Define communism.

no one can, not even those who advocate for it. (aside from “not that thing that was repeatedly tried and failed”)

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

You’re welcome.

And what would be those conditions?

common ownership and control of the means of production in a classless moneyless stateless society governed via collective mutual determination or similar horizontal system of power.

oh, i see, makes sense then why it was never tried. how are we going to have a society without a state to govern it? (i mean not to concern troll here, if a solution can be created for this that would be genuinely interesting, but for example that council the soviets created a century ago was clearly a state)

I love how you just keep flaunting your ignorance here. Communists aren’t imbeciles who think that you can simply snap your fingers and abolish the state, they recognize the need for a transitional socialist period from the current system to a communist one.

and how do you wish to avoid that the leaders of said transitional socialist period just cling to power?

as someone who has to live in the aftermath of one of those “transitional socialist periods” that predictably went nowhere and just broke the country’s spirit completely, i’m really damn curious. we are not talking about hypotheticals here.

I grew up in USSR and I certainly preferred it to what followed after the collapse. Claiming that it went nowhere is just brain dead. The fact is that USSR had to compete with the US empire after the war, and US being across the ocean was completely unscathed while USSR had to rebuild under duress. Of course, if you just ignore all that then you can make intellectually dishonest statements of the sort you do.

If you lived in Russia then sure. If you lived in any of the annexed countries and preferred the priviledge of not being able to travel, secret police checking your every fart amd people dying while trying to, for some inexplicable reason, escape to the evil west, then you’re a traitor to your own people.

meanwhile in the real world

• A remarkable 72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism. Only 8% say most people in Hungary are better off, and 16% say things are about the same. In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era. This is the result of almost universal displeasure with the economy. Fully 94% describe the country’s economy as bad, the highest level of economic discontent in the hard hit region of Central and Eastern Europe. Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country’s switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy; 42% disapprove of the move away from communism. The public is even more negative toward Hungary’s integration into Europe; 71% say their country has been weakened by the process.

• The most incredible result was registered in a July 2010 IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy) poll, according to which 41% of the respondents would have voted for Ceausescu, had he run for the position of president. And 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism, while only 23% attested that their life was worse then. Some 68% declared that communism was a good idea, just one that had been poorly applied.

• Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an “illegitimate state.” In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.

• A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -“during the time of socialism”. The survey focused on the respondents’ views on the transition “from socialism to capitalism”, and a clear majority said they trusted social institutions the most during the rule of Yugoslav communist president Josip Broz Tito. The standard of living during Tito’s rule from the Second World War to the 1980s was also assessed as best, whereas the Milosevic decade of the 1990s, and the subsequent decade since the fall of his regime are seen as “more or less the same”. 45 percent said they trusted social institutions most under communism with 23 percent choosing the 2001-2003 period when Zoran Djinđic was prime minister. Only 19 per cent selected present-day institutions.

Yes, in the real world, some people have a very short and selective memories.

Fortunately statistics are quite clear in proving otherwise.

www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/26/this-is-the-golden-age-eastern-europes-extraordinary-30-year-revival

In reality, the “revival” wasn’t evenly distributed. Lots of people became destitute and exploited in the process, while a small minority of parasites started to enjoy lavish lifestyles built on their backs.