this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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You lost me at "the Soviet Union was doing a communism". Hard to see a dictatorship as the workers owning the means of production.
“The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated.”
— The CIA
(https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf)
And you think that describes the Soviets and isnt just a statement about the red scare?
The document linked specifically is talking about the Soviet system and Stalin.
Yeah, after the death of Stalin.
“Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership.”
It’s like the first sentence of the document dude.
Congrats you made the argument that it was an Oligarchy.
This is such a weird thing people believe in, no?
"USSR was communist!" everyone says, when there was nothing communist about how the country was governed. But, somehow, these same people don't consider North Korea a democratic country, even though they even have that in their name.
And every time I mention that "we don't know if communism works, nobody has tried it yet", I'm getting downvoted to oblivion...
it's almost like there's a concept of political communism and then there's the Communist Party and they're different things but they're purposely conflated at least here in Statesia
I think it's funny that the same people who will mock us with "no true socialism/communism" are the same people who will blame all our problems on "crony capitalism"...
The reason is simple: we KNOW that the issues we currently suffered are enabled by capitalism. Because capitalism's core is "money equals power" and "more money equals more power". This incentivises behaviour like Shell's/BP's/Exxon's to do climate change research, learn that they're fucking the planet over, and then proceed to bury that research under a sleuth of fake, corporate-sponsored "research" stating otherwise.
People like me say "no true socialism/capitalism" because it's true. It's also true that we don't know what issues that system would cause. Maybe Universal Basic Income does collapse a society because laziness ultimately wins over all other values? We don't know!
What we do know is that every time a country/society tried implementing socialist/communist solutions to capitalism-induced problems, the results were exceptional. Look at Finland's homelessness statistics. Look at Baltimore and it's crime rates. Every single time a 4-day work week was tested anywhere on the planet, it was touted a massive success that boosted productivity and happiness of employees. Etc., etc., etc.
It's easy to get good results with capital from capitalist system and throw it into welfare. But you are taking about communism as a core system.
We don't see good examples of it because it fails incredibly fast, and then leaders who tried to build communism understand it, but aren't willing to acknowledge mistake because they will lose power. Thus, they continue to build autocracy.
If communism as economic system works, we first need to prove it as successful PLC of a smaller scale, such as a company that produces something being fully community led from the inside using communist principles, and for such company to be able to compete on the market.
Check out Mondragon and similar companies.
Yes, but how they compare to the rest of the market competitively?
I'll link to my other reply somewhere in here so as to not repeat myself: CLICK.
TL;DR: nobody has yet tried to actually build communism. Every single major instance (USSR, China, NK) where - regardless of beginnings - ultimately turned into totalitarianisms/authoritarianisms before any communist principles could take root.
Oh but they did try. You just prefer to ignore it, but soviet union did attempt different tricks from the communist rulebook - moneyless society was tried and failed, so they had to fall back to working practices from capitalist rulebook and promise the people "communism in the brighter future".
Same way communism was tried in Makhnovschina, Gulyay Pole (south-eastern Ukraine). Stateless, anarchy driven flavour of such. USSR killed all of them and then killed everyone who visited the funeral, btw, so they were afraid of them A LOT. What can we learn from anarchy? That Ukrainian farmers who were not forced into communist state preferred to have monetary relationships :-)
What are you talking about? They always had money. The reform you mention was the return to basing the value of their currency on gold to stabilise it against inflation.
(something, btw, most capitalist states have moved away from nowadays)