Would the Native Americans have fared any noticeably better under the Ottoman Turks or Qing China? Or for that matter, how did the indigenous peoples of central Asia fare under the Soviet Union?
I think eschereal’s point was not that communism was better than capitalism/democracy. I believe his point was that people living in all systems practice some degree of hypocrisy. Because they give broad support to the system, they willingly ignore the faults that lie in the details.
Pratchett said it better:
“And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.”
I don’t know about China, but I actually do think the Native Americans would have done better under the Turks. The Ottomans were surprisingly tolerant, so long as you remembered who was in charge.
As long as you weren’t Armenian.
“The Berlin Wall was actually meant to keep spies and Western provocateurs out and not Communists in” is something I’ve read both of accounts made at the time of the Berlin walls existence and some misguided people today fully believed.
Because when the state owns the land, the capital, and the labor, the labor leaving is stealing from the state.
I think there’s a whole lot of truth in the indictments that Marxism makes of capitalism. What they don’t have is an attractive viable alternative.
We have our own ideology here, and an embarrassing array of doublethink to ignore how we dont live up to our own ideals, but at least we idealize maximizing individual autonomy and making authority a level playing field, with rights and protections for our choices. Marxism does not have a central ideological tenet valuing individual authority or a central criticism of authoritarian oppression. The Marxist notions of inequality and oppression all stem from unequal distribution and control of material resources. To me that opens a huge barn-sized door to the probability of everyone being adequately well-fed and well-housed and supplied with a modicum of material comforts and then being told they can’t dissent, can’t disobey, can’t make their own choices, and that they’re free because they aren’t materially deprived.
A cage is not less of a cage just because you put some plush velvet linings on the bars.
IMO, for true Communism to be viable on a large scale, you need a population and leadership who are by their nature selfless and willing to dedicate their lives to the greater good, and most human beings just aren’t wired that way - we’re selfish beings whose first concern is ourselves and our own families before the rest of society. As a result, you wind up with corrupt, narcissistic autocrats on top, and corruption inevitably spreads through the entire system as people stop thinking “how can I make things work better?” and more “how can I get the most for me and my own out of this broken system”?
To achieve a Marxist utopia you’d have to create a fundamental wocietal shift that would likely take several human lifetimes to implement, with an unbreakable safeguard to stop anyone in power from bending the rules to benefit themselves. Short of some sci-fi scenario with a benevolent AI or an immortal God Emperor, I don’t think it can be done.
Unless you decide that society or civilization or government is a distributed superorganism of which individual humans are just cells, then ultimately the measure of any system is the wellbeing and happiness of individual humans. And said individual humans are each in the best position to observe whether the system is upholding their wellbeing and happiness or not. In that sense “selfishness”- consideration for the self that each of us in charge of every day- is not necessarily a pejorative. It’s only when we each seek to aggrandize our selves at everyone else’s expense that selfishness becomes a negative. Or at worst, when most people suffer from short-sightedness and parochialism and only a few people consider the long-term bigger picture.
Imagine if you can a totalitarian system- whether communist, fascist or even theocratic- that actually worked efficiently in the organizational sense of producing material strength, technological sophistication and political stability; but under which almost every human being was continually miserable. Only in a situation in which naked survival was at stake could such a system be tolerated; that in a terrible sense it “worked” would be cold comfort for those trapped there.
I think you’re looking at the wrong end of the system here. I think most systems have few problems with letting individuals handle the decisions involving consumption. The majority of the problems arise from decisions involving production.
That has certainly been the problem with communist systems as they have existed in the real world. People want to consume goods and services. In order for them to be able to do so, somebody must be producing those goods and services. So how do you make sure this production is happening? How do you motivate people to do produce enough? Communism by divorcing consumption (“to each according to their needs”) from production (“from each according to their abilities”) created a major problem for itself. People asked themselves “Why should I put any extra effort in when it has no effect on what I receive?” Appealing to idealism couldn’t answer this at sufficient levels. So communist regimes have had to resort to coercion.
I remember having that discussion with one lefty after the Berlin Wall fell. I made a casual comment that the fall of the wall and the Communist regimes were a pretty strong show of failure of the communist system, and she immediately replied that those governments weren’t good examples of communism snd their collapse did not show any weakness in true communism.
I wasn’t saying “selfishness” is inherently negative. In most Communist regimes, it’s an essential survival mechanic because the system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to due to the corruption that starts at the top and works its way down.
If a Communist state were functional at providing for the needs and happiness of its people (and there’s another sticky wicket - Communism as an idealogy only really seems to prosper in countries that are already poor and lacking enough resources to support the population) then there’d be no call for selfishness at an individual level, but that would require either a government of incorruptible and selfless public servants or a justice system that cannot be bought and can root out all corruption wherever it may be found, neither of which are practical given the state of human nature.
I’ve said before that I believe my personal vision of the ideal state should never be attempted because the necessary means to bring it about would be morally unacceptable and it would probably fail anyway 100 years later when someone decides he likes the title “King” better than “General Secretary”.
So the tale of one ex-communist I know (far as I know still very much an economic socialist, though). His first visit to a communist country was to post-revolution Nicaragua. While he identified some problems he came away mildly impressed and in no way down on communism. It was a state still in a patriotic fervor with a lot of optimism, which papered over a lot of issues. And it is perhaps worth noting that the early Sandinistas did in fact voluntarily give up power after an election. Things got muddier of course, but it was at least one positive democratic note.
It was his second trip to a settled communist state, Cuba, which actually disillusioned him. He found the hypocrisy of the visible gap between the privileged and corrupt ruling party and the mass of the population was to in-your-face to deny.
Most communists I have known personally have not been ACP types, but rather Trotskyists plus a scattered couple of Maoists. They one and all decried the ‘deformed worker’s state’ of the Soviet Union, but still thought it was a step in the right direction away from capitalism and thus should be defended if given a stark choice. Even while privately admitting that they knew very well that even the post-Khruschev Soviet state would imprison and execute any of them in a hot minute. For them it was a “lesser of evils” choice. Like an annoyed progressive voting for Biden over Trump 
.
Mostly a problem from the late-19th century on, i.e. during the rise of ethnic nationalism. The early Ottoman empire was not an ethno-state, the very late 19th century empire increasingly was. Go back to the 17th century and an ethnic Armenian was (briefly) Grand Vizier and married a Sultan’s daughter. Or you have the Dadians who were Ottoman industrial giants during the Tanzimat period in the mid-19th century (particularly in the area of gunpowder production). There was a reason why the urban Armenians of Istanbul were basically untouched in the moment by the Armenian Genocide.
But that’s a historical side note.
Of course, “our choices” are constrained by what is available for us to choose from. I want a BEV vehicle that does not have a video touch screen in front of me, but that choice is not offered to me, so tough titties, pal, get with the program because that is what everyone else wants. “Choice” is constrained by what you are actually able to choose from, and in our traditional capitalist system, what you can choose from is limited. It does not look to me to be particularly more free than a communist system, just different players deciding what we want.
As far as I can tell, “marxism” says absolutely nothing about totalitarianism or oppression or “state run enterprise” any more than Jesus said anything about women terminating their pregnancies. It seems to be a matter of who is in control of the levers of power. “Capitalism” seems to be more adept at obfuscating who is actually in control of the system and the menu of choices available to its citizens than is “communism”, but the net result looks the same. Some people are more equal than others in both systems.
Are you saying that Elon Musk deciding to not offer you a Tesla without a touch screen is the same “lack of freedom” as Stalin not allowing you to voice your opinions or leave the country and killing you if you disobey?
interesting that you chose the example of a car.
To me, the best example of the failure of communism was the car. Specifically, the Trabant.
Today, in Berlin, at the old checkpoint charlie where the wall stood, you can rent a Trabant and drive like the communists did.
The Trabant is basically a riding lawnmower, but not as well made. Built with 1930’s technology, and sold continuously, with no changes, through 1989.
You complain about about the electric BEV car you want. There are lots of different car models available for you to choose from. Yeah, none of them have the size screen you personally want, but at least you have some choice.
The East Germans had zero choice.
Not true. Marxist theory includes plenty of details about how the proletariat should take over and use the power of the state against its enemies. Most famously in the idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. More generally a lot of Marx’s writings concerned the failures of the Paris Commune where in his opinion the revolutionaries did not effectively use the power of the state to defeat their enemies and just sat around and waited for the reactionary bourgeoisie to wipe them out.
The answer to the OP is: It doesn’t matter what they thought. The world today shows how easily people can put ideology ahead of facts and common sense. Once people choose a side they’ll find some reason to stick to it. They may ignore reality, they may cherry pick from facts and fiction to support their belief. It doesn’t matter, it’s meaningless. They’ll sometimes figure it out, sometimes make it the hill they die on.
That’s not unique to communism; Robespierre made that same argument in defence of terror as necessary for a revolution: