While these regimes may have dismantled previous monarchies, colonial systems, or oligarchies, they did not replace them with democratic governance, but rather installed rigid, one-party authoritarian states that eliminated political competition, suppressed civil liberties, and centralized power. By nearly every standard of democracy these systems fell short, making them less democratic, not more.

Communism still works, just because the Soviet Union isn’t here doesn’t mean everything is a failure.

No, it doesn't. The USSR was the most successful country and only existed for like 60 years, and every other communist country that still exists today is an authoritarian shithole like Vietnam, North Korea or Cuba where people are executed and suppressed constantly.

Competition forces centralization and monopolies over time due to increasinly complex production practices that raise the barrier to entry. It’s unavoidable.

True for a very narrow spectrum of products and services, mostly those that are extremely expensive to manufacture/develop or those under government supervision, like medicine. Untrue for most.

Yes, competing with twitch.tv on streaming is nearly impossible because the infrastructure is extremely expensive. But you can compete with most other companies in the space. Look at lego, for example. 15 years ago, there was only lego, nobody was competing with them, they became worse over time, more expensive, less quality, people complained and suddenly, companies like cabo or bluebricks came up and invaded the market, offering a wider variety of products.

Pol Pot denounced Marxism and focused on an odd agrarian system,

He still followed communist ideals for the most part, or are we going to argue that maoism is not heaviely influenced by communist ideals?

and was backed by the CIA.

The US never directly supported pol pot. Before 1975, they supported Lon Nol, who was fighting against the communist Khmer Rouge.

The part that IS true is that the US did support China and Thailand at the time, which in turn used that aid to support resistance groups in cambodia because vietnam invaded cambodia in 1979 - something the US had no problem with since vietnam was backed by the soviets. Also, it is true that the US and other western countries supported keeping the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia’s official UN representative, however, that was mostly done to undermine Vietnam's rule over cambodia.

So, yes, by extension, the US supported pol pot, but it's not the big "gotcha" you think it is - it was the cold war, an extremely complex geopolitical time.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 weeks ago

Read Soviet Democracy, as well as read up on the government structures of the PRC, Vietnam, Laos, etc. They are democratic.

The PRC is more successful today than the USSR was, and is Socialist. Calling countries in the Global South "shitholes" is wildly chauvanist, along with your unsourced claims about them.

You didn't really go against competition causing centralization. Even further than companies, there are joinings of companies under single megacorps that share supply chains and interwork.

Pol Pot did not "follow Communist ideals," though. Moreover, if someone makes a clear deviation from Communism and denounces Marxism, why on Earth include it as a detractor other than clear bad-faith?

Sure, the Cold War was complicated, but the US was never fighting for Communism and neither was Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge never actually read Marx, and mostly declared any Communist sympathies out of aesthetics and geopolitical support than genuine support for Communism, and the US supported them.