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No true Scotsman, capitalist edition
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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Socialism
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"Not real communism" has 2 flavors.
Western "leftist" edition, claiming all existing socialist states never achieved even socialism
Marxist edition, pointing out that socialism is a transition to communism, and that communism has not been achieved yet.
The latter is correct, but often gets mistaken for the former, which results in rhetorical gotchas by liberal debatelords.
No it's not.
This is correct:
One can calculate this way too. I'll show you.
Since Usonia is capitalist and the population is around 350 million of which the indigenous people is maybe 2 million,
Usonia alone has killed therefore at least 345 million people, since all those people could have been indigenous.
That's fair too, stats fuckery is a time-honored tradition.
Can we discuss this? I don't believe that Marx's definition of communism is a form of society that comes after socialism. I think communism exists now within the working class. Its the real struggle against capitalist class owned private property and capitalist directed production and distribution of the historic means of production.
I actually really don't like the definition of communism as something strictly "out there". Communism exists just as sure as capitalism exists. Socialism can become communist, but communism goes away when capitalism goes away. Communism is the negation of "bourgeois" private property. The left is already too idealist and prefigurative, and Marx was really against that.
If you ask me, the idea of socialism as the achievement of minimum demands, that leads to communism as the realization of maximum demands, is not a Marxist communist theory of change, it is a social democratic one.
I think you're getting at the concept of communism as a movement vs. communism as a mode of production. As a communist, I am committed to bringing about communism the mode of production, so in a way this process itself is "communism" from a certain view. However, this becomes very confusing for those not familiar, and so I try to keep things compartmentalized when discussing with those not as informed.
Socialism is chiefly a mode of production best seen as a transition between capitalism and communism. It's the process of building the communist society where money, class, and the state have been abolished, where private property is no longer a thing. Drawing a distinction between the process of building something, and the object being built, is important. It's the difference between the movement and the goal.
You’re clearly alluding to the words in The German Ideology about communism being the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. And yet in the same work, and in several others, Marx and Engels also do talk about “communist society” and give some rough descriptions of how it would operate. The notion that communism is pure negativity and that it “goes away when capitalism goes away” (or that "the idea of socialism as the achievement of minimum demands, that leads to communism as the realization of maximum demands, is not a Marxist communist theory of change, it is a social democratic one") is something you would have to take up with a lot of works, again, but this is most clearly put down in Critique of the Gotha Programme.
And I don’t think Marx would go so far as to say “communism exists now within the working class,” because there is no world-historic struggle by the collective proletariat to the present state of things; struggle on the individual level is not communism, as is also made clear in TGI, nor would communism exist within the working class semantically regardless, as it is the [which seizes upon the immanent negativity in capitalism and reorganizes production, thereby upheaving capitalist relations of production], it is not some rebellious spirit people come to possess.
My version is: people calling themselves communists, but then extolling all the great things that a state can do by calling top-down social control "consensus" of the proletariat, and who clearly don't actually want to engage with the 'commune' part of communism.
Communism is not communalism. At least if we are talking about Marxist understandings. Top-down administration is not incompatible with bottom-up consensus building, and both are necessary in a fully collectivized system across the entire world.
Communism is not communalism, but it is heavily based on the Commune as a structure (I mean, Marx was literally drawing on the Paris Commune in formulating it) and means of governing by consensus of the proletariat.
Too many communists make a "survival of the fittest"-like mistake when trying to understand DoTP as Marx intended it, which was a descriptive state where the actions of the Proletariat as a body signify their collective will, and only conceptualize it as Lenin bastardized it, which was as a prescriptive mandate for authority by the State.
The Paris Commune, in Marx's analysis, was both progressive and yet a failure for not smashing the former state apparatus and failing to establish proletarian state power. The idea of having a bunch of horizontalist, indepentent but interconnected cells is not a Marxist notion, but instead closer to anarchism. Lenin did not bastardize the DotP, he clarified Marx's intentions against the bastardization by the second international.