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this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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Communism is by definition a society without a state, so nobody has ever lived in a communist state and I doubt there has ever been a communist society in recorded history.
The last stage of the Marxist evolution of communism involves the decay of state institutions through neglect, as they become redundant in a post-scarcity no-cops Utopia.
But there are a bunch of prior stages (including capitalist industrialization even!) that are neglected. And even then, the utopian end-game is routinely disputed by the subsequent generations of Leninists and Maoists who believe we will never truly escape the revolutionary cycle.
There absolutely are Already Existing Socialist states attempting to move themselves from primitive accumulation, through industrial capitalism, and into a collectively governed socialist post-scarcity society. And people absolutely are living in them. And none of them are Utopian (although the quality of life in many of these countries is exhaustively propagandized to be by degrees to be between Unbearably Hellish and FALGSC-adjacent).
The problems that these countries typically have, however, aren't ones that armchair communists on a niche western internet platform are capable of solving. You're not going to break the Cuban blockade. You're not going to settle the endless territorial disputes plaguing Vietnam. You're not going to undo the legacy of generations of apartheid in South Africa overnight. You're not going to Make the USSR Great Again.
So maybe save yourself some angst and stop trying to tell Nicholas Maduro and Kim Jung Un how to do their jobs. Maybe worry more about why your local chapter of the DSA can't get a teacher's union off the ground.
All these "you"s make me think that you might addressing me personally.
I make no claim to solve anything, nor how anyone should do their job.
I have provided an (incomplete) explanation as to what communism is, why it does not actually exist in practice and why therefore people commenting cannot be from a communist state.
Apologies, I intended to use the Royal You and was speaking primarily to the British Crown.
A country in which the government has transitioned from primitive feudal to industrial capital and is now under a revolutionary socialist government is still communist at least in so far as its following the roadmap Marx and his peers tried to lay out two centuries ago.
If nothing else, these are communist governments in the sense that they take their governing philosophy from Marx, Lenin, and Mao (and Castro and Allende and Mandela and Ho Chi Mein and we can even throw in Fred Hampton and Rosa Luxemburg and Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim and the thousands of other notable revolutionaries if we're being generous) in pursuit of the communist goal.
To claim otherwise would be akin to claiming you're not a capitalist because you haven't successfully privatized your industry. Or to claim you aren't feudalist because you're not in the Royal Family.
I would argue that in a world where the terms are not synonymous, socialist countries are in fact socialist, not communist.
Following a roadmap to some target literally means that you have not yet achieved that target.
The argument is not that their are no communists, the argument is that they have not established actual communism, therefore the states they govern are not communist states.
Whether or not they want to establish communism does not factor into it.
To claim otherwise would be akin to claiming that a company on a roadmap to profitability is already profitable, while actually still losing money.
Countries that reform their private sectors in order to adopt socialist policies are pursuing communism.
Countries that reform their socialist sectors in order to adopt privatization policies are not pursuing communism.
Right. You are implementing a policy that pursues a target.
"Mao wasn't a communist in 1953 because his country hadn't completed its first five year plan yet" is one hell of a claim.
It would be nutso to say Caryle Group isn't interested in investing in profitable companies.
And yet the entire strategy of growth investing is to identify companies with strong roadmaps and lend to them at higher return rates.
So your analogy works, but not for the reason you'd expected.
One hell of a straw man, you mean.
At what point have I denied that people are communists?
Mao may be a communist and follow a philosophy called communism but China has not established a social order called communism as envisioned by communists.
Countries -> Large collections of People
Not communist -> denying that these large collections of people are communist
Uh huh.
Comminism isn't anarchic, Anarcho-Communism is. While it's true that Communism has never been reached, it isn't because government remained. The State in Marxian terms refers to the mechanisms by which one class oppresses the other, once class is abolished there need not be a state.
Communism was always meant to be a world republic.
I don't see any other way for communism to exist. Any other remaining nation states would eventually try to expand into the stateless territory.
Congratulations for discovering Marxist-Leninism, please pickup your complimentary pamphlet and a fruit pastry. /s
Anarcho Syndicalist Commune
Funnily enough, that scene is somewhat accurate.
That is at a 'state' level, there are still smaller level communist places to live. Like where the word 'Commune' comes from and what communism was derived from and attempted to expand into. There are communes all over the world. US included. There is a famous one in London, lots of large ones in Spain. They are communities that exist in their own bubble of micro economics within their larger communities of normal living. You should look it up. They are interesting and normally very appealing.
I mean, OP asked specifically why comments don't come from
So I addressed the non-existence of communist states.
True, there can be smaller communist societies but I think OP was asking more on a USSR level scale and not 12 hippies living on a farm together.
Comminism, along Marxist lines, is meant to have a World Repunlic. It will have a government, but not a state.
Communes are more along Anarchist lines.