Comment by virgilp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by virgilp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Nah, Stalin and the communist leadership were perfectly capable saboteurs, didn't need help from capitalist interests. In a system where "the state" has the capability to enforce "public good" policies above anything else, it's only natural that the following will happen:

- individual freedom will be suppressed (because "public good"; can't have greedy people doing greedy things, them weeds need to be killed early).

- since individual freedom is suppressed the regime is naturally going to be autocratic, which means that "the state" is actually a handful of people... who now get to freely decide how they define "public good".

The fundamental error of communism is that in any implementation, it doesn't really have mechanisms to "punish" greedy leadership, only greedy individual citizens. Which is an idea as good as it sounds.

The Bolshevik revolution was carried out under the assumption that world revolution would follow, particularly in Germany. This assumption did not hold, and Russia did not have the needed technological developments to sustain themselves.

Cuba is the best example of a successful communist-ish state. Most if its struggles are due to sanctions imposed by the US and enforced via its allies across the world.

> This assumption did not hold

"if the entire world is a sh*thole, nobody will be able to tell it's due to communism"?

I fail to see what "needed technological developments" would West Germany give them.

> Cuba is the best example of a successful communist-ish state

Successful as in "not completely failed, unlike all the others". Look, I sympathize with their struggles being so close to the US & all, but the fact that this is the best-case for you have should give you a bit of pause, because Cuba is by no means close to being a paradise.

To put things in context, both the largest & most populated countries in the world used to be communist. They both had to abandon it & switched to a form of crony capitalism, which, as bad as it is, seems to actually work better for them than the alternative.

Actually, forget I said anything about communism. My intent was to address the original topic, but I just couldn't resist inserting my take on communism to the original analogy used.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com