| HN Mirror

> Considering how every attempt of communism has turned out

People make too much of ideology. "Communism" was the table stakes for getting the USSR to support your government during the 20th century, in the same way that "democracy" [1] was table stakes for US support. You can't really talk about "every attempt" at communism—it's mostly the story of a single superpower and its proxies.

[1]: "Democracy" in quotes, because US intervention in South America in the 20th century was overwhelmingly to the detriment of actual democracy.

The USSR had a lot economic failures, but consider that it began the 20th century as a pre-industrial backwater before suffering an extremely bloody civil war and sky-high casualties during WWII. And they still did industrialize. A lot of their command-economy stuff was highly unsuccessful, but plenty of capitalist economic projects have been unsuccessful too. The Great Depression was a homegrown capitalist catastrophe—2008 too, to a lesser extent—and capitalist economics learned from those mistakes. The USSR was in a much worse position to survive its mistakes, and it didn't. In the aftermath, America imposed shock-doctrine economics on Russia to make it capitalist, and that in turn caused even more damage. Conversely, China modernized in style, on its own terms, and retains substantial state control over private enterprise. Is that a "communist success story"? It depends how you define communism. Is it a command economy? A totalitarian dictatorship? A red colour scheme?

Communism generally defines itself as a classless society: an egalitarian democracy of workers without aristocrat, bureaucrat, or plutocrat. It's a set of ideals for founding a nation—ideals which have never really materialized anywhere. In the aftermath of bloody revolutions, the people who come out on top are generally military strongmen with little interest in democracy, no matter what ideology they tout. So Mao said he stood for democracy! So did Pinochet, so did Assad. They're just words. The differences between how "communist" and "capitalist" societies have worked out is mostly just historical circumstance. Governments that put ideology before success tend not to last. Neither the US nor China nor the USSR fit into that category, though they've all had their hyper-ideological moments (the US is in one now!). In the long run, a powerful state with a big bureaucracy will be ruled mostly by pragmatism. That doesn't mean that policy positions don't exist, but China certainly wasn't shackled by any particular economic position. The upshot is that China basically looks like the rest of the world now, modulo better infrastructure, greater political stability, and fewer civil rights.

The real question has less to do with capitalism or communism and more to do with whether founding a nation on principles really means anything in the long run. Can we really build a better world, or do we just naturally cohere into predetermined social structures as a product of material factors? Ironically, Marx basically believed the latter. He was just optimistic that new technological developments would change the natural structures of society into something more egalitarian, where the oligarch would go the way of the aristocrat. History, unfortunately, has proven him wrong.