Twitter Communists

[TheMorawOne]

It's not that communism has repeatedly been tried, and found to almost certainly lead to oppressive failed regimes - they just didn't do it right. It's the no true Scotsman fallacy.

Communism means fully planned economy, distribution of goods, abolition of private property and many other things that were never implemented. Even communist parties bragged about being in transitory period between socialism and communism. This is because implementing marxism communism requries enormous resources and perfect planning, which makes it almost impossible to do. However, closest thing to that, Ukrainian Free Territory worked fairly well, but was destroyed by Bolsheviks quickly, so it kinda doesn't count.

If this is a 'No true Scotsman' fallacy, then so is saying that no true Scotsman speaks only French, lives in Guatemala and was born to two Inuit parents.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

I think we should probably avoid having this turn into an argument about whether or not communism is a failed ideology. There's already a thread to discuss political ideologies in the Off Topic section.

 

[PantsOfDesire]

I think we should probably avoid having this turn into an argument about whether or not communism is a failed ideology. There's already a thread to discuss political ideologies in the Off Topic section.

True. Only last thing I'd add add is that implementation is part of installing any new system, so I'd agree with @TheMorawOne that we probably haven't actually seen communism implemented. The problem is that it seems to fail in implementation, and that is surely part of the system. Maybe it'd work if it fell from the sky fully formed.

 

[ScottB]

I'll add one thing to this and resist my temptation to say anything further: Marxism-Leninism (which is what most people think of any time Communism or Marxism is brought up) is by itself a single school of thought in what is a essentially a mosaic loosely centered around same vague idea... a bit like religious denominations, in an ironic way. The unfortunate global events which led to the blurring of these sects are real, but they don't provide any meaningful evidence for an honest discussion of Marxism in its native form.

Regardless, I've had my own share of encounters with these extremist types not on Twitter, but on a message board whose membership is drastically skewed toward the left. Most of the Communists there don't know anything about far-left politics beyond what they glossed over on Wikipedia pages. Having to constantly be in the same sphere of these pseudo intellectuals was far more torturous than reading these amateurs' tweets.