So, thought experiment for you. What do you need to overthrow a government and oust a bunch of rich assholes from power? Well, you need power of your own, right? You need loyal comrades.
And say you actually manage it. Chances are it was tough. Some didn’t make it. But now you’re sitting on all this wealth and power. Are you just going to give it back? To who? What if someone abuses it?
You’re the one who did the work. You’re the one with a vision for the future. And now you have these loyal comrades and surely they deserve something for their sacrifices and hard work?
And so it goes.
Anyway, it’s less about Communism as a set of ideas and more about what power does to revolutionaries and how that mixes with the local culture.
Or the CIA made it all up because Mao and Stalin et al did nothing wrong. 🙄
I’ve never seen it put so well. But yeah, it’s super hard for anything nice to actually follow a revolution without outside support.
And there is always outside influence too. That outside influence might make even the best of socialist experiments fail because of embargoes and assassinations. Or maybe the outside influence wants the socialism to succeed, but maybe it has to be their brand of socialism, or else.
Wew lad but can you ever tell this is .ml.
So, thought experiment for you. What do you need to overthrow a government and oust a bunch of rich assholes from power? Well, you need power of your own, right? You need loyal comrades.
And say you actually manage it. Chances are it was tough. Some didn’t make it. But now you’re sitting on all this wealth and power. Are you just going to give it back? To who? What if someone abuses it?
You’re the one who did the work. You’re the one with a vision for the future. And now you have these loyal comrades and surely they deserve something for their sacrifices and hard work?
And so it goes.
Anyway, it’s less about Communism as a set of ideas and more about what power does to revolutionaries and how that mixes with the local culture.
Or the CIA made it all up because Mao and Stalin et al did nothing wrong. 🙄
They made mistakes. But overall their countries were a gazillion times better from their influence.
e.g. From 1950 to 1980, life expectancy at birth in China grew from between 35 and 40 years to 65.5 years, one of the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history
I’ve never seen it put so well. But yeah, it’s super hard for anything nice to actually follow a revolution without outside support.
And there is always outside influence too. That outside influence might make even the best of socialist experiments fail because of embargoes and assassinations. Or maybe the outside influence wants the socialism to succeed, but maybe it has to be their brand of socialism, or else.