"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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To be fair, Cowbee didn't specify that they successfully tried it!
Blablabla but that wasn't actually communism but authoritative democrapublic federalopol!
I mean.... it wasn't.
Communism means all things held in common. Theft wouldn't be a thing because everyone owns all property together. Ownership is meaningless.
Every one of those societies only paid lip service to communism - partly because it only works when everyone in the commune knows everyone else and holds each other responsible. It doesn't work at scale. What those societies really were was "The state owns everything and if you complain about it you get disappeared."
Technically it could be argued that they attempted to implement it, even if they failed 🤷
I agree with this, I don't think Lenin for example was somehow inauthentic in their socialism / communism even if their implementation often fell short of their espoused ideals; I just think the attempts to make it work failed for various reasons.
(Maybe some of those reasons have to do with the ideology, e.g. vanguardism might pose a greater risk of the revolution being hijacked by a corrupt insider group - maybe Stalin was more inevitable given Lenin's commitments to the vanguard; maybe commitments to viewing the revolution as a "totalitarianism of the proletariat" and insisting on centralizing power makes it easier for the state apparatus to be hijacked and used against the interests of the average person, and so on).
Anarchism welcomes you
yeah, I find Lenin's attack of "left-communism" uncompelling. I understand the need to be pragmatic and to secure the revolution, etc. - we can't always have sunshine and rainbows, but if your goal is to create an egalitarian society like communism, I think it makes more sense to start working those egalitarian muscles earlier rather than later. I also think this plays into natural human instincts to be pro-social with one another and to cooperate, especially when the context is authentically mutual and clearly so.
Plenty of projects manage to operate in egalitarian ways, that doesn't guarantee their doom and organizing in an authoritarian fashion is not a foregone conclusion as the most efficient way to operate, let alone even a good one.
You're all missing the point of the paraphrase - communism could be a good thing if anyone tried it.... it's sarcasm.
It means that as yet, nobody has actually tried communism. In other words, there has yet to be a communist state - none of the ones the west considers to be 'communist' are actually communist, neither in ideology, or treatment of their people.
maybe you're aware, but "communist state" is an oxymoron since communism is distinguished by being stateless ...
My impression of the situation is that the Russian Revolution was attempting a communist revolution, and while the Bolshevik concept of Marxism was very particular (as was the Menshevik conception, as is probably most Marxisms), it's unclear what you mean exactly by "actually tried communism" - are you saying Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks never had communism on the mind, that the revolution never actually intended to bring about communism?
Or are you saying the Bolsheviks never tried skipping straight to implementing the communism Marx theorized about because they focused only on the socialism Marx claimed was necessary and would bring about communism naturally, and thus they only tried socialism but never communism?
It's probably important context to note that at the time, the Bolsheviks were already the more radical leftists willing to skip ahead and attempt the revolution without the necessary liberal revolutions as a prerequisite. The Mensheviks were more moderate and even more committed stageists, who believed the aristocracy first had to undergo liberalization as Marx theorized before it would be ripe for the seeds of the socialism which would then eventually wither away into communism.
EDIT: I should say, I don't mean my comment in an antagonistic way, I'm just genuinely wondering what your perspective is on what is or isn't a genuine attempt at communism; without clarification, I just assume you mean these movements, by focusing on socialism, didn't directly implement communism and thus were never really communist. (Which as you might tell by now has its problems, but isn't the worst starting place. I tend to think overly dogmatic readings of Marx and assuming his dialectical materialism still has relevance for predicting the future of human societies could be considered a problem with these movements.) Anyway - just wanted to say, I mean this all in friendliness and cooperation, I don't necessarily disagree with you.
It's all the CIA's fault!
mental gymnastics intensifies
to be fair, the CIA did play a large role in undermining communist / socialist-identified governments, and in turn the authoritarians exploited the resultant legitimate fears into justifying slave camps, suppression of civil rights, political purges, and so on.
The slave camps and suppressions of civil rights predate the CIA, and the CIA's predecessor as well.
The CIA has done a lot of shit, but those horrors were home-grown on the Soviet end.
Sure, and like 5000 years of monarchy and feudalism stood in opposition to classical liberalism. At a certain point you just need to get good or go back to the drawing board.
yeah, German Idealism turned out to not be the best theoretical foundation for predicting the future of human society - unlike how Hegel thinks about human history in a linear fashion, we are not always moving in some guaranteed direction, nor are the societies that pre-date aristocracy "primitive".
EDIT: I misunderstood your comment. Monarchy did stand in opposition to liberalism, the difference is that liberalism was backed by people with great amounts of wealth and power - the shift to liberalism was more like a change in hands from foreign colonial powers to local moneyed elites. The problem is that socialism as a proletarian revolution does not appeal to the wealthy and powerful, so it's not surprising socialism hasn't received the same support liberalism has. The closest we got was something like FDR's social liberalism, where some wealthy folks realized some amount of social services help stabilize the political situation, and that this is good for them (property rights and wealth are more secure in a stable society than in one marked by constant threat of revolution or reactionary coups).
But I wouldn't call that socialism in the Marxist sense, it does not have communism as a goal for example.
They only failed because they had to exist within the context of capitalist hegemony!
November Kelly: "Damn, I hate when I have to exist within a context."
What a shock it's cowbee. Fucking one-note
Easily the most grating excuse. 'It's never been tried!' But they tried to try. Then what happened?
These same people will point to capitalist democracies failing after a century or two, and say, ah-HAH, this inevitable endpoint disproves the entire philosophy! Does this pragmatic analysis apply to what happens in places they like? Does it fuck.
Listen, it's not like liberal democracy gets a pass. Arguing for a republic must have been a right bitch when the only clear example was Oliver Cromwell's fumbling efforts to not be a king. Even after the American revolution went pretty well, the French tripped on their own dicks, straight into a row of guillotines. Government is hard because people are bastards. No safety in anarchy, either, since communes tend to get rolled by the nearest power structure.
There is no system that can't be spoiled by a big enough asshole.
I'd argue that while the "end goal" has "never been achieved," that doesn't mean it hasn't been tried. They tried it, and they failed before they got to the end stage, every time, typically stopping in autocracy and not progressing further for some strange reason. But by trying to reach that end goal in the first place, by definition you've tried.
Like if you try to dunk a basketball but break an ankle before you even get off the ground, you still were trying to dunk, you can't claim after that it only counts as a "trial" if you touch the rim just because you're embarassed.
People. What a bunch of bastards.
My brain is currently fried and I read the second paragraph as a rap, works pretty well. Good flyting even if unintentional.
Thank you Khmer Rouge… very based, very cool
Absolutely loved their killing of everyone.
They basically tried to return to agrarian empire states.