this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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I'm going to take your question as genuine and answer in equal.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Most leftists will agree with you, the USSR and other Eastern Europe countries that were communist did a lot of damage and most likely more harm. They committed atrocities. They were authoritarian. It was disgusting.
The leftists who still prop those countries up on their shoulders are what many call tankies. Today they sing praise about Russia, China, and North Korea, but your observation is correct, they won't ever move there. These are individuals who repeat propaganda and are, ultimately, just red fascists. When you actually dig into their ideals they parallel and sometimes mirror Nazis.
I believe leftism cannot have an authoritarian element to it. I think most social hierarchies need to be destroyed. I think the only way to have a socialist society is through democratic means. Democracy in the workplace and national level. I think most of us can agree workers need higher wages and there is a wealth gap that needs to be dismantled. I think most of us believe healthcare needs to be universal, food and shelter and water, education, information (internet), speech, and much more should be free and readily available. There is this element of freedom that needs to be achieved that isn't found the countries that are "communist".
I don't want to explicitly say those communist countries wasn't "real communism", but fascists, authoritarianism, always appropriate from progressive movement. There is no freedom, especially of workers, under a dictatorship. If workers are starving, dying, being outright black bagged and killed, i don't think that can be considered communist.
The last paragraph comes across as about "no true Scotsman" as it gets. Maybe true IRL communism is as much fiction as the star trek depiction of it is.
That's the point of my concluding paragraph. I am acknowledging that fallacy. So I ask, if freedom is an actual component to socialism, communism, or anarchism, then is the USSR actually a communist state? I can easily argue North Korea isn't. China and Russia aren't socialist at all. Russia is an oligopoly and China is just state capitalism.
So what is "true socialism"? I don't think we can ever achieve. We can't have a "perfect" society, but I do think we can get close enough having workers been more in control of their labor, be more democratic, and not live in an authoritarian state. We may not 100% be able to live in a Star Trek universe but I think we can get quite close.
Sure, here are some examples:
As you may imagine, they aren't finding their way to exist easy. But they sure are having success in learning how to create a horizontal society.
The former is operating illegally amidst intense violence that they have as much responsibility for as the Mexican government and the latter have committed ethnic cleansing. So I'm not sure why you think they are good examples. Unless you think socialism means people must be killed.