It's not even an issue of population. Communism requires material conditions you simply cannot create by killing the opposition, no matter how much you desire to preserve "the revolution."

Capitalism is but one manifestation of material and labor scarcity. Until those things are eliminated you will experience the exact same ills in one form or another. Until those things are eliminated the only option available is harm reduction. Revolutionary communism fails specifically because it fails to recognize itself as a particularly shitty form of harm reduction, insisting the entire concept is bourgeoise propaganda. This is what contemporary leftist theorists have come understand, and what obnoxious internet edgelords refuse to acknowledge, because it requires admitting that Stalin and Mao didn't get it right.

Ironically this is literally the foundation of Dengism and modern China, which MLs say they like, until you reduce it to first principles, at which point it once again becomes bourgeoise propaganda.

We can always do far and away better than capitalism

i think the real ticket, for global economics, especially ones that are going to be sustainable is going to be some sort of pseudo capitalist society. Especially one with a free market. Free market decentralization is a hard target to beat.

There's room for a lot of interesting study here, i'm not sure any exists, and i've yet to see any unfortunately, it's mostly just people dickwagging around trying to do the le socialism thing, which is funny, i guess.

My former officemate grew up in Russia in the 80s, he hated a shitload about growing up in the Soviet Union. He raved consistently about two things: the education system and gender equality.

His mother was a mathematician and computer programmer, and he didn't have issues with school there until after he'd been here (the US) as an exchange student and had some... Cultural differences with his teachers.

"People who smile a lot in Russia are considered to be unintelligent"

I’ve talked to a handful of working class people that lived under communism for years and they have nothing good to say about it. Not a single positive thing. It’s easy to dream about these things and wax poetic when you don’t experience them firsthand.

You should talk to some Australians instead. Australia's communist nations have been stripped of their land, so most australians alive today don't have much direct experience with communism, but the modern descendants of Australian communists all have good things to say about the way it was done 300 years ago what with the stateless, classless, moneyless gift economy.

The problem is that folks see these things implemented in the past and say “let’s just do that.” Why can’t we take the good parts and think beyond the rest?

Of course we should! Every instance of socialism should adapt to the specific material conditions. There's not much reason to think that socialism in developed countries would look the same as socialism is pre-industrial societies.

It's just that in order to know what worked and what didn't, it's necessary to treat those projects as serious, earnest attempts at socialism and to be willing to point out both the positive and negative aspects. And doing that will immediately get you branded as a tankie by .world. Because in practice, tankie doesn't actually mean that you defend everything any socialist state ever did, it means that you defend anything a socialist state ever did. Thinking critically and trying to learn from the mistakes from the past makes you a tankie.

Dronies have a pathological need to distance themselves from every attempt at socialism (except the ones that failed, which can be upheld as perfect since they never had to implement their vision), which renders them unable to look at the past from an objective standpoint. They are more concerned with making sure everyone knows that they're "one of the good ones" than they are about studying and learning from the past. Tankies, otoh, are willing to own up to the facts and acknowledge that past projects were genuine attempts, even when they ultimately failed as the USSR did. Of course it would not have failed if it didn't have its flaws. But you will rarely see a dronie pushing this angle or interrogating the reasons for the failure, because learning from its mistakes is too close to treating it as as serious and legitimate project - far better (and easier!) to just write off the whole thing and push for shit that has only ever existed in your head and has never been tainted by contact with reality.