here who only read the Communist Manifesto, have no understanding of communist systems throughout history, and have no valuable input to the conversation be like "well read Marx xD de la communism ACTUALLY means a utopian society xd i'm contributing so much to this thread"

it lasted a fair bit longer than 5 mins before it failed

lol

Actual GDR historian here. The reasons why the GDR failed are more complex than you are stating but if we are looking at the economics only it's important to state the GDRs pre-war territory was more industrialized than the Western parts of Germany even higher than the Ruhrgebiet. This dude is right to a certain extend but what was even more important was that the GDR heavily relied on the German economy i.e. they needed the coal and steel from the Ruhrgebiet to have their industry working. GDRs economy went to shit early on cause the ties to the West were cut. They never recovered from that.

Because he thought socialism would happen in a democratic society, not one with an autocratic bureaucracy.

Capitalists like profiting off of dickishness.

I don't think you understand what dictatorship of the proletariat means. It means the proletariat get to dictate society through democratic means.

This is why Marx though you could only get over that last hurdle to post scarcity with socialism.

Leninism was proven wrong. I will pay to have you cryogenically frozen so when you wake up in 1000 years you will see socialism does follow capitalism.

>not knowing about the „Verselbständigung der Exekutive" and that Marx was aware of the danger of bureaucracy

I always found it funny how the GDR was the best Soviet satellite even though the USSR tried to plunder it as much as possible.

K e k I don't think you understand what the term "dictatorship" means. And I think its becoming increasingly obvious that you're pretending to have any familiarity with Marx/Lenin/Engels or history because they very explicitly outlined what they meant in a number of writings.

"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?" -Engels, On Authority (1872)

>Lenin warned against Stalin achieving power and would have stopped him had he not suffered a debilitating stroke.

Are you talking about Lenin's "Testament"

>Stalin turned it into a cult, killed all his political rivals, and started implementing monumentally retarded ideas like Lysenkoism.

Turned what into a cult?
He killed counter-revolutionaries and revisionists.
Stalin died before the double-helix was discovered, one blot doesn't make the Soviet Union a disaster.

This. Is like people never read the Anti-Düring.
Only true before 1949. Afterwards it became a showcase to the West.

>defending Lysenkoism
>disregarding that theoretical genetics already existed

No. People have mentioned that to me before but I never read anything about it. I thought that Lenin regretted appointing Stalin, took steps to prevent him from consolidating his power, and, ultimately, wanted him to be removed from office but was prevented by his health.

>K e k I don't think you understand what the term "dictatorship" means.
Go edit the wiki page then
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat

>And I think its becoming increasingly obvious that you're pretending to have any familiarity with Marx/Lenin/Engels or history because they very explicitly outlined what they meant in a number of writings.
Lenin was 13 when Marx died. He wasn't buttbuddies with Marx like Engels was. Stop pretending like they're actually closely related.

>"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?" -Engels, On Authority (1872)
Authority is democracy is the authority of the citizens over the state, not the authority of the state over the citizens.

>to each according to his contribution
So you want to outlaw inheritance, usury, banking, investment, public trading companies, and so on?
I think this isn't compatible with modern life.

How do you even rate the contribution of celebrities? Artists in general, athletes, people who provide a mode subjective service and don't produce any material goods?

From the Wiki page you're claiming to have read:

>Both Marx and Engels argued that the short-lived Paris Commune, which ran the French capital for over two months before being repressed, was an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

>Marxism–Leninism follows the ideas of Marxism and Leninism, seeking to establish a vanguard party, to lead proletarian uprising, assume state power on behalf of the proletariat, and create a single party socialist state.

Not sure if you're genuinely retarded, trolling, don't know what the Paris Commune is, or have been deceived by the name "democratic centralism" into thinking that a single-party state is genuinely democratic.

>So you want to outlaw inheritance, usury, banking, investment, public trading companies, and so on?
>banking is outlawed
Dude seriously read a book before you spout stuff like this. Banks exist to to direct investments originally, not to trade stocks.

>So you want to outlaw inheritance
Just have a heavy progressive tax on inheritance. Inheritance has been around longer than civilization has, people aren't ready to give up inheritance. Basically, the success of a genius should not last more than 3 generations of mediocre inheritors, and over a span of 3 generations, the inheritance should decrease back near normal levels instead of increasing, unless the inheritors themselves are geniuses. Your children shouldn't just be able to hand over their inheritance to a portfolio manager and liver comfortably off dividends for their entire lives while growing their capital. But sure, you can give them a pretty decent head start.

>usury
Yes, fuck the Jews, fuck them.

>banking
Nationalize the banks. Treat bank profits like taxes for general spending.

>investment
At the very least make the investment markets like stocks less based on speculation of speculation, and more on speculation of success. Overspeculation leads to malinvestment and bubbles, because people want to profit off of highs and lows on charts, not the actual success of a company.

>public trading companies
They're already public, they're an excellent argument how you can run a socially owned corporation. Except in socialism the shareholders is everyone, so they'd encourage good business, but not if it means the company is screwing over normal people.

>I think this isn't compatible with modern life.
What does this even mean? You mean we couldn't magically turn socialist next week? Isn't that obvious?

>How do you even rate the contribution of celebrities? Artists in general, athletes, people who provide a mode subjective service and don't produce any material goods?
Well regulated markets. Markets are good in the absence of a better mechanism. Reasonable regulation prevents them from being distorted.

You're seriously arguing that the Paris Commune is just like Stalinism? Are you retarded?

>
>Marxism–Leninism follows the ideas of Marxism and Leninism, seeking to establish a vanguard party, to lead proletarian uprising, assume state power on behalf of the proletariat, and create a single party socialist state.
>implying marxism is leninism
Try again

Interesting, thank you

>why can't I sprout wings and fly away?

guess what, we're accountable to reality.

Like I said one blot doesn't make the Soviet Union a disaster. Lysenko wasn't a good scientist, I was defending Stalin desu.

Sounds like Trotskyist lies. Lenin called for Stalin to be removed from General Secretary in his 'will' because he was "rude" and his rudeness would cause a split with Trotsky. It was resoundingly rejected as Stalin was held in high regard by the party. Stalin and Lenin were very good friends. But Lenin's wife was not too fond of Stalin.

Rude.

I think its clear that Marx didn't want "the proletariat get to dictate society through democratic means" lol.

True. I think I remember reading about him wanting to remove Stalin in the Archie Brown book I mentioned earlier ITT so I'll have to revisit that.

>I think its clear that Marx didn't want "the proletariat get to dictate society through democratic means" lol.

Based on Leninist Boshevism? Lenin who was 13 when Marx died? You're going attribute Lenin's ideas to Marx?

Based on the fact that the Paris Commune wasn't an autocratic dictatorship of a single despot?

Are you just making shit up? Your quotes don't even prove your point.

>We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Communism was actually very successful considering it was built on staggering economic centralization. I would have thought it would have done much worse than putting the first man in space.

More like it was very successful considering it was built on war thorn defunct agrarian countries without national identity or a working economic structure.
They pretty much started from scratch.

First thing that Stalin did, was "just" compressing 150 years of industrial revolution into 20 years. The way he changed the industry was simply copied from the history of the Western nations.

Then you had war economy sponsored partially by the US and then it went to shit after there were no more precedents to copy and the whole Eastern bloq mostly isolated itself from the rest of the world.

From then on their central planning was totally testing the waters and no more "let's get up to date with the Westerners".

>farfetched political theory is perfect in every way
>nobody can pull it off

I mean if communism was so good and would work so well I'm sure it would have at least existed at this point right? Why is literally everyone who claims to be a communist suck at communism? Maybe they need to make an incorruptible communist robot to properly force everyone into communism?

what's your point

>Communism is a classless, moneyless society where things are produced solely for social need.

Then you can say it failed because almost every government that purported to try to implement it failed miserably and descended into tyranny or poverty.

I seriously doubt the """""true""""" form of any government has truly existed, because it's always somehow flawed in its implementation. Only communists seem to nitpick so much that it "hasn't REALLY been tried"

That said I don't personally think "communism failed" in just the same way I don't think monarchism failed or democracy failed, because I think each system of government has potential to be done correctly if well-implemented and suited to the temperament of the society. The thing is, I think compared to the other systems of government communism is the most difficult to achieve both for the difficulty at implementing it and the fact very few societies have the right temperament.

econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/museum/musframe.htm

You can't "compress" a cultural and technical revolution.

The russians keep aplying models of centralized planning for mass production of goods. That didn't go anywhere without some of the quirks of capitalism, like planned obsolence, if you can make lightbulbs that last a 100 years there's no point in making more light bulbs, once you completed the distribution of lightbulbs, they simply didn't had enough people to justify the size of their production.

They wasted resources in things that didn't serve any purpose like war machinery.

You can't let people without work in a communist regime, cause the citenzhip and the ideology itself, relies on the self awareness of the workers conditions, if your workers loss their jobs and have a shitty income, you have a fully aware working class that feel like they were cheated, but you can't trick them into buying shit they don't need, cause that's capitalism game, so they make them fight proxy wars and feed them propaganda 24/7, to keep paranoid leaders more calm.

It didn't work cause people aren't dumb and they can talk to other people and the grass is always greener and all that shit.

After all, capitalism economy relies on some of the same principles, the main difference is that the story of revolutions for socialist countries came a hundred years to late.

Counter-revolutions, make impossible for the russians to build a distribution net of resources that they needed desperately, they had a million tanks and no country to sell them, or exchange them for goods.

Under all the ideologies, the XX century world leaderships were the same, but the proposed economies depend on the size of the markets, capitalism had more time to build a world market.

That's it.

>Because animals solve problems to attain profits, which is the creature's reward.

Have you ever noticed that humans have domesticated animals and many animals have done well even in such a way, without go-getter profit oriented capitalist animals seeking to save part of their dinner and reinvest it?

Even using the term profit in a capitalist sense in context of animals is silly. "Profit" to most animals on earth, domesticated or in the wild, is "today's meal and not dying" IE "he profited from eating that meal and not dying." While to capitalist societies usually refers to surplus gain, not sustenance. Otherwise you could use profit in a communist context by saying "Ivan profited today from eating his meal and not dying." Not to mention the variance between different animals and their habits. Comparing a cat to a squirrel or a squirrel to a cow or any of them to a rational, self-aware human being is nonsensical except in the very broadest terms like "we all eat, drink, and shit."

Not even advocating communism, by the way, your comparison to animals is just not useful. Just talk in terms of human beings, and yes I know "but humans ARE animals" but when you start saying "animals do x" you're speaking generally, not specifically.

...

I typed out two well worded responses. Two fucking times I forgot the captcha and lost them. I'm going to tear my fucking dick off.

Basically, the SU was stinky poopoo, Marx wasn't Nostradamus, Marxist-Leninism isn't the only communist ideology, and the collapse of a country is not definite proof that their politics are a failure.

Lot's of animals store food.

Ants have farming and live stock methods, they do work expecting a later profit, the example it's valid if you use social animals.

Animals aren't one dimensional beigns.

Because Marx worked from some pretty shaky economics to build the foundation of his predictive structure. Since that turned out not to be true, is it any surprise that the predictions he made fizzled?

-capitalism is like nature, it regulates itself, the prices of things, what gets produced, what doesnt get produced, doesnt have to be planned.

-the State cant replace or immitate that successfully. And recent history proves it.

-a technologically advanced society with no State, property or social classes is impossible.

-We live in a time in which language professors may lose much of their worth in 20 years because of universal translators, and in a time in which taxi or truck drivers may become unemployed because of self driving vehicles.

That makes me think the luddites were much more insightful than the marxists, because massive technological unemployment is a real threat to the economy.

those are some good points, even though I am an anticommie you have swayed me a little and made me see that I oversimplified some things

Which is why I said this:
>Not to mention the variance between different animals and their habits. Comparing a cat to a squirrel or a squirrel to a cow or any of them to a rational, self-aware human being is nonsensical

I said the above for a reason. Why not compare people to ants or squirrels instead of "animals" if that's your goal? The reality, as is evidenced by the fact that specific examples of specific animals is needed, that going "humans are animals and animals do x" is not a valid argument. Humans aren't ants. Humans aren't squirrels. Humans aren't cows. There is no way on earth we could have the society ants have because we're fundamentally different in temperament. "Animals" are so diverse that it's very difficult to just invent a commonality and pretend it's some law of nature.

Because the anarchists had to carry in the true Left-Right war and their pussy communist "comrades" left them out to dry. Leftism died in the villages of Spain.

yeah I was getting sick and tired of the DISGUSTING oversimplification going on in this thread. It's borderline revisionism! I figured I'd set you fuckers straight

Ultimately, you'll probably see a large reduction in human population and enormous resources spent on individual children in terms of education and training. Decisions to reproduce are definitely made in an economic context.

>the collapse of a country is not definite proof that their politics are a failure

The collapse of a government isn't proof of their politics being a failure. The collapse of a state, on the other hand, is definitive evidence that the political institutions in place failed.

You can't compare the temperament of an ant with a human, but you can compare the production methods.

Numbers don't lie, ants live stock, make resources to feed the young and maintain a stable growth of the colony during any period, just like our live stock and storage methods.

Ants economy of resources and distribution of labor works.

It's centralized and planned, it's not the natural order of things, they make those farms artificially.

Nature it's not a magical self regulated gift of God, it's a thing, that's out there and include us.

Separation of experiences, due to arbitrary lines of argument, are just ideological trenches.

If anything I'd say that ant societies are more comparable to communist societies than capitalist ones anyway, and even then much of that is thanks to their biology.

Regardless - my point was simply this: The guy's argument, regardless of the validity of the conclusion, was flawed. It's radically oversimplified to say "animals do x, humans are animals, therefore humans do x" when the premise "animals do x" is already flawed and that humans are very unique as far as the animal kingdoms go. Some animals do have similar traits to humans, but but even those are varied, and many - such as ants - are very collectivist. They aren't acting in rational self-interested profit in their colonies.

Your comment about ants reminds me of that book by Kropotkin, which deals with the question on if capitalism is human nature. He looks at how many animals live, like bees and ants and lemming and meerkats and caribou. The list goes on, but it's a good book.

>someone tries to point out possible objective differences
>HURR LE NO TROO SGOTSMAN XDDDDDDDDDDD

>The USSR's repressive, single-party politics come directly from Marx

Because development isn't a smooth, linear process.

You're talking out of your ass.

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Man, I'm not a commie but that's a nice false equivalence there.

why is it so hard to pin down socialism? whenever it is shown to fail, like in venezuela, people pretend it's not an example of it, when it succeeds like sweden, people flock to it as an example of socialism done right.