I vaguely remember a user debunking this claim but I cannot find that comment and I don’t remember what post it was on.
Communism works on paper, but in practice it is hunted down and destroyed by the CIA :V
Capitalism doesn’t even work on paper or demonstrably in reality.
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Easiest dunk is to show that the West REFUSES to let communism “fail” by itself. If socialism represented a bumbling oaf of a society, it would inevitably stumble and collapse of its own accord. No need for attacking Grenada, Vietnam, Laos with open warfare. No need to assassinate Allende or the many socialist politicians that were killed. No need to send armed forces to stop the Russian Revolution. If socialism was purely set up to fail, we wouldn’t see the PRC rising to become a major world power, etc. I could go on, but basically if it will fail, let it. Obviously the west doesn’t let it because it’s a shitty argument from the start, I GUARANTEE you that nobody (high ranking at least) in the US gov genuinely believes this. Maybe a few dumbass senators or Reps but Foreign Policy advisers, CIA/FBI, they understand that socialism is not going down on its own
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Good point but it wouldn’t explain why their literacy rates are higher than even the West who have been industrialized and given every advantage
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I think the implied question is how they started behind the advanced capitalist nations and came to rival or better them. Part of the literacy drive in China, for example was to shift from traditional to simplified characters. I’m actually curious as to whether any other (capitalist) country has done or could do anything similar. And whether this could be achieved without exercising state authority.
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Stalin’s first five year plan changed that for tens of millions as they suddenly had running water, electricity and public schooling/vocational training.
So it worked
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I applaud you for acknowledging the benefits of socialism even though it sounds like you disagree with it overall.
I’d encourage you, though, to think more about what “authoritarian” actually means. All states claim authority to use violence. The only limits states acknowledge on how much violence they can use are the limits they agree to (and therefore can abandon at their convenience). All states sharply respond to certain types of dissent – certainly violent dissent, almost always dissent that (the state claims) is associated with a foreign state, and often even peaceful dissent. This applies to any liberal democracy you can name. Look at how many peaceful protesters the U.S. brutalized in 2020, look at the recent U.K. ruling on sentences for peaceful protesters blocking roads, look at how Germany preemptively bans even discussion of Nazism.
So when Cuba arrests dissenters who are backed by an extremely hostile foreign power, is that any different from what the U.S. would do? When the USSR arrested nationalist dissenters who sympathized with Nazis, is that any different than what Germany does? What actually makes these “authoritarian” countries different from the “good” ones, apart from having the audacity to reject capitalism?
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If you’re here in good faith, I would recommend reading “On Authority.” It isn’t too long, more of a pamphlet than anything else.
https://redsails.org/on-authority/
Capitalist society has tried to fearmonger about vague “Authoritarianism” as long as it has been around. They were calling socialism “authoritarian” before Mao, before Stalin, before any actual socialist state even existed to use as a case study.
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“Good faith” just means being willing to hear us out. Obviously I’d like it if you would change your mind, but as long as you’re trying to understand our point of view(even if you don’t change yours) you’re still welcome here.
My point was that capitalist media of the 1800s was accusing socialism of being “authoritarian” before any socialist nations existed. How could they declare something to be “authoritarian” (or anything for that matter) before it actually existed? Does that not seem like poisoning the well?
And it seems your understanding of these nations comes solely from a western, capitalist country’s interpretation of them and their system. Are their systems “authoritarian” or are they just “different” to the system you live in? Maybe try and read some primary sources on how they structure their system, and listen to what they say about their own system, then weigh what they say about it with what you already know, compare and contrast, that sort of thing. If the only information you get about a nation comes directly from their biggest enemies, of course you’re going to think they’re all horrible.
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There is no magical literacy equilibrium.
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We can debunk it, but that would involve the party making this claim actually having to read, think, and challenge their past assumptions. They may well do that in some contexts, but not when they’re arguing in bad faith and parroting stupid lines like this one.
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Exactly. It’s a thought terminating cliche. For a few other common examples, look at the lib responses in this very thread!
Qui Bono
How is this not a U2 cover band somewhere?
honestly i don’t bother talking with people that come with childish bad faith arguments like that, it’s akin to talking to a lizard.
id try approaching it by asking what exactly do they mean by “works”, like works in what sense?
“Well it’s a good thing I live in paper!” /s
To be fair, China literally invented paper :P
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Papyrus or parchment doesn’t count
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Tell them to explain their logic. They will either shut up or double down on more specific, easily debunkable logic.
It’s a silly argument because it’s basically unfalsifiable. You could lay out the most rational argument for communism and it wouldn’t matter because it’s all just words on paper. It also just kind of ignores the fact that plenty of communist theory has yet to be written. We have to go through a scientific process of experimentation to figure out how to build it. We can hypothesize about how it could work but none of that is set in stone.
Also ignores the fact that the person parroting that quote is not educated on the subject at all.
There’s nothing to debunk because the claim itself is based on an absurd level of ignorance, they don’t even know what they mean by the word communism, and it makes no sense for it to be “tried”. The only consistent references that could almost make sense are these
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Communism as a theoretical state of being (classless etc society) posed by
meMarx (and some others) as the eventual project and outcome of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As such, it has never been “tried”, it can’t be “tried”, it is more of a goal or state of being rather than a strategy you can adopt. Plus, that project requires that the capitalist class be deposed by the working class such that efforts in that direction could be enacted, which unfortunately has been limited by the extreme and violent reactions of imperialists. It’s difficult to do that project when you’re just trying to survive the sanctions and wars. -
Communism as in a country run by a communist party. This has been tried, and to great success, with fantastic improvements in quality of life for those living there. What failures we do identify largely fall into two buckets: (1) targeted for destruction by imperialists and they were forced to succumb or (2) fell apart through the former and internal failures to build a robust political system, e.g. someone like Gorbachev should never have even been near the reins of power. Both can be criticized, but neither can be chalked up to, “oh dang commies can’t run countries”. Alsi, the largest real economy on the planet is run by a communist party and overcame over a century of colonialism and then industrialization to do it.
But really, someone saying this isn’t even speaking the same language as us. It’s really a conversation between two clueless liberals: one that simplistically craps on “communism” and it “failing” (without pointing to anything concrete) and the other liberal trying to say things like, “well real communism has never been tried”.
In both cases, they’re in need of a basic education, starting with, “what is a communist?”
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Universal economic prosperity does require more than communism, just like an engineer must know more than just geometry. But engineers who deny the law of cosines tend to build shitty bridges
Lmao it doesnt work even on paper let alone reality. If it did, it probably wouldve
Cuba.