The European countries were not and are not democratic socialist countries. They're at best social democracies, and even that is an extreme stretch. They're mixed-market economies with social welfare programs.
Cold War era anti-communism did not draw distinctions between Soviet "socialism" and democratic socialism although the Soviets explicitly purged democratic socialist movements and organizations and preferred leaving Spain to the fascists rather than allowing them to come out on top.
Soviet "socialism" also isn't communism -- heck, the term "actually existing socialism" was coined to ridicule "utopian" leftists who wanted to achieve communism in Soviet-affiliated countries. Communism, a stateless society without private ownership, was always only considered the stated end goal of these countries, even when they actively took steps to prevent any progression towards that goal.
If Orwell's detractors have been right on one thing about Animal Farm it's that people on the right are too ignorant to treat it as anything other than a condemnation of all forms of socialism although he specifically wrote it to condemn the Soviet Union's corrupt bureaucracy and the exploitation perpetuated by all forms of statism, whether under the guise of fascism, Soviet "socialism" or capitalism. The actual morale is fairly straightforward: the pigs get corrupted because they try to replace the humans but the oppression stems from the system affording the humans (and pigs) their position, not their species. You can't replace one state power with another and hope this will result in the abolition of the state because the state exists to perpetuate itself.
Real communism is nothing more the state of being ruled by those who ostensibly pursue and aspire to achieving the state of communism (which is never and will never be real.)
He is right that the Soviets said that communism was the end goal they would inevitably achieve. But communism in that sense was never real. The real communism was being ruled by the people selling that aspirational fantasy.
Well, that's what vanguardism gets you. It's why e.g. anarchists are fundamentally opposed to vanguardism. The problem with vanguard parties is that once the vanguard party is in power it's now in its own interest to continue being in power and any step towards communism would be counter to that interest. Unless you happen to luck into having a benevolent dictator who somehow against all odds actually is a true believer in communism, isn't corrupted by having absolute power, doesn't fall victim to the bureaucracy and systems of power he commands (e.g. Sankara) and lives long enough to both get into power and use that power to deconstruct the entire system that enabled him, you just end up with a new political class replacing the owning class without also abolishing the working class.
If people didn't fall for people "selling an aspirational fantasy", we wouldn't have made it out of feudalism. Early anti-capitalists just severely underestimated how resilient capitalism is (i.e. most of them did not anticipate Disney selling you anti-capitalist messages as a product, or "late-stage capitalist recuperation"). Given how long Europe was stuck in feudalism it's not at all unreasonable to expect capitalism to be replaced by something better -- as long as you don't expect it to happen in your lifetime.
The Kibbutzes are indeed communes, but they cannot sustain themselves. They exist on subsidy from the state, funded by taxing the capitalist part of the economy.
America has, since its inception, spawned over 10,000 communes. None were successful.
The closest we are to real “communism” I would say is in Switzerland,
where people vote together on any issue in a direct democratic way. They seem to reject economical communism, where the means of production are owned together.
I agree that "capturing the means of production" is a red herring. The idea is to abolish private property, i.e. private ownership of "the means of production".
Arguably a reform stating something along the lines like, say, "non-publicly traded corporations above $1MM annual revenue for three years or employing at least 20 people must transfer ownership to a worker's council all employees automatically are members of for the duration of their employment" (this could be extended to take into consideration repayment of the initial investments of the founders as for any other loan) and similarly limiting publicly traded corporations while also offering government grants for founding employee-owned corporations (before hitting the revenue or employment cap) would pretty much tick that checkbox and I don't think that would really be "communism" in a meaningful way, even if I think it's an overall improvement for society.
I see communism as equivalent with anarchism so my definition isn't shared by all "communists" but the point isn't to "give power to the people" but to abolish the systems which give individuals power over other. That includes a lot of "SJW"/"woke" topics like white supremacism, cis-heteronormativity, ageism/gerontocracy (i.e. treating children as lesser beings rather than persons with intellectual and physical limitations), ableism (i.e. treating people with intellectual and physical limitations as lesser beings) and "the patriarchy", as well as capitalism. That's quite the laundry list so I'm fine with incrementalism.
Of course some communists like Engels conflate(d) hierarchy with the vague nation of "authority" to create a strawman against this notion of communism, i.e. that anarchists not wanting individuals to have power over others means they can't do violence in order to help bring about communism or defend it -- which of course is nonsensical because opposing systems of power does not contradict using power (i.e. violence) in opposition of those systems. There are other ideological disagreements too but it boils down to anarchism being "communism but more so" and Marxist-Leninists being of the opinion that that is worse and that therefore not being able to achieve that with their means (e.g. vanguardism) is not an issue.
"Communism" is a loaded term which means different things to different people, but if you mean the word as Soviet Marxism or Marxism-Leninism then it is an orthodoxy of political and economic thought with some very specific precepts, some of which do not really emphasise democracy.
I named some examples that might fit the bill in another comment: "Makhnovia" (wiped out by the Soviet Union), revolutionary Catalonia (wiped out by the Soviet Union and the Spanish fascists), Shinmin (wiped out by the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan), the Paris Commune (at least partially), Rojava and the Zapatistas (tho they would eschew any Western attempt at labelling them).
Most anarchists however tend to focus on prefiguration: creating environments in which communism can take hold when the superstructure collapses or goes away. This can take the form of mutual aid programs, weapons and first aid trainings, farming/housing cooperatives and so on just to name some of the more overt examples. Arguably the Black Panthers came closer to communism than the Soviet Union.
Yep, these whiny mfs always complain about something. One second it's workers rights, then it's extrajudicial assassinations by the government... Complain, complain, complain!
Think Walter, if anarchism and dem socialism is really doomed to fail, why would you the government need to assassinate leaders and perform regime changes :) surely it would be cheaper (and more effective) to let them crumble?
The US has had 10,000 communes. They have a 100% failure rate. How many had their leaders assassinated?
The usual cause for failure is people get disenchanted with living in a commune and leave. It usually takes 1 to 2 years for their communist zeal to be ground down by reality.
Capitalism is illegal in Cuba. Communes are legal in the US.
It's quite a distinction.
If you want to join a commune in the US, google for one and join it. Nobody is going to stop you or punish you for it. You can start one yourself with some like minded friends.
That takes a whole bunch of historical shortcuts that I'm not comfortable with. For starters, the communists in Western Europe advocated violent revolution and - no surprise there - the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. If they couldn't get there through an election then it wasn't going to happen. Democratic socialism was the voice of reason next to the bloodlust of the 'true' communists.
Reform and revolution was an active area of debate between Western European communists. What made Western European communists lean towards revolution were the bans on socialist parties by various countries, and the subsequent repression. This convinced many communists that they would simply never be allowed to get elected and transition out of capitalism.
The second thing that ended reformism amongst Western communists was World War 1, which was used as a cudgel against any kind socialism and allowed the state to essentially use wars as a pretext to destroy communist movements and expel antiwar radicals from popular leftwing parties.
And the rest of people didn't want nothing to do with it. The SPD, when it was an explicitly Marxist and revolutionary part in Germany for example, got up to 35% of the vote.
It's after the expulsion from the SPD and the bans on various communist activities that Western European communists were decided on revolution. It wasn't because they were cartoonish bloodlusting villains.
Germany is just an example, the sentiments are common to many European countries pre-WWII.
The statement that "the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it" is true in that most European countries never had majority support for revolutionary socialism. But in many countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) it was a substantial block, in many places on par with support for more moderate socialists/social democrats.
Revolutionary socialism is a highly fringe political viewpoint today, but it was much more popular in the inter-war years. It took a long time for people to learn of (and start to believe!) the atrocities that occurred in the revolution in Russia.
It is true that it was much more popular then than it is today. But it still as far as I know never managed to gain more than a small percentage foothold. That doesn't mean that it was insignificant, it doesn't take a whole country to subscribe to something to change the course of history. But revolutionary socialism/communism did not come even close to being able to subvert the democratic process in those countries that already had a majority or coalition rule in place. Though there definitely were recorded attempts in almost every country they all fizzled out.
I'll say it again because apparently it didn't land: Germany != Western Europe. Germany had a lot of conditions that made it ripe for a vote like that which did not apply to any of the other nations in Western Europe at that time (or any other time, really).
In this case it is. Firstly, similar events transpired in other countries, and secondly, the German communist movement was by far the strongest and most influential one until the USSR happened. Secondly, prospects for a smaller country like, say, Belgium turning communist alone are very dim, and so for many smaller countries the plan for communist parties was more or less to wait until Germany or France became communist.
While a nice quote and possibly even true, Lenin's totalitarian "communism" is not the goal of socialism.
Communism was supposed to be a stateless utopia, and Lenin definitely did not get rid of the state. His wasn't even a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's a dictatorship by a small elite.
Social democracy is much closer to a "dictatorship" of the proletariat, because there workers actually have a voice.
It's important to realise that when Marx wrote his thing, many "democracies" still didn't allow poor people to vote. Marx would have been much happier about western capitalist denocracies than about Soviet communism. Although obviously the next step has to be to get money out of politics. And out of news media. Giving the people a voice doesn't help much if they're easily manipulated by the rich and powerful.
Lenin is not talking about democratic socialism there, but rather the full blown dictatorship of the proletariat, nationalizing all means of production, etc etc kind of socialism. When it comes to democratic socialism, Lenin was not a fan, to put it mildly. He is absolutely scathing of the concept in for example _the State and Revolution_.
We should just treat these so called communism as monarch communism, because every practical communism end up being having a monarch.
This is different from ideal communism or let's just call it fantasy communism. Because the ideal form of communism where everyone is equal and nice never happened and will probably never happen
> In other words, if you tried to "do a communism", you'd either be carpet bombed (or more likely have a fascist coup funded against you) by the US, or you'd be made an offer you can't refuse by the Soviet Union. The inevitable outcome of this was that the only "communist experiments" that were able to grow in that era of history were ones that instantly aligned with the Soviet Union or that were sufficiently non-threatening and irrelevant to both sides (and thus likely never showed up on your radar).
This isn't true, and many communist countries were openly hostile to the USSR. Yugoslavia went it's own way, China split with the USSR and had a war, Albania sided with China against the USSR, the Khmer Rouge were hostile to the USSR, North Korea tried to position themselves between the USSR and China. Even many countries that were aligned with the USSR weren't controlled by them (for example, Vietnam and Laos).
Saying "this isn't true" and then listing a bunch of countries which either explicitly sided with China, were aligned with USSR "but not controlled by them" or that literally have Wikipedia articles called "$Country-Soviet split" is a bit silly. I never said that they were vassal states. I said they instantly aligned with the Soviet Union or had to be irrelevant to both sides. Albania, China and Yugoslavia are "counter-examples" only in that they were initially aligned with the Soviet Union but then deviated from it.
The Sino-Soviet split pretty much occurred because the Soviet Union itself deviated from Stalinism and Mao didn't like that. China only got away with that because like the USSR it was extremely large and powerful. It literally split off to become a third superpower and its ideology was functionally indistinguishable from the Soviet Union with regard to its ability to achieve the supposed outcome of communism and its insistence on giving all power to the state in the meantime.
Albania initially sided with Mao in order to split from the Soviet Union because much like Mao, Hoxha disagreed with post-Stalinist reviosionism in the USSR. Its split with China in turn was the result of China's embrace of liberal market reforms under Deng, i.e. another round of revisionism.
Yugoslavia only survived its break with the Soviet Union because it (like China post-Mao) opened itself up to the US. However Yugoslavia's "communist" origins are directly tied to the Soviet Union, it's still downstream from Marxism-Leninism.
The Khmer Rouge were also downstream of Marxism-Leninism and directly funded by China. Vietnam is probably the most ridiculous example you could have thought of given that the entire Vietnam War was a thing (and Ho Chi Minh Thought is also of course downstream from Marxism-Leninism). Likewise North Korea with the Korea War and it nowadays pretty much only existing at the behest of China (its only serious ally).
I'm not sure what you were going for but if you wanted to disprove "if you tried to 'do a communism' you had to align with the Soviet Union or be bombed by the United States" the only thing you've accomplished is adding the nuance that you had to either align with the Soviet Union or, post Sino-Soviet split, China. The point remains that unless you were somehow compatible with Marxist-Leninism in one of its many forms, you were on your own against the United States and its economic geopolitical interests.
> A state exists to enforce private property claims by the few against the many.
And to defend the state's citizens & territory against outside threats. And to enforce some system of justice against those who break the group's laws & taboos (e.g. murder).
You don't need to do a state to do either of those things.
Arming and teaching every resident how to defend themselves and each other and how to organize a resistance against invaders is entirely sufficient to "defend against outside threats" and requires less firepower than a standing army capable of achieving the same (especially against, say, the United States). Of course having a geography that makes a land invasion difficult is a plus, historically.
You don't need a carceral system or police force to "deal with" internal problems either. It might be worth looking into the concept of Transformative Justice (which is distinct from Restorative Justice). I recall a historical example of a culture in which when a "crime" happened, the community would gather and instead of expressing their grievances and the harm of the criminal's actions, the group would give examples for positive things the accused had done in the past. The idea being that the act must have been an aberration, not a defining trait of their character. It was then the offender's mission to demonstrate they were the better person they had been in the past.
Of course a lot of "crimes" that exist in legal systems only exist because of hierarchical control (e.g. most offenses committed out of jealousy/impotence), desperation in inequality (e.g. most offenses commited for financial benefit) and lack of support structures (e.g. most drug-related offenses). "Murder" doesn't really exist in isolation and it's absurd that we should treat it as such.
I'm literally an anarchist. Calling anyone left of the US Democrats a "tankie" makes you sound like the person annoying helpdesk by continuously referring to anything with a cable on it as "the computer".
Heck, you could have read the first sentence of the Wikipedia article:
> Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to communists who express support for one-party communist regimes that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical.
I also literally gave you examples for "fantasy communism materializing" (of course none of them meet the strawman of "everyone is equal and peaceful" because that's not in any definition of communism outside maybe a PragerU video).
I’m not certain that’s it. The best theory on why communism never caught on in Western Europe is that they were too developed. You need a lot of people that are in agriculture and Western Europe was beyond that.
I presume by "National socialists," you mean the Nazis. They weren't particular advocates of the free market, but they weren't socialist in a meaningful economic sense. The Nazis did consider Communists as enemies. Their argument that Communism was an extension of Jewishness would be farcical if it weren't so tragic.
But for their part, the Communists would have been perfectly happy to make peace with the Fascists. They (correctly) recognized liberal democracy as a common enemy to their authoritarian dictatorships. Stalin didn't ally with western democracies until Hitler's surprise attack.
The only people in the National Socialist German Workers Party who believed in something resembling a form of socialism were those supporting Strasser and he and his ilk were amongst the first killed during the party's purges.
There's even a famous political cartoon of Hitler emphasizing the words Socialist and Workers for one crowd (blue collar) and National and German for the other (aristocrats). A more sophisticated quip might have been "what about National Bolshevists?" (aka "nazbols") but the short answer to that too is that if you try and add some red to your brown, it's still just another brown.
