I would not call late-Soviet era revisionist leaders the "best minds in Russia"
When capitalism fails, it must be because we have dumb incompetent cheeto leaders :cheeto-man:
When socialism fails, well, the best possible minds were in power, and with zero outside influence it just couldn't work because socialism is impossible
The dumbest shit about this lib narrative is that it completely contradicts the Cold War narrative that they simultaneously will switch to without blinking an eye.
The Soviet Union was a backwards, 1984 hellscape with no food and comical mismanagement. It also, somehow, was a world bestriding evil empire superpower with advanced technology that was trying to militarize space and dominate the world and the whole free world needs to be mobilized against its unstoppable might.
I think it's possible for both things (hellscape + superpower) to coincide. That's how I see the US - at the same time it's a superpower and a crumbling mismanaged hellworld.
If your argument is that communism doesn't work, you have to contend with the fact that it took a deindustrialized country with a 75% illiteracy rate to space in roughly 40 years.
Libs choose not to do this.
The fact that the US is a decaying empire really has nothing to do with it.
Well they think just saying "it doesn't work" means fucking anything to anyone other than propagandized dog brained libs.
Just ask: What didn't work? Why didn't it work? When did it stop working? What measures were taken by "the best minds in Russia and China" to make it work, and why did those attempts fail? Watch their blank gormless faces when you ask them to simply flesh out this argument beyond the first fucking non-premise of "it didn't work". They don't have the slightest clue because they haven't thought about it beyond that.
Yes, I notice this often. They say "x didn't work" and then you ask what was it that didn't work, and in what sense? And they frequently just don't really know what they mean, so they say contradictory stuff. The most coherent replies are the ones saying "it collapsed". But then did it work before it collapsed? If not, in what sense, and what made it not work? And why did it collapse? They don't really know.
It's wild. The USSR existed for about 70 years, and China is around that as well. How does something that doesn't work last an entire lifetime to become globally dominant forces? The only way this works is if you have this foundation laid before you've even had the chance to consider the alternative.
I'm a communist and think communism works. I just think it's possible to be a nuclear military superpower and also crumbling.
And that's part two, libs have no conception of industrialization. They think Lenin woke up one morning and Russia was a fully industrialized country (but NOT due to anything the communists did), and the only thing the Bolsheviks did is manage to fuck up this miracle of a fully formed industrial superpower appearing out of nowhere.
Evergreen Michael Parenti quote:
You can look at any existing socialist country [...] If you look at any one of those countries, you can evaluate them in several ways. One is comparing them to what they had before, and that to me is what’s very compelling.
Yeah, everyone points to DPRK and Cuba in the mid-90s. But that was during the collapse of their entire international economic base, and it was STILL a thousand times better than what they had before. Like the Joseon Dynasty is nightmare fuel shit.
Well yeah but in the case of the DPRK, there is a counterargument: South Korea.
Not until at least the mid 80s. I mean it was an honest to god totalitarian Fascist state until 1997, it developed by depressing wages and deferring consumer development to a far greater degree than NK, and the development was funded by massive US military aid.
I don't think "Fascism good actually, especially when we fund it" are the optics the US is going for here.
Nah that's not the best answer. The best answer is that North Korea got bombed to shit to the point where US bomber pilots complained that they had nothing left to bomb.
Yes, my father thinks the USSR didn't make anything, they just used the pre-existing factories of the Tsars. You know, the countless modern electrified factories build by the Tsars.
That's because that was basically the narrative the neocons in the CIA were pushing so the US could keep developing weapons, that the USSR had super-weapons.
ah yes, the "ideas" of the revisionist leaders caused it to collapse. Because we're materialists and thats how history moves. By ideas of men.
I wasn't trying to say that, I'm just making fun of the "best minds" line. But I get your point.
