I’ve already thought of this quite a bit and reached a conclusion, that I like to call “the gulag museum problem”.
As a communist myself: many people were brought unjustly to prisons in the hardest years of the USSR and suffered greatly there, probably hundreds of thousands of innocents. Should there be a museum dedicated to them? Yes.
However, this is focusing on one event in one particular difficult time of history in one particular socialist country. If we start counting the victims of capitalism and colonialism, and compare to communism, we will reach astonishing numbers. The problem is therefore not the existence of the gulag museum: the problem is that for every gulag museum, there should be 20 museums about the victims of capitalism/imperialism/colonialism.
Because they don’t actually care about people who suffered. They just want to put up a museum with a big list of names so they can go “look how evil communism is. They’re just the same as nazis but with a different coat of paint.”
One problem with your argument here is that we actually do believe that there have been proper socialist countries governed by communist parties, it’s just that we understand that they exist under siege and aren’t “pure” like so many western leftists require. They are absolutely proper, but there is excess and mistakes made by administrative bodies meant to protect socialism that exist out of a genuine necessity to fight counter-revolution and imperialist aggression.
Further, we can compare peer countries by how well each system has worked at satisfying the needs of the people, where socialism absolutely has superiority. Capitalism’s death toll is higher both by rate and by magnitude as well.
Socialism is pre-communism. Communism itself cannot fully exist until global socialism, but each individual country can begin the transition between capitalism and communism called “socialism.” Socialist states aren’t communist not because of imperialist aggression, but because communism itself is a higher, global mode of production.
Socialist countries exist under siege, but generally commit far less harm than capitalist countries.
Returning to the original comment, you just seem generally mixed up on terms and are drawing false conclusions from them.
Socialist countries aren’t communist, you call them pre-communist which highlights my point.
This is just quibbling over semantics & context. When communists run a state, yes that state is technically socialist/pre-communist. That’s why those states have “Socialist” in their names and not “Communist.” There is never going to be a “communist state,” because definitionally communism’s long-term end-goal is a classless society. And since we define the state as a system which protects the interests of one economic class over others, such a society would definitionally be stateless.
So when someone—assuming they know what they’re talking about—says “communist state/country,” they mean a communist-led socialist state.
It’s a broken culture that makes people act like you; professorial on topics they objectively know less about than their ‘audience’
At what age did you collapse entirely into your mind palace? When did you decide you knew enough to extrapolate what the outside world was like through pure platonic reasoning?
Communism is both a mode of production, and a process. Socialist countries run by communist parties are properly communist in that they are building communism in the real world. This is why Marx states in The German Ideology that
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
The point isn’t that socialist countries would be in that higher mode of production if they weren’t under siege, or that they aren’t sufficiently communist, but that they must build up state power to resist this siege, and as a consequence this state power sometimes commits excesses and mistakes.
So they weren’t allowed to exist in the same comparable peace than capitalistic nations
I think this logic is flawed. Capitalism isn’t allowed to exist in peace either, and this logic leads to constructs like “Pax Romana” getting credibility. Capitalist countries have also coexisted with the constant threat of other capitalist countries, and carried out repression accordingly.
I’ve already thought of this quite a bit and reached a conclusion, that I like to call “the gulag museum problem”.
As a communist myself: many people were brought unjustly to prisons in the hardest years of the USSR and suffered greatly there, probably hundreds of thousands of innocents. Should there be a museum dedicated to them? Yes.
However, this is focusing on one event in one particular difficult time of history in one particular socialist country. If we start counting the victims of capitalism and colonialism, and compare to communism, we will reach astonishing numbers. The problem is therefore not the existence of the gulag museum: the problem is that for every gulag museum, there should be 20 museums about the victims of capitalism/imperialism/colonialism.
Because they don’t actually care about people who suffered. They just want to put up a museum with a big list of names so they can go “look how evil communism is. They’re just the same as nazis but with a different coat of paint.”
The meme is about this https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/12/17/canada-monument-victims-communism-no-names-nazi-controversy
I’m aware
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One problem with your argument here is that we actually do believe that there have been proper socialist countries governed by communist parties, it’s just that we understand that they exist under siege and aren’t “pure” like so many western leftists require. They are absolutely proper, but there is excess and mistakes made by administrative bodies meant to protect socialism that exist out of a genuine necessity to fight counter-revolution and imperialist aggression.
Further, we can compare peer countries by how well each system has worked at satisfying the needs of the people, where socialism absolutely has superiority. Capitalism’s death toll is higher both by rate and by magnitude as well.
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Socialism is pre-communism. Communism itself cannot fully exist until global socialism, but each individual country can begin the transition between capitalism and communism called “socialism.” Socialist states aren’t communist not because of imperialist aggression, but because communism itself is a higher, global mode of production.
Socialist countries exist under siege, but generally commit far less harm than capitalist countries.
Returning to the original comment, you just seem generally mixed up on terms and are drawing false conclusions from them.
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This is just quibbling over semantics & context. When communists run a state, yes that state is technically socialist/pre-communist. That’s why those states have “Socialist” in their names and not “Communist.” There is never going to be a “communist state,” because definitionally communism’s long-term end-goal is a classless society. And since we define the state as a system which protects the interests of one economic class over others, such a society would definitionally be stateless.
So when someone—assuming they know what they’re talking about—says “communist state/country,” they mean a communist-led socialist state.
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Sophomoric is the word
It’s a broken culture that makes people act like you; professorial on topics they objectively know less about than their ‘audience’
At what age did you collapse entirely into your mind palace? When did you decide you knew enough to extrapolate what the outside world was like through pure platonic reasoning?
Communism is both a mode of production, and a process. Socialist countries run by communist parties are properly communist in that they are building communism in the real world. This is why Marx states in The German Ideology that
The point isn’t that socialist countries would be in that higher mode of production if they weren’t under siege, or that they aren’t sufficiently communist, but that they must build up state power to resist this siege, and as a consequence this state power sometimes commits excesses and mistakes.
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No?
You are mixing up the terms
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I don’t take homework assignments from people who didn’t do the reading
I think this logic is flawed. Capitalism isn’t allowed to exist in peace either, and this logic leads to constructs like “Pax Romana” getting credibility. Capitalist countries have also coexisted with the constant threat of other capitalist countries, and carried out repression accordingly.
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