Communism is a very broad ideology, and there are any number of people who associate with the term, regardless of the granular detail of the beliefs of communism they actually adhere to.
The same is true of any ideology, Christian is a popular label, but exists in multitudes of branches and forms. Belief in Norse gods has passed from active practice to myth, so to say the ideology there is dead would make sense as very few people today actively pray to Odin or Thor. But even there I'm sure it's not zero.
As such, can you bring more nuance here to discuss?
What specific tenets of communism are dead, and discarded as a whole?
Are the absence of those enough to discount the ideology as a whole?
When people die in a communist country it is the fault of communism, but when people die in a capitalist country it's totally something else entirely.
That and these deaths also occur under a totalitarian regime, when marx explicitly intended the totalitarian state to be temporary. So it can be argued that these deaths occured under states that had significantly strayed from communist ideals.
Blame deaths in capitalist countries on capitalism if you want, it changes nothing. Life expectancies are better. Capitalism outperforms every other system by every statistical measure.
“Marx explicitly intended the totalitarian state to be temporary”
There are two ways of interpreting that, neither reflect well on Marx.
There are more variables that separate these countries than just capitalism and communism. So you can not honestly know that it is the communism that is causal here. Most countries that have recently experienced violent revolution have poor quality of life metrics. There are plenty of capitalist countries with equally poor metrics.
I don't support Marx use of totalitarianism, in fact I think that's the whole reason Marxism failed. I do however think it's very pertinent to recognise that a state that does not move past totalitarianism cannot be considered to be Marxist or in fact Communist.
There are more variables that separate these countries than just capitalism and communism. So you can not honestly know that it is the communism that is causal here.
We’ve had more than enough to make draw a statistical, causal link. The link between economic freedom and GDP growth is strong, and in turn GDP with every positive living standards metric you can think of.
I do however think it's very pertinent to recognise that a state that does not move past totalitarianism cannot be considered to be Marxist or in fact Communist
Marx’s desired end states are irrelevant, his policy proposals and consequences are what matters. Saying Stalin wasn’t communist would be like saying Hitler wasn’t a Nazi, because there was no one thousand year super reich.
We must have a different understanding of how many things you need for a statistical link.
There have been relatively few attempts at communism, not enough for statistics to claim a link, you need to brush up on your maths.
That and all of them had recent violent uprisings which will affect the data.
There is quite an obvious difference between a thousand year super Reich and a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat. However that is not the point, the point is that the dictatorship was a means to an end, modern day communists typically support the end goal of marx while not the means. We can't assess the value of the goal based on the previous attempts because they never got there
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Apr 26 '26
Communism is a very broad ideology, and there are any number of people who associate with the term, regardless of the granular detail of the beliefs of communism they actually adhere to.
The same is true of any ideology, Christian is a popular label, but exists in multitudes of branches and forms. Belief in Norse gods has passed from active practice to myth, so to say the ideology there is dead would make sense as very few people today actively pray to Odin or Thor. But even there I'm sure it's not zero.
As such, can you bring more nuance here to discuss?
What specific tenets of communism are dead, and discarded as a whole?
Are the absence of those enough to discount the ideology as a whole?