Comment by tirant
15 hours ago
Communism and socialism have always looked good when compared to the principles of other economic and political doctrines:
- No poor people; everyone supported by the State; Everyone works for the common good; shared resources no matter how lucky or unlucky you are…
From an intentional and moral perspective, nothing can beat it.
However it fails and will always fail because of a couple of important reasons:
- it requires the sacrifice of freedom and individuality. - it needs to suppress any other political alternative - it’s finally always implemented by humans (flawed by default) that have their own benefit as a goal.
Even with constant examples of countries demonstrating why communism always ends up being a perverse system, many people still romanticize the system. Interestingly usually only people in free capitalist societies.
It necessarily increases the concentration of power in the hands of the few. Some of you may recall a statement about power corrupting, etc.
Just on the face of it: extending the idea of company towns to an entire _nation_ seems bad to me on paper.
Those 50-60-70+% of people in former communist states don't "romanticize", they just remember being better. Utopia - no, but better than capitalism. Without an example of a communist state shielded from constant attacks, sabotage and sanctions from the dominant capitalist we will never know how good it could get. We just know the imperfect as it was, it was still better.
> Those 50-60-70+% of people in former communist states don't "romanticize", they just remember being better.
Where did you get those numbers? I remember reading about one survey where the number of people with previous regime ‘nostalgia’ was around 50%. That survey had flawed methodology, and the results were probably mostly about nostalgia related to the times when we were young, and our backs did not hurt (obviously, Russian bots in my country keep blabbering about it ad nauseam as if it were actually about the quality of the old regime).
Let’s focus on the numbers that matter - the election numbers: in the 2025 elections in my country (Czechia), communists did not even get over the 5% necessary to get to the parliament. So, I guess what people actually remember here is communism not being better.
there's a wikipedia link above (showing indeed Czechia amongst the least "nostalgic" - only 25% in 2021). As for elections results, how many ppl don't bother to vote (31% absenteeism vs 36% best electoral score, ANO)? how many tv stations do communists have, how many lavishly funded NGOs? how many instances proving the "communist" party to be no more that a pale imitation if not straight up controlled opposition...
As for the "flawed methodology": 66.2% of Romanians regret Nicolae Ceausescu in a study..."commissioned by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile" - I'd say if the "institute" of bad-mouthing communism had to admit that number... well it seems the russian bots are extremely efficient, maybe we should listen to them instead of useless Ursula bots ;)