this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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To be clear, that was authoritarianism, not communism.
Ah, communism is like unicorns. Many people like them but nobody have seen them alive. Because every communist state is not communist but authoritarian.
aUthOriTarIaN
The endless "that wasn't Communism, it was authoritarianism" lines come from liberals sympathetic to the ideas behind liberalism, but who have not read theory nor truthfully examined AES states. No more, no less.
Actually yeah, I think just about every so called communist state is what would be called a failed workers state by the non authoritarian socialists.
And those "non-authoritarian socialists" are liberals.
Trotskist.
Ah, Trots. Spending more time splintering among themselves and refusing to work together to actually get anything done since Trotsky himself.
When does a Communist country become authoritarian? This line is always repeated by sympathetic liberals that haven't read theory yet think they know enough to judge Leftist movements.
It’s a problem of psychology and scale. The communist system becomes susceptible to bad actors the larger the group becomes.
In point of fact: I fully agree that many Latin countries, absent US bullshittery, intervention, and fomenting of coups in the first Cold War, would probably mostly have wound up being successful.
But I absolutely do not agree that the USSR or the PRC should be held up as paragons of virtue of what a Communist system should be. They were very quickly corrupted by authoritarian leaders and cliques from the get go, which is genuinely antithetical to true communism.
How? What makes it more susceptible in ways that Capitalism is better?
Cuba is doing pretty well despite the brutal embargo.
No, they were not. This is vibes-based analysis mixed with Red-Scare propaganda. The USSR and the PRC were both Socialist (and the PRC remains so to this day). What do you mean by them being "quickly corrupted by authoritarian leaders?" You mean that they elected the wrong leaders in your eyes, that they should have gone against democracy?
Inequality shot far down in the USSR, and the Working Class was in control. That was absolutely Communism in action, regardless of your vibes-based analysis. Obviously many things also went wrong, they all had their struggles, but they were actually existing Socialism and should be analyzed as such.
I highly suggest reading Blackshirts and Reds.