this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Communism
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These are hardly good examples of communism, just like how modern day U.S. is a pretty poor example of capitalism. A capitalistic society shouldn't prop up failing businesses using money taken from the workers. A failing business should just fail, yet they've been "rescued" time and time again, at the detriment of the people who don't see those funds and keep being exploited for their labour.
True communism hasn't ever been implemented, and I wouldn't look to dictators as examples for how to do it. Dictatorships are incompatible with the fundamental ideas behind communism.
...at scale.
As the name might imply, "communes" (of e.g. the hippie persuasion) could be truly communist. Possibly some indigenous tribes, kibbutzim, the Paris Commune, Fristaden Christiania in Copenhagen, and various other intentional communities might qualify, too.
True, thank you for the correction.
There have absolutely been true and authentic attempts at building Communism, just via Socialism. Denouncing these Socialist states for not being able to yet achieve global Communism is anti-Marxist idealism.
I'm not arguing that the attempts haven't been made, I'm saying that the end result, or status quo if you'd prefer, doesn't align with intent. Intent isn't irrelevant, but I don't think it holds as much water as results.
Like @grue@lemmy.world said, communes have and do exist, and some form of communism has existed throughout history, and likely before it. The states we have today though don't hold up to scrutiny.
The "end" result did align with the intent. The USSR, for example, never tried to jump straight to Communism. They were Marxists, they opted to go through Socialism.
Communism isn't "doing Socialism for a while then collapsing into magical Communism arbitrarily." It's a long, drawn-out process of building towards Communism. Socialism wasn't a temporary sacrifice, but a drastic improvement on previous conditions.
The states we have today have never identified their conditions as Communist, but as Socialist, with a stated goal of moving towards Communism.
Communes are Anarchist, not Marxist, so pretending only Communes have managed to accomplish what Marxist states set out to do is a drastic misunderstanding of Marxism, Communism, and Anarchism.