> I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort; especially mental health, where one may not mentally function well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably hold a job.
The description is not too dissimilar from a badly photoshopped motel ad. Yes, it nominally resembles reality but just barely and doesn’t tell you about all the nasty things that come with the tiny pool.
Yes, everyone had a job. It was illegal not to have one. Jobs were basically assigned by the state. Most “normal” people could choose among a few OK-ish options. But if you got a hair out of line or crossed wrong people you could get assigned shoveling coal in a small boiler room or building railroads in Siberia. And if you didn’t want that job you became a criminal and went to some mine or quarry working double shifts for gruel in Gulag.
Yes, everyone had a roof over their head. But that doesn’t mean space, comfort, or even privacy. It wasn’t uncommon to have no more than a bed and a small cabinet or chest. Most of the living spaces and urban areas were extremely depressing. It’s all grey boxes and muddy trails. The best you could hope for in most places is some trees and bushes adding a bit of green in the summer.
There was very little people could do to change any of that. You couldn’t move elsewhere just because you wanted. People in cities with better professions could move if they managed to know the right people and could get a job elsewhere. People in villages were basically pinned to their colhozes. Their only option to see other places were a holiday trip if the managed to save up a little or to go into military and be stationed wherever.
This lack of agency resulted in mass depression and alcoholism.
Where do you think the grim and drunk russian stereotype comes from? It’s just the soviet reality.
"In Soviet Russia we have eliminated all capitalist social ills. Unemployment is demoralizing and unproductive, so it is now illegal. Homelessness is unsafe and ruinous to the health of the mind, so it is against the law. Cancer is a terrible, deadly disease and also very expensive, so we have also banned it. And just like that, our surveys show 0% unemployment, 0% homelessness, and 0% cancer! Can your vaunted capitalistic West say the same?"
The problem is you'll probably live on something like $300/month, and the $ won't even be exchangeable internationally - think like food stamps but for everything. Or less. Unless you have connections in the nomenklatura, i.e. those who decide who gets which positions. University admission is handled by a similar circle.
Let me quote the text:
> An anecdote on this very topic became popular in the later Soviet Union. A young communist proclaimed victoriously: “We have founded a society where there are no rich people!” To which an old social democrat shook his head and muttered, “Actually our intention was to found a society were there were no poor people.”
>>University admission is handled by a similar circle.
So obviously I welcome any anecdotes to the contrary, but I was always told that in my formely communist country(Poland) university admissions were extremely fair. Everyone had equal chance if they passed exams well enough - in fact messing around with this system was guaranteed to get you in prison for corruption. And in there were many examples of poor families from very disadvantaged backgrounds sending kids to top universities because they studied hard enough to pass the entrance exams - there was no bribe you could give anyone to get you in, because the principles of fair admissions were upheld as the greatest value. I'm sure there are examples of it happening that we could find, but my understanding is that it was incredibly rare.
Now, top posts at universities - that's a different situation. To be the dean you had to be in the party and know the right people to be considered for the position. But students? Anyone could get anywhere and study completely for free.
I don't know about Poland, but within the USSR, a Jewish person would be unable to go to a good university without paying a bribe (which for many families was beyond their means). Jewish applicants would get a different set of test questions that would be nearly impossible to solve.
The main issue was not the general admission being itself corrupt (though I can't imagine you could not get a top party member child in if you wanted).
The main issue was that anyone the state was not comfortable with was banned from higher education, including their children.
Have any connection to the pre-communist politics, be involved in religion, be reported by your neighbors as speaking against the regime or just got in the way of someone i power - congratulation comrade, you and your children (regardless of how gifted) are now second class, can't go to university & are relegated to second class jobs, for ever!
And this basically applied to everything the communist state could miss-use to award or punish people - jobs, internal and foreign travel, housing, being able to do art or write books, etc.
And any time the single party that could never do any wrong decided to punish you - there was no recourse.
This is like hardcore libertarians, anarchy-capitalists. If they were dropped into a stateless (failed state) area, where they would have complete formal sovereignty, any but the super wealthy (who could afford private security, water and food quality systems, etc.), would soon leave, become impoverished, or die tragically at the behest of other legally unencumbered "self-sovereign" actors.
The excuses they might make, that libertarianism requires some basically supportive context (provided by who? and in what system?) to get off the ground, also undermine the arguments of the hard-independent individual crowd.
(I happen to think that "libertarianism" is a fruitful collection of ideas and insights, but in the context of many other systems with complementary ideas and insights. On a practical level, we need the best of many systems working together.)
> "Try goggle "communism support young americans"."
"According to a new Yale Youth Poll, a survey affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, voters aged 18 to 21 lean Republican by 11.7 points when asked who they would support in the 2026 Congressional elections, while voters aged 22 to 29 favored Democrats by 6.4 points." from https://www.newsweek.com/republican-support-poll-young-gen-z... Whatever else they might be (and I can think of quite a few unprintable descriptors), I'm pretty sure the Republicans aren't communists or leftists.
Neither are the Democrats, so I'm not sure what you're going for here.
This is like Apple dropping the iPhone Mini. Everyone who wanted a small phone didn't just want a screen that's harder to read, or a marginally lower volume to carry in their pockets. They wanted the ergonomics of the original iPhone. My regular-sized (not plus) iPhone is too big for my hands. A lot of the interactions have to be done with both hands, or risk dropping the phone (which has happened many times) doing acrobatics to reach the far edges and corners.
The iPhone Mini never solved that. It was still uncomfortably large, so I never bothered with it because the tradeoffs weren't there. No doubt a smaller screen is worse, but if the ergonomics were significantly better, that would have been my choice.
Tradeoffs. One is willing to cope with some downsides if they perceive the gains to overcome the losses.
Truth is, even present-day UK Labour who are quite centre-right neolibs leaning more to the right, are closer to communism than the US Democrats are.
That is terrifying. Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been? Do people really think somehow that next time will magically be different despite all historical evidence pointing to the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
Not in any detail. In my experience, Americans actually know very little about the Soviet Union, beyond that they were the "adversary" in the Cold War.
“Ideology” is just any system of values. Like “politics” people tend to pretend that ones they like are some other category while the label only applies to things they don't like, but...
> Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been?
Even if they do, when you're living somewhere that's free to fail you before you're even born, the second-worst case can still look good. And also the absolute worse case is Pol Pot, and there's many examples equally awful showing that a lot of people just flat out refuse to accept humans can be that evil.
But also, basically all types of governments can demonstrate the sorts of failure mode that Communism is famous for. Holodomor and Great Leap Forward's famines were Communist failures, the Irish Potato Famine and several in India under the British were Capitalist failures.
> the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
You may be surprised if you read a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Several parts of it have been considered "common sense" in capitalist nations for over a century.
Me, I think Karl Marx made the same error as Adam Smith, that both think humans free from rules are naturally amazing and they largely ignore power seeking behaviours and the consequences of that. Hence Smith is associated with laissez-faire, and "socialist" and "anarchist" were seen by the authorities of the 19th c. as being much the same*.
(I over simplify a bit, this is just a comment and not a script for a replacement idiology).
I've read The Communist Manifesto. There are indeed parts of it that are sensible in isolation. The problem is that taken as a whole, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, etc. are deeply flawed ideologies doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results. History has shown us this repeatedly.
To Quote Ronald Reagan...
“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
What history has shown us is somewhat weaker than you say — for all the stuff they did badly, for all that they wildly missed their own raison d'être and became just another power structure for just another bunch of essentially aristocrats, it did also get Russia from the Tzars to orbit in 40 years.
But that aside, when you're already getting failed and the people failing you specifically hate one thing, it's very easy to reach for that thing.
To your quote: Well, I'm not a communist (unlike a previous partner)… but I'm also not a capitalist, because I see that capitalism also is a deeply flawed ideology doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results, and that history has shown us this, too, repeatedly.
I'm also not "anti-" either of them, because I'd rather see someone take the best of both and find some new mechanism to deal with the other repeatedly observed historical fact: that a non-trivial fraction of the population are power-hungry sadistic arses. To quote, albeit from fiction: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdas...
(Both capitalism and communism have failure modes separate from the problem of dark triad personalities, but both sets are much easier to deal with if your society has also solved the problem of dark triad personalities, and a society does also need to solve the problem of dark triad personalities irregardless of what else it does).
It’s almost like… how can we take the nice social parts from communism - and mix them benefits of capitalism. Almost like, some sort of democratic socialism.
Good thing when people "support communism" they're not calling for a specific system like the Soviet Union, but just for a higher adoption rate of the good things that fall under the umbrella term.
How do you achieve this without creating a brutal authoritarian regime to seize the means of production and silence opposition? How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
Marxism is a flawed ideology because it doesn’t account for human nature.
I recently started reading Henry Ford books and to me it looks like he has achieved the best of both worlds - at least until he passed away. One thing especially resonates with me - decreasing the prices without reducing the wages so that the profit gets close to zero, then find ways to make the manufacturing more efficient and less costly. While the new profit gradually grows - gradually increase the salaries. Then rinse and repeat. In the end people have good salary, can buy cheap (but still high quality) products and have joy while working.
I agree with you that Marxism is flawed, that as you say it doesn’t account for human nature.
But: There's no additional overhead to "seize the means of production" vs. any other system of governance and organisation, given that corporations, money, ownership, and the law are all things that any functioning system of government controls anyway, regardless of if they want these things to be collectively owned (/nationalised) or privately controlled.
Now, my former partner who is a self-identified Communist of some kind (I can't remember which kind), she wants to abolish money, and abolishing it rather than using it would need quite a lot of extra effort.
> How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
I believe the general claim here is "democratically". This doesn't really work too well, but on the other hand, neither does letting people accumulate so much money they become the de-facto leadership with the carrots and sticks of "I will move my business to whoever has the lowest tax/cheapest labour/least expensive safety requirements".
Consider also that normal people are nowhere near as carful with language use as you or I may wish; some of the people you're worried about may be identifying themselves as "Communists" in the first place only because they're exactly one step to the left of the Democrat Party's Overton window while also repeatedly observing the US Republican party describe the Democrats as "socialists".
(Conversely, my former is one of the people I expect you to be correctly worried about, as she agreed with my assessment that she was to the left of the Cuban communist party).
Adam Smith did nit think that. He warned about the danger of business “conspiracy against the public” and thought ethics more important afield than economics. The idea the invisible hand was perfectible is a amplification of his idea
> Potato famine was caused by blight, a natural virus, and Irelands inability to handle the situation.
Ireland was a British colony ruled by absentee landlords at the time, and British policy made the famine far worse by not only refusing to provide aid, but continuing to export vast amounts of food while the Irish starved.
What you are arguing here is factually false and the exact kind of communist apologetics the article is trying to combat. The Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians who would otherwise have been fine. In Ireland Britain used its Royal Navy to deliver regular relief supplies then deployed every available steamship in Ireland to deliver aid. They cut taxes and took on massive debts to fund employing half a million Irish in public works programmes - all aid to try and help them, even as the Irish themselves exported their food.
The idea these are in any way comparable shows up the true weakness of communism - there are no capitalist equivalents to far left barbarities anywhere. The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.
Ultimately this confusion is rooted in economics. The potato famine aid was structured in a similar way to modern aid programmes. Why, because the only sort of "aid" the left deem acceptable is price controls, but they ignore the demand side. If you force prices down without addressing that then you just bankrupt all the farmers as income drops below production costs.
If your response to a famine is to bankrupt all the farmers, you just made things worse instead of better. It puts the country into permanent dependency that means everyone will die if the flow of aid is ever interrupted (like, say, by a World War).
The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.
You might disagree about the best way to help desperately poor countries recover from natural disasters, but to draw an equivalence with man-made famines in the USSR or China is a category error of the worst kind.
> even as the Irish themselves exported their food.
That's a similarity. Ukraine and Ireland both exported food during their respective famines.
> The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.
"Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some in power believed in divine providence or that the Irish lacked moral character, with aid only resuming to some degree later. Large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the famine and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land."
> The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.
This is so wrong I don't know where to begin.
The farmers were the ones doing the dying. Their primary need wasn't money, it was food. The extent to which money would have helped was that their landlords demanded money and evicted them because they didn't have enough food to sell.
Before getting to the Irish-specific details, we must observe that there is no historical debate about whether the Holodomor was deliberate. The Soviets deliberately imposed far-left ideology onto the farmers which destroyed their productivity, and then continued enforcing it through massive violence even as the whole Soviet Union plunged into famine. So the Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians, who if they had never been conquered by the Red Army would have been fine.
That's why this argument shows the deep immorality of left wing thought. The Soviets could have ended the famine at any moment by ending the revolution and restoring free market capitalism. They did not, because they were insane.
You probably are referring to the question of whether the Soviets deliberately took grain from Ukraine rather than other regions due to hatred of the Ukrainians specifically. That is debated. But what is not debated, is that the famine was a deliberate choice.
But Britain didn't create the potato blight nor the famine that followed. The Irish opened themselves to that risk when they chose to overwhelmingly farm a single strain of a single crop, despite knowing that crop disease has existed since the dawn of agriculture. Moreover there was nothing Britain could have done to avoid the famine, despite what left-biased Wikipedia tells you. Here is another quote, from in fact another left biased source, but it is nonetheless still more honest than Wikipedia. Google it if you wish.
"The food gap created by the loss of the potato in the late 1840s was so enormous that it could not have been filled, even if all the Irish grain exported in those years had been retained in the country. In fact, far more grain entered Ireland from abroad in the late 1840s than was exported-probably almost three times as much grain and meal came in as went out."
Banning exports - something leftists claim was a magical solution not done only due to nasty capitalist ideology - would simply not have solved the famine at all, because the Irish situation was entirely unsaveable. In fact the famine happened even when there was large amount of imported food sitting at the docks because the Irish were unable to properly distribute it internally due to bad transport infrastructure, so food just sat there rather than reaching the famine struck areas.
Yet Britain did what it could to help the Irish despite the logistical problems:
- Imported huge quantities of aid using every available ship.
- Employed vast numbers of people to give them an artificial income, labouring the English with large debts to support this.
- Ran soup kitchens that at their peak fed three million people daily.
The biggest criticism the left can make of this situation is that they think Britain should have, somehow, fed the entirety of Ireland for five whole years despite there being no logistical way to do that, no financial means to do it, and no moral obligation to do so either.
So, once again, the idea this is comparable to the Holodomor just shows how uniquely brutal far-leftism really is. There is nothing like it anywhere in the history of capitalism. A large multi-year foreign aid programme is the opposite of what the Soviets did.
That inability was due to capitalism as it was understood and practiced at the time. Indeed, it overlapped with the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
Capitalism has been forced to change a lot since then. Laissez-faire hasn't been popular in a long time.
Nobody wants the Soviet Union. People do want a fair society. Quite arguably, the Soviet Union wasn't even communist (it was only called that, like how the N**s called themselves socialist and North Korea calls itself a democratic republic)
The problem is that communism can’t give you a fair society. You have to seize the means of production by force. This force has always created a brutal authoritarian regime that refuses to cede power willingly. Like in the book Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others. The top members of the party always live better than the proletariat. Marxism just isn’t compatible with human nature.
By the exact same reasoning, no system can give you a fair society. All systems rely on seizing things by force.
Now that's out of the way, perhaps some systems give you better unfair society that seizes things by force, compared to others. Perhaps we could calmly deliberate about which system that creates an unfair society by seizing things by force is the best, and then implement that system, creating the best possible unfair society that seizes things by force.
You underestimate the inability of the Soviet regime to provide its own people with basic consumer goods.
You would have a job and some money, but your money would buy nothing, because goods were scarce. Even finding good shoes would be a challenge and you would need to cultivate relationships with warehouse clerks etc. to get some access to stuff before it was stealthily distributed by underground channels to relatives, friends etc.
Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".
> Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".
Reminds me of an old Russian joke. In stores, you'd typically go to one counter to get some produce weighed, then to a cashier to pay for it.
So, someone goes up to the meat counter, and asks, "Can you weigh me out half a kilo of sausage?" And the guy behind the counter replies: "Sure, bring some in, and I'll weigh it out for you."
At the cost that the Soviet union imposed? I doubt there's even 100.
There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US. There have been many communist communes here and in other countries, like famously Israel and Columbia. All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.
So we've got plenty of historical evidence whether people would choose to have this life. All but a few dozen, out of hundreds of million, choose against it. Including all socialists, everyone in those demonstrations, ... demonstrating extremely clearly:
> There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US.
Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.
> All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.
The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above
> without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
> Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.
This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint. You will pay taxes in a communist system. You will have to deal with all sorts of external influences in a communist system.
> The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above
No it isn't. These were voluntary sales (especially since most were abandoned, not sold. There was no profit in leaving, except in some cases). It is illustrative of the simple fact that given the choice, all but a rare exception chooses against communism.
Or to put it another way: people REALLY don't want communism, and after trying it, that becomes worse. In many cases abandoning these communes required a large-ish group of people taking the decision together. In other words: they organized themselves to destroy their little patch of communism. Which illustrates the next point:
> > without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
> Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
You just made an argument in favor of this. Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.
> This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint
I don't understand. You're saying that also in communism, capitalism comes in from outside and stops you practicing communism?
The USA did bomb and/or coup most communist countries until they were not communist, so you may have a point but it wasn't clear if this is what you meant.
> Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.
> > This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint
> I don't understand. You're saying that also in communism, capitalism
We were talking about external influences. Period. Mentioned was taxes (ie. effort you have to put in to keep a state structure operational), and other external influences. By which I mean from acquiring food to dealing with the weather, and indeed, occasionally dealing with the fact that there are people outside working under other systems. But I bet for most communists it's, ironically, the communist state. That's the biggest external influence they have to deal with. This will include "capitalist expectations" ie. an amount of work you have to perform, without any reward, because that's what the state needs. That's what the state needs to exist, and of course to make the Kremlin look like it looks.
> Don't strawman people.
Then by all means do tell: how will you prevent people either individually or in groups from banding against the communist system? After all, almost by definition, that's in their individual interest because ... communist system. You agreed that it's necessary to stop this but neglected to say HOW you'd do it. In history the "white terror" is one example of how far people will go to band together to destroy communism ...
Every historical communist state (after a short while) chose state terror: indiscriminate, industrial-level violence against individuals. Given that they didn't immediately chose this gives at least an indication that they tried other methods, which badly failed. Even Israel initially did that (well, the Arabs, not yet called Palestinians, did most of it for them), but then switched to give people a choice, which lead to near-total abandonment of communism (even though they kept much of the state institutions communism built).
The US used the word socialist is very strange way. Socialists and communists are not the same thing at all – except in the US, which is one of the very very rare countries that never had a socialist party as far as I know. A socialist party (labor, “social democrat”, etc) is what most countries consider “left” (as opposed to communists which are “far left”)
Socialists want councils and the political discussion to happen inside the party by party members, which is what there idea of democracy is. (The self-labeling as democratic isn't a lie, but what they perceive to be democratic.)
A social democrat wants a welfare state with a democracy with multiple parties.
In practice socialists strive to create communism, which hasn't really worked out anywhere yet. Some declared that it was achieved, but than later backpedaled and claimed it didn't really happened yet.
The definition of Wikipedia is not that different from mine:
> Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems[1] characterised by social ownership of the means of production,[2] as opposed to private ownership.
A social democrat isn't opposed to private ownership. In fact he cares that everyone has enough private ownership.
However the Wikipedia article than uses the term also as a super category for socialism and social democraty, which confuses, because now the term is overloaded in the very same article.
This meaning assignment comes from this:
> Social democracy originated within the socialist movement, supporting economic and social interventions to promote social justice.
They were often in the same party, before the last century, but split as soon as they came anywhere near starting to implement their ideas. If anything, the fact that some english-speaking countries seam to be lenient with the difference, comes from never having experienced a socialist government.
> The US have a very strange definition of the word
As a descendant in a former socialist country, no that definition isn't US-specific. If anything grouping the meanings as the same is lenient and only helps to normalize those who want to implement real socialism. Like their effort to also call them democratic, this is just a way of undermining a democracy by a radical ideology.
> Socialist has been used by members of the political right as an epithet, including against individuals who do not consider themselves to be socialists and against policies that are not considered socialist by their proponents.
I'm not familiar with the notion of socialist in the US, but I would expect it to be like that, i.e. right-wing parties labeling social-democracy as socialist in order to make them deemed unvotable by a majority?
> As an example, the european socialist party
Note how this very party does NOT call itself socialistic in my language and for very good reason. When you look at the different names in different languages, you see that it is only called socialist in countries in West-Europe, whose government had never been socialistic, so they still think that they don't need that distinction.
I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort; especially mental health, where one may not mentally function well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably hold a job.