this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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The more accurate lesson would be that communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War; the countries didn't just implode of their own accord. Now, it's fair to criticize them for this, if you have an ideology all about material conditions and then you aren't able to survive those conditions, you probably messed up, but I think that's a very different assertion from "communism doesn't work".
You are aware of the many attempts in different countries to leave the USSR, right?
All of them were violently shut down, that's why the system was able to keep going, but without violence against their own population the USSR would've collapsed much earlier.
I'm unimpressed. The US has crushed rebellions from its inception, famously including the civil war but also many other attempts, and I would say that the patterns of what some call the New Afrikan nation within the US to revolt, going solidly up to the 1980s or further depending on your interpretation, are perhaps the most important.
As some guy said, "Revolution is not a dinner party" and establishing and maintaining a revolutionary state requires its own violence. No Marxist says otherwise, as it is the famous quote of Engels: "The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist."