Ask Lemmy

the hardest test for any American

define communism

define propaganda

use both in a sentence that applies to the agreed definitions

No, there are outright communists on Lemmy. This is an accurate take.

American says communism and means conservative democrat or Trump Republican, depending on who is saying it.

AES barely even registers, except for the occasional "Why don't you move to Vuvuzela!"

Why aren't there more?

Comminism isn't anarchic, Anarcho-Communism is. While it's true that Communism has never been reached, it isn't because government remained. The State in Marxian terms refers to the mechanisms by which one class oppresses the other, once class is abolished there need not be a state.

Communism was always meant to be a world republic.

Communism is by definition a society without a state, so nobody has ever lived in a communist state

The last stage of the Marxist evolution of communism involves the decay of state institutions through neglect, as they become redundant in a post-scarcity no-cops Utopia.

But there are a bunch of prior stages (including capitalist industrialization even!) that are neglected. And even then, the utopian end-game is routinely disputed by the subsequent generations of Leninists and Maoists who believe we will never truly escape the revolutionary cycle.

There absolutely are Already Existing Socialist states attempting to move themselves from primitive accumulation, through industrial capitalism, and into a collectively governed socialist post-scarcity society. And people absolutely are living in them. And none of them are Utopian (although the quality of life in many of these countries is exhaustively propagandized to be by degrees to be between Unbearably Hellish and FALGSC-adjacent).

The problems that these countries typically have, however, aren't ones that armchair communists on a niche western internet platform are capable of solving. You're not going to break the Cuban blockade. You're not going to settle the endless territorial disputes plaguing Vietnam. You're not going to undo the legacy of generations of apartheid in South Africa overnight. You're not going to Make the USSR Great Again.

So maybe save yourself some angst and stop trying to tell Nicholas Maduro and Kim Jung Un how to do their jobs. Maybe worry more about why your local chapter of the DSA can't get a teacher's union off the ground.

That is at a 'state' level, there are still smaller level communist places to live. Like where the word 'Commune' comes from and what communism was derived from and attempted to expand into. There are communes all over the world. US included. There is a famous one in London, lots of large ones in Spain. They are communities that exist in their own bubble of micro economics within their larger communities of normal living. You should look it up. They are interesting and normally very appealing.