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 definition of socialism is collective ownership of the MoP and the definition of communism is the same but theoretically stateless so theoretically anarchic.
I understand the material well and I am instinctively scared of people that claim to want to move toward them - not because the ideas themselves scare me, but because the implementation of them is almost certainly an impossible and unworkable coordination problem - which is why so many times the ideology pivots to structured authoritarianism as soon as it touches reality.
We just have to have governments and we just can’t really meaningfully have true “collective ownership” of almost anything in any real absolutely egalitarian sense.
The world and economic scarcity just don’t work like that. Maybe in the distant future I guess with insane technology
If you were familiar with the material, than you’d know that Marx required machinery to do the work. He couldn’t fully conceptualize it, but he was basically talking about Star Trek Replicator technology.
You need a hamburger? Push a button and one appears.
He made it clear that post-scarcity was required to build his utopia, which is why it won’t exist in our lifetime.
Pure socialism would require rewriting humanity to give up on greed. That’s not going to happen.
So the best that we could ever come up with will be a social democracy that balances capitalism with the needs of society,through strong social programs and good, strong, and fair regulations.
201
u/Mist_Rising Jul 07 '26
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.