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United States44243 Posts
On January 31 2026 06:34 LightSpectra wrote:
The private owners of steel, railways, coal, and hospitals seemed to give up their ownership without a fight to the Labour government of the UK c. 1945-1951.
You’re missing a bit of context here. They weren’t fully independent of the government in 1945. Labour weren’t proposing a revolution, they were proposing a continuation of what had been the accepted default for six years.
WW2 was devastating to colonial, merchant, and investment interests but for many Brits the experience of national jobs programs, government built and supplied housing, full employment, equitable rations etc. had positives. Many people ate better on rations than they had before the war. Attlee’s argument was that if it could be done in wartime, why not peace? Of course the wartime government ran up ruinous deficits as a necessity to win the war but it’s wrong to imagine 1945 as a revolution. The groundwork was already there, it was the Conservatives who were proposing going back.
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Whether or not it was "revolutionary" is not so important as was the fact that 20% of the economy being collectivized didn't cause society to collapse or stagnate, but resulted in widespread and dramatic increases in standards of living. So if that much can be done democratically, why not 30%? 70%? Why should I believe there's some inherent relationship between abolishing private property and authoritarianism when there's more examples than just Attlee's government?
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United States44243 Posts
On January 31 2026 09:25 LightSpectra wrote:
Whether or not it was "revolutionary" is not so important as was the fact that 20% of the economy being collectivized didn't cause society to collapse or stagnate, but resulted in widespread and dramatic increases in standards of living. So if that much can be done democratically, why not 30%? 70%? Why should I believe there's some inherent relationship between abolishing private property and authoritarianism when there's more examples than just Attlee's government?
It wasn’t collectivized under Attlee’s government. That’s the point. Your entire premise of the election of a Labour government resulting in all these parts of the economy coming under government control is incorrect. A national coalition governed through WW2 in which Labour played a very significant role. WW2 was still ongoing when they held the 1945 election. The Churchill government wasn’t defeated by a new socialist agenda, Churchill and Attlee presented rival concepts of what should replace the wartime national coalition and Attlee’s vision of continuity and expansion won.
There was tremendous economic shock when large parts of the economy fell under government control but in the broader context of u-boats and the blitz it wasn’t the biggest headline of the week. Additionally the national coalition government doing this had suspended elections etc. so your point about no relationship between government takeovers of the economy and authoritarianism isn’t well made here. Nor about living standards, lots of people became homeless around the time the government took over the provision of housing. In context the Luftwaffe had something to do with that but without context you can’t simply declare nationalization was done democratically, smoothly, and without setbacks.
Basically pick another example. Attlee ain’t the one, there’s an awful lot of context that has to come with Attlee.
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"At the end of the War, 94% of industrial raw materials in the UK were controlled by the state.10 However, though the government had taken control of many industries during the War, ownership remained largely in private hands. The only firms taken into national ownership during the War were Short Brothers (aircraft manufacturers), Brown Ltd (precision machine manufacturers) and Power Jets Ltd (manufacturers of propulsion jets)." Source: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8325/CBP-8325.pdf
The critical difference between private and collective ownership is whether the profits go to the owners/shareholders or all of society. The state managing and regulating production doesn't change that. So yes, the nationalizations did happen after the election of 1945.
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On January 31 2026 07:20 Falling wrote:
Anything is possible in theory, but in practice? How many kicks at the can does Marxism get? Infinite tries for the Marxist, but for me not one more if I care about the well being of the people of that country. Not only has it only produced tyranny, it is also a demonstrably less productive system that equally spreads the poverty but doesn't produce wealth for the average citizen.
You can even look at the early colonies (Jamestown is the one I recall) which predated Marxism but early on the colony held the product of their labour in common... and was on the brink of starvation with governors writing about the constant complaints of how people were not doing their fair share so what was the point of working hard for another to lazily receive the benefits. Once they stopped the common storehouses the colony had surplus enough to trade and the women saying they couldn't work because of their children were out in the fields. (I've lost the pdf of the journals so I can't pull the direct quotes right now but the paraphrase is close enough.)
The individual profit motive is far more powerful then the more abstract working together for the common storehouse. (Even if due to job specialization, the individual profit motive does create a form of cooperation for the benefit of many.) With the common storehouse, some of the people will work really hard but a great many will not which will build resentment or apathy in the hard workers. At which point do you introduce coercion if the internal motivation is insufficient to work for the common good?
You’re taking two different angles here, and both are common, but worth distinguishing. The first (which I’ll focus on for brevity; we can revisit the second later if you want) is a sort of empirical, “black box” approach – let’s ignore any of the theory about why Marxism or capitalism would/would not work, and just look at the historical record of societies pre-communism and post-communism. How’d it turn out?
And really, we’re probably talking about Russia and China, right? Those are certainly the most well-known, and in a lot of other cases they’re small and/or peripheral nations whose fates are mostly decided by the ways great powers intervened there. Afghanistan went communist in 1978, and it certainly didn’t go very well for them, but I think it’s pretty hard to look at that story and say the outcomes are a result of fundamental merits or defects in Marxism.
But Russia, sure, it went pretty bad ultimately. The February Revolution looked promising (certainly an improvement over the tsar) but it basically leads to a Kerensky dictatorship until the October Revolution puts the Bolsheviks in power. There’s asterisks – all that is set against the backdrop of WW1, a trying time for everybody, and maybe Bolshevik rule doesn’t turn out so badly if not for the nightmarish civil war they’re immediately embroiled in for many years after WW1 ends. There’s certainly atrocities you can blame on Lenin, but the really hideous stuff comes when Stalin takes over, which doesn’t really seem like a guaranteed outcome from the start. As for China, I’m just not as familiar with the history – maybe someone else could recount the ins and outs there and answer whether the bad outcomes are directly traceable to the ideology.
But like, the French Revolution got pretty ugly, too, and that was a revolution based on the principles of liberal democracy, no? That also ended with a strongman dictator invading everybody, but I don’t think anybody here would say that’s an inevitable outcome of democracy or egalitarianism or constitutional government. There *were* plenty of guys in the 19th century who were pretty sure that was the inevitable outcome of those sorts of principles, and worked hard to make sure everybody stuck with the traditional monarchies instead, but that just meant by 1914 you had a bunch of ancient, ailing dynasties in charge – holdovers from the previous century, totally unequipped for the challenges of the new era, with millions dying as a result. (Nothing like today, of course.)
Don’t get me wrong, I think modern socialists are pretty eager to take Lenin’s ideology as gospel, without acknowledging that he pretty clearly wants a one-party state, and that’s pretty directly responsible for a lot of what comes next. And there’s certainly some No True Scotsman to the often-mocked “true socialism has never been tried” line. But I also think the black box approach – “Marxism always ends in dictatorship, therefore anything from that branch of political thinking is automatically poisonous and evil” – is a bit lazy, no?
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Canada11594 Posts
Russia and China are the most prominent examples and if there were only two examples, that would be a bit lazy, yes.
Members of the Warsaw Pact could be mini-examples although to what extent their policy was dominated by Moscow making them all the one and the same-- better additional examples would be Albania and Yugoslavia. But we could include Laos, Cambodia, etc.
Certainly the French Revolution was an aborted attempt to become democratic, but we actually do have quite a few successes that we can point to whether it's a slow transition into a constitutional monarchy like the UK and Canada or a sudden break with war fought into a republic like America or lost war into occupation into democracy like Japan. There turns out to be quite a few paths to form successful liberal democracies. Not all succeed. Some retreat into authoritarianism like Putin's Russia or will bounce back and forth whenever the military decides to step in like in Thailand.
But any causal link that movements founded on liberal democratic principles leads to failed democracy and an authoritarian regime would be incredibly weak with so many counter examples.
Whereas the push to create a system founded on Marxist principles doesn't create some successes and some fails or it doesn't create some successes but after a hundred or two hundred years it slides into authoritarianism. It becomes authoritarian within a couple years of the movement gaining power if not immediately.
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Let's try this from a different lens, what government/economic models have been the most widely regarded successful and how are they different from humanity's failed attempts at capitalism and communism?
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On January 31 2026 12:49 Falling wrote:
Russia and China are the most prominent examples and if there were only two examples, that would be a bit lazy, yes.
Members of the Warsaw Pact could be mini-examples although to what extent their policy was dominated by Moscow making them all the one and the same-- better additional examples would be Albania and Yugoslavia. But we could include Laos, Cambodia, etc.
Certainly the French Revolution was an aborted attempt to become democratic, but we actually do have quite a few successes that we can point to whether it's a slow transition into a constitutional monarchy like the UK and Canada or a sudden break with war fought into a republic like America or lost war into occupation into democracy like Japan. There turns out to be quite a few paths to form successful liberal democracies. Not all succeed. Some retreat into authoritarianism like Putin's Russia or will bounce back and forth whenever the military decides to step in like in Thailand.
But any causal link that movements founded on liberal democratic principles leads to failed democracy and an authoritarian regime would be incredibly weak with so many counter examples.
Whereas the push to create a system founded on Marxist principles doesn't create some successes and some fails or it doesn't create some successes but after a hundred or two hundred years it slides into authoritarianism. It becomes authoritarian within a couple years of the movement gaining power if not immediately.
I mean, again, for much of the 18th century this was how a lot of folks analyzed liberal democracy – in both the English Civil War(s), and then the French Revolution, folks started out with some high-minded ideals about consent of the governed or whatever, but inevitably a bunch of wild-eyed radicals seize power and execute the king. Successful revolutions in the New World had happened, which revolutionaries could point to as examples in much the way modern socialists might point to China or something, and their opponents would point to a variety of knocks on those systems – if a socialist country was deeply reliant on an institution like the the chattel slavery of the American South, don’t you think people would be pointing to it as proof the ideology is bankrupt?
I don’t want to get too into the weeds on this, partly because I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of historic socialist revolutions (weren’t Laos and Cambodia in China’s orbit the same way the Warsaw Pact “socialist republics” were? Maybe not, I don’t know the history well). But also because I do actually agree with you to an extent – I think there are fundamental problems with economic central planning and one-party government. The latter, in particular, might just inevitably leave you with something dictator-like sooner or later. Socialist revolutions are generally going to involve a whole lot of expropriation of private property, too, which – justified or not – is always going to be an extremely controversial and disruptive process. In a lot of historical cases that’s gonna end poorly.
But at the same time I still think it’s lazy to end the analysis at “everything starting from Marxism, bad. If Marxism touched it, it’s poisonous.” A lot of these historical examples you’re bringing up are a result of people trying (and, often failing) to figure out what decolonization should look like. I don’t think the liberal democracies ever had very good answers for that question, and it inherently deals with a lot of thorny questions (like expropriation!) that it was critical to address. Places went communist because the communists were the only ones saying “you should take your land back from the colonizers and not compensate them for it.” Which… depending on the particulars, idk, that might seem right to me?
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But China is neither communist nor socialist. It's a capitalist single-party dictatorship, authoritarian and verging on totalitarian. It didn't prosper economically until it adopted capitalism under Deng. What exactly would modern socialists be pointing at here?
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On January 31 2026 17:37 maybenexttime wrote:
But China is neither communist nor socialist. It's a capitalist single-party dictatorship, authoritarian and verging on totalitarian. It didn't prosper economically until it adopted capitalism under Deng. What exactly would modern socialists be pointing at here?
That's kinda the point ChristianS is making. China is an example of how communism failed. Anybody serious about trying again will have studied these examples in order to learn lessons of what not to do (e.g. Cultural Revolution = bad). Just like anybody serious about liberal democracy in the 19th century would've studied the French Revolution in order to learn what not to do (e.g. guillotining everyone = bad).
His point was simply that just because some countries tried it and failed doesn't mean it can't work. There's nothing fundamentally flawed about the economics. There are, however, problems. Problems that Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Albania, Cuba and all the other communist experiments faced and failed to overcome. So the same way later revolutionaries learned from the French Revolution about what is and isn't a good idea, modern communists have learned from the failed communist revolutions. A detractor would point to the failures and try to make the point that all those failures means humans just aren't capable of creating that kind of society, but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale.
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Fair enough. I think I missed the point. I haven't read the whole exchange. :-)
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Canada11594 Posts
Well Cambodia and Laos may be in the Chinese orbit, but I don't think the communists of those countries were literally Chinese soldiers occupying their country and then the communist party takes over. Which seems to be more or less what happened with Bulgaria (from a cursory read) which is why I am hesitant to use it conclusively as an independent example when perhaps it was just an extension of the Stalinist communism that had already gone bad. Someone from Bulgaria could tell me more. Cambodia and Laos seem to be fairly homegrown even if established communist countries are bound to assist any of the people's movements globally.
“everything starting from Marxism, bad. If Marxism touched it, it’s poisonous.”
Places went communist because the communists were the only ones saying “you should take your land back from the colonizers and not compensate them for it.” Which… depending on the particulars, idk, that might seem right to me? Well Marx isn't 100% wrong in the sense that he was observing real problems for the working class. I mean, novelist Dickens was also critiquing the condition of the working class. Correctly noticing a problem isn't the same thing as proposing a good solution and sometimes the prescription might be worse. Hitler was correct that Germany got a bum deal at the end of WWI. His solution was rotten to the core.
One of the best things to come out of all the communist revolutions was to scare the bejezus out of the capitalist countries and eventually they moved towards reforming labour laws amongst other things. Which is why while I tend to vote conservative, I could never be libertarian. Changes were needed from the labour conditions of the 1800s and early 1900s. The Marx prediction that the most highly capitalistic countries would begin the revolution seems to be the reverse. The capitalist countries reformed, pacifying the revolutionary movements whereas those that suffered under imperial rule hearkened to any call for liberation and exchanged imperial tyranny with socialist tyranny.
Well, I think a combination of the English Civil War and the French Revolution permanently scared the British away from forming a republic and instead continued their much slower reforms from a monarch with a council of lords to a Parliament of landlords that controlled the purse to one where representatives could be voted for by the elite to the eventual expansion to enfranchise all citizens.
But at the same time as the French Revolution you have the American experiment that hadn't turned to anarchy and Britain demonstrated that an increasingly powerful Parliament wasn't the end of the world.
And in all cases other countries iterated on what they saw from the earlier ones and you saw increasing numbers of countries shifting power out of the hands of one monarch into separate branches of government with greater representation of its citizens. What you didn't see is dictatorship after dictatorship arise with secret police and prison camps of the political outcasts.
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Systemic overhaul is something so extreme I think it's very difficult to pull off, and that's exactly what revolutionaries aim for, but have incpomplete awareness of how intricate and far reaching this system actually is. We're at a point of too big to fail/overhaul maybe? The only changes you can effectively manage are small incremental ones, which is more or less how you should approacb it if you don't immediately want over 100k people get dealt a worse hand.
Belgium for example is in a very difficult predicament where we need to make difficult choices that will hurt some/most of the population because we've coasted on too good conditions for so long.. of course all the leverage is now using it to armwrestle with the government. We even had school children protesting this year, lol.
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On January 31 2026 18:23 Falling wrote:
Well Cambodia and Laos may be in the Chinese orbit, but I don't think the communists of those countries were literally Chinese soldiers occupying their country and then the communist party takes over. Which seems to be more or less what happened with Bulgaria (from a cursory read) which is why I am hesitant to use it conclusively as an independent example when perhaps it was just an extension of the Stalinist communism that had already gone bad. Someone from Bulgaria could tell me more. Cambodia and Laos seem to be fairly homegrown even if established communist countries are bound to assist any of the people's movements globally.
Sure, it’s not Chinese Army troops setting up the government. But it is happening against a backdrop of wars of independence against the French, then the Americans. You’ve got decades of mass casualty fighting, Americans on the one hand dropping so many bombs that unexplored ordinance is still a huge problem to this day. Then you’ve got the Chinese on the other hand offering massive support for the most militant communists they can find, largely for proxy war reasons. That’s not a recipe for success, whatever the ideology of the victorious faction is. Afghanistan went bad for some similar reasons.
This is part of why I mentioned the “small, peripheral nations” thing earlier. Haiti has had a pretty bad time since their independence from France, but I don’t think we can reasonably call that proof that slave revolts are bad (and certainly not proof that slavery is good!). It’s just proof that great powers have an powerful suite of options for immiserating smaller neighbors when they have a mind to.
Show nested quote +
“everything starting from Marxism, bad. If Marxism touched it, it’s poisonous.”
Show nested quote +Places went communist because the communists were the only ones saying “you should take your land back from the colonizers and not compensate them for it.” Which… depending on the particulars, idk, that might seem right to me? Well Marx isn't 100% wrong in the sense that he was observing real problems for the working class. I mean, novelist Dickens was also critiquing the condition of the working class. Correctly noticing a problem isn't the same thing as proposing a good solution and sometimes the prescription might be worse. Hitler was correct that Germany got a bum deal at the end of WWI. His solution was rotten to the core. One of the best things to come out of all the communist revolutions was to scare the bejezus out of the capitalist countries and eventually they moved towards reforming labour laws amongst other things. Which is why while I tend to vote conservative, I could never be libertarian. Changes were needed from the labour conditions of the 1800s and early 1900s. The Marx prediction that the most highly capitalistic countries would begin the revolution seems to be the reverse. The capitalist countries reformed, pacifying the revolutionary movements whereas those that suffered under imperial rule hearkened to any call for liberation and exchanged imperial tyranny with socialist tyranny.
Sure, and I think it’s a reasonable criticism of Marx that his theories are overly idealized and “pure.” Economists back then generally had that tendency – kind of like physicists’ models using frictionless, perfectly uniform spheres. In economics I’ve heard it called the “Ricardian vice.”
Assuming the most capitalist countries will be where the exploitation is greatest, and therefore where revolution will come first, might make sense if you assume those countries will remain maximally lassez-faire capitalist. But their political systems are capable of identifying and responding to the threat, and they have the profit margins to be able to afford some placating the masses. It’s the up-and-coming capitalist powers that have to keep their gas pedal to the floor just to compete, which is why you pretty consistently see the most horrendous working conditions in whichever country is currently trying to “catch up” to already-industrialized powers.
Well, I think a combination of the English Civil War and the French Revolution permanently scared the British away from forming a republic and instead continued their much slower reforms from a monarch with a council of lords to a Parliament of landlords that controlled the purse to one where representatives could be voted for by the elite to the eventual expansion to enfranchise all citizens.
But at the same time as the French Revolution you have the American experiment that hadn't turned to anarchy and Britain demonstrated that an increasingly powerful Parliament wasn't the end of the world.
And in all cases other countries iterated on what they saw from the earlier ones and you saw increasing numbers of countries shifting power out of the hands of one monarch into separate branches of government with greater representation of its citizens. What you didn't see is dictatorship after dictatorship arise with secret police and prison camps of the political outcasts.
The American experiment did not end in either anarchy or dictatorship, it’s true. I’ve already mentioned there were plenty of knocks on the Americans you could make at the time, if you were so inclined, and I also think without the rather singular figure of George Washington it’s not hard to imagine it going to dictatorship in the US, too. We also didn’t have a king to execute, or maybe we would have!
I do think, however, there’s always a tendency on the part of revolutionaries to underestimate the staying power of the ancien régime. The US never would have won without the French monarchy’s help, and when Simón Bolivar is trying it in South America, he has a spectacularly hard time of it, considering the Spanish monarchy doesn’t even exist at that point! They’ve been overthrown by Napoleon, the royalists can’t even agree on who they would swear fealty to, and yet the mythical Crown is still astonishingly difficult to overthrow.
Similarly, despite Marx’s predictions, it wasn’t really workplace conditions that led to communist revolutions. It was war, first in the Paris Commune, then in Russia. The idea of asking a population to endure (or die in) WWI battlefield conditions, by the millions? And you’re not doing it for a nation that gives you rights and a vote and citizenship, it’s for the tsar? And not just any tsar, but fucking Nicholas? Not to mention despite everything you’re sacrificing, everybody knows you’re gonna lose the war anyway? *That* became untenable, not low wages and long hours in factories and coal mines.
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People have been poring over the 2-3 million new DOJ documents that they say represent their compliance with the Massey/bipartisan law from last year.
Highlights so far are Bill Gates asking Epstein for antibiotics to slip to his wife after he got an STD from Russian associates of Epstein, while Epstein was banned from Xbox Live.
This next one MIGHT explain Musk's crashout last year. Epstein inviting him to a party and the combination of Elon being so focused and busy and Epstein's indirect way of speaking and 50 IQ typing style led to a funny misunderstanding:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 10/EFTA01956458.pdf
While more proof of unbridled sleaze comes out I wait with bated breath for evidence of systemic rape of minors/children by... dozens, scores, hundreds? of people over decades which would implicate way more criminals than the cases we already have.
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Just straight up ignoring that the new file release includes Trump raping a girl described as 13-14, huh?
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On February 01 2026 03:48 LightSpectra wrote:
Just straight up ignoring that the new file release includes Trump raping a girl described as 13-14, huh?
If someone now said their friend told them you raped them, would you find it credible? Probably not. Then after submitting that to a tip line and making a record of it, would you find the format of the accusation, now having been recorded by someone who archived it, increases the credibility of the accusation? I wouldn't.
My favorite tip from the document you linked is this one.
Online complainant reported she was a victim and
witness to a sex trafficking ring at the Trump Golf
Course in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA between 1995-
1996
Imagine being raped in 1995 at a golf club that Trump opened in 2006. This is the comparable credibility that led follow-ups to those tips to lead nowhere.
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On February 01 2026 04:19 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2026 03:48 LightSpectra wrote:
Just straight up ignoring that the new file release includes Trump raping a girl described as 13-14, huh? If someone now said their friend told them you raped them, would you find it credible? Probably not. Then after submitting that to a tip line and making a record of it, would you find the format of the accusation, now having been recorded by someone who archived it, increases the credibility of the accusation? I wouldn't.
If someone accused me of raping them, I would immediately do everything I can to prove my own innocence by demanding the public release of every document that could possibly exonerate me, not smear the victim(s) and beg Congresspeople to cover up those documents.
My favorite tip from the document you linked is this one. Show nested quote +Online complainant reported she was a victim and
witness to a sex trafficking ring at the Trump Golf
Course in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA between 1995-
1996 Imagine being raped in 1995 at a golf club that Trump opened in 2006. This is the comparable credibility that led follow-ups to those tips to lead nowhere.
Ah, so if dozens of people are accusing you of rape, all you have to do is find a single minor error or inconsistency in one of those accusations, and then all of them are now utterly debunked. I hope one day Trump is indicted for child molestation and he tries that strategy on the jury.
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On February 01 2026 00:46 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2026 18:23 Falling wrote:
Well Cambodia and Laos may be in the Chinese orbit, but I don't think the communists of those countries were literally Chinese soldiers occupying their country and then the communist party takes over. Which seems to be more or less what happened with Bulgaria (from a cursory read) which is why I am hesitant to use it conclusively as an independent example when perhaps it was just an extension of the Stalinist communism that had already gone bad. Someone from Bulgaria could tell me more. Cambodia and Laos seem to be fairly homegrown even if established communist countries are bound to assist any of the people's movements globally. Sure, it’s not Chinese Army troops setting up the government. But it is happening against a backdrop of wars of independence against the French, then the Americans. You’ve got decades of mass casualty fighting, Americans on the one hand dropping so many bombs that unexplored ordinance is still a huge problem to this day. Then you’ve got the Chinese on the other hand offering massive support for the most militant communists they can find, largely for proxy war reasons. That’s not a recipe for success, whatever the ideology of the victorious faction is. Afghanistan went bad for some similar reasons. This is part of why I mentioned the “small, peripheral nations” thing earlier. Haiti has had a pretty bad time since their independence from France, but I don’t think we can reasonably call that proof that slave revolts are bad (and certainly not proof that slavery is good!). It’s just proof that great powers have an powerful suite of options for immiserating smaller neighbors when they have a mind to. Show nested quote +
“everything starting from Marxism, bad. If Marxism touched it, it’s poisonous.”
Places went communist because the communists were the only ones saying “you should take your land back from the colonizers and not compensate them for it.” Which… depending on the particulars, idk, that might seem right to me? Well Marx isn't 100% wrong in the sense that he was observing real problems for the working class. I mean, novelist Dickens was also critiquing the condition of the working class. Correctly noticing a problem isn't the same thing as proposing a good solution and sometimes the prescription might be worse. Hitler was correct that Germany got a bum deal at the end of WWI. His solution was rotten to the core. One of the best things to come out of all the communist revolutions was to scare the bejezus out of the capitalist countries and eventually they moved towards reforming labour laws amongst other things. Which is why while I tend to vote conservative, I could never be libertarian. Changes were needed from the labour conditions of the 1800s and early 1900s. The Marx prediction that the most highly capitalistic countries would begin the revolution seems to be the reverse. The capitalist countries reformed, pacifying the revolutionary movements whereas those that suffered under imperial rule hearkened to any call for liberation and exchanged imperial tyranny with socialist tyranny. Sure, and I think it’s a reasonable criticism of Marx that his theories are overly idealized and “pure.” Economists back then generally had that tendency – kind of like physicists’ models using frictionless, perfectly uniform spheres. In economics I’ve heard it called the “Ricardian vice.” Assuming the most capitalist countries will be where the exploitation is greatest, and therefore where revolution will come first, might make sense if you assume those countries will remain maximally lassez-faire capitalist. But their political systems are capable of identifying and responding to the threat, and they have the profit margins to be able to afford some placating the masses. It’s the up-and-coming capitalist powers that have to keep their gas pedal to the floor just to compete, which is why you pretty consistently see the most horrendous working conditions in whichever country is currently trying to “catch up” to already-industrialized powers. Show nested quote +Well, I think a combination of the English Civil War and the French Revolution permanently scared the British away from forming a republic and instead continued their much slower reforms from a monarch with a council of lords to a Parliament of landlords that controlled the purse to one where representatives could be voted for by the elite to the eventual expansion to enfranchise all citizens.
But at the same time as the French Revolution you have the American experiment that hadn't turned to anarchy and Britain demonstrated that an increasingly powerful Parliament wasn't the end of the world.
And in all cases other countries iterated on what they saw from the earlier ones and you saw increasing numbers of countries shifting power out of the hands of one monarch into separate branches of government with greater representation of its citizens. What you didn't see is dictatorship after dictatorship arise with secret police and prison camps of the political outcasts. The American experiment did not end in either anarchy or dictatorship, it’s true. I’ve already mentioned there were plenty of knocks on the Americans you could make at the time, if you were so inclined, and I also think without the rather singular figure of George Washington it’s not hard to imagine it going to dictatorship in the US, too. We also didn’t have a king to execute, or maybe we would have! I do think, however, there’s always a tendency on the part of revolutionaries to underestimate the staying power of the ancien régime. The US never would have won without the French monarchy’s help, and when Simón Bolivar is trying it in South America, he has a spectacularly hard time of it, considering the Spanish monarchy doesn’t even exist at that point! They’ve been overthrown by Napoleon, the royalists can’t even agree on who they would swear fealty to, and yet the mythical Crown is still astonishingly difficult to overthrow. Similarly, despite Marx’s predictions, it wasn’t really workplace conditions that led to communist revolutions. It was war, first in the Paris Commune, then in Russia. The idea of asking a population to endure (or die in) WWI battlefield conditions, by the millions? And you’re not doing it for a nation that gives you rights and a vote and citizenship, it’s for the tsar? And not just any tsar, but fucking Nicholas? Not to mention despite everything you’re sacrificing, everybody knows you’re gonna lose the war anyway? *That* became untenable, not low wages and long hours in factories and coal mines.
I think Venezuela is a good example of a country that was set up pretty well to succeed. You had an extremely popular and charismatic leader who had support of the people and military. You have absolutely massive oil reserves with infrastructure already in place. Massive other minerals reserves including gold.
It started out pretty good, but it turned out the leadership was just giving back a fraction while they consolidated power. Grifted so hard that they didn’t even do the basic maintenance. Turned the gold mines into slave labour including children. And managed to create a massive refugee crisis without war or famine.
That question of how to do communism without tyranny is the big one that needs to be answered before anyone who reads history and doesn’t discount any bad news as capitalist propaganda or capitalists being the problem.
Check me if I’m wrong but I don’t think there is a single communist leader that doesn’t eventually live as the richest guy in the country while many people starve or live like paupers. It just became a narco kleptocracy hell hole.
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On January 31 2026 18:09 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2026 17:37 maybenexttime wrote:
But China is neither communist nor socialist. It's a capitalist single-party dictatorship, authoritarian and verging on totalitarian. It didn't prosper economically until it adopted capitalism under Deng. What exactly would modern socialists be pointing at here? That's kinda the point ChristianS is making. China is an example of how communism failed. Anybody serious about trying again will have studied these examples in order to learn lessons of what not to do (e.g. Cultural Revolution = bad). Just like anybody serious about liberal democracy in the 19th century would've studied the French Revolution in order to learn what not to do (e.g. guillotining everyone = bad). His point was simply that just because some countries tried it and failed doesn't mean it can't work. There's nothing fundamentally flawed about the economics. There are, however, problems. Problems that Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Albania, Cuba and all the other communist experiments faced and failed to overcome. So the same way later revolutionaries learned from the French Revolution about what is and isn't a good idea, modern communists have learned from the failed communist revolutions. A detractor would point to the failures and try to make the point that all those failures means humans just aren't capable of creating that kind of society, but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale.
Who has learned though? Anyone who asks those questions gets called bad faith (including you I believe).
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EPT
