Comment by WalterBright
5 days ago
Always the same excuse, that it wasn't "real" communism.
Quoted from your reference:
"Communism is ... a stateless, classless society where resources are owned communally" which, if you read about Jamestown, was the situation with their agriculture.
Jamestown was hardly a dictatorship of the proletariat where workers owned the means of production, nor was it stateless or classes. It was quite literally a strong state's company town that was kept afloat by investors, where rich colonists had servants that grew cash crops lol
The farming was done as a communal activity. Jamestown abandoned it after the first year, and switched to the far more successful system of privately owned plots where the owner could sell the produce as he saw fit.
This information is all easily found online.
> "Communism is ... a stateless, classless society where resources are owned communally" which, if you read about Jamestown, was the situation with their agriculture.
A group owning sharing one resource does not imply communism.
Is this how you're read theorems or design programs? There is a difference between "one", "some", "all", most" - the statement you quote does not remotely prove your claim (which of course is nonsense.)
Likely every country on earth has socially some (or one, or many) communally owned, shared resources. Yet it's ludicrous to claim all countries are communist.
The US has co-ops, community gardens, ESOPs, community owned wifi places, power companies, housing projects, roads, lands - so now the US is communist since it has orders of more magnitude community items than Jamestown, right?
And, also from the words you quote, "... a stateless... society..." Not a single country most would call communist is stateless, so now, by your limited and flawed reasoning, there are no communist societies. Yet this too is silly.
And Jamestown was certainly not stateless either (or classless - they also had slaves - so it's baffling how you pick out a few words you like and ignore a lot more to get to your conclusion).
> "....which, if you read about Jamestown..."
... you would realize.
You're looking for boogey-men where they don't exist.
Can you name a single successful collective farm?
> Likely every country on earth has socially some (or one, or many) communally owned, shared resources
Usually their inefficiency and failure is propped up by taxpayer money. The more of the country that is communally owned, the more communist it is, and the more failure, until there isn't enough taxpayer money to subsidize it and the country fails.
In your reading of Jamestown, what's your explanation of why they abandoned collective farming after the first year? And the Pilgrims did the same?
Collective farming is communism.