Why do people mention the Soviet Union in order to point that communism doesn't work when in reality the Soviet Union...

>the soviet union ended like the soviet union
Thanks for the history lesson.

Although it is a simplistic example, it does point to the fact that the communist system (and here i am using the term system in a manner that is comparable to a physical or mathematical usage of the term) appears to be inherently unstable when you plug in the variables of how humans behave either through biological incentives or within the frameworks of societies that tried to prop up communism. In fact, id argue that it's an inherently unstable system, but i wont becaise i am phone.

Also jews

define capitalism

...

If a necessary condition for some end is impossible then that end is impossible.

I think it's two different groups of people.

There's nothing /pol/tard about his post.

An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are primarily controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

Most forms of historical feudalism (especially pre-17th century) are capitalistic under this definition.

capitalists btfo

What's wrong with the Soviet Union?

>Have a garage sale to get rid of extra stuff
>Get gulag'd for engaging in profit seeking activity

'No'.

"Real" Communism is sort of like a distant utopia state that humans will someday achieve. But first, you need a totalitarian dictatorship to completely destroy feudalism, capitalism, sell-out socialism, oligarchic "democracy", etc., and all of these's vestiges. Bombined with permanent world revolution (centred from Moscow, natch)... this will one result in a state of humanity where people are finally read for "real" communism.

The Soviet Union did not pretend that it was the theoretical idealization of Marx and Co.

Spotted the actual reddit user, go back to r/stalinsasshole and stay there.

Not the same guy. Capitalism by itself is not necessarily terrible. It's the current state of vampiric hyper-capitalism, hijacked by self-serving oligarchs that's the problem. The American state let itself be bought and sold, largely by its own internal fatcats.

Not even a tinfoil hat guy, much less a commie, but it's plain to see.

It probably works fine enough on small-scale autonomous (not co-dependent) city-state or agricultural community levels.

Cuba almost made it as an actual communist country, but American economic sanctions forced them to buckle to Soviet demands or face starvation.

Probably not, but its a moot point anyway, isolated autonomous groups are just that... Isolated from the reality of the global society.

I hear Yugoslavia was pretty cool compared to other communist countries

I don't think that's true. At the end of the day, people will always work harder and be more creative and innovative if they are going to personally profit from the results of that increased efficiency. Private ownership is simply more efficient than central planning, even on a small scale. Keep in mind that this doesn't preclude government regulations.

Revolutionary Catalonia is a much better example of real, functioning communism/anarchism.

>It's the current state of vampiric hyper-capitalism, hijacked by self-serving oligarchs that's the problem
That's the only possible form of capitalism. Either you have regulations in place to protect the freeness of the market, and open the door to lobbyists, or you don't, and the free market destroys itself. There is no financial incentive to compete in an efficient market when inefficient markets exist or can be created.

You realize that that's exactly the point of communism, right? Capitalism is the system where businesses are run by oligarchs, not communism.

Ideologically, they are correct.
The Soviet state aimed to reach 'true' communism, and was authoritarian socialism.

The issue is that it's near impossible to achieve communism unless you controlled the entire planet, and I doubt anyone that did would let their power/state melt away.

Capitalism is like a beast. Chain it and you can put it to good use. If it breaks lose however it will pray and feed upon the weak and poor.

>commies in the 1950s
>"the Soviet Union proves that communism is the way of the future, WE WILL BURY YOU"
>commies in the 2010s
>"the Soviet Union wasn't real communism"

You only say that because it didn't last more than a few months. Had it prevailed and the CNT/FAI fucked up (commies always do), you would also say it wasn't "real communism".

Had Kornilov crushed the Soviets in 1917, you would also think they would have developed into real, functioning communism/anarchism. Since the Soviets won and did what they did, you dismiss them (but only now, of course)

Learn to dialectics son. The Roosevelts crushed the bullshit of the Glided Age and yet here we are again in a 2.0 version of it. The only solution to the contradictions and problem of capitalism is socialism

Communism hasn't been tried. That's the thing. It's near impossible to reach. Plenty of states have tried, but they haven't reached what Communism actually is.

The problem is, people from outside look in and say 'Well, they're communists, aiming to make communism, so their state must be communist'. When in reality it's a socialist state attemping to eventually reach communism, but being waylaid by dictators and outside influence.

Except for the part that it wasnt really communist, had worse living conditions than its democratic neighbors and was under gmthe rule of an autocratic party that persecuted dissent.

The bury you was a mistranslations.

In the original russian, it means more that they're going to surpass you, not kill and bury you.

Indeed, which is why I doubt "real" communism can work today. If shit hits the fan and we go full apocalypse, you might find some survivor communities that adopt communistic styles of living. That's about the only future I see for communism though...

Of course people are motivated by rewards, that's basic psychology. It's no surprise that every communist system is corrupt as fuck.

I think it's rather fatalistic to state it's an either-or black-white scenario. The free market is not really 'free' anyhow. Strict separation of powers (civil and market) should ensure that government cannot be corrupted by profiteers. America has become a prime example of a plutocracy (not quite an oligarchy yet, but perhaps that will happen), yet there are plenty of other Western liberal states that more or less successfully limit the role money's influence on government.

It depends what your goal is. In America, quite a lot of the time, it's obviously profits above all else.

Capitalism is sweet and delicious, but insidious too. It's like societal diabetes.

Communism is the only ideology people analyze according to the discourse of communist themselves.

People don't say Louis XIV didn't represent "real divine rights of kings" because God doesn't exist and couldn't possibly bestow divine rule on a French nobleman, but people seriously discuss communism according to the tenets of communist theory instead of as an historical phenomenom.

Sweet cultural hegemony.

Yes, that doesn't disprove the point though.
Namely that communist is great and it never fails, and when it inevitably fails then it wasn't real communism.

>having "extra" stuff in the first place

Stop exploiting surplus labor

Well I don't live in America, and my country is already more or less 'socialist'.

The communist forces in the Spanish civil war were heavily heavily influenced by Soviet machinations. The Soviet/Russian system of communism was by then already very much of centralized authoritarianism. These forces did not want free-thinking isolated hippie farmers getting any bright ideas. Idealistic theoretical communists who didn't tow the Soviet line were frequent targets of assassination.

Well, both sides are stupid.
The left for saying 'YEP THIS IS COMMUNISM IT WORKS' when it's socialism in transition.
And the right for seeing any socialist measures as 'lel it's communist'

It's like if you announced you were going to make some chocolate, and had made the best chocolate ever, when you'd not finished making it. Then the faulty oven that you refused to let anyone else clean ruins the dish, and someone else takes this as proof that chocolate is impossible.

>born too early to see the new glorious world
>born too late to suffer under the old world
>born just in time to see monsters
>mfw

>my country is already more or less 'socialist'.
Bitch please if your country is one of the Nordics, you best shut the fuck up

Communism is a system where the entire economy is centrally planned by bureaucrats working under the authority of a single-party non-democratic state.

>BUT THAT'S NOT REAL COMMUNISM

That's the system that the Communist Party implemented.in every single country they managed to acquire power in. If it doesn't match the rhetoric then that's their own damn fault.

>And the right for seeing any socialist measures as 'lel it's communist'
Well that happens a lot nowadays. For some right wingers, public healthcare is commie. For some lefties, low taxes is fascistic.
As long as you don't exaggerate it's not a problem I think. The problem comes when, for example, for some people everyone right of them is an unabashed Nazi, no nuance in between.

What's the difference between liberal (in the classical sense, not how Americans use it) and neoliberal?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
Holy shit nigger, at best you are describing Marx-Leninism, at worst you are outright lying

It's because...well.
The issue is, communist revolutions tend to occur in backwaters.

They often have to stuff everything into a central state authority to smash the old and rebuild from the ground up.

Issue is that once people get that power, you get those who don't wanna give it up.

>left/right dichotomy

Pure ideological disease and so on

The fact that a political group can fuck up entire societies several times and still claim to not be guilty because the perfect utopia they were trying to achieve still exist inside their minds, and that another attempt is justified, is reason enough to completely exclude this group from the political arena, if not for physically removing them from society.

If you were not a communist, you would realize how disgusting how that discourse actually is. "We will rob you, control you, kill you, in the name of an imaginary future that exists only in our minds, and if we don't achieve this future, that is no fault of ours, it's the fault of society that wasn't ready".

That's why so many countries banned communist parties and killed communist activists. This kind of mentality is simply incompatible with democratic society. It's psychothic madness.

>If it doesn't match the rhetoric then that's their own damn fault.
Yes, but it still doesn't make it communism. Most of the communist regimes acknowledge that and call their systems socialism, or stop associating with Marx althogether.

Sorry that the "real communism has never been tried" meme triggers you, but it's factually correct.

Elaborate?

This

>tfw to intelligent to not be a centrist neoliberal

It the application of communism in the real world always ends up the same way, then yes, technically it's a fact to say that communism has never been tried, but it's intellectually dishonest.

I was under the impression it was a literal translation that meant something along the lines of "I'll say something nice at your funeral when you finally manage to kill yourself" figuratively.

How do you propose to isolate regulators from corporate interests in such a way that their regulations are still relevant?

>be anarcho syndicalist
>get killed in the kronstadt by soviets
>get killed in ukraine by soviets
>get killed in spain by soviets
>get killed in every soviet satellite
>decades later all the soviet crimes are your fault
:^)

Stalin was based though.

No it is not an application of a stateless, classless and moneyless society. It is an acceleration of the process to reach such a society, literally bypassing socialism and in almost all cases capitalism.

That is why communism in occurs, coz Lenin had a brilliant idea that socialism can be bypassed. And also why there is a difference between communist parties and socialist parties

I really dont understand how so many people buy into the idea that you can simplify a socio-political-economic problem of possibly thousands of dimensions into a 1D problem. Well, i can, but its a stupid solution made by stupid brains.

>be anarcho syndicalist
>set up worker's councils in Petrograd
>"oh no, the councils became a tyrannical government"

>be anarcho syndicalist
>set up worker's councils in Guangzhou
>"oh no, the party that controlled the council estabished a tyrannical government"

>be anarcho syndicalist
>set up peasant communes in the jungles of Cambodia
>"oh no, the peasants took the cities and slaughtered everyone"

>be anarcho syndicalist
>cooperate with the government of Venezuela and set up rural and industrial communes
>"oh no, the communes became organs of political and military support to an authoritarian government"

The difference between Kronstadt and the Petrograd Soviet, between the Makhnovites and the Red Army, between the CNT/FAI and the Bolsheviks, is that the later won.

>Communism
>state

That's because communism is only desirable in backwaters. When people are fed and comfortable (or complacent if you prefer the term), why should they want to shake everything up?

Eh, the kill/control for an ideal future is similar to the Italian fascists and German national socialism, amusingly enough.

Not communist, btw. Democratic socialist personally. Trying to build a utopia will never work. Might as well just fix up what we have

What are some other dimensions for example?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just not knowledgeable.

I mean, to be fair, German national socialism isn't fascist either once we get down to it. (e.g. Italian style)
I'd say it's more reasonable to say that the States were attempts at communism, and that every state that has attempted to transition to Communism has failed.

Communism is a system where businesses have no hierarchy. You have a guy whose job it is to make widgets, a guy whose job it is to make sure all the widgets work, a guy whose job it is to make sure everyone gets along, a guy whose job it is to handle all the paperwork to make sure the widgets get where they belong, etc, and they all come to work and do their job because it's what they're passionate about, or at least because they enjoy the workplace environment, not because some corporate overlord threatens them with being fired (read: potential homelessness and starvation). That's really all there is to it.

The Soviet Union was never that. It never claimed to be that. It did make lofty claims to be a step on the way to that, although it ended up being the polar opposite in many ways.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: judging communism by the USSR is the equivalent of judging democracy by the DPRK.

In the beginning, "left" meant that you were anti-monarchist whereas "right" meant that you were pro-monarchist. The definitions have shifted since then.

Capitalists kill/control all the time, they just do it indirectly by exploiting cheap third world laborers. They're simply more effective at keeping their atrocities hidden from the public eye.

>That's because communism is only desirable in backwaters
More like the captialists' grip on the masses is less strong in backwatered third world countries. See Cultural Hegemony on the first world, meansBut that is not necessary the case anymore, as more and more problems are arising in first world country, with shit like inequality, social ills and consumerism. Sooner or later either capitalism is saved from itself ala New Deal or transits to socialism

But enough of what ifs. As long as that user i responded to acknowledges that communist parties aren't necessarily implementing communism but rather an accelerated process to reach communism, I am content

Nice revisionism m8, link to anarcho syndicalists in cambodia or venezuela supporting the government? Councils with no power and party organs are as anarcho syndicalist as soviet elections are a proof of democracy.

No no, imagine it in the sense that every issue is a dimension with discreet states in the more complex example (abortion yes/no) or continuous, but simplified (yes, but only to a certain extent depending on other issues etc., which by the merit of constraining this dimension are already constraining the system to be simplified). Now thats just one issue out of thousands. How the fuck do you come to a situation, where you simplify all of these issues into a left-right 1 dimensional problem? It seems like madness (well really its a simplificatory function of our brain, but imo its a useless evolutionary vestige when it comes to designing a socio-political-economic system).

Eh, I don't think you understand. It's not about killing, it's about the inverted perception of time.

Normal people see time flowing from the past to the future, they can study the past and learn lessons and prepare for the future, in this way, it's perfectly normal for a person to support socialist policies because they have worked well in the past, or because they solve certain specific problems.

Communists, on the other hand, first view the future, the utopian communist society that is the basis of all their revolutionary activism, and then adjust their behavior in the present and their interpretation of the past with the only purpose of bringing it into the present. I need to study more if this is a result of the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism, according to which history inevitably leads to communism, or if there is another reason for this mentality, but the fact is that communists feel a freedom to act as they want with no regards for morals or the sufferings they cause because their actions are already justified a priori for their part in bringing the utopian future.

You can't compare capitalists hiring hitmen to kill workers in Colombia to this, not only because of the scale, but because the entire mentality is different. The "capitalist" kills for a specific reason, the communist kills in the name of a grand ideological project.

>The "capitalist" kills for a specific reason,
It is profit, it is always profit

>Communists, on the other hand, first view the future, the utopian communist society that is the basis of all their revolutionary activism, and then adjust their behavior in the present and their interpretation of the past with the only purpose of bringing it into the present. I need to study more if this is a result of the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism, according to which history inevitably leads to communism, or if there is another reason for this mentality, but the fact is that communists feel a freedom to act as they want with no regards for morals or the sufferings they cause because their actions are already justified a priori for their part in bringing the utopian future.
This is specifically addressed by popper.

Or Power, Love, Revenge, or Hate.

But if you need a violent revolution and then an oppressive state when trying to accelerate the coming of communism, when you have a large enough amount of people who help you realize this because they want revolution, what then would you need when capitalism as you say is so entrenched that virtually no one wants communism? At most, they want certain reforms to the system, and not necessarily against capitalism itself.
Also, what would be a non accelerated approach to communism in your view?

NOT

I am not defending the accelerated process that Lenin started, only ensuring you don't mix it up with the endgoal that is Communism.

>Also, what would be a non accelerated approach to communism in your view?
How can someone who talk so much communism don't already know the answer? Are you even aware let alone read leftist theory? It is Socialism, it has always been socialism.

If you fail at what you consider the prequisite stages of communism, it doesn't look bright for str8 up communism.

Right, and that doesn't explain what I asked: how would you convince people who lead good lives, materially speaking, that they should strive for revolution?
And again, it's not that I mix it up. I know it's not the same thing, but there's always some caveat excusing that it is not the correct way to implement it, when every single experiment has failed.

Because every time a "communist" state was founded, the USSR was offering military and monetary support if you became their puppet, and the USSR actually appeared to be a functioning model at the time.

...

>Capitalism by itself is not necessarily terrible. It's the current state of vampiric hyper-capitalism, hijacked by self-serving oligarchs that's the problem.
That's what Marx said though. Capitalism is better than feudalism, but as capitalism develops, yes, most everyone is living a better life than before capitalism, but the inequality, conflicts of interest and lack of opportunity get worse.

>how would you convince people who lead good lives, materially speaking, that they should strive for revolution?
Short answer: you don't.
only 2 dominant models ended up in widespread use: the soviet model and the chinese model. Hungarians didn't exactly have the choice in how they wanted to go about communism, there's no hungarian model.

How many of these threads do you really think have to be made a day?

>when every single experiment has failed.
More like one experiment repeated over and over has 'failed'.

>how would you convince people who lead good lives, materially speaking, that they should strive for revolution?
>What is Reform or Revolution?
That the good times will not and is not lasting. Also you don't need to have a revolution to implement socialism but also reform capitalism (ie social democracy or democratic socialism). Of coz both methods has critiques and flaws. Literally google "Reform or Revolution?" to see that revolution was and is not the only solution considered among leftists

>comparing slavery to capitalism
In what way does capitalism not benefit you? You are not a slave. In capitalism, everyone is the master.

Not that guy, but just to play devil's advocate, people often benefited from slavery by being slaves, it wasn't all that uncommon historically for people to sell themselves into slavery to escape starvation. Very few people are masters in capitalism, even the bosses are usually just running dogs for their own masters, and the only masters are those in a position to take advantage of the material coercion present in nature and ensure that the only real option of those below them is to work for them.

>In capitalism, everyone is the master.

Because it literally instructed people to overthrow their oppressors yet they went right ahead and allowed a dictator to oppress them. You have to wonder how they made such a giant leap over that gaping goatse chasm in Marxist thought and why dictators loved his ideology so much.

It would be generous to say the central premise of communism, that the "means of production" is the cause of all ills, is insufficient. Communism has a very warped view of the world and the problems that afflict it, more or less ignoring power structures outside his myopic view of capitalism, itself inaccurate, treating everything as a massive conspiracy that always leads back to the capitalist.

It's not that it leads back to the capitalist, or even that it's a conspiracy. It's that society is driven primarily by its material conditions and needs, and thus tends to revolve around the means we alter those conditions and satisfy those needs, so it naturally centers around the major players of industry, which isn't wrong, just overly simplistic.

Communism as a house is a magnificent concept of how a house should look were it be built from the top down - thereby theoretically solving all of the problems of people living in flawed "bottom up houses"

The house itself is flawless and will ultimately be the house everyone will live in. Unfortunately all attempts to suspend a roof in mid air have resulted in calamity, a real top-down house has never been tried

>In capitalism, everyone is the master.

>Work for me for a tiny fraction of the true value of your labor, or starve
>Not slavery
Yeah, no. You can't meaningfully consent to something unless you also have the ability to decline. As long as you can't simply decline to work and have your basic biological needs met, you can't consent to work. The definition of slave is a nonconsenting worker.

>In capitalism, everyone is the master.

I've spent the entire thread bashing commies up to this point but man that was cringey.