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> All forms of Marxism ever practiced lead to despotism, which most of us can agree is a bad thing.

What you call a Marxist system is something that Marx said could only work in the most advanced country if it was ready for it, which in that time was Germany. He said such a system would not work elsewhere.

So what form of Marxism failed? Even Lenin, who many Marxists did not consider Marxist, was a Marxist enough to say that Russia would not establish communism. That the Russian self-described Marxists had the chance to take power in Russia and they took it. That Lenin wanted to take power in early 1917 came as a surprise to Stalin, Trotsky, Kamenev etc., in fact Trotsky was not even with Lenin then. It surprised them because it was not a Marxist idea. Then Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, i.e. capitalism. Then he died.

Marx clearly spelled out what not to do, and some did what he said not to do, then people attribute the failures of those who did what Marx said not to do, to Marx.

[mionhe]

This kind of argument seems to always pop up in this context.

There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.

Of those 17 attempts, every one has ended up creating extreme poverty for the masses. Every one has led to massive amounts of death and abject misery. Every one has led to a dictator that sees his people as just cogs in a machine, easily replaced.

No matter how great Marx's system is (and having seen the aftermath personally of one of those attempts to enact it, I'm inclined to think that his system of thinking is semi-articulate garbage), it's obvious that we can't do what he prescribed and get the results he claimed we would.

Frankly, the part where all of the power temporarily concentrates before redistribution is the problem area: no one can withstand the temptation to just keep it.

Or possibly they never intended to let it go in the first place.

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> There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.

What does Marx say in the Communist Manifesto?

"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution."

This is what Marx said, what his ideals were. A political fight in a country with the developed proletariat of the Ruhr Valley - Germany. What he can be judged by is what he said.

Marx said a precondition for his ideals would be the conditions the Ruhr Valley and Germany had. So if attempts made without the ingredients he stated failed, then Marx's ideals are shown to be correct. Your examples prove Marx was right.

[desumeku]

There are far more than 17 capitalist countries which meet every criteria you've listed as an evil of Communism.

[zahlman]

"Marxism (or any other such system) has never been tried" is such a tired and pointless argument.

There have clearly been repeated attempts to implement it. If you say that none of them have actually implemented it, you should consider that strong evidence that it cannot actually be implemented. These attempts have clearly universally led to great harm, which is evidence that the attempt inevitably leads in that direction.

If you expect to defend Marxism this way from the accusation of having "failed", then at best you are kicking the ideological can down the road, and at worst engaging in No True Scotsman fallacy.

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> Marxism (or any other such system) has never been tried" is such a tired and pointless argument.

> There have clearly been repeated attempts to implement it.

To implement what? People at the time of Marx asked him what system they should eventually implement. Marx replied he was not August Comte and did not write recipes for the cookshops of the future.

You have conjured up some non-existent system Marx supposedly wanted to put in place, then you say it was a failure, then you admonish people for not seeing Marx's system did not fail. What system? He explicitly said he had none.

Also, China by some measures has the largest economy in the world. Hanging over party conferences and Five Year Plan meetings are pictures of Marx and Mao. How has that failed. "Well, Marx's picture is there, but it's not real Marxist" people respond. Speaking of no true Scotsman cope.

[zahlman]

>You have conjured up some non-existent system Marx supposedly wanted to put in place, then you say it was a failure, then you admonish people for not seeing Marx's system did not fail. What system? He explicitly said he had none.

No, I have not. I have pointed at every national-scale real-world system which its proponents argued to be intended as Marxist.

> How has that failed.... "Well, Marx's picture is there, but it's not real Marxist" people respond.

Now who is conjuring non-existent things?

Or are you seriously arguing that China is an example of "the most advanced country" which "[is] ready for [Marxism]" in the modern age, and that Maoism is an example of Marxism which you wish to claim as a success (while denying any Russian regime such status), and that "by some measures the largest economy in the world" (with several times the population of the USA) is ipso facto a success?

I don't think your argument merits a serious response, but there's a passing attempt anyway.