That is terrifying. Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been? Do people really think somehow that next time will magically be different despite all historical evidence pointing to the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
Not in any detail. In my experience, Americans actually know very little about the Soviet Union, beyond that they were the "adversary" in the Cold War.
“Ideology” is just any system of values. Like “politics” people tend to pretend that ones they like are some other category while the label only applies to things they don't like, but...
> Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been?
Even if they do, when you're living somewhere that's free to fail you before you're even born, the second-worst case can still look good. And also the absolute worse case is Pol Pot, and there's many examples equally awful showing that a lot of people just flat out refuse to accept humans can be that evil.
But also, basically all types of governments can demonstrate the sorts of failure mode that Communism is famous for. Holodomor and Great Leap Forward's famines were Communist failures, the Irish Potato Famine and several in India under the British were Capitalist failures.
> the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
You may be surprised if you read a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Several parts of it have been considered "common sense" in capitalist nations for over a century.
Me, I think Karl Marx made the same error as Adam Smith, that both think humans free from rules are naturally amazing and they largely ignore power seeking behaviours and the consequences of that. Hence Smith is associated with laissez-faire, and "socialist" and "anarchist" were seen by the authorities of the 19th c. as being much the same*.
(I over simplify a bit, this is just a comment and not a script for a replacement idiology).
I've read The Communist Manifesto. There are indeed parts of it that are sensible in isolation. The problem is that taken as a whole, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, etc. are deeply flawed ideologies doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results. History has shown us this repeatedly.
To Quote Ronald Reagan...
“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
What history has shown us is somewhat weaker than you say — for all the stuff they did badly, for all that they wildly missed their own raison d'être and became just another power structure for just another bunch of essentially aristocrats, it did also get Russia from the Tzars to orbit in 40 years.
But that aside, when you're already getting failed and the people failing you specifically hate one thing, it's very easy to reach for that thing.
To your quote: Well, I'm not a communist (unlike a previous partner)… but I'm also not a capitalist, because I see that capitalism also is a deeply flawed ideology doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results, and that history has shown us this, too, repeatedly.
I'm also not "anti-" either of them, because I'd rather see someone take the best of both and find some new mechanism to deal with the other repeatedly observed historical fact: that a non-trivial fraction of the population are power-hungry sadistic arses. To quote, albeit from fiction: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdas...
(Both capitalism and communism have failure modes separate from the problem of dark triad personalities, but both sets are much easier to deal with if your society has also solved the problem of dark triad personalities, and a society does also need to solve the problem of dark triad personalities irregardless of what else it does).
It’s almost like… how can we take the nice social parts from communism - and mix them benefits of capitalism. Almost like, some sort of democratic socialism.
Good thing when people "support communism" they're not calling for a specific system like the Soviet Union, but just for a higher adoption rate of the good things that fall under the umbrella term.
How do you achieve this without creating a brutal authoritarian regime to seize the means of production and silence opposition? How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
Marxism is a flawed ideology because it doesn’t account for human nature.
I recently started reading Henry Ford books and to me it looks like he has achieved the best of both worlds - at least until he passed away. One thing especially resonates with me - decreasing the prices without reducing the wages so that the profit gets close to zero, then find ways to make the manufacturing more efficient and less costly. While the new profit gradually grows - gradually increase the salaries. Then rinse and repeat. In the end people have good salary, can buy cheap (but still high quality) products and have joy while working.
I agree with you that Marxism is flawed, that as you say it doesn’t account for human nature.
But: There's no additional overhead to "seize the means of production" vs. any other system of governance and organisation, given that corporations, money, ownership, and the law are all things that any functioning system of government controls anyway, regardless of if they want these things to be collectively owned (/nationalised) or privately controlled.
Now, my former partner who is a self-identified Communist of some kind (I can't remember which kind), she wants to abolish money, and abolishing it rather than using it would need quite a lot of extra effort.
> How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
I believe the general claim here is "democratically". This doesn't really work too well, but on the other hand, neither does letting people accumulate so much money they become the de-facto leadership with the carrots and sticks of "I will move my business to whoever has the lowest tax/cheapest labour/least expensive safety requirements".
Consider also that normal people are nowhere near as carful with language use as you or I may wish; some of the people you're worried about may be identifying themselves as "Communists" in the first place only because they're exactly one step to the left of the Democrat Party's Overton window while also repeatedly observing the US Republican party describe the Democrats as "socialists".
(Conversely, my former is one of the people I expect you to be correctly worried about, as she agreed with my assessment that she was to the left of the Cuban communist party).
Adam Smith did nit think that. He warned about the danger of business “conspiracy against the public” and thought ethics more important afield than economics. The idea the invisible hand was perfectible is a amplification of his idea
> Potato famine was caused by blight, a natural virus, and Irelands inability to handle the situation.
Ireland was a British colony ruled by absentee landlords at the time, and British policy made the famine far worse by not only refusing to provide aid, but continuing to export vast amounts of food while the Irish starved.
What you are arguing here is factually false and the exact kind of communist apologetics the article is trying to combat. The Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians who would otherwise have been fine. In Ireland Britain used its Royal Navy to deliver regular relief supplies then deployed every available steamship in Ireland to deliver aid. They cut taxes and took on massive debts to fund employing half a million Irish in public works programmes - all aid to try and help them, even as the Irish themselves exported their food.
The idea these are in any way comparable shows up the true weakness of communism - there are no capitalist equivalents to far left barbarities anywhere. The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.
Ultimately this confusion is rooted in economics. The potato famine aid was structured in a similar way to modern aid programmes. Why, because the only sort of "aid" the left deem acceptable is price controls, but they ignore the demand side. If you force prices down without addressing that then you just bankrupt all the farmers as income drops below production costs.
If your response to a famine is to bankrupt all the farmers, you just made things worse instead of better. It puts the country into permanent dependency that means everyone will die if the flow of aid is ever interrupted (like, say, by a World War).
The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.
You might disagree about the best way to help desperately poor countries recover from natural disasters, but to draw an equivalence with man-made famines in the USSR or China is a category error of the worst kind.
> even as the Irish themselves exported their food.
That's a similarity. Ukraine and Ireland both exported food during their respective famines.
> The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.
"Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some in power believed in divine providence or that the Irish lacked moral character, with aid only resuming to some degree later. Large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the famine and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land."
> The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.
This is so wrong I don't know where to begin.
The farmers were the ones doing the dying. Their primary need wasn't money, it was food. The extent to which money would have helped was that their landlords demanded money and evicted them because they didn't have enough food to sell.
Before getting to the Irish-specific details, we must observe that there is no historical debate about whether the Holodomor was deliberate. The Soviets deliberately imposed far-left ideology onto the farmers which destroyed their productivity, and then continued enforcing it through massive violence even as the whole Soviet Union plunged into famine. So the Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians, who if they had never been conquered by the Red Army would have been fine.
That's why this argument shows the deep immorality of left wing thought. The Soviets could have ended the famine at any moment by ending the revolution and restoring free market capitalism. They did not, because they were insane.
You probably are referring to the question of whether the Soviets deliberately took grain from Ukraine rather than other regions due to hatred of the Ukrainians specifically. That is debated. But what is not debated, is that the famine was a deliberate choice.
But Britain didn't create the potato blight nor the famine that followed. The Irish opened themselves to that risk when they chose to overwhelmingly farm a single strain of a single crop, despite knowing that crop disease has existed since the dawn of agriculture. Moreover there was nothing Britain could have done to avoid the famine, despite what left-biased Wikipedia tells you. Here is another quote, from in fact another left biased source, but it is nonetheless still more honest than Wikipedia. Google it if you wish.
"The food gap created by the loss of the potato in the late 1840s was so enormous that it could not have been filled, even if all the Irish grain exported in those years had been retained in the country. In fact, far more grain entered Ireland from abroad in the late 1840s than was exported-probably almost three times as much grain and meal came in as went out."
Banning exports - something leftists claim was a magical solution not done only due to nasty capitalist ideology - would simply not have solved the famine at all, because the Irish situation was entirely unsaveable. In fact the famine happened even when there was large amount of imported food sitting at the docks because the Irish were unable to properly distribute it internally due to bad transport infrastructure, so food just sat there rather than reaching the famine struck areas.
Yet Britain did what it could to help the Irish despite the logistical problems:
- Imported huge quantities of aid using every available ship.
- Employed vast numbers of people to give them an artificial income, labouring the English with large debts to support this.
- Ran soup kitchens that at their peak fed three million people daily.
The biggest criticism the left can make of this situation is that they think Britain should have, somehow, fed the entirety of Ireland for five whole years despite there being no logistical way to do that, no financial means to do it, and no moral obligation to do so either.
So, once again, the idea this is comparable to the Holodomor just shows how uniquely brutal far-leftism really is. There is nothing like it anywhere in the history of capitalism. A large multi-year foreign aid programme is the opposite of what the Soviets did.
That inability was due to capitalism as it was understood and practiced at the time. Indeed, it overlapped with the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
Capitalism has been forced to change a lot since then. Laissez-faire hasn't been popular in a long time.
Nobody wants the Soviet Union. People do want a fair society. Quite arguably, the Soviet Union wasn't even communist (it was only called that, like how the N**s called themselves socialist and North Korea calls itself a democratic republic)
The problem is that communism can’t give you a fair society. You have to seize the means of production by force. This force has always created a brutal authoritarian regime that refuses to cede power willingly. Like in the book Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others. The top members of the party always live better than the proletariat. Marxism just isn’t compatible with human nature.
By the exact same reasoning, no system can give you a fair society. All systems rely on seizing things by force.
Now that's out of the way, perhaps some systems give you better unfair society that seizes things by force, compared to others. Perhaps we could calmly deliberate about which system that creates an unfair society by seizing things by force is the best, and then implement that system, creating the best possible unfair society that seizes things by force.
