It doesn’t matter what ideology. If the people running it are rotten, any system can be corrupted.
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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you know, i tell you what. i'm fed up with all this gringo self-righteousness when you talk about "oh communism was bad, oh people where killed, oh people had no food, oh people had no liberty, oh people could not buy ataris, oh our countries are so democratic". your countries were democratic during the cold war in the first place because you had people to sort things out for you here in the global south. for each person complaining about how the food rations in eastern europe were not tasty enough, there were 10 dying of hunger or malnourishment here in the global south. for every person complaining they had to wait 5 years in a queue to buy a trabant or an oka, there were 10 who got no school in a range of 50 km. for every person complaining that their 8 hour shifts in state owned factories were overwhelming, there were 10 who were indentured workers. for every person complaining about how the stasi, kgb or the stb had bugged their apartment, there were 10 suffering the most horrific tortures inside black sites of the military of u.s. allies here in the "third world". for every person complaining about dull standard apartment blocks in mikrorayons, there were 10 who lived in mud shacks and slums, and those are just who were lucky enough to have a roof over their heads. finally, for everyone complaining about chinese sweatshops, which are indeed a problem, there are 10 americans who work and yet cannot afford proper housing.
you wanna complain about how communism was bad? go ahead. you wanna complain how your parents lived under communism and could not drink coke? do so if you wish. but there are still millions of people down here who would give an arm and a leg to have a polish ration, an apartment in a russian gray building, or a yugoslav job. and while the chinese maoist red guard was bad, surely it won't be an inch closer to the harassement people endured on a daily basis by our police forces.
again: you wanna complain? be my guest. but for me that's an encyclopedic example of white privilege.
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When people ask me what communist country was successful I usually say all of them until cia decided to go there and spread freedom 🇺🇸🦅
Well... There was this thing called Soviet Union. They decided to try to speed up the transition to communism by using repression and violence. And ended up being a totalitarian state, a direct opposite of what a communist state is supposed to be like.
Of course you can argue that Soviet Union was not communist, it was just a state that had chosen to call itself communist for propaganda reasons... But still, Soviet Union is an example of a communist country that was unsuccessful as a communist project already by itself. Then came outsiders and helped make it even worse, but bad doesn't become good by some people wanting it to be even worse. Burma is another example. I'd say they hacked away their own leg before anyone else, such as CIA, had time to interfere in their business.
What no theory does to an mf
The USSR didn't "do repression and violence to speed up Communism," they had a successful revolution and established Socialism. By all accounts it was quite successful overall, but we can learn from where they erred and adapt for the future.
The only ones who believe the Soviet Union wasn't Socialist are generally Western Trots or liberals/Anarchists who already don't want the form of society Marxists want, which is a government that publicly owns its large and key industries and gradually folds in the new firms that grow to that level until the entire economy is publicly owned.
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The USSR had to deal with a civil war, rising up during WWI and being sabotaged by the Germans, more civil war, foreign meddling, and all while being the first successful communist revolution. Yet they still managed to raise literacy, raise health outcomes, raise average life expectancy, gender equality, science and technology, end the cycle of famines (after the first one or two they had when they were still building up), had faster growth during that period than any capitalist country (except maybe the US, which was doing imperialism at the time and the biggest hegemon), all while helping sustain other socialist countries, like Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea.
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The USSR is responsible for the largest decrease in poverty in all of world history
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Seeing some of the zingers in the comments here, now seems like a great time to plug my "Read Theory, Darn it!" introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list. Read up, comrades!
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whoops, brazil. we had a budding workers movement that was absolutely crushed by the traitorous brazilian military, in the name of the US of course.
that hasnt stopped syndicalism to take root here and improve our lives a bit, but the communist organizations responsible were all crushed and we see our rights being taken away ever since because no one is left to defend them. we are scrambling rn to see if we can stop fascism.
to anyone who says "why don't you compare communist eastern europe to democratic western europe?". sure, first thing to notice is that eastern europe didn't had companies exploiting underdeveloped nations for their cheap labour and raw materials, their oppression of labour organizations and the support of corrupt rulers. since brazil was mentioned (heh), let us remember that west german companies such as vw or mercedes-benz used to report on syndicalists and communists working and organizing on their plants to the brazilian military during the dictatorship, and sold equipment to the military and police. that siemens sold nuclear reactors to the dictatorship during the late 70s. that many former officials of the dictatorship got leadership jobs in these companies and in basf, hoescht, atlas-schindler, mwm. behind the "economic success" of the rich countries of the west there's always some degree of exploitation of poorer countries.
Luckily the US is dismantling the CIA so that’s good news for communism!!!
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And it often comes into being because of a CIA coup
It's like the chicken or the egg question.
When has the CIA ever financed a communist coup?
Never .... the communists / socialists / democratic groups usually reacted because of a CIA financed coup
09/11 Chile vibes
Communism only works on a small scale. The second society gets bigger, you require a state with militaristic presence to keep the people in line. To this very day, the Marxist ideal of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" has ALWAYS resulted in centralized power structures that became brutal dictatorships.
No matter which country you pick, large ones like china or the soviet union or smaller ones like cambodia under pol pot or vietnam under the CPV, all of them have devolved into a dictatorship. Even "experiments" like yugoslavia under tito were, in the end, still dictatorships where political opposition was disallowed, a secret police was founded and tito still had absolute control. Now, you might say: "But the people lived well!", yes, for about 10 years until the 1960s where the country suffered a massive economic crash, insane debt (because commies suck at economics) and inflation. Tito was able to hold it together with sheer force until he died, and after his death, yugoslavia completely unraveled into the mess it is today.
I know you like to cope with "oh no the evil CIA again >:(" but in the end, communism is a failed ideology that will never work on a large scale without completely suppressing individual freedom and brutally knocking down any sign of dissent.
Edit: By the way, I'm more than willing to argue about this - however, I just noticed that I'm on lemmy.ml so I'll most likely get banned for not conforming to the tankie-ideals.
This is generally wrong, though. Communist countries have dramatically democratized society, it works better at large scale if we are speaking of Marxian Communism because that's the Marxist reason for Communism to begin with. Competition centralizes, so in the future it must be publicly owned and planned. This is the basis of Scientific Socialism, primitive Communism is not the same as the post-Socialist Communism, which must be large-scale as production increases in complexity.
Pol Pot wasn't even a Communist.
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If it's not the CIA it will be a coup from some smart ass****e high ranked in the military/party.
Humans are to greedy to live in a socialist peaceful world.
That doesn't make any sense, though, greed has a larger impact on Capitalist systems as its the main mover and driver.
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Yeah.
The CIA is why the Soviets fell. Not corruption or incompetence.
It was complicated. Kruschev, and later Gorbachev's reforms really weakened the Socialist system because they didn't properly retain strong control of the larger firms and heavy industry (a lesson the CPC took to heart), however the CIA and really the US absolutely worked tirelessly to weaken it. The Soviets also had to spend a much larger portion of their production on the millitary in order to keep parity with the US, meaning that development rates began to slow.
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