A prior thread asking “Is Communism without a future” was started by a recently purged Trock. As it was an interesting perspective on both communism as an ideal and as actually practiced, we have decided to preserve it, with all non-trock posts moved to this thread.
The original OP opined that China specifically has moved past Marx’s motives, and now uses more traditional arguments when attempting territorial or power claims - specifically their historical claim to the territory occupied by Taiwan, rather than liberating Taiwan from capitalist oppressors. They then suggest that the Communist philosophy as a whole (or at least, as Marx conceived it) is dead as an actual political movement for the current age.
Please pardon the clumsy summary, all following posts responded to the original source:
In nations with a history of communism, yeah, it looks pretty finished. Those nations know firsthand it doesn’t work.
In nations with no such history, though, such as the USA or some other Western nations, it is never going to go truly dormant for two reasons: 1) we’re quite a long time after the horrors of Communism in other nations like the North Korean famine or the Great Leap Forward, so the younger generation of today doesn’t believe communism is actually bad, and 2) capitalism is getting worse and worse, which always invites people to go hard left.
Too late to edit: Also, no matter how bad Communism was in real life, there will always be a few Chomsky-like intellectuals in the West who will insist, “That wasn’t true Communism. True Communism has never been given a fair try yet!”
It was “over” a long time ago. Even many economists in the early 20th Century considered it outdated.
Communism doesn’t work, and can’t work, because it doesn’t take human nature into account. Humans are inherently selfish. The genius of capitalism is that, instead of ignoring, minimizing, or condemning this characteristic of human nature, it exploits it for the betterment of all.
And, it never worked, not even in so-called communist countries. Communism assumes the state will wither away, but every “communist” country had a very strong, autocratic, despotic state.
People just aren’t wired the way, say, ants are, working selflessly for the greater good, getting back only what they need.
Communism, socialism, other such isms, do not work on a national scale. Those systems are attempts to bring a village ethos to a nation which is something only a politician or a tactician would try to go for.
We are people, and should be neighbors to each other. Who can be “neighbors” in a country of 300 million people?
I advocate small communities, not 300 million people communities. And THEN communism and socialsm and such might work. Communities where there is a good chance that when you encounter a random member, you might actually know their name.
I don’t think either end of the capitalism-communism spectrum works in their pure forms, as they both invite unchecked authoritarianism and oligarchy and tend to become self-corrupting. They can never really reach their idealized forms before being coopted for the good of the few at the expense of the many.
But they both have ideas worth borrowing, just not taken to the extremes. In much of the capitalistic world, you still have basic socialized services or ideas (healthcare, parental leave, unions, democracy, etc.) and in much of the communistic world you still have some limited variant of free-market economics.
But those countries that seem to be doing well tend to be rather homogenous, culturally if not also ethnically, with strong but not hopelessly corrupt governments. We have the opposite of both.
At the end of the day, it’s a class war under either system. It’s nice near at the top here. It’s pretty bad near the bottom here. People in both dislike whatever they’re born into if they have no social mobility and no hope for a better future.
The actual political and market forces we see are much more nuanced than Cold War propaganda would have us believe and I don’t think anyone except the most blatant Twitter trolls really thinks of it like a switch, where you just go from one side to the other. The messy middle is where we’re all at, and these historical monikers are useful for discussion but not so much for describing reality.
It’s only human nature to want to escape hopeless oppression, whether that’s from communism to capitalism yesterday or the other way around today.
It’s not just grass is always greener, either, but just the realistic opportunities available to someone (or not) in their present realities. None of the isms mean anything when you’re just toiling away at the bottom trying to survive.
The push for communism is louder (if not stronger) in the US because this is where capitalism is failing citizens the hardest, compared to the rest of the capitalized Western and Asian world.
Crazy thing to me is that the tiniest bit of redistribution would go such a long way to quieting discontent without fundamentally changing the structure. If we had a Bernie like figure instead of Trump for a decade, we’d still be capitalist, but likely without all the anti-billionaire hatred, and all the tech CEOs would be hailed as visionaries leading the charge instead of villains robbing the commons. Most other countries don’t have that luxury, where their production can’t realistically be redistributed without huge sacrifices at the top, but here… our elites wouldn’t even notice it.
Don’t forget that the Chomsky types like to blame every bad thing Communists did of the big mean evil capitalist United States. Sort of like the NATO Expansion narrative - “sure, what Russia is doing isn’t great, but let me tell you all about how it is actually America’s fault”.
None of these things have anything to do with Communism, the idea that the means of production should be owned by the state. The first national health insurance system was created by none other than Otto Von Bismark, who was neither a capitalist nor a communist but an old fashioned monarchist.
They would argue that they were only doing what is necessary to overthrow Capitalism. It’s called Vanguard Party.
And you also can’t be communist while being a democracy. No communist society is going to tolerate people voting to bring back private property, for example.
Just to expand on what I mean by this: vanguardists are, in a way, correct. It is impossible to establish communism without an authoritarian vanguard party. What they are incorrect about (or rather, what their public position is incorrect about; I think in private they know this very well) is the idea that it will ever be possible to dismantle the vanguard party and achieve a utopian stateless communist society. The minute you abolish the vanguard party and cease repression, people will start organizing markets (well, more accurately, black markets that were hidden under repression will become public, because no communist society managed to actually eliminate market forces) and then they’ll have to start repressing people again or give up on being communist.
the current best we can hope for is social democracy. which is capitalism with large amounts of regulations and wealth redistribution.
communism as an economic model doesnt work. every communist nation has abandoned centrally planned economics in favor of a mixed system of public and private markets.
in the future we could.have communism in the form of either nationalization or heavy taxation of robotics and AI, and the wealth redistributed by UBI or.some other program.
centrally planned markets run by distributed AI programs may show up as a working option too.
but 20th century communist doesnt work economically. there are some good things about 20th century communism like more investment in health care, education and infrastructure. or in theory better treatment of marginalized people. but it doesnt work economically.
Taiwan is more economic advanced that China. south Korea is more economically advanced than North Korea. west German is more economically advanced than east Germany.
Marx wanted to overthrow capitalism. Most people then and now equated capitalism with democracy and industrial capitalism with oppressed workers.
Theoretically, that equation is sufficient but not necessary. Chinese style communism disproves that. A mixture of capitalist business practices and oppressed workers coexist under an authoritarian government. That’s not unique; I’d argue that China took Russia’s oligarchical capitalism and modified it.
China has only had these policies for a couple of decades. Incredibly successful decades, although the resulting costs and contradictions are not favorable. A worker revolt there is not theoretically impossible. The same could be said about Russia, more so because the country is floundering rather than soaring.
Has any country had a true worker revolt? By my definitions, no. Are they possible today? By any analysis of the modern world, no. Yet that’s not at all the same thing as saying Communism has no future. Chinese style communism shows no sign of dying. The takeover of capitalist haven Hong Kong and turning it into an increasingly totalitarian province is a sign of future plans. Taiwan is next on their agenda. Many more spots in Asia could follow.
A mighty rolleyes emoji to anyone saying that existing communism is not communism. That trick never works.