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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

> This article is just one example of the things that the commies got correct

Minor observation from someone who lived under communism and still remembers it: the commies got nothing correct, except for the idea that extreme wealth inequality is a problem. And that idea is not specific to communism.

Most things that people think "commies got correct" were an accidental side-effect of shortages or other issues. And as for urban planning, this is not specific to communism. The fact that it is in bad shape today in Poland is a result of mismanagement, lobbying and bribes.

Communism is a terrible idea. I repeat this often, because I see this idea re-appear in an idealized form, often propagated by younger people who do not fully understand it.

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I often wonder if what people refer to as communism, wasn't just a corrupted implementation of it, pretty much the same as we currently see under socialist and democratic governments.

I've got no experience under such regime, but I can't say I've lived under a socialist and/or democratic regime either.

In theory, maybe all of them could work great, but we would never find that reflected in practice due to our human nature.

This tends to get a lot of people angry but every nominal historical communist government and its leaders were essentially fascists wearing the trappings of communism as a skin. All attempts to force it under a violent revolutions under such ideologies will essentially end the same way and it is madness to assume "this time" will be different.

Voluntary cooperatives can actually work (by no means guaranteed) but scaling up tends to be the issue.

> I often wonder if what people refer to as communism, wasn't just a corrupted implementation of it

History tends to repeat itself. Your words are almost exactly the same as those used by communist leaders in Poland during periods of social unrest (they referred to "a period of mistakes and distortions").

I am scared of the resurgence of idealized communism, here on HN and elsewhere (see how my comment above has been downvoted). People build their own ideas of what communism is, failing to grasp that it has a fundamental problem with incentives and can never work. It's been tried many times, and it failed every time, with the exact same issues.

If you want to fight wealth inequality, great, more power to you. But that's not communism. The central tenet of communism is common (social) ownership, which is exactly what removes incentives and what has been shown to fail every time.

From what I can see, the understanding of communism online is pretty shallow, with most people focusing on the "let's have a revolution and take away from the rich people" part, with a minor addition of "things communism got right".

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