Why do anti-communists keep using the "GOMMUNISM HAS NEVER WORGED" argument when it's been disproved time and time...

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Is Holla Forums retarded

It's wrong in the sense that it thinks third world revolution could actually lead the world to communism. Any third world country that adopted genuine socialism would be crushed pretty quickly. However it isn't wrong in the sense that even a relatively minor upset in the global supply chain of cheap labour and resources from the 3rd world could totally disrupt Western capitalists ability to bribe Western workers into complacency. Even the implementation of Western style social democracy and Western standards of minimum wage and worker's rights in the 3rd world would be enough to do this.

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Yes yes we in the first world can afford plenty of luxury

Did we not just say the comic goes all MTW?

You are aware that literally none of those countries ever claimed to have a Communist system, right?

You can pick up literally any political economy textbook issued by the Soviet government itself and the terms used to define their own regime was constantly something along the lines of "early stage socialism", "transitional period" and so on.

Let's say that you, with a decent understand of how modern capitalism works, were transported back in the past to a period before the development of a merchant class, before primitive capitalist accumulation, before the modern institutions of finance were developed and when agrarian feudalism was at its peak. Could you, through theoretical understanding alone, make a modern capitalist country out of what you found?

If you think yes, you're a retard, if you think no, you subconsciously admit to a tenet that is at the core of Marxism: the belief that political and economic institutions aren't magically created out of thin air through the force of reasoning, but out of a dialectical relationship with the pre-existing material circumstances of the state it corresponds to and the world it connects to at large.

For Marxists, those of capitalism and bourgeois liberalism corresponds to the things I said above, while Socialism corresponds to a developed, industrialized capitalism where the majority of the institutions are bourgeois and the majority of the population are proletarians (remember Marx himself supported the bourgeoisie in Germany out of this reasoning). To say this is the case of Russia, China or Eastern Europe is absolutely ludicrous, after all Lenin and Trotsky at the eve of the revolution were still routinely questioned by other Bolsheviks about the feasibility of Socialism in Russia, had to place their hopes in a revolution in Germany, and were challenged by other Marxists who said Russia needed a period of democratic capitalist development.

What followed next, as the many zigzags of political economy in the Soviet Union in the 20s show, is not the attempt to develop le Marxist utopia but simply to take a country that had its infrastructure destroyed by war and was on the brink of starvation and make it function again. These are hardly the conditions you'd expect a working nation to arise from, let alone Socialism.

And you also seem to forget that the Bolsheviks were by no means the people who set the standards of Marxism is. They were alienated from the International of socialists because of the revolution, were in conflict with other Marxists and Socialists in Russia (including the more popular SR) and even the founder of Marxism in Russia, Plekhanov, disagreed with the revolution. Even if you play the "Soviet states disprove Marxism" card you're still left with the question of why it disproves Marxism as a whole and not just the Marxism of a relatively small group, while supporting that of many others.

You could create a capitalist system easily enough. It wouldn't be modern, but what does that prove?
Capitalism co-existed with feudalism in the Middle Ages.

All modes of production co-exist, we co-exist with slavery and co-ops today. The question Marxism asks is which mode of production is the dominant one, to which classes it corresponds to and how those classes manage power.

And if you really think you could create a capitalist system out of any circumstances you encounter, what reason do you give for it being, for centuries, essentially an European phenomenon, and why do you think it started in places like Britain and not all other european places at once? Because Marxists typically respond to that question by looking at the gradual spread of market relationships in these countries, the ascension of the bourgeois class, their relationship with stock exchange (as in the Netherlands) and the gradual undoing of feudal institutions by revolution and protestantism. Any other perspective would basically reject the economic view of history in favor of something like "eh, they just thought of it first"

It probably wasn't dominant because most people still had to work the land. Which we don't recognise as capitalism.

Except most of the "political economy zigzags" derived from reversing previous failures at organising the economy around Marxist principles. Lenin didn't embrace the NEP because "it will jumpstart development", he belatedly accepted the NEP because "War Communism" was a catastrophe.

Because many of Marx's most famous predictions did not play out as he expected, which you acknowledge multiple times in the same post.

Much post-Russian-revolution Marxist thought has been devoted to why revolutions on ostensibly Marxist/socialist principles occurred in underdeveloped agrarian states. In Marx's own times one of the most vexing questions in Marxist (and socialist) thought was why the United States - the most developed capitalist state - had the least developed socialist parties/movements when compared to Europe

Yes. I am aware, I said genuinely attempting to ACHIEVE communism the system, because they were genuinely communist the ideology. There is a tendency on the left to conflate the two when it suits the arguers purposes and keep them separate when THAT suits the arguers purposes that literally everyone sees through. THAT'S why people keep saying "gommunism has never worged." Because gommunism the ideology has not to date worked, and people aren't willing to own up to that and portray it as mistakes to learn lessons from but rather fall into "NOT TRUE COMMUNISM!"

Because they don't know what communism actually is, OP.

The "no true communism" thing is said because a lot of people think the Marxist ideal is literally the USSR, the criticism you give (not "owning up") is something you could only say to a Trot because if you're a Stalinist you are indeed "owning up" and if you're a leftcom you probably have a critique of Leninism itself so it's stupid to ask someone who isn't even a Leninist to "own up" the USSR, it's as stupid as asking a Nietzschean to "own up" the Holocaust

Save this post, read a book on Soviet history and then re-read so you can cringe as hard as anyone with a Wikipedia-tier knowledge of the epoch is right now.

First, War Communism itself was not attempt at building an ideal or norm that would set the standard for Socialism. It was literally what the name implies, an improvise command economy for war, so the NEP can't be read as a retreat from "Marxism". As I said, Marxism is the philosophy of studying the development of class and politics in accordance to economic development, and Marx himself supported Capitalism and the bourgoeis class in several scenarios where it could play a progressive role. Lenin didn't go against this, and his pre-War reforms were hardly radical:

Or, to put it briefly, Lenin wanted capitalist reforms that Marx gave as prerequisite for Socialism "from above", since it had the West as an example, instead of constructed spontaneously by private and market forces. This interrumption of this and the development of War Communism was caused by civil war.

But then again, for the sake of argument, let's fucking assume that the NEP was the abandonment of "Marxism". A mere half decade after the NEP was enacted, both its first supporters (like Trotsky) and its longest supporters (like Bukharin) had already stepped away from it and started pushing for different degrees of state planning and collective farming because the NEP proved unworkable in terms of political economy. And this wasn't something they'd do just to be Socialist-y, because in practical politics it was an idiotic move: Stalin and Bukharin for example had spent the past years telling the Left Opposition to shut up with its calls for a more planned economy. If the appearance of the NEP means Socialism doesn't work, its dismissal should mean that Capitalism doesn't work either.

And second, and I'm already repeating myself here, there's no such thing as organising an economy around "Marxist principles" because Marxism denies the existence of immutable laws of the economy in the first place.

This is another cliche people with 0 knowledge of Marxism parrot all the time because they've heard someone else saying. His "most famous predictions" often are misinterpretations of his analysis of capitalism or plain wrong bullshit, like the idea that he said some mega crisis that would bring Socialism was arriving.

The prediction I assume you're talking about, of intensified proletarian struggle in the developed west, was far from wrong. Socialism and socialist parties were far stronger in Germany, France, the US and the UK than they were in Russia, China or pretty much any other place where capitalism hadn't reached a high degree of development. If by events that he would need a fucking crystal ball to predict (such as a world war) a fringe group like the Bolsheviks could jump ahead of its European counterparts and seize power before they did is hardly proof that an analysis of general trends of history he made half a century before were wrong.

Yes it was

Not even remotely related to anything I said in my post

It depends. No one denies that people like Mao and Stalin were communists and Marxist in personal philosophy and worldview, but that doesn't mean they get to magically overruled the relationship between material basis and superstructure that Marxism preaches.

There were, however, many people who themselves could care less about Marxism and building Socialism and whatever, but they saw in alliance with the Soviet Union and the international network of parties it created career opportunities, and the same could be said about entire generations of government in Marxist-Leninist countries. I mean, look at your country, is every politician there a true believer and ideologue of what they say?

I'm not sure what you're even talking about, but the Left is full of morons who are as clueless about Marxism as the overall population, so whatever.

When I, and most people who know at least the basic tenents of Marxism say communism has never been tried, say that Communism has never been tried, what we mean is that although communists have gone into power in several countries, they were usually limited by material and political circumstances, and that their ambitions, despite popular belief, was not to immediately build a model worker's utopia, but to attend short-term demands in accordance to a Marxist scheme of historical development (like Lenin's state capitalism that I wrote in the above post) so to conflate their specific policies for their specific case with immutable Marxist dogma is wrong.

I think many many lessons were learned from the Marxist-Leninist experiments, but you want us to learn a lesson like "oh this Marxism thing is bogus because these countries with a Marxist government were shitty" which is a bad way of approaching what is, ultimately, a tool of social and historical analysis

Or Darwinists for Nazi racial theories, which btw is what a lot of christian fundamentalists do.

its an utopian ideal, many ideologies have them