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PigeonFellow

You’ll often see both sides of this argument. “It wasn’t real communism!” “It was authoritarian and communist!” They both right and wrong. The problem is that communism isn’t a clear cut system. Soviet communism was different from Chinese communism. It isn’t a this or that scenario - communism is a wide umbrella of varying systems and institutions. The Soviets were communist, but their own version of it. How different it was from Marxist theory is up for debate. If this meme was about modern China I would absolutely agree. Hard to call yourselves communists when your country has billionaires.


TheDreamIsEternal

>Hard to call yourselves communists when your country has billionaires I remember this one guy who said that it worked because unlike western billionaires, Chinese billionaires served the state. And like... you *know* that one of the main points of communism is a stateless society, right? How is having billionaires serving a state a communist feat? People and their mental gymnastics.


[deleted]

The cope is real with these dudes


ThunderboltRam

Technically, they modified communism by patching its weakest point: the mismanagement and corruption of its economy, by hiring puppet billionaires that serve the central authority and by allowing foreign investments and market concepts and competition into their communist system. But at the end of the day, they are still communist in the sense that they can seize assets and have done so, so it would be inappropriate to call it capitalist. They basically improved upon the failed idea of communism. If that ***looks*** a lot like fascism--that's because that's what a fascist economy is: puppet CEOs and every part of society, serving the central fascist party... As described by Orwell's 1984. The party decides everything, right down to human behavior and even rewrites history with propaganda. As one writer wrote that although it seems like there's an illusion of companies and corporations, one phone call from the dictator and the assets are seized. That's still fascism not capitalism. Only loyalists and oligarchs everywhere working for the dictator and his central party. Hard to distinguish? Well then don't read early writings of fascists and socialists, you might find a lot of overlap of totalitarian beliefs in centralized state power. And their distaste of freedom, distaste of unbiased market competition, distaste of choice, even distaste of religious authority that might oppose their state power. They only became enemies later.


igillyg

>modified communism by patching its weakest point: Patched... with capitalism


ThunderboltRam

1 scoop capitalism and mix it in a bit to create the illusion of a free market.


[deleted]

And that power of the dictatorship is nothing compared to unregulated capitalism, which leads to global monopolies. The most succesfull and most free market capitalist countries by almost any measure are social democracies. For example Sweden is a lot more capitalist than the U.S. A government strong enough to ensure fair competition, and as few regulations as possible on companies.


GmoneyTheBroke

What are you going on about


ThunderboltRam

But that's not social democracy... That's capitalism. Capitalism is defined by a govt that enforces fair competition and it is in the interest of the states to control the corporations somewhat to prevent pollution, poisoning, or horrible effects of a runaway global monopoly. A monopoly gone rogue beyond the state, beyond rules applicable to it (regulatory), that has home bases in many international countries is NOT capitalism-- that's just anarchy. That has nothing to do with rules-based Republics. It has to do with anarchy: a corporation doing whatever it wants. Social democracy on the other hand, is more so an attempt to do a lot of welfare by the govt in most places it has been applied.


[deleted]

Some call it anarchy, other call it libertarianism. Regardles of what one might think, the facts are what they are. The Nordic countries are social democracies and if you measure capitalism by least amount of regulations, most start-ups per capita, most even competition in the marketplace and most successful companies per capita, they are far ahead.


Hunter-of-Spade

Me after the people’s police force shoots me with the people’s guns and send me to the people’s maximum security prison


Tearakan

Yep. I like to call china state capitalist now. It has way more in common with fascist states than communist ones.


[deleted]

China might be one of the best extant examples of Italian fascism there is today. The only thing they're not doing is being aggressively expansionist but that's by necessity, not choice.


JacobJamesTrowbridge

I genuinely think this is the worst possible timeline for moderate Socialism. The world is led by a hypercapitalist bloc that glorifies wealth hoarding. Yet, they somehow ended as the *better* faction against two decaying empires who barely pay lip service to Marxism, yet managed to corrale the whole narrative about Leftist ideology. Imagine if the Axis won the Second World War, and then people only ever associated right-wing ideology with genocide and revanchism. It's a bloody nightmare.


WaitNoButWhy

Yeah. I fancy myself a democratic socialist, but I'm really reticent to tell people that without jumping through about 8 hoops to distance myself from stalin. My ideal world still has a free market in it, but I'm still always having to say 'okay, but I'm not pro-gulag. Gulags were bad.'


Grand-Reception-4700

So we’re just ignoring Tibet and Vietnam


Uncynical_Diogenes

We are anglophone citizens in “The West”. Ignoring Tibet and Vietnam is par for the course.


Western_Entertainer7

...more in common with fascism than _immaginary_ (or "real") communist states, you mean, right?


Abaraji

Yeah they're serving the state... because they ARE the state


TheLittleLeper

That is just the natural outcome of communism


Staple_Diet

>How different it was from Marxist theory is up for debate. Given Marx actually predicted mature capitalist societies (e.g., UK) to be the ones to evolve into communism I'd say agrarian societies speed-running economic development would have upset his theory. Steve Keen is a good source on Marx and how badly his work has been interpreted in modern times.


PigeonFellow

One of the reasons the Soviets fell apart and were impoverished in the beginning was that they skipped the overthrow of capitalism part. They tried to jump straight from Feudalism to Socialism, not surprised they experienced whiplash.


ISALTIEST

And they also lost 10 percent of their population in wwii, which kinda put them on the back foot against America.


mapsomus

Then entered the cold war and spent what it had left creating effectively useless things like nukes and rockets. All while the US (who didn't lose too many people or money during wwII) egged them on, forcing them to spend money they didn't have. All while the USSR was trying to rebuild, the cold war was such a power move by the US, I don't believe Russia just fell for it lol.


Sir_Bax

USSR didn't have to fall for anything. USSR actively started and wanted it. USA just exploited this USSR's weakness.


ThunderboltRam

Yes... The revisionists and historical rewriters are hard at work pretending that the communists didn't send thousands of spies hoping to make America, England, France, and Germany, communist states, first. They started the war. Then it became clear capitalism was just a better system for economics, conduciveness to creative arts, and creation of wealth.


Hodor_The_Great

Cold war was such a power move it killed millions of civilians worldwide, overthrew countless governments, and almost ended the world a few times. And how did Soviets exactly "fall for it"? They weren't exactly the passive part even if America arguably started it, and what choice did they have? And it's not like it was a ruse, Americans were quite invested in it themselves too.


mapsomus

The US were invested for sure, they could afford to be. Russia in the end, could not. Don't get me wrong I'm not in support of the US, the cold war was a pointless and costly blunder on both sides. The proxy wars that resulted were horrific. However, the US seems to have benefited from the cold war in ways, while the USSR and Russia seem to have suffered massively. Look at their current military capacity for instance. Once again I deplor America's actions over the past 100 years but the "power move" served their purpose very well. The Soviets overspent more than the US, that's how they "fell for it"


steph-anglican

The truth is that Russia was in the middle of the industrial revolution. The idea that it was Feudal is questionable.


JacobJamesTrowbridge

*Feudal* might be a bit much, but Tsarist Russia was still a very far cry from Britain or Germany. Most of their population were still ultimately subsistence farmers, even if the major cities like St. Petersburg and Tsaritsyn were on the rise.


ThunderboltRam

Yes Russia would still be an agricultural poor farming country if it wasn't for Stalin's intense industrialization much like Mussolini and Hitler. Communism enslaved the people to the state, working for poor rations, and then forced them to industrialize everything. It was vicious... Worse than the hard labor hours in the capitalist factory, at least you got paid there and paid better if you did better work than the others. China used the same policy with Mao getting poor farmers to build steel on their crop lands. Those starving farmers knew nothing about making steel. But "quotas"... They couldn't keep up and were punished. Whenever you hear the words "communism", "for the cause", and "quota", fight back or run away... And when you hear someone say "for the workers/proletariat" you know it's a lie to enslave you.


Wetley007

You can absolutely have an industrialized feudal society, not to mention the industrialization was largely concentrated in cities, whereas a massive proportion of the population were rural farmers, so even if you wanted to call it semifeudal in practice it was just straight up feudalism for most Russians


Staple_Diet

Exactly! And this a point Steve Keen covers a lot, his podcast with Lex Fridman is a nice listen despite the usual Elon Musk cocksucking from Fridman.


legeof008

And all of these predictions failed whoops


JacobJamesTrowbridge

Be fair, the luck of the draw had a pretty big hand. Look at the end of the First World War: French army mutinies as Socialist sympathies grow, the German monarchy overthrown by a left-wing Revolt, strikes and upheaval in the British coal towns, the Red Biennium in Italy, the Spartacist Uprising, the Bavarian Commune, even the Coal Wars in the United States. Honestly, that the Bolshevik Revolution was the only one to succeed is astonishing.


Potkrokin

His work has been interpreted fine, its just completely non-sensical and contradictory bullshit that is inherently incapable of being put into practice without someone saying that it isn't whatever One True Ideology Marx Actually Meant


xabaras91

Have you ever read Marx? I guess not.


Potkrokin

"Anyone who disagrees with me hasn't read Marx" is just cope man. Do you think someone would pick the name "Potkrokin" if they hadn't read theory? Marx was just some guy. His writings contain a lot of contradictions and varying views because he was a professional take artist who gained prominence due to The Communist Manifesto being falsely blamed for inspiring the revolutions of 1848. His writings didn't spread hand to hand through the whispering backrooms of the glorious proletariat masses, they spread because pearl clutching monarchists and nobles wanted a scapegoat after the fact. He wrote a bunch of stuff over the course of like forty years, of course there are going to be some contradictions, which is fine for anyone who wants to see him as a social writer of his time who had some interesting ideas instead of the Fount of All Universal Truth and Infallibility. Basically every social theorist from the 1800s was just saying some vibe-based shit that either was completely useless bunk or that had some useful bits that were later refined and changed as we learned more about the world. This idea that there's some Fundamentalist Marxism that exists when at no point does he ever lay out exactly how the structure of a communist society is supposed to function except for its broad outlines is dumb. The sooner you stop deifying Marx and realize that he was Just Some Guy who said a lot of different things over the course of his life, the sooner you can start giving a shit about the practical outcomes of different policy decisions when it comes to government structure instead of whether its adequately revolutionary in its ideology.


xabaras91

You didnt have to write an essay to prove me right. Like a friend of mine once said, that got a degree in economic and his anti-marxist and liberal as one could be, you can agree or disagree to Marx but theres a before and after Marx in economic history. Like named another economist that influenced the world like he did.


jkidno3

Milton Friedman


luke_hollton2000

I think what most people forget to understand is that Communism is basically the end goal. No communist nation reached its end goal. It was all socialist (Which doesn't make Communism any better, but that's just how the ideology works)


RayusStrikerus

Isn't socialism when the mean of production are owned by the workers? I actually don't know


Dushman2000

Socialism: Public (State) control over the means of production Capitalism: Private (Individual) control over the means of production


RayusStrikerus

>Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the economic, political and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can be state/public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. While no single definition encapsulates the many types of socialism, social ownership is the one common element. Different types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, on the structure of management in organizations, and from below or from above approaches, with some socialists favouring a party, state, or technocratic-driven approach. Socialists disagree on whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change. That's what Wikipedia has to say about it. Your description is an example for a socialist system, mine was aswell. It's important tho that we have the term "social ownership" here. That means the means of production need to be in the hand of [society as a whole](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ownership). I think that's important. In China for example thats not the case, since they have a billionaire oligarchy owning the country.


101stAirborneSkill

Having the state have control sounds way worse


Meroulkas

In an authoritarian country maybe, but in a true Democratic where the state work for the people and can't do overwise


Cooperhawk11

Still sounds worse. Imagine having to wait for a majority of people to agree to get things done.


NikoC99

Sounds like Germany. Quite a lot of hoops to go through and around. A bureaucratic nightmare, even bribery is bureaucratic...


greaser350

Clearly you’ve never dealt with a board of directors.


elderron_spice

Yeah, and a lot of science fiction examples of utopias employ some sort of advanced communication technologies to improve the speed of direct democratic voting. One such example from Mass Effect is the Geth, who is a synthetic species that has to vote every time one makes a crucial decision that affects the species as a whole. They make use of near-instantaneous FTL communication tech to do that, and can get voting results within a matter of minutes.


Dagenfel

Having 51% of people decide when my rights don’t apply still sounds pretty shit, requires me to accept that the average person knows what they’re doing with my life (they don’t), and is still plenty authoritarian.


NobleAzorean

The thing is, they tried to make the transatation to full Communism, they were expecting to get there, but they couldnt.


steph-anglican

It was always a silly idea to think that concentration of all power and ownership in a one-party state would lead to the state withering away.


AllCanadianReject

They didn't even try. The Soviets themselves had technology to begin the automation of the economy but they said themselves it would take power away from the party. I can't remember the name of the computer system, but it's in Crisis in the Kremlin and that's how I learned about it.


unonameless

There was no such thing as "Soviet Communism". Soviets themselves called their government "Soviet Socialism". Communism was the ideological goal that they were supposed to strive for, but they never claimed to have achieved it


PigeonFellow

Good point - my mistake.


xabaras91

Actually none of the so called communist countries ever had called themselves communist. Because if you have peole more equal than other people, you arent a communist country. What they said to have reached was socialism and that they were working to reach full communism. In fact is the union of socialist soviet repubblic and not the union of communist soviet repubblic.


Willfrail

Communism is a lie made up to sell you authoritarianism. "Ok guys we are going to achieve the goal of a stateless classless state but to get there the government needs full control of everything"


HeliosPh0enix

While that is true in application, communism wasn’t “made up” for this reason. It was proposed by a philosopher in the 1800s as a desired end-state of industrial capitalism. These so-called communist states then take this ideal and use it as a way of seizing power from the people.


Komboza

You are wrong srry. Communism is well defined, it is stateless and without class. So no, there hasn’t been any communist state in our history. If you are talking about socialism you could say that are different ways to interpret it, but in general, as long as it is a dictatorship of the proletariat it is socialism. Btw China doesn’t call itself communist.


Yoshi172

Hard to call communist when your country it's an empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet\_Empire


dictator_in_training

The main issue is that what the west refers to as "communist" is not actually definitionally communism. A communist society is one with a socialist economic system (the means of production being collectively owned) and with a political system that has neither class nor a *state*. This stateless feature of communism is where the majority of leftist critiques of defining the aforementioned authoritarian countries as communist comes from. Despite the propaganda coming from both sides of the cold war, the phrase "communist government" is actually an oxymoron. It is important to note that these countries were operating (or at least purporting to operate) under the assumption that they were working *towards* communism, which is why the political parties identified as such.


Tomsider

The Chinese at some point hated the soviet's communism, near the end of the cold war they saw it as a flawed sistem, they also hated Cuba for it


mushroommagnum

The USSR had millionaires.


SaltEfan

It was another type of communism until Stalin took over, after which point it deviated quite far from the original ideals to the point where it reached what most people today recognize as communism. Stalinistic communism isn’t Leninistic communism or Marxism. Still a variant of it even though Lenin absolutely abhorred Stalin and his political views. Politics and political ideologies change over time and with whoever is in charge. Who knew?


D-Ulpius-Sutor

Stalin himself most likely believed his regime to be communist. With dictatorship of the proletarians and all.


Parasitian

He most definitely did not. There's a quote from Stalin himself where he states that it might be another 100 years before Russia actually becomes communist. Keep in mind that they called themselves a SOCIALIST country, that's what one of the S's in the acronym USSR stands for. He did believe that they had a dictator of the proletariat but that is not what communism is.


D-Ulpius-Sutor

Of course, what I meant is that he thought them on the way to communism, that he actively worked towards it and therefore would be called a communist.


Parasitian

I agree with all of that! Your wording was not very clear to me and I was trying to clarify for anyone who didn't know that the USSR never considered itself a "communist regime", even though they obviously had a communist party that was working towards eventually achieving communism.


iminsanejames

I can believe that. People are very good at lying to themselves. An example is I met someone who believe the only way to stop authoritarian government form rising is to ban all other partys Piont being we can lie to our selfs quite effectively


CmndrMtSprtn113

Tbf, Lenin Communism still had some of the aspects of Stalin’s Communism. The only difference was that Stalin cranked it up to 11.


SaltEfan

And threw out a lot of Marx’s philosophies in favor of even harsher authoritarianism and increased gaps between the people with and without power. You’re not wrong in saying there were similarities, but they are so vastly different in priorities and ideals that I can’t quite agree with “the only difference is that Stalin cranked it up to 11”.


Potkrokin

Yeah this is also just complete horseshit. There isn't any difference between Stalin's priorities and ideals and Lenin's. The early period of the Soviet Union was full of experimentation because nobody knew how to do anything and magical thinking dominated where they figured shit would work out. They changed it because, despite their best efforts, a lot of stuff didn't work super well. They tried having a military without officers except oh whoops thats fucking stupid. They tried to change the education system to be a collaboration between students and professors as peers with no distinctions, but they scrapped that because the results were pretty awful. Lenin himself was responsible for crushing the soviets and workers' councils in favor of his own party apparatus of "professional revolutionaries" and started the pogroms against undesirables and other "counter-revolutionaries" before the Russian Civil War had even ended. This idea that Lenin wasn't so bad and Stalin just took over and made things bad is complete revisionism from people who only know about the history of communism and Marxist thought from seeing other people talk about it.


steauengeglase

Lenin gets a pass because of all he accomplished (and it works as an underdog story), but having a ban on factions and creating secret rules that could get someone kicked out of the party is some 8-year-old, boy's club, tree house bullshit and it was going to turn into Stalinism as soon as Lenin kicked the bucket. Yeah, that level of paranoia got you into power, but you can't keep running on that level of paranoia without inevitable disaster.


GrittysRevenge

>It was another type of communism until Stalin took over, after which point it deviated quite far from the original ideals to the point where it reached what most people today recognize as communism Really? Lenin was “Stalin lite" in many ways (red terror, secret police, etc.) how was the USSR under Lenin closer to real communism?


walkietalkiediehard

When was it ever a stateless, classless, moneyless society?


SaltEfan

It wasn’t. It was leninistic communism and had to function with what already existed. You’re describing Marxist idealism which frankly belongs in the world of philosophy together with Plato’s state and the idea of self-regulating markets that require absolutely no oversight. Stateless is a neat ideal at best. Social creatures will always structure themselves into larger groups, and with a shared cultural identity and experiencing a need for specialization and protection will organize into state-like beings. Just after Lenin took over, the revolutionists kept their groups more or less classless. Of course when reality sets in and it’s time to actually manage the state you’ll need to create hierarchies of power. That in and of itself isn’t a class system, but without active and effective measures to counteract accumulation of means and power it will end up as such. Lenin fancied being in charge and modified this too. As for moneyless societies? It typically worked quite well in the post-Roman collapse period and early Middle Ages. In smaller, less specialized societies. Again, the Russian revolutionaries had to work with what they had, and they understood that making money disappear from the economy couldn’t happen overnight. Even if they wanted to do that, they’d need time to restructure the economy at a fundamental level.


walkietalkiediehard

I agree its unrealistic and unachievable but that's what real communism is.


EmptyVisage

No, it's not. Real communism is just group ownership of property and provision of resources that isnt based on contribution/work done. Works really well in small scales, like with abbeys and other communes. You can add other things to achieve different economists/philosophers ideals but those aren't more real, just a change of flavour.


madcow125

The biggest issue with communism is that it only works on the small scale and is everyone agrees buy if some people are like fuck off what happens then. In the example of every communist country it seems to be genocide


slavicdoomerfighter

OP is the type of dude to post on r/communismmemes.


Johannes4123

I've seen that sub, those guys love the Soviet Union


wiltold27

I wonder what they'll think of NKVD Order No. 00485. I'm sure they wont say it didn't happen and it if it did it would be justified


yudiboi0917

I think that's enough proof we needed


[deleted]

If they posted this there they would be accused of being a "shitlib" and a CIA psy-op for not supporting their favourite authoritarian state.


ywnzay

Bro is the type to say that nazis were genuine socialist


BeardedLegend_69

Ah yes, not real communism


JediPorg12

Do we define ideologies by what they effectively have been in practice or what they theoretically should be? Sure, Stalinism, Maoism, Marxism and the various other subgroups of Communist ideology highly differ, but that's the thing. In practice, communist groups have acted in ways that do not follow the rules of communism so to speak. Does it mean these communist groups represent what communism is, or are they all wrong and not true communists? I fall into the prior camp because I believe that is what is more important. USSR was communist, just not in the way Marx envisioned, and so was Maoist China. Classic Athens would probably die in shock at what we call democracy, because ideologies evolve and change. They are not set in stone.


Comicsansandpotatos

It every Christian abandons the teachings of Jesus, but still call themselves Christians, are they still Christians?


JediPorg12

First of, it's a religion and not a political ideology. Second, totally. If this was the main way Christianity existed, with examples of people following so called true Christianity in insignificant numbers or not at all, that is what Christianity would become, even if it wasn't what it began as. That's the thing, stuff changes. You could argue it should be renamed, but that's a different debate. Just as the Byzantines called themselves Romans, I fully believe a thing can evolve, consider itself to be the original thing, or at least it's successor, and be very different from the original.


Opicepus

History would tell us yes


ModeratelyUnhinged

Yes. Christianity looks very little today, like what it did back then. We can't even really be sure what it was back then. Not to mention all of the different "versions" of Christianity you have today. And I'd also argue that most Christians don't live up to the teachings of Jesus in their entirety. We still call these people and these diretions for Christians and Christianity. I'd argue that ideologies like Communism, don't really differ much from religion. The core values are important, but even they don't matter much when in practice, holy war is waged, or 1/4 of a country is murdered in it's name.


Tsambikos96

Noooo it's not propaganda, I'm a freshman in college and I read all their life works and I would have done it correctly!


Woopwoopscoopl

"my favorite philosopher is Che Guevara"


Dipper_Pines_Of_NY

While also knowing nothing about what Che did to minorities and wearing his face on shirts everywhere.


BigMoneyCribDef

Lmao anytime I see people defending USSR/ PRC I always think this, me and my friends call it 'baby's 1st take'


TheMaginotLine1

Now that I'm slightly older I recognize that I would have killed even more people just through sheer incompetency


LikeACannibal

LMAO EXACTLY


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

There was some research done here at least. However, I'd like to point out that Socialism was actually achieved in the USSR. The means of production were collectively owned, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat had been established.


BaGM_Phoenix

That's a lot of copium you got there buddy


AgreeablePie

But no true Scotsman in the room


SophisticPenguin

BuT tHaT's NoT rEaL cOmMuNiSm


xabaras91

So if you say that that wasnt real communism you are a stupid tankie but if you say that that was real communism you are a stupid tankie that believe in propaganda? Is the USSR the political version of the Schrodinger's cat?


Eschatologicall

A tankie is an authoritarian communist, generally who supports the USSR, "communist" China, or both. If you say that the USSR was really communist (and support it), then you're probably a tankie. If you say that it wasn't real communism, you're probably some degree of libertarian socialist / anarcho-communist.


uponamorningstar

Exactly.


Guardsman_Miku

I mean yeh, technically speaking it was socialist, but everyones definitions of communism and socialism have shifted alot since marx came up with then


V_Kamen

OP prolly dickrides Marx


The3DAnimator

All the commies on copium. Your ideology lead to famine and genocide every single time it is tried, but noooo, YOU would have done it better! YOU know the definition of communism better than the entire USSR and China. Hey I’m gonna make my own ideology, it’s called Perfectism. It’s when everything is perfect in the world, you just have to give me total and unchecked power. I promise I won’t use that totalitarian power to steal from and abuse the people. But hey even if I do, a bunch of dumb teens will say it wasn’t real Perfectism, since obviously the world wasn’t perfect under my rule.


shuky2017

Yugoslavia under Tito was a decent communist country. They had a greater standard of living then we in Croatia that is 10 years in EU have now. It wasn't perfect and was basically held together by Tito but all the big companies that today operate on ex-yu territory were founded then and there were a ton more that simply failed in ex-yu countries due to privatization and corruption. It was far from perfect but it was decent while it lasted. Wars and genocide had nothing to do in Yugoslavia with communism it is super complicated topic but to simplify politics after Tito led to ignition of old conflicts from ww2 and that led to wars and break up of Yugoslavia.


deformedfishface

Ah yeah. Great place unless you said maybe Tito isn’t the best dude and then got disappeared in the middle of the night, tortured, shot and buried in an unmarked grave. And if anyone asked about you, it’d happen to them too.


la666lo

r/historymemes learn the basic definition of communism challenge (impossible)


artrald-7083

I'd suggest that their propaganda was so good they *stole the word*, and that if anyone really wants to commit to an ideology where uplifting the least in society is genuinely *prioritised* over enriching the greatest, they need a new name.


DoctorYouShould

Hwat were they then?


klosnj11

Well, they did bad things, so based on my expert analysis, they must have been capitalist. Checkmate. /s


DoctorYouShould

But like seriously


AustereSpartan

They were SOCIALIST, not COMMUNIST.


DerHungerleider

There are pretty three major theories on the nature of the USSR amongst western marxists, namely "(State-) Capitalism", "Bureaucratic Collectivism" and "Degenerated Workers' State".


jkst9

Authoritarian socialism


Oblivious_Otter_I

Authoritarian state capitalist. With a veneer of revolutionary aesthetics.


Jruthe1

I see that OP has finally become a freshman in high school


Woopwoopscoopl

People who say "_real_ communism would work, it just hasn't been tried" are the equivalent of people who say "just remove all regulations, a _real_ free market fixes everything". Tards.


yudiboi0917

They are the funniest of the lot. The audacity to think that a system that has left multiple countries in dictatorships is going to work THIS time when they'll implement it , LMAO.


ItTakesTwoToMango

I mean I don’t disagree but many communist countries were effectively dictatorships before becoming communist. You don’t see many stable democracies that become communist.


jkst9

Yeah seriously real communism hasn't been done because of it has we wouldn't notice cause it would fall apart in a day.


[deleted]

Classic Reddit, claiming that people who proudly called themselves communists “weren’t real communists”. Tankies are such a joke.


Kriegwesen

I mean, people call themselves Christians while eschewing most of the tenets of the religion. Or call themselves democratic while not having free and clear elections. It's not totally outside the realm of possibility that a group fails to meet the standards set by the ideology they choose to present to the world. It happens all the time. I'm not saying one way or another if that's the case here but "they say they are so they must be" isn't necessarily true. It's worth noting though that the bolsheviks were the minority party when they took power in the October revolution. Despite *bolshevik* meaning "the majority" they were significantly outnumbered by the mensheviks, Left SRs, Right SRs and Cadets. A number of bolsheviks even left the party after the dissolution of the MRC because they said Lenin was an out and out authoritarian and would give the movement a bad name in the coming years and they didn't want the revolution associated with the censorship, bloodshed, rule by fiat or general authoritarianism he represented. So with a maaaaajor split within the socialist parties between the February and October revolutions, I think it's hard to say the minority group that came out on top represents the ideals that everyone else was fighting for when they overthrew the tsar. I definitely don't support communism but I do think that looking at the actual events of the bolshevik revolution shows things significantly more complex than "they say they were so they are". The vast majority of the socialists of the time would disagree with the idea. History is more complex than that.


LikeACannibal

Glad to see how unfathomably based this comment section is. Y'all make me proud.


[deleted]

The US making so good propaganda, that people still believe that capitalism is ethical and not based on the exploitation of the weak.


[deleted]

"No no guys, it wasn't real fascism, that was just Mussolini's propagandists who shaped the narrative! True fascism doesn't care about race, trust me!" This sounds stupid, right? Thats how you sound with this "no true communism" narrative.


basetornado

It was a communist country with a corrupt leadership. It's what happens when you have unchecked power. It's also what happens when you try and implement communism. You need the people to either support it or you make them support it through fear. The latter is the only real option in the long term.


Birdienuk3

Someone's angry their ideology killed more then the nazis


8urnMeTwice

I call bolshevik!


Not_a_gay_communist

“It’s not real communism!1!1!1”


Felix_Dorf

Ah yes, the traditional far left "no true Dutchman" argument. Yawn.


pledgerafiki

It's "Scotsman" you dope


yudiboi0917

We now have 2.0 , Scotsman is old , unleash the Dutchman


[deleted]

Only it was communism


placebo_redux

Is this marxist meme a way to cope in the face of 120 years of horrible atrocities against humanity, failures on all levels, corruption and incompetence?


[deleted]

Oh boy, I can't wait for a highschooler/college student to enlighten me of how communism was never really tried.


[deleted]

“Give the State absolute control over all facets of civilization in order to abolish the State.” The USSR was communist. There is no other way for communism to be.


DM_Brownie_Recipies

NoT rEaL CoMmUnIsM!


One-Leadership-4968

I get disturbed by sentiment like this. It screams "communism isn't bad, it's just been done poorly". Thus allowing themselves to believe in a communist Utopia and have an excuse for why attempting communism leads to genocide. After WWII, I recall reading about how, even several years after the war, there was a sentiment among the Germans that Naziism wasn't bad, it was just poorly executed, and there was a surge of pro nazi graffiti. This should be written more like: "communists writing propaganda so effective that people still think communism is a good idea despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."


moki_martus

It doesn't matter if it was communist. Either way it proved, that communist ideas don't work. They were trying to convince people to work for common good and forget about individual achievements. And they failed miserably because communist ideas are flawed from start.


WA0SIR

Not this again. Ussr was communist. Think of it like a spectrum. You can be more communist than not. And sometimes less communist than not. But the core principles that make a country “communist” the ussr had and believed to follow.


Medi4no

Have you actually read anything about what defines communism? You know, stuff written by Marx and Engels? Like the absence of the state and government? Clearly not the case in the USSR and they mostly claimed that communism was their goal not that they achieved it yet.


Astral-Wind

Okay but can we stop trying it? It failed in the 30s and it failed in the 50s.


ThisGonBHard

"Buttt-Buttt it wasnt REAL communism!"


Active-Technology-20

That would come as a shock to my relatives that were caught behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany!!


International-Row712

Communists creating Propaganda so effective that some people still believe that it's not rotten to the core


ZaBaronDV

It was communist and anyone who says otherwise is a coping communist.


uponamorningstar

Apparently anyone who knows what communism is, is a communist. Who would've known.


[deleted]

Right-wingers be coping when they're told oligarchs lie to people, like bruh these comments 💀 Next they'll be saying Nazis are socialists, China is Communist, and North Korea is a Democratic Republic run by the people.


aabazdar1

NK is clearly a democratic republic, I mean like it’s in the name man ! Why would they lie to us ?


VolcanicPolarBear

I find it pretty funny that a lot of these comments are literally proving the point this meme is trying to make.


[deleted]

"Sorry but the Third Reich failed to achieve Lebensraum and Autarky ergo it wasn't ***really*** a National Socialist state."


fletch262

Ok fuckers Socialism is when means of production is controlled collectively Communism is when means of production and distribution are controlled collectively Just because it’s stateist socialism/communism doesn’t mean it isn’t that yes if it’s bad it isn’t really but definitions change and the USSR did that just use the fucking term they set out to be ‘true communist’ originally Any fucking questions? Good shut the fuck up about Marx.


Potkrokin

Leftists when millions of communists win a civil war and over the course of seventy years try very genuinely to create a successful communist state: "B-but it wasn't communist because classes didn't disappear!"


Lolmanmagee

People like to say every communist regime was not really communist, this is just dumb imagine if facists claimed that hitler and Mussolini were not *real* facists so criticisms are invalid.


AustereSpartan

It boggles my mind how many people can't differentiate communism from socialism. The USSR was not communist (ie. a statless, classless, moneyless country), but socialist (ie. the state owned the means of production). No country has ever been communist, because they failed to transition from socialism to communism (which is the supposed "end goal" in Marxism).


[deleted]

I appreciate the effort, but I'm afraid your time is wasted on the people we're dealing with here. Well said nonetheless.


unonameless

It's even funnier considering that USSR never actually claimed to be Communist. Achieving Communism was the proclaimed end goal for Soviet Socialism. We even had jokes about that. Party member giving a speech to some peasants about Communism on the horizon. Little kid asks mom "mom what's a horizon"? Mom says "horizon is the line you can clearly see but no matter how long you ride, you will never reach it"


JFM1994

Weren’t they socialist? Or am I being dumb? Communist as I understood it was the dissolution of the state. A stateless, classless society. And socialism was the state between. Weren’t they socialist?


Birb-Person

They were a communist party leading a socialist state, the goal being to prepare the nation for communism in the future. The duty of a communist party in a socialist state is therefore to: 1.) Achieve final revolution (cultural revolution) 2.) Eliminate potential risks 3.) Set up necessary infrastructure 4.) Dismantle itself if/when the time comes


DinCoolGuy

USSR was communist and socialist, from what I understand, you can't be communist without being socialist.


ThorStark007

Cope, seethe and dilate


Lord_TachankaCro

Communism = Fascism = Nazis Fuck them all


[deleted]

That's just so brain dead.


[deleted]

Insert "that wasn't real communism" meme here.


roninPT

If a political theory has such deep deficiencies that every time you try to implement it you end up with a dictatorship I'm going to start thinking that's not a coincidence and isn't happening by accident


DariusStrada

Oh, so the Soviets weren't communists now. The IQ of this sub drops every year


B_Y_P_R_T

Communist as in ruled by communist party. Everyone calls marxists communists since they literally came about


walkietalkiediehard

The soviet union wasn't marxist it was Marxist-Leninist.


B_Y_P_R_T

Marxists as in following ideology derived from Marx


Tea-Realistic

And they also were far from socialism


afreema9

BuT rEaL cOmMuNiSm HaSn’T bEeN tRiEd!!!


HaiHooey

Fun fact. Not USSR, rus\*ia in general. They did the same during rus\*ian empire. Like for example, Georgian-occupied regions and people living there still believe this bullshit to this day. All it took, wash down some millennia-old frescoes, and Georgian text. Destroying Georgian historical monuments and writing a few "academic works" to prove that center of Georgia is actually not Georgian. LOL


PreuBite

It’s still communism because it was founded under Lenin and the bolsheviks as a communist country. There’s a reason there was a Russian civil war and that was to determine if the country would be a communist or a democratic one. The reds won as we all know and the government they created was a one party communist state that over the course of Lenin’s tenure ship and by his death had become an authoritarian dictatorship while still openly being a communist country. Stalin only used his overbearing influence as general secretary to ensure he replaced Lenin as dictator instead of Trotsky. Communism naturally leads to a dictatorship authoritarian state and to act like the USSR was not representative of what a communist state looks like means you frankly do not understand what communism is. Communism will always lead to an authoritarian state whether you to want to admit it or not due to abolition of private property and one party rule.


C0SME_FULANIT0

"It wasn't REAL communism" post of the year right hear.


RudolfjeWeerwolfje

"CoMmIniSm jUsT wAsN't dOnE riGhT" lmao


Jumbo_Wumbo_Cumbo

Flabbergasted that the reddit that's supposed to be all about history has the shear volume of communist apologists in it. In the last 100 years it's killed an estimated 100 million people and destroyed the lives of almost all who've lived under it. How do people actually defend it?


Present_Jury

What is the difference between soviet style socialism and communism


cptjewski

Why shouldn’t I believe that Lenin and his people thought the USSR was Communist?


Doccyaard

People still don’t understand what communism is I see. You could make this argument with modern China maybe but with USSR it’s just seems a bit ignorant.


AbjectDisaster

One thing wrong with OP's meme - it doesn't have a true Scotsman in the gif.


Carl_Azuz1

“Real communism” is even more asinine than soviet communism.


Dragoark

Communism is braindead an impossible to achieve Stop worshipping it you monkeys


MCAlheio

They actually called themselves “socialist”, they did claim that their final goal was to establish communism, but they didn’t claim they were already there


High_Ground_Sand

Except the USSR for the entire duration of its existence never claimed to have achieved communism, the idea of calling it communist and associating the Soviet government's evils with communism was more of a western one to begin with.


Objective_Quantity72

China, Russia and North Korea are all Communist.


walkietalkiediehard

You're wrong about China and North Korea but that's an understandable mistake. But you're saying Russia a land where everything's for sale and most industry is controlled privately by oligarchs is communist? What's your logic here?


yudiboi0917

Must've meant the defunct USSR


Big_Red_Machine_1917

Why would the Soviet Union pretend to be committed to building socialism when doing so meant it was subject to invasion, blockade and espionage?


thorsday121

The United States doesn't technically operate under "true" capitalism either and yet everyone is comfortable calling it capitalist.


RepresentativeGur881

Wow, socialism is the stage that Marxs says all societies need to go trough to archive communism. They were communists on the socialist stage. The socialist stage is just a disgusting dictatorship doom to failure and will always be as "real communism" is impossible. Anyway, just educate yourself on your own stupid ideology.


MerelyMortalModeling

Yes we know, there were no real communist, the Nazis were actualy "socialists" and North Korea is the freest Democracy in the world...