Has communism ever worked? Legit question...

But the USA does exist and it does/did sanction Cuba, so I wouldn't be able to decisively prove that Cuba is a successful socialist state in my arguments against my so called "friend". How would it work out without US influence?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

Not socialist.
Nothing wrong with Cuba after Che.

I skimmed this article, and I'm not really super sure if the guys I'm trying to convince would take that as evidence. Could you please explain a bit about how this state was successful during it's three years of existence?

It would have modern cars and lots of power plants.

In the case of the USSR, the success is clear: during the late 20's and 30's they built up what was a developing country, ravaged by a world war and then a civil war, up to the second largest world industrial power. After that, the Soviet system delivered consistent growth in people' standard of living, technology, and so on. It then suffered economic stagnation in the 80's however, and the capitalist reforms that were then imposed collapsed the state. But the 50 years of successful socialist development are a clear success story.

The case of the DPRK is more complicated.

Okay. Are there any socioeconomic studies or anything published that I could provide as expert opinion on this? I know people don't trust "expertise" as much nowadays, but I think having some actual professional thought put into the matter might make it sound more convincing.

The 50 years of successful socialist development? What time period, like, from what year to what year? I know people say the USSR did a lot of awful things like persecute religion and mass executions, as well as the whole starvation and oppression stuff, so I'm wondering what years you're talking about and if it's possible to paint a good picture of the USSR in a time period where they were doing well without all the dictator business.

...

Going by what he is describing, from the 30's to the 80's. That is when the thick of the planned economy was in place, although after Stalin they gradually introduced some market pieces which helped to bring the economical stagnation of the eighties(though Cockshott argues that it was more of a political problem than an economical one, here's were he talks about it: youtube.com/watch?v=EE-kCZnlGZU).

Implying that is bad, reactionary.

There was one period of famine in the early 30's that's it. None between then and the mid nineties, when capitalism caused mass death in Russia. So on that count, the success lasted more than 50 years right of the bat. As to mass executions, those too ended in the main in the thirties. Religion was also rehabilitated soon after during WWII. Of course WWII made life hell while it lasted because of the capitalist nazi's invading, but really, between 1945 and 1980 Soviet socialism was quite humane and successful, and it remained humane if not so successful after 1980. Economic and technological growth, full stomachs, highly educated people, superpower status. Counts as success in my book.

I don't understand why it's a bad thing to ask questions, user. I'm really trying to build my case as to how socialism is a better economic model than capitalism, which I really do believe. I just don't have any concrete evidence to support what I believe, thus why I'm asking for help.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2430906

Liar, you've already been whining about executions, dictatorship, etc., which is unrelated to economics.

But it doesn't seem like a good thing to persecute mass amounts of people based on their social upbringing. It wasn't okay for Hitler to kill jews and homosexuals, was it?

you're not very good at this are you Zig Forums?

Religion is not innate and people can be shown their religion is nothing more than reactionary, archaic garbage

I haven't been whining, dude. I'm just pointing out that other people have extensively discussed and written about that kind of thing, and I'd love to get hard evidence that that isn't the case.

Which religions, and why?

No idea fam. It seems to me that's just what happens when you have a proper planned economy and the raw materials to build your stuff.

>>>Zig Forums
Alternatively, read a book and stop asking to be spoonfed

what does "worked" even mean?
Capitalism has clearly caused a lot of misery but righties still say that it "works", and point to bullshit like "natural law" or whatever for the justification of it, yet when it comes to leftism, cappies say that socialism "does not work" and point to the misery it has caused to people, so cappies are all hypocrites, unless they wish to reform the economy like socdems to make it more leftist, which clearly just makes the discovery that more leftism creates more prosperity for the general public. Moderates don't usually pick up on that fact about their ideology.

Just tell your friend that they are a hypocrite if they justify capitalism but put socialism at a higher moral standard. At least fuckheads like ancaps are usually consistent. Tell us what your friend has said in retalliation to leftism.

If you want examples of communism, just look at nuclear family structures. They are utilitarian and from a psychological point of view, more equality and less totalitarian "traditionalism" produces more confident and happy children and parents generally. From this primordial state of society, you can extrapolate that larger communituies also operating on the basis of utility and equality will function just as effectively.

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Christianity, Judaism, Islam, all of them
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm
marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/ch01.htm#1

All right. Well, I'm looking for studies or reports or any fact-checked literature that can conclusively prove this. It'd be a big help towards getting others to believe what I'm trying to tell them.

All of them? Like Taoism or Hindu? Or what about Zoroastrianism or the Baha'i Faith? Are those all bad religions too?

Well, I'm not really sure either. The prevailing argument seems to revolve around whether socialism "works" or whether it's "real socialism" or not. Are those just memes, then?

Read a boook

Which book?

Some stuff was already linked above that's decent. Bakunin's an anarchist of course but still good reading. Ask in the book thread there are people who are more well-read than I am

marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm

Is this website objective? I'd like to get as neutral of a point of view as possible.

I mean it's a work written by Lenin himself so of course it will be "biased" in favor of his beliefs. The site is an archive for Marxist works

its an archive not a news journal you disingenuous fag

Well, it's hard to convince people of an opposing opinion without using objective facts, like statistics or real world examples.

why did you ignore the study linked above then?

I didn't see it. Which one was it?

Those memes emerged from social engineers putting it into cappies' heads that when people do bad stuff in socialist societies it is because of socialism, BUT when people do bad things in a capitalist society, it is their fault, so of course rational leftists will be defensive of this obvious propaganda.

You can see how well something works, objectively through statistics and logistics. If capitalism is the superstructure of your nation and you have relatively worse healthcare than a socialist country per capita for example, you can say that it fails to support the nation to the maximal ability available. You can even take moral positions like many leftists, a society which allows billionaires to exist yet also for homeless people to exist is an immoral one which fails to prioritise the needs of the public.

It is simple to deconstruct the ineffectiveness of neoliberalism to benefit society, the REAL task is to break the titanium shell of ideology that a capitalist wears since their political ideas are a product of what they have been told rather than what they have independently formulated, it takes a while.

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defensive against*

Okay, now we're getting somewhere with actual numbers! My only concern is that , just from what I see, there's a big difference in the population of the US and Cuba. It feels like it'd be a lot easier to provide better healthcare to a smaller population. Would a socialist country of 300 million people take care of it's citizens as well? These are the kinds of things I need to extrapolate to provide a convincing argument.

It's actually easier to provide services like healthcare to a larger and richer population because you can have more division of labor, more people dedicated to teaching more doctors and doing research, etc. plus the us spends a lot more money, meaning the problem isn't resources it's organization

Okay! Makes sense.

America has a larger GDP per capita than Cuba too, which means that america could collectively provide better healthcare.

A true socialist system would be run by and for the public, not be bureaucrats who sell parts of the countries' healthcare to private interests like they do with the NHS.

everywhere where it was implemented
even in lesser developed and stringent socialist countries such as Venezuela socialism works better for the majority of people
the current crises that exists now was a constant theme for the majority of the people, but the media didn't pay attention because it wasn't on the CIA agenda to overthrow the government as it was already int heir pocket at that time

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Communism can only work in a white 110+ Autism Level community.

What counts as a true socialist system? Is it anything that exists now or has existed? How could we change things to create a true socialist system that doesn't have outside influence from capitalism?

*blocks your path*

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Isn't Venezuela suffering from extreme starvation and poverty right now? I thought I heard about that stuff in the news.

exaggeration and bullshit, also caused by capitalists withholding products
they have repeatedly found filled up warehouses with food left to rot
if anything it's not a failure of socialism in itself but rather the socialists failing to just shut down the bourgeois, kill them all and seize the means of production throughoutly

Parenti is very eloquent in this one. I love this speech

youtube.com/watch?v=6Tmi7JN3LkA

I'll stop fucking up my posts now i swear

It's all exaggeration and bullshit? So there's no famine?

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Are you able to conclusively prove that the mass starvation in Venezuela is the result of capitalists withholding food? If you could, this would really help the arguments I'm trying to make against people that don't believe those kinds of things.

Venezuela was showing strong economic growth until petroleum prices plummeted, in part because Chavez failed to capitalize on its good economic fortunes, but more recently because the US has been trying to destroy it, and they haven't really made a secret of it. They're trying to do there what they did to Honduras. The Venezuelan middle class and bourgeois have been doing everything they can to overthrow and sabotage the government for "ruining the country" by having the audacity to see that even poor people have access to decent living standards and social security, to the point that there have been reports that there are large warehouses full of food and supplies just sitting and rotting because the bourgeois want to exacerbate the problem.

Just recently though Venezuela's stock exchange rocketed up thousands of percent while American, European, and Asian markets were crashing. I haven't looked at the Caracas exchange lately though, but I imagine it's changed since the American markets "came out of correction :^)"

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How is anyone supposed to "conclusively" prove or disprove anything without actually being in venezuela

i could just spam you with articles you can find yourself looking for maybe telesur reports via google or even youtube
but just saying so without provided sources is still a more fact based claim than saying it's due to socialism, which isn't backed up by anything

Unbiased, verifiable first-party sources would help. News reports, economic studies, I'd even take expert opinion from people qualified in the areas of economics and politics.

As long as those articles can be fact checked and properly sourced so as to provide credible information, I don't mind you linking them.

Socialism is just when society comes together and helps itself through direct rulership
The enemies of this liberation are capitalists and the government
we need to get rid of them through violent revolution
to do this we need social organisation and solidarity
to have this we need to invoke class consciousness

friendships are a form of socialism, if you want it put in a literal context.
There have been marxist-leninist societies which call themselves socialist, but I'm not as educated as some others on here about that. I am an anarhcist anyway, so I don't support bureaucracy.

telesurtv.net/english/news/Venezuela-Protesters-Set-40-Tons-of-Subsidized-Food-on-Fire-20170630-0017.html
telesurtv.net/english/news/In-Venezuela-Opposition-Linked-Firm-Hoards-Millions-of-Goods-20150114-0053.html
youtube.com/watch?v=DdEM_oj88lE

you seem to imply that MLs do support bureaucracy
this is completely wrong
with Stalin the number of people working in that field was constantly in decline

Why do you want to get rid of "the government"? Isn't it beneficial to have a group of people that you collectively agree to appoint to manage things so you can focus on your own work for the society?

What's the benefit in giving another political authority over me

That's how society works, though. People have specialized jobs that they perform better than if everyone had only average skill in everything. Your computer needed specialized programmers to make it's software, specialized engineers to put together the resources that specialized miners and metalworkers processed… Real life isn't Minecraft where you get everything yourself and put it together yourself. You have to have everyone working together in a specific role they can excel in for a functional society, unless you like living like the Amish.

So yeah, it's not your job to decide the rules of society unless you make it your job, right? And that's what a government is: a group of people whose specialized job it is to make, enforce, and interpret the rules.

You might as well have attributed it to human nature you fucking brainlet.

Can you elaborate, please?

Stalin died in '53, but the soviet union survived until '91, can you speak of anti-bureucratic additutdes in the government proceeding Stalin?

I would rather localise governments to communities rather than having millions of people bow down to one national network of power and communication, anarchism promotes direct democracy, to pertain to individual communities' needs as according to the communities themselves.

For example, in the UK, the federal government gives more money to the south of England than the north, so having the North rule themselves will only benefit them.

But if you want anarchy, how will you have democracy?

I want communities to manage themselves, anarhcists focus on decentralisation, not abolishing all platforms of power, just the ones which promote injustice, like big national governments which are in bed with corporations and bankers.

Yes. Look up something called a Kibbutz.

Why would that be? I keep hearing that from US republican hacks, but they don't build on it. The amount of doctors and nurses /capita would scale with population, and the absolute amount of medical research would be higher, so logically a larger population would not be an issue. People's health is not affected by the amount of people they share citizenship with. It's a total red herring.

All right. What's a community? Like a single town or city? A neighborhood? A state? I guess I'm just not sure how big of a unit you're thinking of.

Your post is nothing but baseless a priori assumption that the current capitalist division of labor is the natural state of things projected on into forever. It's a ridiculous assertion divorced from historical example and is an absolutely brain dead assessment of potential alternatives to bourgeois political organization.

Specialization is for machines and insects and people don't need to give some fuck political power over them to assemble a computer, you maroon.

I think that people should decide that for themselves, if millions of people have individually consented to being part of a cooperative operation of society then I'm fine with it. Some people should be able to even reject any and all communuities if they wish, I am not an ideologue, I just have core values, freedom and justice, whatever represent these, I support.

One should separate political authority from technical authority in an industry or government job.

I feel like the best answer is what Bakunin said:
In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me.
marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/authrty.htm

Okay, so specialized labor shouldn't exist?

Who should have political authority, then? Whose job is it to decide the rules that their community lives by? How do you make it so that those rules are well-devised and benefit the community?

What's your decision, then?

Would it not be reasonable to refer to the politician in the matter of politics, and lawmakers in the matter of laws?

communities are however big people decide for them to be.

Which people? Are you included in the people? How big would you like your community to be?

Someone told me Rick and Morty is a stupid show. I scoffed at them and replied, "To be fair it takes an altitudinal Autism Level to comprehend, nein, fathom Rick and Morty. The humour is extrêmement subtile, and without a doctorate degree covering Bell inequalities, micro-lattice structures, and Schrödingerian quasi-contradictory quandaries et cetera (basically common knowledge among the top 10.3% among the world's best theoretical physicists) most of the jokes will evanesce or float away like Kantian noumena vis-a-vis Kantian phenomena, in other semantic units AKA words to plebes, as they say in some ethno-linguistic communities, but I digress: ありがとうございました. Furtherthus, to neologize a neologism henceforth, Rick’s existential-ideological naysaying, which is ITSELF located within/via Althusserian/Foucauldian poststructuralism along the subversive-critical lines of various neo-Marxist-Leninist-Maoist analyses - his tacit (cf. Polanyi) schemata appropriates affective resonances from Narodnaya Volya literature, AKA 네 엄마는 너무 뚱뚱해. The fans understand this 陰毛, as colloquially known (excepting for Gettier cases), to quote the Chinese media scholar Jean-Claude Baudrillard: "Un jugement négatif vous donne plus de satisfaction que d'éloges, à condition que cela ressemble à de la jalousie" ; they have the Intelligenz/くそ to truly (BUT WHAT IS TRUTH, cf. Sura 2:140, John 18:38) appreciate the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Hegelian synthetic a priori interpenetrative dialogic concealed within and without these tokens of jokes, to realise that they’re not just totalitarian HAHAHAs 😀 in a post-postmodern world of hegemonic HUHUHUs 😞 - light-hearted Chopin to your heavy-handed Brahms, if I may, no pun intended - they betoken something deep about Heidegerrian Dasein (cf. Mahabharata 5.39.58) through which we can, in the words of the poet William Wordsworth, 一个巫师从来没有迟到，他总是一个有力量的人 (Nǐ shìgè báich for those who aren’t fluent in Korean). m_nkind (note: "Mankind" is a sexist term, see Judith Butler's Gender Trouble published by Routledge, London:London March 1990) or should I say, specimens of m_nkind who manifest disaffection (i.e. βοηθήστε με, παρακαλώ να με βοηθήσει κανείς) contingent upon “their” finite liminal qualia vis-a-vis Rick & Morty’s transcendental apperception via meme-ification truly (but again, WHAT IS TRUTH? お前はもう死んでいる) ARE idiotos (masculine of idiota in German, contra p_triarchal discourse)- of course, necessarily they wouldn’t appreciate vis-a-vis their unity-of-consciousnesses, for instance, the linguistico-Bayesian formal articulation in Rick’s slogan existentiel “Wubba Lubba Dub Dub,” which itself is a Derridian poly/hypertextual para-dactyllic reference to Turgenev’s Lacanian epic отцы и изюм (reminiscent of Turgenev's earlier вы используете переводчика, не так ли, сука?) I’m smirking right now in several languages just envisioning in my corpus callosoom one of those cisgendered, capitalist-fascist, hyper-Puritanical, anti-anti-anti-omnicorporatistic biguts scratching their 陰茎 (EXCUSE MY FRENCH) in anti-jouissance as polyglot, Renaissance Zen m_n Dan Harmon’s Minervian owl unfolds itself (Note: あなたは実際にこれを翻訳していたのですか？あなたはあなたの時間を無駄にしています ) at the break of dawn/don/DUNE (semantic balderdash!) on their Lovecraftian-boob-tubes, to subtly reference the semantic units of the Scottish philosopher David Hume who would also say: “あなたのママはとても太っている.” What 아 름 다 운 영 혼 을 가 진 바 보 들 .. je suis tout seul."

Any person, we all have social networks with people. Facebook groups can be considered communities.

That was difficult to read but worth it.

All right! So what size community would you personally be comfortable living in, without government or specialized labor?

Ideally one would apply a principle of those being affected by a choice having political authority to vote or decide the outcome of that choice. That is, it would be necessary to give political power - real political power - to everyone and not just a class of lawmakers and bureaucrats. Even in a society with more or less socialized production the ability of this class to influence outcomes of decisions would give them leverage to establish themselves as a class within society and to promote their own material interests. Even in a situation where they are paid only a normal worker's pay they could still take decisions which would result in non-monetary forms of compensation, such ensuring that their own working conditions were better than others or using control of job appointments to extract sexual favors from those being hired.

The problem is not so much the individual abuse of authority but the tendency for this authority to expand and solidify over time into definite class relations.

So absolutely every single person in a society should have direct say on the making, enforcing and interpretation of laws? This seems reasonable, but how would it work effectively if nobody is trained or specialized in these skilled trades?

Well, in theory you wouldn't need a say on laws that didn't affect you, but in matters pertaining to public budgets, taxes, etc everyone would be affected.
If "politics" becomes a trade then it implies there is a class of politicians, which would be unfortunate.

Lenin pushed for basically the same ideas: all government officials are to be elected, subject to recall, and paid the same as an ordinary workers. Their job is to administrate and execute the decisions of the people and not to make decisions for the people. Trying to apply this principle, I admit, is very difficult in practice. For that reason a revolution should aim for a very radical leveling of society in the very beginning rather than waiting for an eventual transition. The longer a revolution waits to abolish class structures the more difficult it becomes due to the old classes (and new ones) entrenching themselves into the social structure.

To make complex rules and judgements based on those rules requires specialized talent, though. Unless you really want everyone to live in tiny preindustrial villages like the good old days, where nobody needed to make complex laws to regulate the intricacies of modern civilization, wouldn't you need a group of people who are specifically trained to expertly address such matters?

true communism has never been tried.