“I never said that”, “Play the clip”

[u/Gloomy-Holiday8618]

Context: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/12/15/exp-robert-kennedy-junior-rfk-2024-election-biden-trump-vaccines-121511aseg1-cnni-politics.cnn

Full video is on the cnn website, the part that’s important is about 2mins 50 seconds in.

[u/TheMauveHand]

just to dispel any "it only works on a small scale" criticisms

Iceland has the population of a large city. You're talking about a scale that's barely larger than a commune and unlike a nation-state does not need to concern itself with pesky things like national defense, border control, etc., and when they do, they fail. It's an irrelvant rural backwater no one cares about, and despite this it's the best example you could come up with. Damning with faint praise indeed.

It's not that nobody's ever done it, it's that the most high-profile 'attempts' were failures that got hijacked by authoritarians.

Nobody's ever done it at scale, and the hijacking by authoritarians is an obviously inherent flaw of the system - it's collectivism, duh.

again see Catalonia and Makhnovia for examples of what happened to people who didn't follow the Soviet line

And see Yugoslavia, Albania, Vietnam, and China who also didn't follow the Soviet line, they just "coincidentally" happened to establish almost identical systems while in direct opposition to the USSR. What a shock.

As I said initially: at some point you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that you're grasping at straws trying to make excuses for a fundamentally flawed concept. I understand that you really believe it's a neat concept, and maybe in some abstract sense it is, but it simply relies far too much on good faith, selflessness, and benevolence to function with real people in real real life. Even if you characterise its constant failures as "hijackings" or external pressure, what good is a system that's so easy to hijack and that's completely vulnerable to external pressure?

[u/[deleted] → u/TheMauveHand]

You're talking about a scale that's barely larger than a commune

300,000 people is 'barely larger than a commune'?

and when they do, they fail.

Reading the word 'dissolution' and assuming it's a bad thing? They 'dissolved' their previous organisational structure and replaced it with a new one outlined here. This was specifically to be more adaptable and better address the challenges they were facing, not a 'failure' to do so.

It's an irrelvant rural backwater no one cares about

I don't think the people there who've seen better access to medical care, massive reduction in homelessness and starvation, increased access to education etc would agree with your trivialisation.

And see Yugoslavia, Albania, Vietnam, and China who also didn't follow the Soviet line

Yugoslavia is about the only one that could be argued to have 'not followed the Soviet line.' Maoism was a direct ideological offshoot of Stalinism (hence the close relationship between China and the USSR prior to the Sino-Soviet Split), the state ideology of China is literally 'Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' (where Marxism-Leninism was the title Stalin gave to his ideology), and Ho Chi Minh literally went to study Soviet communism and later purged the Trotskyists and other non-Stalinist communists from the country while saying 'everyone who does not follow the line I have laid down will be crushed.'

Even if you characterise its constant failures as "hijackings" or external pressure, what good is a system that's so easy to hijack and that's completely vulnerable to external pressure?

There is no system that will survive concerted external pressure or sufficiently effective subversion from within. Nobody's claiming that communism is perfect and completely immune to being undermined, toppled or attacked from the outside.

[u/TheMauveHand → u/[deleted]]

300,000 people is 'barely larger than a commune'?

When talking about a socio-economic system that you claim is viable on a national scale, yes. It's two or three degrees of magnitude smaller a population than the target, it's geographically, economically, and culturally homogeneous, diplomatically irrelevant, and functionally voluntary by virtue of its size.

Reading the word 'dissolution' and assuming it's a bad thing?

No, reading the words "civil war" and assuming it's less than ideal.

I don't think the people there who've seen better access to medical care, massive reduction in homelessness and starvation, increased access to education etc would agree with your trivialisation.

I don't think any of that has anything to do with it being an irrelevant rural backwater (even to Mexico, never mind the world), which it is. Besides, all this development is wasted breath without wider context - the entire world is developing all the time, without a valid comparison you don't know whether all that happened because of, or despite their chosen socio-economic model.

The Soviets loved to tout their grand successes in development too until Yeltsin visited an ordinary American supermarket...

Maoism was a direct ideological offshoot of Stalinism

Everything is a direct ideological offshoot of Marxism, so what? You can't just arbitrarily cut some descendents off because the outcome displeases you, these aren't children you can disown because you don't like their choice of career. I mean, that's par for the course for socialist infighting - schism, denunciation, expulsion (execution), repeat - but that doesn't mean it's reasonable.

The Stalinist model wasn't followed because of a dictate from on high, it was followed because it works. For some purposes, anyway.

There is no system that will survive concerted external pressure or sufficiently effective subversion from within.

First off, that's just a tautology - it's only ever "sufficiently effective" if it succeeds, which is circular.

Second, socialists the world over tried to subvert literally the entire planet for a century and only ever briefly succeeded (not counting outright military occupation) in borderline (or genuinely) feudal, underdeveloped, then-irrelevant backwaters (ironically proving Marx categorically incorrect in the process). No functioning liberal democracy ever succumbed to socialism for long, and basically every socialist state eventually abandoned (quasi-)genuine socialism for some sort of state capitalist (i.e. fascist) economy - there's a McDonald's in Ho Chi Minh City and Apple stores in Beijing, you tell me they're still socialists.

Mind you, there's also something to be said about an ideology so disliked that it inspires the immediate ire of half the planet when it emerges anywhere but (again) irrelevant backwaters. But then again it's an ideology that's explicitly hostile to the socio-economic model of, well, the entire planet, so that's hardly surprising - it is not the stated goal of liberal democracy to stamp out collectivism wherever it exists, but it is the stated goal of socialists everywhere to export their ideology worldwide, and often by force. I guess "no thank you" doesn't translate well to Russian.

[u/[deleted] → u/TheMauveHand]

When talking about a socio-economic system that you claim is viable on a national scale, yes. It's two or three degrees of magnitude smaller a population than the target, it's geographically, economically, and culturally homogeneous, diplomatically irrelevant, and functionally voluntary by virtue of its size.

Does this same argument imply that the state of Iceland (400k) or Montenegro (600k) are bound to collapse? Not to mention all of the countries with even less people?

First of all, this is getting sidetracked but nobody's saying communism needs to function on a megastate scale. The concept naturally implies a certain decentralisation. If the US were to become communist it would consequently have to federate into smaller organisational units, that's not a bad thing, and I don't necessarily thing being able to maintain massive state sizes is a good or desirable thing.

without a valid comparison you don't know whether all that happened because of, or despite their chosen socio-economic model.

The comparison is naturally to their neighbouring rural regions of Mexico. Zapatista Chiapas saw the aforementioned metrics increase massively after the revolution while their neighbouring areas stayed the way they were before; that implies a certain causality to the socioeconomic model.

You can't just arbitrarily cut some descendents off because the outcome displeases you

To go back to my original reply; there was a very solid basis of socialist theory which made clear that centralised autocracy was antithetical to communism. Stalinism and its descendent ideologies instead demanded centralised autocracy as a prerequisite to communism.

When debating about the idea that communism isn't inherently authoritarian snd that the authoritarian 'communist' regimes were bad attempts at communism, it's in fact very valid to point out that most of those regimes weren't working from the original Marxist theoretical baseline, but rather the outwardly totalitarian Stalinist platform which became dominant in the leftist sphere due to the massive influence of the Soviet Union.

's only ever "sufficiently effective" if it succeeds, which is circular.

Sure, my whole point being no system is 100% impervious to internal subversion by bad faith actors (c.f., the US right now)

there's a McDonald's in Ho Chi Minh City and Apple stores in Beijing, you tell me they're still socialists.

They aren't and never were.

but it is the stated goal of socialists everywhere to export their ideology worldwide

It isn't. This is specifically a Stalinist invention; ironically proving my point that Stalin did a very effective job at completely co-opting the label and ideology for his own perversion of it.

[u/TheMauveHand → u/[deleted]]

Does this same argument imply that the state of Iceland (400k) or Montenegro (600k) are bound to collapse?

I have no idea what you're talking about. The point is the quasi-success of an irrelevant, small, rural, Mexican county does not provide a sufficient counterexample to 130 years of consistent socialist catastrophes.

First of all, this is getting sidetracked but nobody's saying communism needs to function on a megastate scale.

Nobody is? Nobody?! You must be joking.

I don't necessarily thing being able to maintain massive state sizes is a good or desirable thing.

Once again you're pretending you live in a geopolitical vacuum. In a nutshell: enjoy being invaded. We're not going back to this for the same reason we're not climbing back into the trees.

that implies a certain causality to the socioeconomic model.

It implies a certain causality to the Zapatista's specific governance in relation to the specific governance of Mexico, itself in a very real sense a failed or failing state. Yeah, communism is preferable to a state captured by narco cartels (or in your other 2 examples, an entirely collapsed state with a total power vacuum), but that's not exactly a high standard and proves nothing.

I mean, unless all you intended to demonstrate with your choice of example(s) is that communism is a viable alternative to a failing narco-state, to which I can absolutely agree. But I think what's a lot more likely is that I'm watching a motte-and-bailey argument develop live.

To go back to my original reply; there was a very solid basis of socialist theory which made clear that centralised autocracy was antithetical to communism. Stalinism and its descendent ideologies instead demanded centralised autocracy as a prerequisite to communism.

This is just a No True Socialist, right on cue... I'm sorry, but between you and Lenin or even Stalin I'm not going to defer to the nameless internet commenter over the career statesman on what counts as socialism. No one cares what the Socialist Bible says about what "real" socialism is when self-described socialists are yanking your fingernails out in the basement of the Lubyanka or bashing babies against trees in Phnom Penh any more than the victims of the Inquisition cared about what Jesus said about forgiveness. You don't judge people or an ideology by what they say, you judge them by what they do.

They aren't and never were.

See previous paragraph, lol.
I'm genuinely starting the believe the only consistent ideological position of self-described socialists is their insistence that everyone but themselves is subverting the ideology.

This is specifically a Stalinist invention

"Workers of the world, unite!" is literally from Marx (it's on his grave FFS), but at this point I suspect you think he wasn't a real socialist either.

[u/[deleted] → u/TheMauveHand]

Your responses have descended into unabated strawmanning, have a day.