holdin' out for a hero

Imagine if the Russian Revolution didn't turn out horrifically in the end. Imagine if the Soviet Union was an actual Marxist polity in something other than nomenclature.

God. History is so full of disappointments.

I should take up drinking.

Try opium, ive heard opium is the opium of the masses
Imagine if Lenin could handle being in second place after elections
- Woah, SECOND place?! With a paltry 75% supermajority of socialist parties in the legislature!? I'm pretty sure Lenin HAD to reject those so-called 'results', clearly the reactionaries were ready to take back control at any moment.
Imagine if a socialist revolution actually took place in an industrialised country like Marx predicted.
Communism works on paper. But in reality it’s impossible for humans to not be greedy, put themselves above others and not take power. You think the guys running the government are gonna give themselves an equal share to what a lower class person is getting?? Pffft.
Humans are too flawed for it to work. I like socialism but Socialism has to be snuck in there, cause even saying it’s socialism freaks out Americans
- There's... a lot to unpack here. But the end goal of communism is that there isn't a hierarchical government of professional bureaucrats in the final stage of communist society.
- You can definitely trust those same people to run a capitalist system instead.
The problem with communism is the requirement for an intermediary despotic stage. There is no way that anyone involved ever intended it to get beyond that (with the possible exception of Marx himself). That's just not how humans work.
- Marx's "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was envisaged as democracy though.
  Bourgeois democracy (ie what we largely live in today) is "Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie".
  It's in reference to what class holds power, not an actual autocratic or oligarchic power structure.

You guys just haven't read enough theory

I think the main issue has been how people try to implement Marx's ideas without the full context of his work. Marx wrote while sociology and economics were in their early stages. The idea that society could be rationalized, studied and planned was a brand new idea in the Enlightenment Era.

His work builds well off of his economic axioms, but that doesn't make it a universal truth. We're quick to recognize this in many other fields of study; for example, Newtonian physics is outmoded even though it's logically consistent with our daily life. However, the mix of philosophy and socioeconomics in Marxism makes it harder for people to see that.

Since it's a description of how society should progress, it makes any deviation antithetical to the end state. To maintain the logical and materialist foundations, a new theory must be constructed and thus a new -ism is born.

The other important factor is that revolutionary periods are times of incredible change. People in the 18th - early 20th century were lurching from crumbling bedrock institutions. Things like burgeoning atheism, urbanization and mechanization left a void in identity.

So revolutionary theory started doing the lifting for all of those. It became religious dogma, career, and the core of their social life. Similar to modern religious fundamentalism, that breeds a mindset where any criticism is a personal assault and a ready acceptance for ends-justify-means public policy.

All of this means that the old truism "it doesn't work in practice" is valid but completely misses the point. Marx wrote his theory assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum, and revolutionaries started chopping cows into spheres to fit the theory.

You can see the legacy of this today. It's why the left has strict acid tests for ideological purity while the right doesn't. I don't think that a radical left utopia is currently possible, not because it runs counter to human nature but because the left can't move beyond academic theory.

Society isn't an equation that can be solved, it's a living organism adapting to its environment. Theory should form the foundation but can't be prescriptive; a doctor cures the ills that need curing because perfect health is impossible

Don’t forget Castro

Honestly, I give more leeway to Castro, who was in a bad position and didn't pretend to be an original theorist, over Lenin or Stalin who fucked up their governments in new and exciting ways.
It doesn't justify the authoritarianism of the Cuban regime, but I see Castro in a much more tragic light than Lenin or Stalin, who created most of their own problems and made those problems the rest of the world's as well.
The Cubans have done pretty goddamn well considering. Among other things they have never had a higher percentage of their population in prison or subject to systemic racism than America.
What's going to be interesting is what happens when Trump finishes expelling 500k+ Cuban refugees.
- Among other things they have never had a higher percentage of their population in prison or subject to systemic racism than America.

"So what you had was that the world's two major propaganda agencies, for their own quite different reasons were claiming that this destruction of socialism is socialism. And it's very hard to break out of the control of the world's two major propaganda agencies when they agree, and they agreed for different reasons, but they agreed, and then that becomes doctrine and dogma."

- Yeah, Chomsky is just campism for people with more than one brain cell.

That's because due to human nature, basic greed, and cruelty Marx's idea of governance is quite impossible.

Which idea of governance? Socialist workers' democracy, or the end-state of communism?
- The end state of communism. It's a nice idea don't get me wrong, it's just ignorant.
If that's true we need to all commit suicide and let th next species take over.
Thankfully human nature is cooperation and compassion, you know the things we explicitly evolved.
- If that were the sole case the Geneva convention wouldn't exist. We are capable of compassion and cooperation yes; but unfortunately that tends to be overshadowed by hate greed and other horrible evolutions.
- Ah yes, the Geneva convention: written, signed, then promptly ignored.