[colechristensen]

>Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."

This is a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure it matches up with reality.

Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control in order to transition from and dismantle capitalist institutions. This is exactly what happened in China and the USSR... there just never was a phase 2.

That's not quite "this will never happen here", more like premeditated dictatorship that never ended because the ruling class preferred being a ruling class rather than return themselves to "communist paradise".

[mananaysiempre]

If we’re exhuming odious corpses, Lenin did say the first step would be to control the telegraph and telephone exchanges. Control over the spread of information was understood to be crucial even then. (Admittedly in Lenin’s case he was also talking about battlefield coordination inside a city, what with the absence of portable radios.)

As far as Marx, well, he didn’t provide a recipe for phase 2 either—he just kind of assumed that things would fall into place naturally after the revolution (that needed to be global! the whole communism-within-a-country thing was a later invention / post-hoc rationalization, lampooned masterfully by Voinovich’s Moscow 2042). The entirety of the nascent social sciences field (which Marx was performing to the contemporary standards of, however disastrously that turned out) was rather high on the whole natural law thing around that time. Turns out that, if you created a power vacuum, it would be filled by people who had most ruthlessly optimized for capturing power, as opposed to fairness, your preferred ideology, or anything else. Which at first meant Lenin and then ultimately Stalin, in whose purges died the last true (if at that point very, very bloody) believers. (Notice also how there are very few mentions in history of the eponymous soviets, councils [of workers and peasants], deciding anything whatsoever.) Also most of the intellectual backbone of the nation and the national liberation movements of multiple peoples, but who’s counting.

[bccdee]

> Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control

Not that it particularly matters, but he didn't say that. Marx never set down specific ideas about how a communist or proto-communist society should organize itself. He thought history was a natural progression of inevitable forces and was more interested in establishing the inevitability of communism (ha) than in describing specifically what a post-capitalist society would look like. (Misleadingly, he did use the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat," though not to describe any type of dictatorial government.)

The whole "vanguard party of elites ruling by fiat" thing was Lenin's idea. Lenin though the working class wasn't educated enough to lead itself, so a ruling Communist Party should act as a steward on their behalf. Naturally, this idea was popular with people like Lenin and Mao, since it justified their being elevated to the status of authoritarian dictators.

> more like premeditated dictatorship

Lenin's communist party was, in theory, meant to represent the public. The pitch was never, "time for our prescribed period of temporary authoritarian dictatorship." Like any other political party, the Communist party was supposed to be democratically selected and represent the public. Obviously it quickly became corrupt and snuffed out the democratic elements, but any government is vulnerable to that sort of thing.

No, I think the USSR's descent into authoritarianism was very much an "it won't happen here" phenomenon, save perhaps for the fact that the Tsar's monarchy had only just ended and authoritarianism would have been nothing new to Russia.

[Gud]

Not really, because pre-Soviet Union wasn’t a capitalist society.

Russia and China were barely industrial nations.

[spwa4]

If buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist, then Soviet Russia was capitalist. Pre-Soviet Russia was mercantilist, which can be somewhat handwavyly described as capitalism-unless-I-can-kill-you, both between people within a nation and between nations themselves and is still not entirely dead.

[oscaracso]

Buying and selling things internationally does not make a country capitalist.

[uhhuhnwhatdoes]

No True Scotsman applied to concept; fascinating.

Capitalism is circumlocutions of long dead people who provided little to society but the sound of their voice, vacuous writings.

So kind of the educated labor exploiters of the past to explain how the world must work. Very TINA of them.

Capitalism is people socially convincing each other there's a communal upside to capitalism. Sounds almost like socialist communist nonsense, this capitalism.

Strip away endless obfuscation the real economy is anything but physical statistics, it becomes clear capitalism is just empty rhetoric.

[pessimizer]

You said "if buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist," somebody told you that's not what capitalism is, and you said "no true scotsman."

You have to do better than this to convince people of things.

If you had said "Buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist" rather than posing a pointless hypothetical, you would have had to defend that, and you weren't ready to.

[gishh]

Capitalism and communism couldn’t be more different, in the true definition of the terms.

Communism is literally a ruling class dictating the lives of an entire country. Capitalism at least gives the opportunity of individual action.

You are allowed to hate capitalism, clearly you do, and advocate for socialism, et. al. Whatever point you think you just made with your post is completely devoid of substance.

[spwa4]

Of course. I would argue that's even extremely obvious. But you will never hear a communist or socialist put it like that.

[Gud]

Well, that is not the definition of capitalism.

[Demiurge]

Russia was primarily an agricultural exporter, but it was most certainly a capitalist society prior to revolution. It bought and sold many things, and was an industrial nation, on par with many others in Europe, with a capacity to build war ships, tanks, artillery, trains and so on. It had other tremendous inequalities, but without factories, without lower officers in the navy and army, without the first revolution where the capitalists took over, there would be no second revolution of the bolsheviks, or soviets.

[colechristensen]

Your hair-splitting argument is missing the point entirely, don't you see that?