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The Dangers of Socialism they warned us about... (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/workreform@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

If you are honest it’s undeniable that half that list can be linked to every country ever attempting communism.

Problem is Americans don’t understand there is something in between their insane system and North Korea. Its called democratic socialism

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (1 child)

    I'm aware. But none of them have ever actually met the definition of communism. At minimum, all of them still had central unitary state powers. That is, by definition, not communism. The flaw with the theory of economic transition to communism is not necessarily the communism, but the transition. It requires a unitary party to seize the means of production, and then voluntarily distribute those means to the people and dissolve the central government structure. You'll notice that that last step has never happened on a national scale in history.

    I'm also not a communist, for what it's worth.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago

    But none of them have ever actually met the definition of communism.

    I really dislike this kind of thinking. People citing that we've never had a communist country tend to think:

    1. Only true Communism counts as communism. (So no failures of any real nation can ever be attributed to it.)

    2. Any country with any degree of market economy counts as capitalist. (So the sins of any nation can be attributed to capitalism.)

    They use an extremely tight definition for communism and an extremely loose definition for capitalism. I'm a leftist myself, but I can recognize the intellectual inconsistency.

    By the same logic, I could argue that the Catholic Church never covered up sex abuses by priests:

    True Catholicism has never existed, as there's never been a time it's been truly universal. (The word "Catholic" means "universal.") Obviously we can only ever talk about the failures of Catholicism once we've actually achieved true Catholicism. Until literally every single living human being is a devout Catholic, any discussion of the merits of Catholicism is purely theoretical and shouldn't serve to guide our decisions.

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