Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by _yosefk 3693 days ago
An egalitarian communist state has never existed, it's always a state where the ruling party does as it pleases while the majority has no rights whatsoever. (Whether this is superior or inferior to an apartheid state is a tough question.)
1 comments

That's not true, Cuba is egalitarian, to a far greater degree than the Soviet Union was. Revolutionary Spain was very egalitarian. The Soviet Union can't really be called socialist, it was more of a totalitarian dictatorship.
Grandparent said "communist", not socialist, so while many people argue about the difference it doesn't seem relevant here.

Revolutionary Spain did not survive long enough to discuss IMO.

Cuba... egalitarian in what way? Is there anything the government does that the citizens can legally undo without overthrowing it? (Note that a benevolent dictatorship can exist, in theory, and among other things it can be a communist - or a racist - dictatorship; nothing prevents from the dictator to grant freedoms to the subjects, the point is that nothing prevents him from taking them away, either. If you don't refer to rights in the sense of things the government cannot prevent you from doing but instead refer to "egalitarian" in some sense of Cuban citizens living substantially different lives than Soviet citizens, I'd be curious to hear what exactly you mean.)