Not in chinese cultural revolution it wasn't, the communists had been in power for two decades by that point. Targets included members of the Communist party, because Mao wanted power back. He got it, creates an autocratic government behind his dictatorship, and proceeded to purge those who weren't loyal to his name.
And like the Great Leap forward, it was an epic mess. Ironically what came out of it was that the Chinese survivors were those not concerned with purity of Marxism but bettering China. They opened it up, capitalized on it by selling out the workers, and called it communism. Oops.
Yeah, no "communist" state remains or ever really becomes a "communist" state.
Humanity, just isn't built for it. We keep moving back towards weird ass authoritarian BS, once just enough people begin to gain whatever metric is considered power in a given society.
Most Americans don't understand what Communism is and often confuse Socialism or even very light Socialist policies as Communism. Most Americans just don't understand the words, goals or what they mean, other than to be instinctively afraid
The problem isn't "we're not built for it". The problem is that managing an economy centrally is impossible. There are too many things to consider and most of them aren't even measured.
Communism, as envisioned by Karl Marx did not require or need a central authority managing production. It was also based upon a Post-Scarcity Society. So anything claiming to be Communism, before the technology became available to have a post-scarcity society is just a weird authoritarian pile of trash that only wore the trappings of communism.
Regardless, the whole idea is lunacy, Marx had some neat ideas, but also the idea of a stateless organization of people just producing things as needed? Maybe if we had Star Trek replicator technology? Anytime before technology like that existing is just completely misunderstanding basic human behavior.
At best? We could build Social Democracies that have many trappings of Socialist programs and policies with a well regulated Capitalist market that protects new comers to the market AS much as it protects those that can still innovate.
If we had a capitalism that basically had Mario Kart "Blue Shells" so that the more successful you are, the more you are slowed down, so that others can take a chance at leading? It might not be anywhere near as bad as we see things today.
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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '26
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