1063
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

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.

this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
1063 points (98.3% liked)

Work Reform

17094 readers
1561 users here now

A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.

Our Philosophies:

Our Goals

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS