Was communism ever tried? In the Soviet Union, PRC, etc, the workers didn’t own the means of production; the state did. Calling that communism is like calling present-day Russia a democracy.
And yeah, like the other commenter said, a lot of attempts at communism were thwarted by CIA-backed coups. Not exactly a fair measure of viability.
CIA had nothing to do with USSR being a failed state. Communism is just as easy to fuck up as capitalism or democracy. People are this way and no doctrine will ever be just as long as humans are responsible for its upkeep.
And looking more broadly, how much of any given system's death toll should be counted, and in what way. Mao caused massive amounts of death with the Great Leap Forward, which arguably would not have happened under a system that relied less on central management and more on capitalism's distributed feedback mechanisms. Then there were purges, suppression campaigns, and land reforms that resulted in productivity losses.
But comparing that with a capitalist country that is a liberal democracy is hard. There are a lot of factors involved. Case in point: there was solid growth in China and the USSR. But we can't make a direct comparison between them and the West. China and the USSR were playing catch up using technologies produced by capitalist countries. Take tractors, which immensely boosted productivity. Those were sourced from the West, at least initially.
Stuff like this always happened in China’s history, we can’t just say that he killed X amount of people so it’s bad, we have to contextualize everything. Also, it’s like saying that the American revolution is bad because it killed X amount of people
Representative democracy sweatin’ hard with this kinda logic.
Otto Von Bismark firmly believed that republics could never succeed, as they tended to rapidly deteriorate into horrible authoritarian bloodbaths whenever they were tried.
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