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  • Serious question: has communism ever been proved to work at scale? (not communist regimes, the communist ideology)

    • No, it gets destroyed by a CIA-funded coup every time. (Read Jakarta Method)

      But look at Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Kerala, China, Burkino Faso for modern attempts at Socialism/Communism

    • No system has ever worked at scale. Capitalism is literally destroying the planet we live on, Feudalism wasn't any better, and no other system was ever applied at such a scale.
      Maybe the scale is the problem, and the Anarchists were right all along.

      • (most) Anarchists don't have a problem with scale, just with hierarchy. We can have democratic and free associations at any scale.

        • You can't force your system onto every society and culture on earth, as Capitalism has done, when your system is Anarchism.

          • That's true. Imperialist ideologies like capitalism or the state socialism of the CCCP have an advantage in spreading their influence globally. But there's nothing in principle standing in the way of one world, one federation, a million tribes. Anarchism does scale quite the well in that regard

            • The USSR was not Imperialist, rather, it supported liberation movements against Imperialism and Colonialism.

              • I'm sure the Ukrainian free soviets where happy to be liberated, or the sailors of Kronstadt. I'm sure the Spanish workers were glad to be shot in the back in the name of the party. The people of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were without a doubt thrilled to be occupied. The land grab in Finland liberated plenty of people, they were welcomed with open arms, yes? Communists leaders around the world felt so liberated, in fact, they bonded together in third-worldism to escape the influence of the СССР.

                • There's a lot of complexity tossed aside here, and it hurts your point, more than helps it. When pulling the Krondstadt "trap card" out of your deck and using it as evidence of Soviet Imperialism, for example, you are making several unstated approvals that demand interrogation:

                  1. The Krondstadt Revolt was led by Stepan Petrichenko, an "anarcho-syndicalist" that tried to join the Tsarist White Army a year prior to the revolt. He did not care for progress, he would have rather reinstated the Tsar than help the Soviets establish a Socialist State.
                  2. The Krondstadt Rebels carried a critical port in the midst of an extremely chaotic civil war. Their demands could not be met without drawing away too many resources in war time, they used their privledged position in order to seak favorable treatment.
                  3. If we assume that you call the Bolsheviks traitors for crushing the Krondstadt Revolt, this implies you wish they conceded. What would have happened? In all likelihood, the Soviets would have lost the Civil War and the Tsarists would have reinstated the Tsar. This would mean you support the Tsar over the real popular working class movement.

                  This general obfuscation of the real struggles for quick "gotchas" applies to all of your examples, such as the Spanish Anarchists who were supported by the Soviets alone, or when you uphold Makhno, who was targeted by the Soviets after raiding them:

                  The Makhnovists were one of several guerrilla bands that had allied with the Bolsheviks and became units of the Ukrainian Soviet Army in 1919. “Makhno’s forces were assigned a strategically vital section of the Red Army’s Southern Front facing the counter-revolutionary White Army of the former Tsarist general Denikin.” [18] But even during his time as a commander of the Ukrainian Soviet Army, Makhno deliberately stole from and undermined his Bolshevik allies. The historian Arthur Adams writes that “Makhno supplied himself, sometimes by commandeering entire Bolshevik supply trains meant for the Southern Front... Soviet food collectors and political institutions found it impossible to function in the region under his domination.” [19]

                  Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia all have unique histories with nationalism that would be even more oversimplified than what I had to do for the others to drive a point, so I won't waste time doing so and simply say you can't just state a country and claim it was Imperialized. Perhaps @PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml would like to weigh in.

                  Further, you erase the liberatory role the USSR played in Cuba, China, Korea, Angola, Algeria, Palestine, and numerous other countries. Each would also need its own deep investigation, but your one-sided comment erased them entirely.

                  Even further, occupation is not Imperialism. Imperialism is a mechanism of extraction, the USSR drove its economy internally, rather than externally as the Western Powers did. That was my original point to begin with.

                  Really, you need to do more multi-sided research.

                  • you can’t just state a country and claim it was Imperialized

                    Polish communists were very much internationalists (for example Róża Luksemburg who even get a split with Lenin over the point of not wanting Polish independence), but Polish left was divided as every other European left between communists and various opportunists. Also communists got more or less slaughtered during the 1905 revolution, so opportunists immediately gained advantage and in 1914 same thing as everywhere happened, socialchauvinists from PPS tried to gain independence by piggybacking partition powers (mostly Austria-Hungary). By the end of the WW1 majority of surviving Polish communists ended up participating in either Russian or German revolutions, so in interwar Poland not many of them were left. Remnants and new generation got opressed by all bourgeoisie interwar governments from the socialchauvinists through the nationalists to fascists.

                    Conclusion: if anything, the ideological descendants of the original Polish communists from Ludwik Waryński to Róża Luksemburg are to be found among people who founded Polish People's Republic. If someone now claims they are inheritors of "interwar left", it's socialchauvinism at best, and it gets tested and proven every single time, parties like PPS, SLD, UP, APP, Razem, names like Ikonowicz or Zandberg, all of them talked big and then became liberals lapdogs.

                    • Thank you for this, comrade! I'll have to do more research into this. I appreciate your insight greatly.

                  • Whether their occupations and annexations where extractive or expansionist in nature, and whether they qualify for the definition of imperialism, is discussion that can be had, although I have neither the time nor energy to have it here. What stays unchanged past this talk of semantics is the fact that they were an authoritarian and expansionist state. To quote Rosa Luxemburg:

                    When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!) Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc. (Lenin’s speech on discipline and corruption.)

                    • Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918.

                    1918, this was written well before Stalin's reign of terror, in a time when general sentiment towards the revolution was full of hope. Even anarchists where quick to support the revolutionaries, but quickly became disillusioned from what they saw. To quote Trotsky, the man himself:

                    The working class [...] cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers [...] Compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism [...] Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps.”

                    Then later in the year, as the workers were becoming angered at their treatment:

                    the militarization of labour...is the indispensable basic method for the organization of our labour forces

                    And

                    Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? [...] This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive. Compulsory slave labour [...] was in its time a progressive phenomenon. Labour [...] obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker, is the basis of socialism.

                    • First of all, all governments are authoritarian, what matters is which class is the one exerting its authority, the Proletariat or Bourgeoisie. States are material things. Further, it isn't quite accurate to refer to the USSR as "expansionist." It certainly grew, but it wasn't a gang of conquesting warlords.

                      Regardless of what Rosa Luxemburg predicted in 1918, or what the ultimately traitorous Trotsky believed, the Soviet society ultimately was fairly democratic. It wasn't some Utopia, but Pat Sloan described it quite well in Soviet Democracy, as did Anna Louis Strong in This Soviet World, written well into the 1930s.

                      Ultimately, the comment I took issue with was your description of the USSR as Imperialist, when in most definitions of the word it was quite the opposite. There are a number of valid critiques to make of it, don't misread me, but it also played a progressive role in the 20th century and came with dramatic improvements for the Working Class, and the struggles it faced both internal and external can be learned from all the same as many will be universal for anyone building Socialism.

            • I used to want a one world federation. Then G W. Bush happened and I saw potential problems with that. We never got a one world federation, and djt happened and I see the problems with this spreading, despite lacking a one world federation. I'm not sure what the answers are, but it is becoming saliently clear what they aren't.

      • Anarchists would still have to deal with scale in terms of trade, production and centralization - after all, not every commune would be able to produce penicillin, insulin, chips, phones, steel, etc as a hobby. In other words, they would still have to replace capitalist system to a decent enough extent to be able to meet all their needs.

    • Have to get past American and western interventionism to figure it out. But socialism lifted millions out of poverty look at Chinese and Russian history. Both countries went from feudal and monarchal society to industrial powers houses lead by peasants and workers, rivaling the United States in mere decades. So I’d say yes socialism does work. Also both those societies went from a near totally illiterate society to a 100 % total literacy within a generation. Free healthcare, housing, education and unemployment was non existent. Just to name some more achievements of socialism.

    • https://dessalines.github.io/essays/capitalism_doesnt_work.html

    • Yes, The PRC, DPRK, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and former USSR all are examples of Communist parties over Socialist systems. Communism, the post-Socialist, global fully publicly owned economy hasn't been achieved yet, but thus far Communists have been able to successfully build Socialism, its necessary prerequisite.

    • no capitalism keeps declaring war on it, the road towards it however.... Massive Ws in the soviet union, the prc, dprk, east germany, just tremendous achivements

    • China, Yugoslavia, USSR, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, Cuba, DDR, etc etc

    • Capitalism is a global system, it is based on exchange value and things being produced and sold for a profit, not for use (which is known as commodity production), and if you want to trade internationally, you have to follow this capitalist mode of production. Communism, on the other hand, aims to abolish the production of commodities (money included) and instead produce goods for use. Notice how these two systems differ so much, international trade between actual communist and capitalist countries becomes impossible given how differently they value things.

      Now consider how today's capitalist nations are so dependent on trade, and it's because trade allows nations to prosper, to grow, to have increased standards of living and gives the nations access to materials they otherwise couldn't have produced within their local borders. If a nation goes full isolationist, it loses access to all of that and the nation becomes crippled.

      So there's three ways for communist countries to go about the global capitalist system:

      1. Go full isolationist, which would cripple a country substantially.
      2. Participate in the capitalist market, meaning the country would be forced to produce commodities and participate in capital exchange which would make them, in one definition or another, capitalist. This also heavily risks the country to fall into full capitalism with time (as seen historically).
      3. Support worker movements internationally en masse and hope they succeed with achieving their revolutions. If they succeed, only then can exchange value be safely abolished, goods be produced for use instead of profit, and international socialist/communist trade can actually happen with people having their needs met.

      It's clear that international communist revolution is pretty much the only viable way forward, and the only opportunity to do so failed (with Spartacist uprising, Hungrarian Soviet Republic, etc being crushed, leaving USSR standing pretty much alone).

      So to answer your question with all this nonsensical wall of text in mind, no. Actual communist/socialist mode of production has never existed (therefore whether communist ideology works hasn't been proven), as any experiments so far had essentially been capitalist.

      • This isn't quite accurate. If you maintain public control over the large firms and industries, and the proletariat controls the state, you remain on the Socialist road. Markets themselves are not necessarily Capitalism.

        Communism must be global, but we can't make a fully publicly owned economy simply by declaring private property illegal, the USSR didn't even manage to do that.

        • If you maintain public control over the large firms and industries, and the proletariat controls the state, you remain on the Socialist road.

          Agree, there has to be DOTP directly after the revolution which has to retain some capitalist features, mostly for economic survival purposes.

          However, once the military struggle against capitalists are over and economy is sufficiently reorganized, a country has to quickly abolish the value form and actually turn to a socialist mode of production, else it risks either backpedaling to capitalism and/or turning revisionist. This is precisely what happened to USSR, given how they couldn't transition to socialist mode of production due to their peasant problem + Stalin's delusions of "Socialism in one state".

          If there's an active maintenance in post-revolutionary period of capitalist mode of production, then the country is capitalist even if the production is nationalized or owned by workers.

          Markets themselves are not necessarily Capitalism.

          Historically markets predate Capitalism, so yes, but they're never socialist or communist given how socialist mode of production does away with commodity production. If commodity production is abolished, then commodity exchange (markets) can no longer exist. This does mean that market socialism is capitalist as commodity production remains, the law of value remains, all that's different when compared to Capitalism is that the state regulates it which doesn't magically make it socialist.

          • I think there's a problem in analysis of time scales, and the fundamental role contradictions play, dialectically.

            If, by "millitary struggle against Capitalists" you mean the immediate revolution and establishment of the DotP, there is then a long and protracted process of building up to a fully publicly owned economy. You cannot achieve this through fiat, it must be developed towards, and markets remain the most effective method of moving from low to high levels of development. You cannot simply abolish the value form with a stroke of a pen, black markets emerge for that which is not provided. Erasing the commodity form is a material and historical process, not a legalistic one.

            Socialism in one country is undeniably correct. Had Trotsky's permanent revolution been adopted, ie abandoning the buildup of Socialism domestically in favor of exporting revolution abroad, we would have had more failed revolutions and the USSR would have been crushed due to a lack of development. The very foundation of Permanent Revolution is on the assumption that the peasantry can only temporarily align with the Proletariat, which ended up being proven false when the Soviet system solidified, rather than fell apart in the first few years.

            The biggest issue here, however, is your adoption of the "One Drop Rule." I wrote a post on the subject, but to simplify, the concept that if some degree of Private Property exists the entire system is Capitalist goes against all notions of Dialectical Materialism and throws away the entire Materialist basis for Socialism in the first place. Just as Public Property in the US is not Socialist, Private Property in a Socialist system does not mean the system is Capitalist.

            All systems have contradictions. What matters most is which class is resolving the contradictions via the State, the Proletariat, or the Bourgeoisie. If the large firms, key industries, and State are firmly in the hands of the Proletariat, the system is on the Socialist road. We cannot abolish the small manufacturer or firms, we must develop out of them. The process of building towards Communism through Socialism is through the continuous resolution of these contradictions, as by necessary laws of physics they cannot be resolved legalistically, or with the stroke of a pen.

            The idea that the Socialist Mode of Production is unique among all in that it is the only Mode of Production judged by purity, rather than the principle aspect, is an error in classification that ignores the real trajectories we observe in Socialist states like the PRC, which are increasing in Socialization of the economy over time. Rather, we can look all the way back to Marx for evidence to why this is true:

            The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i. e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

            I want you to look at the bolded word. Why did Marx say by degree? Did he think on day 1, businesses named A-C are nationalized, day 2 businesses D-E, etc etc? No. Marx believed that it is through nationalizing of the large firms that would be done immediately, and gradually as the small firms develop, they too can be folded into the public sector. The path to eliminated Private Property isn't to make it illegal, but to develop out of it.

            The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital;[43] the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

            This is why, in the previous paragraph, Marx described public seizure in degrees, but raising the level of the productive forces as rapidly as possible.

            China does have Billionaires, but these billionaires do not control key industries, nor vast megacorps. The number of billionaires is actually shrinking in the last few years. Instead, large firms and key industries are publicly owned, and small firms are privately owned. This is Marxism.

            I also recommend What is Socialism? as its an excellent essay that goes more in-depth on the topics I went over.

      • this.

        adendum: in some "primitive" societies, there was no private property of the means of production. marx and engels studied that extensively.

    • Not capitalism ≠ communism (or communist ideology). Imagine an interest-free economic system. This could also work completely without communist ideology, but would get rid of the problematic core principle in capitalism that money attracts more money (which for instance might have stopped the Swasticar CEO from even becoming so powerful). This would also improve the value of work compared to just owning money. But maybe I am just delusional and instead the anarchists are indeed right. Dunno.

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