Okay, so whenever I'm bitching and arguing at debating with Communists, or when anyone debates with Communists, the Soviet/Cuban/Venezuelan/ regime is brought up, it's usual that Communists say that "___ wasn't really Communist!" and I'm pretty sure that's a "No true Scotsman" fallacy. I mean Capitalists don't say that the fuck-ups by drug-dealers and poverty aren't Capitalist; nor us Fascists say that the holocaust wasn't real Fascism. So uh… da hek libtard?
btw this is a serious post if for some reason you couldn't tell
But capitalists and fascists do that all the time. The very first thing a right-winger will say after accepting any criticism of capitalism is that it's "cronyism" or "government regulations" holding back some idealized, pure capitalist system. Less retarded fascists will distance themselves from Hitler in favor of Strasser or some other "true" idea of fascism which doesn't involve them executing millions of people and then catastrophically losing a world war.
Brandon Kelly
They do. They say it's 'corporatism'. Why would you when you think it was a good thing? Now, 1. Communism is both a description of a society and a name for wanting such a society. If the defining features of a communist society don't occur, then by definition real communism hasn't occured. 2. People say X wasn't real socialism because there is no and there never has been one single ideology under the name 'socialism', and people generally don't want to be blamed for the fuck-ups (which have been exaggerated) of people they don't agree with.
Aiden Young
I have never heard anyone saying that, actually. Maybe I'm just not looking at it hard enough. Also, Zig Forumslacks and many other Fascists are anti-Semitic and give heavy approval to Hitler's final solution. What to do with other races is what varies.
No, they say it's either a fuck-up of Capitalism or claim it's Capitalism but morally dubious. Well why would you even support an ideology that can't be properly classified or achieved? That seems either defeatist to a supporter or evidence of an ideology's failure. Also, see above to why we think the holocaust is good.
Zachary Barnes
You've never argued with them because "that's not capitalism; it's corporatism!" is their fucking catchphrase. So the important thing here is to establish what is and is not communist. For the word communist to mean anything there have to be things that are and are not communist. That goes for any political system whatsoever. For communism though, people are usually talking about the specific economic situation of Full Communism, where there is no private property, money or state. That's a pretty clear definition and it legitimately has never existed barring maybe primitive communism in prehistory.
I do agree this is a shitty way to talk about for instance Venezuela. It's necessary to say they're not communist but if you're actually trying to talk to people you should follow up with explaining why it isn't and what it is. From there you can talk about why it has the problems it does (poor management, corruption, sanctions from the West, and countermeasures put in place by the private sector making up 70% of Venezuela's economy) which are not inherent to attempting to transition to a socialist mode of production but are a product of the country's context as a third world nation doing things the capitalist empire doesn't like.
Jayden Walker
Read the post again. There is no one single ideology. "Achieving an ideology" doesn't mean anything.
Austin Turner
Achieving an Ideology means that a majority of it's supporters can agree that it's been done.
fair point.
The reason why it's covered by the private sector is that when it wasn't, it was fucked and collapsed. Also, what about Cuba, China, and the USSR?
Do you have anything to back that up? These are pretty complicated arguments and it's not at all settled within the left to what degree these places are or have been socialist. For my side (the simple version), China has billionaires running shit, Cuba is reasonably socialist but obviously has been crippled by economic sanctions, and the USSR doesn't fucking exist anymore.
Brandon Brown
also no more socialist than Norway, and if you bring ut VZ as a case of socialism failing then Norway is the reverse. But both are in actuality social democracies.
They do, all the time. Why do you think they invented the term "crony capitalism"?
Yeah, they just claim it didn't happen.
The thing about Venezuela is that while it is a social democracy of sorts, it has not transitioned out of the capitalist mode of production and into worker-owned socialist models. Chile was much closer than that, and it was successful until the Chicago boys got to it. Also, Venezuela's economic problems have more to do with the price of oil and a lack of diversification in its economy than with any social programs run by the government.
Supporters of capitalism make the same argument all the time. I told a guy "I guess that wasn't real capitalism" when he said Brazil had artificial barriers to entering the market and he had a look on his face like he'd been walking down some stairs and missed a step. Anyway, this is a mindless and dumb application of an informal fallacy. You're better off just never referring to informal fallacies by name, it makes you look like a hack. The no true Scotsman fallacy as you're applying it is a flashy "gotcha" which saves you from arguing in good faith against theories you've never heard of formulated by people you've never read.
Ayden Gutierrez
Yeah they do. I've seen people argue that anything other than anarcho-capitalism isn't real capitalism.
>the Soviet/Cuban/Venezuelan/ regime is brought up, it's usual that Communists say that "___ wasn't really Communist!" "Our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it." - Vladimir Lenin. The fuck they don't. When have they ever listed the failures of the USSR-Bloc countries as failures of capitalism, exactly? Name one time. Here's a little anarchist history for you. Marx was KICKED THE FUCK OUT of the International - technically, for purging people, but he started purging people when Bakunin informed him that monopoly capitalism becoming the state is not, in fact, any part of the last couple thousand years of left theory. Similarly, Lenin only entered russia AFTER the socialists - primarily the Socialist Revolutionary party - had won both the civil war and the elections, and did so to overthrow a socialist government to implement, in his words, capitalism. Then you've got Krondstat, Spain, Ukraine, joint gas-van operations in Poland, et cetera. Just examples of "global democratic centralism" being enforced, obviously. So you have TWO self-avowed capitalists. And some spergs on the internet who obsess about pointing at… THEMSELVES. Literal, documented, anti-left capitalist militants. Somehow they never mention m'creditunion or m'barnraising, when talking about socialism. …but they will "no true capitalism" the fuck out of these avowed capitalists. Sure, we have a small plague of fascists who prefer the Kims or Stalin as their all-powerful daddy figure; Left unity, on the other hand, consists of punching MLs in the face. Communism also has a definition : nobody is excluded from the MoP, and people organize themselves. localtools.org/find/ Here is some actual communism. We just want to make this sort of self-directed behavior - complete with a total absence of manufacturing barriers - more of the economy. Can you find ANYTHING in the ML bloc states which does this? Anything at all? So, we've established that the capitalists you claim "don't" do any "no true scotsmaning" are no true scotsmaning the fuck out of a pair of anti-left capitalist activists (Marx and Lenin) with their "it wasn't real capitalism." And we've established that while real communism has actually been tried on a moderate scale, it wasn't even attempted by ML states. I think you should go back to these "capitalists" you're talking to and demand answers very, very harshly. Here's that particular lenin quote. marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm Here's a bit about Marx getting booted until he was literally fucking alone and couldn't hold a conference. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workingmen's_Association#After_1872:_two_First_Internationals en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Bakunin's_Maxim Here's a little bit about just how late Lenin entered russia to attack the socialists. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin#February_Revolution_and_the_July_Days:_1917 …and so on. So really, would you consider it rational to say "As a Hatfield, I find the actions of William Hatfield to be a foul example of McCoy treachery?" Would you consider it even remotely sane? Have you considered maybe questioning the hell out of what kind of people you're running around with on this basis? Maybe you should start trying to make a case for how tool libraries will, you know, "cause gawd to punish us with famine." Or how the US patent office, which will actually let you download a car, is the one and only factor which has ever kept the US an impoverished and powerless state. "No true scotsman" does not at ALL apply to things which actually have definitions, until you've restricted yourself to a subset within this… in which case it's STILL a definiable subset, as long as it has a definition. And maybe you should ask yourself why you're pointing to the avowed capitalist anti-left as your person of straw and ignoring… so much. Maybe it's because your position is shit and you feel you HAVE to lie? (tankies gonna bitch… but every dead marxist furthers the revolution, so…)
Aaron Gutierrez
Pure, slanderous bullshit. The provisional government was full of socdem faggots that wanted to continue the war and almost got their shit pushed in by their own military, which was stopped by the Bolsheviks. Only after the provisional government attacked them did they retaliate.
More slanderous bullshit. It was Bakunin that was removed, not Marx. And it's because his ideas are fucking stupid. Having a working state apparatus is what allows you to fight off invasion, as the anarchists of Spain painfully learned. Dictatorship of the proletariat will happen and we will have socialism. You are free to knock over trash cans until then.
The truth is that the radical left is divided between several tendencies that hate each other and have in the past tried to physically remove each other based on disagreements about how to achieve communism. "Communism" describes both an ideology that seeks to achieve communism - a stateless, classless and moneyless society where there is no social obstruction of access to the means of production through the commodification of labour - as well as the latter itself. The USSR, Cuba, GDR etc. did not claim to have achieved communism, they claimed to have achieved socialism - defined by Marx and Lenin as the lower stage of communism - but they were communists, as in their end goal was to bring about global communism.
The whole "not real communism" and "state capitalism" memes didn't come out from nowhere though. In the internet hippies like this one went out of their way to claim that every attempt at building socialism wasn't real socialism and only his short-lived village-sized commune in backwater Kongo 70 years ago was real socialism - Marxists try to use a scientific analysis of material conditions and history, as opposed to utopian socialists like anarchists who think you can just conjure up communism independent of the conditions of capitalism. All their attempts at it failed, and anarchism is now a dead meme ideology, for that they blame the "tankies" - they will cry about the sectarianism of Marx and Lenin, call for "left unity" yet Marxist states painted half the globe red for decades in the 20th century while their ideology continued to be impotent.
Calling Marxist-Leninist states "state capitalism" is another internet meme spouted by anarchists and Leftcommunists, and seems to be commonly accepted stance of anime posting ultraleftists, which is usually a hallmark for not even knowing your own ideological history. The old Leftcoms like Bordiga as well as Trotskyists didn't think the USSR was state capitalist, the use of this as a buzzword was coined by an offshoot sect of Trots headed by a guy named Tony Cliff, but Trotsky himself as well as his ideological successors considered the USSR as a "degenerated worker's state", and later most Leftcoms followed Ticktin's claim that the USSR was a "non-mode of production" You should have noticed the ridiculousness of these arguments by now. Only Leftcoms on the absolute fringe such as Chattopadhyay consider the USSR capitalist (and base their arguments more on alienation and reification of social relations than on economics). Suffice to say, none of these tendencies held any influence whatsoever in the real world outside of obscure French and Italian lecture halls, similarly how anarchists never held any influence outside of hippie communies or Bolivian social housing projects.
All in all, you are dealing with intellectual laziness. It's easy to shrug away systemic critique of your entire Weltanschauung by screaming "not real socialism". That does not mean that every state which called itself socialist was socialist, of course.
Sebastian Thompson
Lenin. Decent dubs and quads, though.
Angel Rivera
Since when? There are naturally problems that can arise when businesses are run by private citizens, such as creating monopolies. Where leftists lose me is when they go "So, monopolies are bad, right? What if we gave the government a monopoly on LITERALLY EVERYTHING?"
You know very well that Lenin meant the NEP when he called the USSR state capitalism. He said that five modes of production existed during the NEP, a capitalist one, a state capitalist one, a socialist one, a peasant one and one with simple commodity production (craftsmen, shop owners, etc.).
To claim that the usage of state capitalism as it is done by Leftcommunists, anarchists, Trots, etc. is coherent with Lenin's definition is very dishonest. Sad!
Isaac Ramirez
k… Perhaps with the USSR gone, the WORKERS will control the means of production, rather than some ancap "wouldn't it be great if the CEO was also the state" dystopia.
Jaxon Miller
Capitalism and socialism are modes of production, which are not on a scale of "more monopoly" or "more competition". A government can have a monopoly on stuff and still be capitalist (China), if anything nationalisation of industry is a temporary measure to transition to a socialist form of ownership. The bourgeois state must be seized and dismantled, and a socialist state must be erected on top of that, where production is for use, not for exchange and making profit. Monopoly capital is bad because it is inherently imperialistic, as it seeks to expand beyond national borders, but in socialism these "monopolies" seize to be capital in the capitalist sense, this is why there is incident of a socialist state being imperialist for the sake of exporting capital.
Stalin supported the Republic. Yes, the USSR should have allowed the Nazis to occupy the entire country and hand them over da joos. Why do you even give a shit about a right-wing authoritarian regime, like Poland at that time? It's not like they were anarchistic or anything. That was Trotsky, not Stalin. Lay the corpse of your dead bandit kingdom on someone else's doorstep. This implies that anarchists are ever going to do something again which I think will be very unlikely within the next 150 years.
I would not like it either if the CEO was the workers. Also
Kayden Bell
Also, drink bleach. Lenin's quote is completely taken out of context, he didn't declare "Prussian totalitarianism" as his model, he meant that Russia should learn from Germany how to industrialise, because Germany was the most industrialised country at the time. Go away Bertrand Russel.
Ian Gutierrez
…by which you mean Franco, who came to power with the help of the NKVD's kidnapping, torture, and repressions of the anarchist, socialist, and communist personnel. What difference does it make? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_van …they were close enough allies to engage in technology-sharing and Joint operations in Poland. Cut a Marxist, a fascist bleeds.
Robert Wilson
Franco was fighting against the Republic. I don't know how your slogan "Franco and Stalin" applies here. Yeah, no. It's not like the CNT-FAI was winning any engagements. In fact, they would have stood a better chance if they didn't decide to split from the Republic. Kid, the gas van was used in the the 30s internally. There is a difference between using gas as a method of execution (which it is still today) and exterminating peoples. Besides, Yezhov was in charge of the NKVD at that point, an unperson who later got executed for his excesses, so did the inventor the gas van, Isay Berg. You are trying to give the impression that the Soviets were complicit in the Holocaust, but the gas vans were used by Nazi Germany only after 1941, when they invaded the USSR. A few hundred thousand Jews I guess.
Eli Lopez
Marx didn't distinguish between socialism and communism.
Blake Young
In terminology, no. But what does it matter? "Lower stage of communist society as it emerges" is way too long.
The soviet union was communist, under Lenin's rule (even with it's downsides). Stalin fucked everything up and the soviet union became socialist only in name, much like north korea is "democratic" in name only. As a matter of fact, red fascism seems to be a pretty accurate term for both the soviet union (post-Lenin) and north korea, since there was/is zero worker's control of the economy (the central tenet of socialism/communism).
Also, government doing shit ≠ socialism. Socialism, as I pointed out before, is the worker's control of both the economy and society as a whole. The government doing everything is the textbook definition of fascism. Socialist states must be without a centralized form of authority and it must be under the "dictatorship" of the proletariat (direct democracy). Neither the soviet union, nor north korea, cuba or venezuela meet any of these requirements.
On cuba, however, they have been praised for their educational system and universal healthcare, also they seem to be implementing a yugoslavian type market socialism as of recently. The problem was Castro, not socialism as such.
Venezuela's problem goes far beyond Maduro (albeit he's ain incompetent assclown), since the US has constantly imposed embargos on them. Linking your economy solely on oil doesn't help either, especially with the oil shock of 2014. As a side note, under Chavez's rule, Venezuela's economy grew exponentially.
Long-story-short: The soviet union was socialist under Lenin's rule. North Korea is only socialist in name; cuba is a mixed bag, but has it's perks; venezuela is a shithole because of Maduro's incompetence and because the US has constantly messed up with their country.
Additionaly, as other's have pointed out, capitalists use the very same "No True Scotsman" fallacy when someone criticizes capitalism: that isn't capitalism, it's corporatism/cronyism!!!111!!; capitalism has never been tried!!!111!!. "Anarcho"-capitalists and libertarians/minarchists are the biggest offenders. They simply fail to give a well thought rebuttal whenever someone points out the failure of capitalism, outside of whataboutism.
Angel James
It's funny, most Marxists are open to working with anarkiddies, but most anarkiddies want to attack Marxists. Maybe it's time for you to realize that maybe you're the cunt here?
Levi Murphy
"Communist" in ideology, yes, but it was not communist in form. That is a distinction that confuses a lot of people.
Jonathan Gonzalez
OP the short answer to your question is that the No True Scotsman fallacy does not apply to these examples since the very definition of "scotsman" in these cases is precisely the matter of debate.
Agree with this. 1. Minor disagreement - Marx defined lower and higher stages, Lenin equated them with the terms "socialism" and "communism." 2. They didn't even achieve the lower stage by Lenin's definition. They still had commodity production, there still existed non-socialized means of production (esp. in agriculture), money, value, profit, and all elements of capitalism still existed. At best they were in a transitional period and never went beyond that. It's not an attractive term but it does fit the bill. 1. Bordiga claimed that what others called "state capitalism" was just "plain capitalism." 2. Trotsky seemed to be against using the term state capitalism largely because it implied a third mode of production that was neither capitalist nor socialist. But Trotsky died in 1940 and near the end of his life there was an ongoing debate about the nature of the USSR. Trotsky's wife later resigned from the 4th International because it was clear to her that the USSR was no longer a worker's state. She criticized the 4th International for not being willing to recognize that conditions had changed. People were describing the USSR as state-capitalist as early as the 1930s. Trotsky was debating the use of the term (at least) as early as 1939. I think a lot of post-war Trotskyists had very confused ideas that if taken to their conclusions would have revealed serious logical inconsistencies. There's a good article by Chris Harman on the kind of confused thinking that people like Ernest Mandel engaged in.
William Cruz
also, i've always liked your posts because you actually put effort into them, even if i disagree with you.
Eh… Not quite. In fact, that probably pushed it to "not even close."
Xavier Williams
I see the "not true communism" thing more frequently as a strawman used by right-wingers than as a position taken by actual leftists. Most Marxists I'm aware of (both the ones I know IRL and on here) accept that the USSR was socialist and that Cuba still is socialist until this day. The most widespread view on these states is that their successes should be repeated and their failures avoided in future socialist experiments. That view seems correct to me. Not approving of the Great Purge or whatever else went wrong in the USSR doesn't mean you deny it was socialist or deny the socio-economic improvements it brought in many fields. Venezuela, on the other hand, literally has a larger private sector than Denmark. It's hard for me to see how you can claim it's socialist let alone that it has a "communist regime". If you haven't seen this, you should interact more with other Capitalists and Fascists.
Benjamin Murphy
Only if you use the ML definition of "socialism" where the value form is still intact and the proletariat does not actually control anything.
Kayden Martinez
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of "anarchy", not "socialism".
Congrats, you just walked into the "socialism is when the government does stuff" minefield, and neither the populace nor the workers are self-organizing! Buh-bye!
Ayden Price
"Buh-bye"
Dominic Myers
Put on a trip already, so that people can filter you.