CIA Link to Cuban Pig Virus Reported (1977)
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An interesting but contested claim by an anonymous intelligence source, that CIA (or an asset) used African Swine Fever as a bio-weapon in Cuba two years after the Nixon administration publicly ended US bio-weapons programs, and a few years before the international bio-weapons convention. Apparently Chomsky promoted this claim as well. This seems perhaps no so far fetched considering other US intelligence shenanigans that were evidenced to have occurred at the time in that region, but this particular event doesn't seem to be publicly evidenced.
I went as far as attempting to confirm that at least the _claim_ itself is broadly recognized, and the article was really published by SF Chronicle, because... well, in 2020, what is even real? :p
Not defending the practice, more saying we've been assholes to each other forever.
I know it's impossible to quantify, but it's interesting to think about all the death and misery they have sown at home and abroad, often in the name of patriotism.
There is a lot of interesting religious aspects that come to play (especially in Protestantism)
China doesn't have a classical communist type of centrally planned system and it has a very large private sector. Isn't that very much like capitalism?
USA's greatest rivals actually kept USA in check from ever expanding and it's funny how you phrased that in terms of socialism. You have no idea what socialism is and mix it freely with whatever sounds good to your point.
And don't forget, it's our western capitalistic system which gave China everything on a tray in the pursuit of profit with no regards to long term goals.
It is our western capitalism who shipped tens of millions of jobs to China with no regard to national security.
America was very much not involved in this, and had mixed feelings, but after WWII it was an easy prejudice to glom onto in order to antagonize the nation that was the only significant threat left to its newborn hegemony. Helping countries around the world murder all of their communists (and anybody who was sympathetic to any form of sharing) was the best way to guarantee that the "self-determination" of those cleansed nations would bring them within US orbit.
This couldn't work in most of Europe for obvious reasons, so the US allowed them to have (or even imposed) extensive social democratic policies to "prove" that European capitalism would have the safety net of socialism without the privation (or the Stalin) of communism, and its intelligence services put almost every public intellectual, writer and modern (the less figurative the better) artist on the payroll either directly or indirectly in order to pump out some sort of liberatory anti-communism to contrast with the Socialist Realism and recapitulation of Hitler's "Degenerate Art" thing that Stalin was imposing over the USSR.
Internally, however, the US had no interest in allowing any more social democratic policies (other than what FDR had done after the Russian Revolution had proved a success.) Labor strength would slow the growth of US companies. Instead, a rise of transfer payments to the professional and management classes in the form of subsidized homeownership and education would create a barrier between the working and middle classes that would protect the ownership classes from any sort of restraint. Another factor was encouraging (or forcing) stock investment among the middle class, in order to tie their interests to the interests of the very, very wealthy. The trick to control the middle class was (and is) to overpay them, then overtax them. They would live in the lap of luxury, but be constantly insecure. The luxury they would ascribe to the success of the company they worked for, and the companies they invested in; the insecurity they would ascribe to taxes, which would be completely ascribed to transfer payments to the poor. A large proportion of those taxes would also be refunded in the form of middle class subsidy, though, while another huge and increasing portion would go to the military, in the name of preventing a socialism that would take away their suburban luxury through increasing transfer payments.
> If socialism "doesn't work" why fear it?
The US as an institution has never been interested in what does or doesn't work for people in general, just in preserving and expanding the interests of the people who make its decisions (just like every other institution.)
edit: Yes, it really is amazing what you can read on the internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Rus...
What do you do when the massive amounts of disinformation campaigns remove any sort of international solidarity from you?
Have you talked with anyone who lives there? The problem is not propaganda or poor PR.
Same goes for Venezuela nowadays.
The sanctions and embargo that is still on going to Cuba is choking their economy and recovery to the global stage.
It also doesn't help that they were used as a proxy by the US and USSR.
I mean, do you believe that all those poor martyrs who died trying to leave the country by boat just so happened to have floated away from their beach when they lost track of how much good times they were having?
A revolution is inherently something that's going to break the stability of a country for a few years to few decades. That's simply a given when it comes to revolutions. The rich and privileged can find a way to escape the country during a revolution, especially if they don't believe the revolution will do them any good.
What comes after a revolution is reconstruction of that stability, this is extremely difficult when you're being choked by the biggest economic power in the world.
When have sanctions actually improved lives for anyone? When has deploying literal biological weapons helped anyone?
The US doesn't play fair with economic systems that go against the grain the US has set. This is where the problem is. We can't even see if this alternate system would work or not because of how the US treats them.
Are you serious? Do you actually believe the balsetos risking their lives during the 90s in makeshift barges to escape Cuba's totalitarian stranglehold are the rich and priviledged escaping Castro in the 60s?
I'm explaining what happens in a revolution. The rich and wealthy pack up and leave. This happens in basically every revolution.
I've made no claims. I've presented facts regarding the 90s balsetos exodus from Cuba and requested you to clarify your baseless assertion that even nowadays only these so-called rich and powerful are anything less than stellar to report on Cuba's totalitarian and oppressive regime, even when you're faced with the facts that tens of thousands of people risked their lives to escape Cuba's stranglehold in makeshift barges.
And somehow you preferred to deflect the question. Why is that?
Did you see the old Cubans at Versailles (or for that fact all over Little Havana) celebrating Castro's death? Did they look like the rich of Cuba that fled. My father in law was a farmer, they took his families farm he was essentially poor, when they took it and destitute after the fact, he was sentenced to death at 16 for speaking out. He ran a mine field, after escaping prison to claim asylum by setting foot in Guantanamo, most Cuban's take their chances by boat because it is safer. It's delusional to think that communist systems have not been given their fair shake. They all failed and they all failed spectacularly due to the fact that they have a propensity to kill their own people when things don't go according to how the pie in the sky dreamer, dreamed it up.
Trump has effectively shut that down and has made millions of enemies and millions of future enemies from Iran. You can't just choke an economy and expect the state to get better. If anything you're just making it worse.
Do you believe that the US has most of the responsibility while Cuba's dictatorship has none at all?
The parent poster commented on Cuba's current state but never mentioned any active role of Cuba's ruling regime, which single-handedly rules the country with an iron fist for over half a century.
Instead, he commented on a couple of US presidents, including the current acting president which was elected over six decades of continuous rule of Cuba's acting regime.
If we are honestly discussing who is responsible for Cuba's current state, can you try to explain to me without resorting to ad hominem attacks why are the two last ruling US presidents relevant but Cuba's very own regime isn't even worthy of a side reference?
Because I'm pretty sure the Castro brothers were the ones calling the shots for over half a century, including how and where to jail political dissidents.
It's pretty customary to break off relations with a country when diplomats are attacked, it goes against the very fabric of diplomatic immunity. Sure everybody tails them, everybody spies on them, but physical attacks are so far outside the norm, that I was actually surprised that it took as long as it did to disconnect the small ties that had been established. I have my issues with the current administration but to chalk one up against their side after US diplomats where attacked is wanting at best.
There is no doubt the US meddles and sometimes (maybe even most times) for the worse, but to attribute Cuban or even Venezuelan strife to primarily the US is an overreach. The US has backed some bad players in response to communism (Pinochet comes to mind), but to attribute the misdeeds of the ones that actually went left, to the US is more of this fantasy-land, we want to try communism again and this time we will get it right thinking.
What someone says, when they say, "if it where not for the US and capitalist influence it would have succeeded" is actually that they are saying: that they are smarter than Engle, Marx, Lenin, Castro, Che, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin and the rest of them; if we just implement their non-dictator, non-western influenced, idea of communism things will be great this time. The problem is, all the above mentioned thought the same thing.
I lived thru communism (had family that lived under it in East Germany, father-in-law was a refuge from Castro), I never realized it would only take a generation to completely forget how bad it was.
Honestly what scares me more is, I always thought Fascism and the Nazis had run their course and there would be no way anyone could make that mistake again. Now watching the apologizes for the failings of communism, I am really not so sure, now I realize if these fringe Nazis find the right voice, appeal the the right social triggers and pull on the correct emotional strings, they could actually become a force to recon with.
You lived through a dictatorship. Very different things.
There are various leftist thoughts that are more libertarian than whatever system we have right now.
The fact that you're equating nazism which isn't even an economic school of thought to communism, which is, means you frankly don't know what you're talking about.
Your experiences are valid, and I would hate to live in USSR or Cuba, but your experiences aren't the end-all of communism.
Fascism absolutely has an economic model you could call it socialism lite. The Nazi's slid from full socialist to Fascist (the Chinese did the same thing, they represent somewhere between a socialist and Fascist state now, because communism does not work, as well, the US has had it's slide towards it, Prescott Bush was a known Fascist and wanted the US to trend towards it):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism#:~:text=I....
The Nazis where first and foremost national socialist and then softly migrated to Fascist. As far as political spectrum libertarians are to the extreme right, with Anarchist being the end of the spectrum to the right. What the new speak definitions of left/right are trying to do is interject economic, social and emotional issues into the spectrum, because communism cannot be sold in it's original form so now it is being packaged with social issues and plays to emotions. That being said, historically left/right was in systems of and the authorities of governance, the further to the right, the less authority the government had. It historically has not entailed economic models nor social issues like abortion, gay right, etc. You technically could have a far right communist utopia but given the limit of government authority, it would not last long as communism has to be enforced, thus back to central planning, thus back to the left.
The left is defined by reliance in government and the desire for centrally planned governments, the right is towards the limitation or abolition of government. The Republic is a little to the right, Democracy is further right than that, confederation is further right than that and finally no law is the extremity of the right.
We can certainly state that I lived thru communism, the fact that they all became dictatorship speaks more to the flaw of the system than it does that it did not get a fair shake.
I would also certainly say I know what I am talking about given that I am well studied in geopolitical affairs, worked in the field and have extensive experience with the horrors of communism. The fact that you did not know that the Nazis where socialist and slid towards a Fascist economy means you frankly don't know what you are talking about or further that libertarians are extremely right and cannot be left as per their desires to limit government, as per historic and classically defined political pendulum analysis. As well, you most likely have had no experience with a real communist government as most people that even have peripheral experience with communism are wary of government overreach and would not look for a reason to argue or advocate for it. You would realize it's not something to get right.
Your theory of we will do it better than Marx or Lenin puts millions of peoples lives in the balance. It's not going to work this time, central planning always leads to totalitarianism. That is what caused it, not the CIA not KSK not MI6, while they have had their meddlings they did not set up death camps, gulags or oppress dissidents for the communist (every communist regime that has come into existence mind you). It will not bring equality for the oppressed and will bring nothing but suffering for the majority under it's rule. The leaders of the movement, disillusioned with it not working out, will develop a final solution to fix it, which generally means getting rid of some people. This is the way it went down every time, and even before the US started meddling in their affairs.
As further reading I would point you to the chronology of US and USSR spying. As you will note, the USSR had an established agency, propaganda network and sources before the US, and where actively meddling in US affairs, many agencies where formed in light of this new reality, the USSR had a active policy of world wide spread of communism, because Lenin believed in Marx as a profit and Marx was emphatic on the fact that for communism to succeed it would have to be a world wide revolution, Lenin is the text book example he implemented Marxist vision to a T, and honestly out of all of them he was probably the best example but it was the communist according to their core doctrine, that said the capitalist has to go. They painted a mark on people not the other way around. When the capitalist went and it still did not work, someone else had to go, in the case of the UUSR, it was the intellectuals then portions of the Bolsheviks, then the artists. the US response was to contain that spread after the fact, somewhere along the way, that commission changed and the CIA decided it was going to get into nation building, but that does not excuse communism for it's spectacular failings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_espionage#Chronology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency#Im...
Right so you're specifically talking about your flavor of communism you went through. Which is exactly missing the point of what I said. Please tell me what part of this is centrally planned, or has a strong state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-communism
> The Nazis where first and foremost national socialist and then softly migrated to Fascist.
Yes, they were nationalist. AKA fascist. But we already knew that didn't we.
> with Anarchist being the end of the spectrum to the right.
You're actually trying to use the political spectrum to discuss politics? You understand there are nuances involved, right? I'm tired of people falling for the political compass meme thinking they've understood politics in a 2 or 3 dimensional grid.
> The left is defined by reliance in government
Okay what? Where was this definition?
> and the desire for centrally planned governments,
You're literally making stuff up now.
> We can certainly state that I lived thru communism, the fact that they all became dictatorship speaks more to the flaw of the system than it does that it did not get a fair shake.
You lived through ONE flavor of communism that was authoritarian. Not every flavor of communism is authoritarian or centrally planned.
> I am well studied in geopolitical affairs
Yet you use a political compass to describe politics.
> worked in the field and have extensive experience with the horrors of communism
Yes the horrors of communism. Specifically your flavor of communism.
> The fact that you did not know that the Nazis where socialist and slid towards a Fascist economy means you frankly don't know what you are talking about or further that libertarians are extremely right and cannot be left as per their desires to limit government, as per historic and classically defined political pendulum analysis.
Uh huh. What part of the nazi economy was worker owned and operated? Do you just pick up on the name of something and say "ah yes they called themselves socialist therefore who am I to question them?"
> peripheral experience with communism are wary of government overreach and would not look for a reason to argue or advocate for it.
Except you're wrong here and plenty of people who have lived through USSR are still advocates of communism, just not stalinism :)
> central planning always leads to totalitarianism.
You're the only one bringing this one up mate.
> not the CIA not KSK not MI6,
Yeah they didn't do anything to destabilize countries, no sir. Wonder if the situation was as bad as you're talking about, why did they get involved?
> death camps, gulags or oppress dissidents for the communist
No but we have the modern prison industry complex to do that for us. Same shit, different name. https://twitter.com/chloedontsurf/status/1277422601061744640
> As further reading I would point you to the chronology of US and USSR spying. As you will note, the USSR had an established agency, propaganda network and sources before the US, and where actively meddling in US affairs, many agencies where formed in light of this new reality, the USSR had a active policy of world wide spread of communism, because Lenin believed in Marx as a profit and Marx was emphatic on the fact that for communism to succeed it would have to be a world wide revolution, Lenin is the text book example he implemented Marxist vision to a T, and honestly out of all of them he was probably the best example but it was the communist according to their core doctrine, that said the capitalist has to go. They painted a mark on people not the other way around. When the capitalist went and it still did not work, someone else had to go, in the case of the UUSR, it was the intellectuals then portions of the Bolsheviks, then the artists. the US response was to contain that spread after the fact, somewhere along the way, that commission changed and the CIA decided it was going to get into nation building, but that does not excuse communism for it's spectacular failings:
This is the wildest justification of the redscare that I've read. You're acting like Marx somehow invented communism or that his version is the only version out there.
I'm sorry you lived through an authoritarian state, it sucks, I know because I lived through one as well. But if you take your head out of the dirt and actually go understand that not all of the left want a strong central government, maybe then we can have a better conversation.
Communism and Democratic Socialism are different beasts but that is also where the danger lies, many communist see socialism as the palatable step to their end goal. It's not a red-scare, history is littered with the dead proof and human wreckage of the failings of communism. You would be hard pressed to convince me to give communism no matter how it is dressed up a try again, there are just too many failings and bodies along the way, many of which I have seen with my own eyes, to risk "getting it right, this time".
Foreign interventions are all about interests and they ruin other other countries. That's how we bash Iran for democracy, but we sell bombs to KSA at the same time. WAR and Oil are big businesses.
You can easily connect all the dots in Iran and you get to the point that today they have corrupted leaders. Nobody is letting them to construct their country. I'm not sure if it's fair to blame them now.
"Although Reza Shah declared neutrality at an early stage of World War II, Iran assumed greater strategic importance to the British government" "The invasion's strategic purpose was to ensure the safety of Allied supply lines to the USSR"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Soviet_invasion_of_Iran
"The CIA collaborated with the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and install General Fazlollah Zahedi. Later, the 1979 hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran, lasting 444 days until January 21, 1981, stemmed from past CIA affairs in Iran"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Iran
"According to Iraqi documents, assistance in the development of chemical weapons was obtained from firms in many countries, including the United States, West Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France. A report stated that Dutch, Australian, Italian, French and both West and East German companies were involved in the export of raw materials to Iraqi chemical weapons factories."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_attacks_against...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...
"International policies pursued by the Shah in order to increase national income by remarkable increases in the price of oil through his leading role in the OPEC have been stressed as a major cause for a shift of Western interests and priorities, and for a reduction of their support for him reflected in a critical position of Western politicians and media, especially of the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter regarding the question of human rights in Iran, and in strengthened economic ties between the United States of America and Saudi Arabia in the 1970s." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Reza_Pahlavi#Criticis...
"Iran Air Flight 655 was a scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai via Bandar Abbas that was shot down on 3 July 1988 by an SM-2MR surface-to-air missile fired from USS Vincennes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
At most, he was working for intelligence agencies creating blackmail material. Not even the story of the year, let alone the decade. Even if he was actually murdered in prison by powerful people or an intelligence agency it wouldn't be very interesting. There's no broad trend. No betrayal of public trust. Just run of the mill spy stuff.
The strongest result of the Epstein incident is that it will serve as a strong warning to powerful men not to put themselves in a compromising position.
Ultimately what matters is incentives, and I do wonder what kind of utopian scheme you could come up designing specifically for that...
Communists in the USSR (and backed by the USSR) stole property on a vast scale and murdered or enslaved people by the millions. The CIA did many bad things but it is very hard to out-do the USSR on evil acts.
West vs East Germany was as good an experiment as anyone is likely to ever see. It was capitalism vs communism head-to-head. The communists had to build a wall to keep their enslaved population from escaping from a secret police controlled hellscape to what was (in comparison) a capitalist utopia.
The US is a fundamentally mercantile country that found out the hard way (through two world wars) that non-interference doesn't work. It very reluctantly adopted the role of world police.
In many ways it resembles the problems all policing forces face, which is that people tend to focus on the mistakes rather than the successes.
The people that spend time railing against US policing failures spend no time trumpeting its great many successes.
It's always easy to point the finger. It's much harder to explain how one would have done a better job solving such complex problems.
Both the U.S and U.S.S.R pumped huge amounts of money and resources into "their" Germany. Both sides needed to show that their economic model was the correct one. This rather pollutes the results of any experiment.
Additionally, West Germany was heavily industrialised and had much more in the way of natural resources. East Germany in contrast was mostly agricultural. In the immediate aftermath of WW2 the western allies agreed to dismantle factories in West Germany and send the equipment and materials to the east.
A better example would be one where a country divides into communist & capitalist states and has no interference from the outside world. I don't know if such an example exists.
The US and USSR were equally powerful, playing the same game, with the same population. Ideology vs ideology. Capitalism won by a mile.
Because fundamentally the US isn't driven by an all-encompassing ideology. Capitalism doesn't dictate how every citizen live their life. It only describes how the economic system will work. Anyone inside the system is free to create their own enclave. If you want to move to Oregon to live on a commune, no capitalist commissar is there to stop you. Starting a capitalist enclave in a communist country would have had to sent to the gulag.
Maybe a comparison should be drawn between post war Yugoslavia and Austria as they had comparatively less interference from the major power blocs.
Also the U.S had much greater economic power than the U.S.S.R throughout the cold war. After WW2, Stalin even considered accepting American economic aid from the Marshall Plan.
I don't know, didn't work out so well for the Rajneeshees. Or Clive Bundy.
I was being a little bit tongue in cheek, and you're right that you can fly under the radar, but it's also possible to draw the interest of the feds, and then they will fuck you up.
I spent a fair amount of my summers as a kid in a buddhist community hidden away in the woods. I think they're all above-board now, but at the time they were always fighting w/ the govt, trying to hide illegal busses & cabins out of site in the trees and stuff like that.
That's not really true. Reports of living "off-grid" make it out to be extremely diffiicult to not be part of the consumer economy. Similarly, the un-banked have a lot of trouble. Heck, even adamant Linux users report a huge amount of trouble when trying not to be part of the "Windows Ecosystem".
We've had plenty of tests of communist states becoming capitalist ones though, for reasons it would be difficult to attribute entirely to capitalist interference
This was the case throughout Latin America. Castro, Bosch, Allende, etc. Furthermore there are no examples of the KGB interfering on the scale of the US (specifically the CIA) in places like Cuba, Chile, etc.
"Communists in the USSR (and backed by the USSR) stole property on a vast scale and murdered or enslaved people by the millions. The CIA did many bad things but it is very hard to out-do the USSR on evil acts."
All of which pales in comparison to the settling of the new world, America's settling of the west, etc.
If we want to focus on the 20th century there is nothing comparable to the use of nuclear weapons or America's actions during/after the Vietnam war where they engaged in the largest bombing campaign in history and use of Agent Orange.
"The US is a fundamentally mercantile country that found out the hard way (through two world wars) that non-interference doesn't work. It very reluctantly adopted the role of world police."
This is a lie. After the US expanded throughout the continent to their heart's content (by killing/removing the existing inhabitants) they began expanding beyond their shores as evidenced by their involvement in the Philippines and Cuba as well as their deployment of the marines in other areas of Latin America from 1898 on.
Cuba, in particular, was initially ruled as a colony until it was deemed too expensive. Then Cuba was granted its "independence" alongside the Platt Amendment, which gave the US de facto control over Cuba's domestic, foreign, and economic policy and resulted in them interfering regularly in elections, deploying marines to protect American property, etc.
The communist movement ended up giving birth to the KGB. For that to be true there would have to be time travel involved.
The KGB certainly did their share of support and outreach to both peaceful movements and outright funding of many Red Army Faction terrorist groups which faded away after the fall of the USSR cut off funding and crushed hopes, but claiming they are responsible for their very existence would be an oversimplification.
For my part, I'd love to see the CIA disbanded. They're a lawless, evil organization.
(If anyone wants to see some really horrific shit, check out the CIA MKULTRA mind-control experiments.)
Vietnam's reforms are to create the materialist basis for Communism. They're pretty up front about this, how there's no "one size fits all" socialism, etc.
Maybe you're right, I'm definitely not an expert on the history. How impactful was that?
The impression I got from conversations I had when I visited Vietnam years ago is that it was a domestic-led reform, in response to the centrally-planned, non-ownership, non-market economy not working out.
> Vietnam's reforms are to create the materialist basis for Communism
That's the hype, but what does that really mean if in practice you've changed to a market economy?
It's an interesting question, but it should be worth examining the framing; why do incentives matter so much in the discourse? Is social incentivizing the core (or should it be the core) of an economy? What have incentives looked like in pre-capitalist societies? Were they always monetary, or different for different classes, genders, or other groups of people?
The literature from sociology, anthropology and social psychology in the last twenty years has shed some light on those questions, so I'd also be interested to hear about them. There's a moral dimension too - do we want to create a kind of society where the incentive to work for a great proportion (or perhaps even a majority) is held over their heads by a wage they need to live, or defer to the totalizing administration of the state's welfare policies? Even welfare has transformed; since the 80s there's been a trend toward what's been called "workfare".
For better or worse in the real world fundamentals "leak" past the officially set incentives and may undermine them.
Monetary per-se and capitalism per say are an anchronistic terms as trade goods filled the niche for millenia be they perishables like food and furs or imperishables like gold and jewels. Communism could be called a deep retro throwback to palace economies. There is a lack of records of personal wealth or tracking and the indication there from sunken ships shows outgoing local goods and incoming foreign goods in bulk in amounts beyond personal production or usage. Essentially it is apparent that the leadership took all outputs and allocated supplies as needed to those under them. Sounds similar to "from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs". It proved in the end eventually unpopular and unsustainable given the Bronze Age collapse and their complete lack of survival of old palace economies even with other benefits. Although given bronze age standards a lot of people wanted to kill their neighbors for various reasons (revenge for theft, captures, and killings) so it may have been unrelated to the economics.
It seems you failed to register that life under communist regime also fits into the "wage slave" pattern you're describing, moreso than in democratic and capitalist societies.
In fact, back home the local communist party is rather insistent in referring to people as "workers", to underline that that's precisely their raison d'etre.
The only difference between communist regime's and non-communist regime's regarding how resources are allocated is the communist rhetoric that tries to classify the resources syphoned by the state into the regime's pocket as the people's income.
what I'm getting at is that it doesn't seem very useful to discuss what economic/political systems might work in a vacuum. maybe an isolated communist society could be a true utopia, but that doesn't really matter if a belligerent neighbor has planes, tanks, and nukes. a society can't last unless it can at least deter attacks from outside.
But they won't because China has nukes.