I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort; especially mental health, where one may not mentally function well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably hold a job.
Yes, everyone had a job. It was illegal not to have one. Jobs were basically assigned by the state. Most “normal” people could choose among a few OK-ish options. But if you got a hair out of line or crossed wrong people you could get assigned shoveling coal in a small boiler room or building railroads in Siberia. And if you didn’t want that job you became a criminal and went to some mine or quarry working double shifts for gruel in Gulag.
Yes, everyone had a roof over their head. But that doesn’t mean space, comfort, or even privacy. It wasn’t uncommon to have no more than a bed and a small cabinet or chest. Most of the living spaces and urban areas were extremely depressing. It’s all grey boxes and muddy trails. The best you could hope for in most places is some trees and bushes adding a bit of green in the summer.
There was very little people could do to change any of that. You couldn’t move elsewhere just because you wanted. People in cities with better professions could move if they managed to know the right people and could get a job elsewhere. People in villages were basically pinned to their colhozes. Their only option to see other places were a holiday trip if the managed to save up a little or to go into military and be stationed wherever.
This lack of agency resulted in mass depression and alcoholism.
Where do you think the grim and drunk russian stereotype comes from? It’s just the soviet reality.
"In Soviet Russia we have eliminated all capitalist social ills. Unemployment is demoralizing and unproductive, so it is now illegal. Homelessness is unsafe and ruinous to the health of the mind, so it is against the law. Cancer is a terrible, deadly disease and also very expensive, so we have also banned it. And just like that, our surveys show 0% unemployment, 0% homelessness, and 0% cancer! Can your vaunted capitalistic West say the same?"
1) start a civil war killing a few % of the population
2) take every large property in the country killing or driving into exile its owners
3) deport ethnic minorities and take their property
4) artificially create a major famine killing many millions of people and driving half the country into slave like labour
5) start a major war killing a double digit fraction of your population
6) rely massively on foreign labour and foreign aid during and after the war.
7) cause smaller wars and crises around the world to extort more foreign aid.
8) jail and send to forced labour camps everyone not performing a government assigned job.
9) collapse, the second you can't extort labour internally or funds and goods internationally
Let me quote the text:
> An anecdote on this very topic became popular in the later Soviet Union. A young communist proclaimed victoriously: “We have founded a society where there are no rich people!” To which an old social democrat shook his head and muttered, “Actually our intention was to found a society were there were no poor people.”
Many in the west would like this idea. Try goggle "communism support young americans".
Even if they do, when you're living somewhere that's free to fail you before you're even born, the second-worst case can still look good. And also the absolute worse case is Pol Pot, and there's many examples equally awful showing that a lot of people just flat out refuse to accept humans can be that evil.
But also, basically all types of governments can demonstrate the sorts of failure mode that Communism is famous for. Holodomor and Great Leap Forward's famines were Communist failures, the Irish Potato Famine and several in India under the British were Capitalist failures.
> the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
You may be surprised if you read a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Several parts of it have been considered "common sense" in capitalist nations for over a century.
Me, I think Karl Marx made the same error as Adam Smith, that both think humans free from rules are naturally amazing and they largely ignore power seeking behaviours and the consequences of that. Hence Smith is associated with laissez-faire, and "socialist" and "anarchist" were seen by the authorities of the 19th c. as being much the same*.
(I over simplify a bit, this is just a comment and not a script for a replacement idiology).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_anarchism_and_li...
To Quote Ronald Reagan...
“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
But that aside, when you're already getting failed and the people failing you specifically hate one thing, it's very easy to reach for that thing.
To your quote: Well, I'm not a communist (unlike a previous partner)… but I'm also not a capitalist, because I see that capitalism also is a deeply flawed ideology doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results, and that history has shown us this, too, repeatedly.
I'm also not "anti-" either of them, because I'd rather see someone take the best of both and find some new mechanism to deal with the other repeatedly observed historical fact: that a non-trivial fraction of the population are power-hungry sadistic arses. To quote, albeit from fiction: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdas...
(Both capitalism and communism have failure modes separate from the problem of dark triad personalities, but both sets are much easier to deal with if your society has also solved the problem of dark triad personalities, and a society does also need to solve the problem of dark triad personalities irregardless of what else it does).
If you're thinking of countries like Sweden and Norway, those would be called social democracy.
Marxism is a flawed ideology because it doesn’t account for human nature.
But: There's no additional overhead to "seize the means of production" vs. any other system of governance and organisation, given that corporations, money, ownership, and the law are all things that any functioning system of government controls anyway, regardless of if they want these things to be collectively owned (/nationalised) or privately controlled.
Now, my former partner who is a self-identified Communist of some kind (I can't remember which kind), she wants to abolish money, and abolishing it rather than using it would need quite a lot of extra effort.
> How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
I believe the general claim here is "democratically". This doesn't really work too well, but on the other hand, neither does letting people accumulate so much money they become the de-facto leadership with the carrots and sticks of "I will move my business to whoever has the lowest tax/cheapest labour/least expensive safety requirements".
Consider also that normal people are nowhere near as carful with language use as you or I may wish; some of the people you're worried about may be identifying themselves as "Communists" in the first place only because they're exactly one step to the left of the Democrat Party's Overton window while also repeatedly observing the US Republican party describe the Democrats as "socialists".
(Conversely, my former is one of the people I expect you to be correctly worried about, as she agreed with my assessment that she was to the left of the Cuban communist party).
Now that's out of the way, perhaps some systems give you better unfair society that seizes things by force, compared to others. Perhaps we could calmly deliberate about which system that creates an unfair society by seizing things by force is the best, and then implement that system, creating the best possible unfair society that seizes things by force.
Same with the RETVRN types who dream of an ancient-like societal structure without realizing that they would likely be slaves.
The excuses they might make, that libertarianism requires some basically supportive context (provided by who? and in what system?) to get off the ground, also undermine the arguments of the hard-independent individual crowd.
(I happen to think that "libertarianism" is a fruitful collection of ideas and insights, but in the context of many other systems with complementary ideas and insights. On a practical level, we need the best of many systems working together.)
They rationalize why the things they want (like property rights) aren't really a state.
"According to a new Yale Youth Poll, a survey affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, voters aged 18 to 21 lean Republican by 11.7 points when asked who they would support in the 2026 Congressional elections, while voters aged 22 to 29 favored Democrats by 6.4 points." from https://www.newsweek.com/republican-support-poll-young-gen-z... Whatever else they might be (and I can think of quite a few unprintable descriptors), I'm pretty sure the Republicans aren't communists or leftists.
This is like Apple dropping the iPhone Mini. Everyone who wanted a small phone didn't just want a screen that's harder to read, or a marginally lower volume to carry in their pockets. They wanted the ergonomics of the original iPhone. My regular-sized (not plus) iPhone is too big for my hands. A lot of the interactions have to be done with both hands, or risk dropping the phone (which has happened many times) doing acrobatics to reach the far edges and corners.
The iPhone Mini never solved that. It was still uncomfortably large, so I never bothered with it because the tradeoffs weren't there. No doubt a smaller screen is worse, but if the ergonomics were significantly better, that would have been my choice.
Tradeoffs. One is willing to cope with some downsides if they perceive the gains to overcome the losses.
Truth is, even present-day UK Labour who are quite centre-right neolibs leaning more to the right, are closer to communism than the US Democrats are.
So obviously I welcome any anecdotes to the contrary, but I was always told that in my formely communist country(Poland) university admissions were extremely fair. Everyone had equal chance if they passed exams well enough - in fact messing around with this system was guaranteed to get you in prison for corruption. And in there were many examples of poor families from very disadvantaged backgrounds sending kids to top universities because they studied hard enough to pass the entrance exams - there was no bribe you could give anyone to get you in, because the principles of fair admissions were upheld as the greatest value. I'm sure there are examples of it happening that we could find, but my understanding is that it was incredibly rare.
Now, top posts at universities - that's a different situation. To be the dean you had to be in the party and know the right people to be considered for the position. But students? Anyone could get anywhere and study completely for free.
The main issue was that anyone the state was not comfortable with was banned from higher education, including their children.
Have any connection to the pre-communist politics, be involved in religion, be reported by your neighbors as speaking against the regime or just got in the way of someone i power - congratulation comrade, you and your children (regardless of how gifted) are now second class, can't go to university & are relegated to second class jobs, for ever!
And this basically applied to everything the communist state could miss-use to award or punish people - jobs, internal and foreign travel, housing, being able to do art or write books, etc.
And any time the single party that could never do any wrong decided to punish you - there was no recourse.
Or rather to a one of TOP 3 best universities in a one of TOP 3 largest cities in the country unless choosing some engineering specialization.
> a different set of test questions that would be
really hard to solve, indeed.
You would have a job and some money, but your money would buy nothing, because goods were scarce. Even finding good shoes would be a challenge and you would need to cultivate relationships with warehouse clerks etc. to get some access to stuff before it was stealthily distributed by underground channels to relatives, friends etc.
Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".
Reminds me of an old Russian joke. In stores, you'd typically go to one counter to get some produce weighed, then to a cashier to pay for it.
So, someone goes up to the meat counter, and asks, "Can you weigh me out half a kilo of sausage?" And the guy behind the counter replies: "Sure, bring some in, and I'll weigh it out for you."
"Capitalism is based on exploitation of a man by another man. In Communism, it is the other way round!"
There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US. There have been many communist communes here and in other countries, like famously Israel and Columbia. All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.
So we've got plenty of historical evidence whether people would choose to have this life. All but a few dozen, out of hundreds of million, choose against it. Including all socialists, everyone in those demonstrations, ... demonstrating extremely clearly:
without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.
> All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.
The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above
> without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint. You will pay taxes in a communist system. You will have to deal with all sorts of external influences in a communist system.
> The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above
No it isn't. These were voluntary sales (especially since most were abandoned, not sold. There was no profit in leaving, except in some cases). It is illustrative of the simple fact that given the choice, all but a rare exception chooses against communism.
Or to put it another way: people REALLY don't want communism, and after trying it, that becomes worse. In many cases abandoning these communes required a large-ish group of people taking the decision together. In other words: they organized themselves to destroy their little patch of communism. Which illustrates the next point:
> > without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
> Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
You just made an argument in favor of this. Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.
HOW will you prevent it? State terror.
I don't understand. You're saying that also in communism, capitalism comes in from outside and stops you practicing communism?
The USA did bomb and/or coup most communist countries until they were not communist, so you may have a point but it wasn't clear if this is what you meant.
> Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.
Don't strawman people.
> I don't understand. You're saying that also in communism, capitalism
We were talking about external influences. Period. Mentioned was taxes (ie. effort you have to put in to keep a state structure operational), and other external influences. By which I mean from acquiring food to dealing with the weather, and indeed, occasionally dealing with the fact that there are people outside working under other systems. But I bet for most communists it's, ironically, the communist state. That's the biggest external influence they have to deal with. This will include "capitalist expectations" ie. an amount of work you have to perform, without any reward, because that's what the state needs. That's what the state needs to exist, and of course to make the Kremlin look like it looks.
> Don't strawman people.
Then by all means do tell: how will you prevent people either individually or in groups from banding against the communist system? After all, almost by definition, that's in their individual interest because ... communist system. You agreed that it's necessary to stop this but neglected to say HOW you'd do it. In history the "white terror" is one example of how far people will go to band together to destroy communism ...
Every historical communist state (after a short while) chose state terror: indiscriminate, industrial-level violence against individuals. Given that they didn't immediately chose this gives at least an indication that they tried other methods, which badly failed. Even Israel initially did that (well, the Arabs, not yet called Palestinians, did most of it for them), but then switched to give people a choice, which lead to near-total abandonment of communism (even though they kept much of the state institutions communism built).
I don't think you have an accurate appraisal of many socialist countries (e.g. Norway, Denmark).
Meanwhile, it would appear that Capitalism inevitably leads to wars and requires frequent wars to feed the military industrial complex.
Socialists want councils and the political discussion to happen inside the party by party members, which is what there idea of democracy is. (The self-labeling as democratic isn't a lie, but what they perceive to be democratic.)
A social democrat wants a welfare state with a democracy with multiple parties.
In practice socialists strive to create communism, which hasn't really worked out anywhere yet. Some declared that it was achieved, but than later backpedaled and claimed it didn't really happened yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
The US have a very strange definition of the word “socialist”, which other english-speaking countries (and seemingly wikipedia) do not share.
As an example, the european socialist party does _not_ strive to put communism in place.
socialist != communist
> Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems[1] characterised by social ownership of the means of production,[2] as opposed to private ownership.
A social democrat isn't opposed to private ownership. In fact he cares that everyone has enough private ownership.
However the Wikipedia article than uses the term also as a super category for socialism and social democraty, which confuses, because now the term is overloaded in the very same article.
This meaning assignment comes from this:
> Social democracy originated within the socialist movement, supporting economic and social interventions to promote social justice.
They were often in the same party, before the last century, but split as soon as they came anywhere near starting to implement their ideas. If anything, the fact that some english-speaking countries seam to be lenient with the difference, comes from never having experienced a socialist government.
> The US have a very strange definition of the word
As a descendant in a former socialist country, no that definition isn't US-specific. If anything grouping the meanings as the same is lenient and only helps to normalize those who want to implement real socialism. Like their effort to also call them democratic, this is just a way of undermining a democracy by a radical ideology.
> Socialist has been used by members of the political right as an epithet, including against individuals who do not consider themselves to be socialists and against policies that are not considered socialist by their proponents.
I'm not familiar with the notion of socialist in the US, but I would expect it to be like that, i.e. right-wing parties labeling social-democracy as socialist in order to make them deemed unvotable by a majority?
> As an example, the european socialist party
Note how this very party does NOT call itself socialistic in my language and for very good reason. When you look at the different names in different languages, you see that it is only called socialist in countries in West-Europe, whose government had never been socialistic, so they still think that they don't need that distinction.