Comment on This Fall, Florida Students Will Be Forced to Take “Anti-Communist” Classes
Soup@lemmy.world 3 days agoI agree with everything but the first paragraph, which unfortunately taints the rest. Communism can’t really be considered a failed system if it’s only ever existed in its infancy. Capitalism is a failed ideology specifically because it was given every possible advantage and has still completely and utterly failed to address the needs of any kind of remotely fair and just society. Any attempts to make the switch toward communism in this world are incredibly difficult undertakings because of how it is the antithesis of the existing structure, while capitalism only needed to make one easy step away from the feudalism is was created to replace. History is pretty clear on this if you look beyond the very surface level propaganda, to the point where you don’t even to “just google it bro” but can actually just see it all woth your own eyes.
I’m not a full-blown tankie communist, but I’m absolutely a socialist. My aims are toward the next step or two, not much further but certainly not so close as can be easily hand-waved by those with too much power.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 3 days ago
But is this not just a more sophisticated presentation of the No True Scotsman fallacy? You can’t dismiss every single attempt at communism with some variation of “that wasn’t real communism”. After so many attempts in so many countries over so many years, we have to accept that the idea itself is inherently flawed.
We have to establish a common standard that defines failure and success in an ideological system. You seem base your definition on perfection, where you think a capitalism is a failure because it’s an imperfect system while communism has never been tried because there has never been a perfect implementation of it. I disagree with this notion entirely because perfection can only exist in the abstract. Every system that has and will ever exist in the world is going to flawed. What separates a successful system from a failed system is how productive it is in practice.
I also don’t accept the premise that communism is the next in the evolution of economic systems. Society always has a bunch of competing ideas that all claim they’re the next big thing, however just because an ideology claims that it’s next in the evolutionary ladder that doesn’t mean that it is. Societal evolution is not defined by claims, but by the actual implementations that took place as well as their results.
As implied in my previous comment, I’m big on accepting history objectively. The statements you’re presenting go against this notion. I don’t like the idea of pretending that ideological claims are historically accurate or objectively true while dismissing the criticism against them as propaganda. If you have case to present to prove otherwise, please do present it. Otherwise, I have a hard time accepting communism as anything other than a proven failure.