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Supposedly, some guy called Carl Marks even wrote a book about capitalism: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Karl_Marx/Capital,_vol._I
But alas, he didn't anticipate people on the internet saying "that's not real capitalism." 😔
The link is broken for me.
I think lemmygrad is buggin
Only a handful of theory noobs have ever said ‘not true communism’ unjokingly. I swear, every other reference to the phrase is just anticommies either whinging about it or making fun of it because they know that it’s the easiest argument to tackle. They don’t wanna spend time patiently commenting on something serious like Human Rights in the Soviet Union; it would take too much effort.
It is the anarchists who use that argument because they hate the socialist state and don't read theory.
I wish there were only anarchists with this position. Trots do the same thing. Some Maoists do something similar, but calling every experience revisionist.
I read some theory and I don’t hate the people’s republics.
Good. Because these people also need to read theory asap.
Do these people think that once you overthrow the feudal/bourgeois order, communism just somehow magically happens without the necessary productive forces?
That is basically Bordiga's argument (ok I am oversimplifying it a bit, but they state in "Dialogue with Stalin" that "commodity production, including private property, is neither “natural” nor, as the bourgeois claims, permanent and eternal. The late appearance of commodity production (the system of commodity production, as Stalin says) and its existence on the sidelines of other modes of production serve Marx to show that commodity production, after it has become universal, just after the spread of the capitalist production system, must go down with it." This has some anarchist energy right here).
These people never think that far. They heard the meme definition of the communist stage of development somewhere (stateless, classless, moneyless), see the USSR getting called communist by liberal media (never noticing the contradiction to the name of the Union...). Never heard of the transitional stage of socialism they then come to the eronious conclusion that USSR does not equal a stateless, classless and moneyless society, thus it can only the only other thing! Capitalism!
They do. Because they are uneducated or brainwashed and never stop to consider if their interpretation of a certain thing is actually correct.
Hahaha! I used to say generic crap like that all the time. It was only after reading Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality, along with other works, that I took on a more nuanced position.
Sure, I still consider the U.S.S.R. to have been presocialist, but I could say the same for the Paris Commune: it’s a facile and uninteresting conclusion to draw about something so significant. It is far more productive to instead explore the progress that the working masses made in them.
I think people just underestimate the amount of contradictions it takes to run a new society, after a revolution. You will have internal reactionary groups trying to undermine and coup the young government. You have to deal with a really bad economy, with many people starving and production halted in many places. You have to deal with the threat of imperialist countries, as well as trying to make partnerships with them to stablish trade. You have to deal with weak government structures, which are many times susceptible to corruption. You will have to rebuild the army and defense forces and deal with traitorous officials and generals. It's a monumental task, with many ways to fail and a few ways to succeed.
I know the Bolsheviks were ruthless on how they dealt with the crisis shortly after the post revolutionary period. But if you understand the history of which revolutions succeeded and which ones didn't, you'll understand why the Bolsheviks did what they did. And unfortunately, Machiavelli was right.
THE MAKHNO PROFILE PICTURE HAHAHAHA (Makhno got crushed easily, I think).
yeah, the dogmatic logic that libs impose about "real socialism/communism" would, when applied to anything else, resolve itself with nothing being anything and everything being nothing - so they are left picking and choosing what is real in a totally incoherent manner, rooted solely in their own biases
Yet everytime you point out that capitalism is bad and cute several examples, they literally say " That's not true capitalism! It's Cronyism/Corporatism/Imperialism/Authoritarianism/anything else.
As if those were different diseases and not just individual symptoms of the whole.
I have heard of more people saying "not real capitalism" than "not real communism" (though the latter is said sometimes, because I happen to have been one of them in the past when I was even less educated on Marxism than before).
Anyone who uses "not real communism" is probably a baby left 99% of the time.
Though I love China in this debate. China has Schrodinger economy! A Capitalist country when it's winning and being used to defend how good socialism is, but it's conveniently a socialist nation when it comes time to list the horrors of communism.
Yeah, you cannot have it be both communist and capitalist at the same time! Bourgeois media likes to demonize it like a communist country but says it betrayed communism at the same time?
I've mostly gotten this from other communists. It's the No True Scotsman fallacy switched to No True Communist due to some odd tribalism. They get so hung up on methodology and ideology that they lose sight of the goal.
I found it used by BadMouse lol (in their video about becoming an anarchist after being a Marxist-Leninist) as a supposed thing that Marxist-Leninists have said as a criticism. Whether or not the criticism from MLs was true depends on additional factors. However, if they did not support certain key aspects of Marxism-Leninism (like the theory of imperialism), then they should not be called a Marxist-Leninist.
There is a difference between minor and major principles, with the latter being key to determining if one fits into a given category.
Yeah it was basically my view until I read more about socialist countries and realized my brain was still mired in anti-communist gunk (even after I agreed with the ideas of Marx).
Western Marxists are notorious for it. Especially the 1st world Maoists and Hoaxhaists.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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