Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalism
I guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
Yeah the communists I know mostly just roll their eyes at this sort of objection, and, like, okay, I get that they’re tired of fielding criticisms of that sort, but it’s not like they have really solid retorts that anyone who cares to know can easily look up. If their goal is just to wait for widespread revolutionary class consciousness to develop naturally and then assume it will all work out, I dunno guys.
Even on a maximally optimistic timeline we’re something like 30 years out from the kind of mass socialist movement that existed at the
fin de siècle, so if they’re serious about this then proselytism is crucial, and they’re not going to get very far with that unless they can convince people that the widespread suspicions toward communism aren’t likely to apply to their movement. Unless they’re just trying to use the threat of communist revolution as a bludgeon to extract short-term incremental concessions from the ruling class, in which case more power to them I guess.
Far leftists often get made fun of for obsessing about arcane details of ideology, having schisms over potential policy long before they ever conceivably might get actual power.
Far leftists also have to contend with a history of bad institutional and policy decisions leading to the death of millions and autocratic government.
I like to think the first is a result of the second.
I think that problem with that idea is that the schisming came before the gaining of power. There’s a good case to make that the causality is (partially) reversed there.
Agree. Far Leftist/Communist arguments, from what I see of them, don’t appear to be about technocratic differences, but more about moral ones.
It would be interesting to see them argue like economists over specific detailed alternative societal models, and probably more beneficial since they might run more tests of them.
Political factions in general also appear to lack the idea of running competing tests in order to assess their effectiveness. Sadly that might be an artifact of gaining power.
