this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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I guess you don't work under communism.
Yeah, people didn't. They didn't give a shit about the "collective" farms. They worked because they were forced to and fucked it up for everyone because there was no difference between giving it your all and slacking off. Hundreds of microfarms worked better than one large collective one because they didn't think it was "ours" they thought it was "nobodys".
I've read George Orwell's account of life in Catalonia during the civil war when the nation was communist, and that's not the picture he painted at all. He talked about music and art in the streets. People excited about the new economy. People who wanted to work, or to enlist as soldiers and fight the marxist-leninists
And yet over here it is exactly what happened. So we have 3 years during a civil war, and 60 years of a failed state.
Huh. It's almost as if all the various alternatives to capitalism couldn't be lumped into one... Revolutionary Catalonia was Anarcho-Syndicalist, so about as far from the totalitarian soviet system as possible.
I don't believe your country was ever under communism in the last two thousand years. I think you're actually from a former USSR state. Not even Stalin ever dared to claim that the USSR had achieved communism, and he was an arrogant git who would have said it if he'd had a shred of evidence.
No true scotsman fallacy. I could say that no country was under ideal capitalism so you can't criticize it either. You have to look at reality, not make believe nations that never existed.
Throwing around the names of fallacies that don't apply instead of actual arguments doesn't further your cause just as much as you might think it does.
The no true Scotsman fallacy applies if:
The main issue here is that using this fallacy, the claim becomes a non-falsifiable tautology. Every Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge is not a true Scotsman, thus the claim becomes always true by excluding every counter-example.
Let's apply that to the situation at hand.
Please read up on your fallacies before throwing around the names of them.
When you claim that something is a fallacy, even though the fallacy you claim doesn't actually apply, then you are doing so to discredit the whole argument without actually engaging with it. This is a perfect example of the Strawman argument, which itself is a fallacy.
Actually, I think this is a case of the fallacy fallacy
I have to admit, a did not know that one. It's even more fitting than the strawman argument! Thanks for sharing, TIL.
(Though I do believe the fallacy fallacy is a subcategory of the strawman argument.)
Nerd up!
"I don't believe your country was under communism, that's not real communism" is EXACTLY the scotsman fallacy. But by all means, go for a lengthy post that says nothing.
Go, read what I wrote, then come back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
Let's see how the USSR performed against this definition of communism.
Common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products in society based on need.
Kind of, the state owned most means of production and distributed products. Arguably based on Russian need rather than any other Soviet republic's need. Let's be generous and say partial pass for this one.
Absence of private property and social classes
Presumably this is private property as in the distinction between personal and private property set out by Proudhon. In that regard, as the state owned most all private property, in a way it was absent. But the state still owned it, and the state is counter to communism. Social classes still remained.
Ultimately money
Still existed.
The state.
That definitely still existed.
So what part of the USSR was real communism? Kind of common ownership of the means of production and kind of the absence of private property. All other criteria were failed.
Tbh, I don't even think the first two points apply.
Ownership by the state, especially a state that the people have no control over, isn't really ownership of the people. The main point of ownership (also under communism) is control. If I own something, I control it. I can decide what happens with it. Under capitalism the worker doesn't own the factory, because the worker has no control over it. The worker has no say over what or how or when the factory produces, so the worker doesn't own the factory.
Under the USSR system, the worker also has no say over anything regarding the work. The only difference is that the owner isn't another person but the state.
Something like the early stock corporations would be closer to communism. There each worker owns stock in the company and thus can vote on what the company does.
Same goes with social classes. There certainly was a class difference between party member (or at least high ranking party member) and non-party-members.
Private property also still existed, just on a lower scale. People still owned their cars, their stereo systems and all the other items of daily usage.
(I'm not disagreeing with you, just trying to reinforce the point)
Aye that's fair. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" and all that.
Just to clarify though, owning your own car and stereo falls under personal property, not private property. See my comment here for a brief distinction of the two: https://feddit.uk/comment/18187961
Yeah, ok, I see that distinction, it does make sense.
So if someone calls you a git, and you say "I'm not a TRUE git", is that a no true scotsman too?
If someone gives you an example of a communist country and then you go "no no that's not communism" when in fact yes, it was communism, because otherwise as you yourself said "no country in the last 2000 years was communist" then that's the true scotsman.
I said YOUR country wasn't communist in the last 2000 years. Many were. Like Catalonia. Like I told you.
I just gave you a true scotsman 4 messages ago, genius. You pick those debate skills up at Harvard?
You gave me a singular anecdote from a state that didn't exist for even three years.
That's one more anecdote from a communist country than you've given.
The same is true for capitalism too, though.
If you work in your own little company or if you are self-employed, then the "mission" of your work might be important to you and a source of motivation.
But if you work in a huge corporation, hardly anything you do actually matters. If don't perform at 100% and instead slack off, there are other people doing the same work. And if everyone slacks off, then they just hire more people. And even if the whole department underperforms, there are other departments that rake in the money.
And whether the company thrives or goes under, your input as a lowly grunt wouldn't have made a difference anyway. Even as a mid-level manager your input wouldn't have made a difference.
Years of my work at my job can be wiped out with one email from the CEO.
Literally the only difference between capitalism and communism when it comes to that is whether the CEO wipes out my work or the state.
But if a CEO does something that actually destroys the company (without question) the governance structure that most companies in most countries have will put a halt to it. If the company is of size to have an actual CEO than they will have a need for a governance structure.
The sad part is that due to whatever reason it doesn't always work like that.
Heck somebody once told me that in the US you can just fire people for whatever, which is insane to me
Governance structures aren't without fail either, as exemplified with quite a few big corporations going down over time.
Governance structures are also present in political systems, and also there they can fail.
A government and a corporation are really not all that dissimilar when it comes to managing work, projects and so on.
Yeah that was also my reason to say that it doesn't always work like that.
People also defend companies or system that lack transparancy, things like not publishing annual reports etc
And yet people work in huge corporations and those are succeeding fine. Yet the collective farms that I mention led to famines and underperformed severely.
Huge corporations also underperform compared to smaller startups.
If a small startup wants to roll out some new thing they just get to the work. If a corporation does the same thing it first takes a year of preparation and internal politics.
Remember the old anecdote about how long it takes to order an empty cardboard box at IBM? That one was an extreme example, but the concept persists.
We had a project, created by two people over half a year. The corporate parent liked it and wanted to expand the product to all the country division. So they planned for a year, then assembled 8 teams with a total of 50 people to copy that project with a planned development time of 3 years. They overran the deadline by 2 years.
Cool. Yet you are ignoring the very tiny fact that collective farms started famines. They didn't "just underperform".
Well, I guess the great depression never happened, correct?
The great depression has never starved millions of Ukrainians to death.
iirc...Lysenko (soviet agri-scientist - a shitty one) had convinced the party leaders that his newly bred 'winter-hardy' wheat breed was worthy of being planted en masse. It had worked well under ideal lab conditions but failed after several crop yields when planted in the field, and this created famine.
You are not recalling it correctly.
no i am.