Marx Bro

There's a difference between pre-Marxist communism (which existed), Marxism, and what the Soviet Union and its satellites tried to impose.

Marx was all for progress.  He envisioned the end game to be a truly classless society where everyone's basic needs were met and people felt free to find their own purposes in life.  He was all for automation as he saw it freeing workers from drudgery.

The thing is, he was only a diagnostician, not a clinician.  He could identify the problem, but he didn't know how to cure it and admitted that.  His follow up to Das Kapital was supposed to be a blueprint of how to get to a truly communist future.  Instead, it turned into a massive  mountain of notes because every time he came up with an idea, he'd run all the options in his head and realized what he was about to suggest wouldn't work in the long run. 

In the end he threw up his hands and said it would be up to generations to come to figure it out, the best we could hope for now was a smooth and peaceful transition from capitalism (which he approved of as an intermediary step[1]) to socialism before trying to tackle communism.

Unfortunately for him, Lenin and the Bolsheviks got their hands on his notes[2] and cobbled together Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, their own guide book on how to run a communist state based on ideas Marx had already rejected!

Russia, BTW, was not Marx's ideal choice for the first nation to experiment with communism (actually socialism) for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being its long history of brutal authoritarians created a culture inured to brutality and depriviation.  Marx thought Germany wold be the best spot to start experimenting with socialism-to-communism, but ya can't have everything, no?

The capitalistic West ganged up on the USSR from the start.[3]  This did not make Lenin & co feel very lenient to internal opposition and dissent, and they cracked down brutally hard.  Stalin was essentially Lenin's Luca Brasi but Lenin saw how dangerous he was.  He urged those around him not to let Stalin seize power but that idea went out the window[4] when Lenin died.  Pretty much everything in the USSR after 1924 was like The Godfather if Michael and Sonny got bumped off and Luca Brasi survived to run the family.

Fortunately, Stalin was saved from the internal rebellion that was brewing when Hitler invaded, giving him a convenient foreign enemy to direct Russian ire again and buying time from Western interference by becoming a member of the Allies.

There's a metric shit ton more history to go into after that[5] but essentially Russia (and subsequently China and the satellites of both nations) may have visualized true communism as their goal but had fnck-all in figuring out how to achieve it.

China now employs a weird socialism / capitalism hybrid that currently seems to be working for them; I'm curious to see where they'll be 10-20-50 years from now, especially in light of AI already demonstrating it’s better at stock market investments than human beings.  It’s possible Marx and Engels grand communist future may come to pass after all once the reins of the economy are handed over to AI.

© Buzz Dixon

[1] Marx liked capitalism as an intermediary step toward socialism.  There’s a lot you don’t know about Marx -- and a lot of what you think you know about him pro-bourgeoise (look it up) B.S.  For example, did you k ow that he was a sports writer at one time to support his family?  Or that his famous quote about “Religion is the opium of the people” was not a criticism against religion despite what Bible-bangers claim but actually an acknowledgement of how religion provides comfort to the underclasses in society?

[2] They asked for them politely and Marx's estate provided them; whether originals or copies I don't know.

[3] The US actually invaded the USSR in 1918, realized they'd eventually get their asses handed to them if they hung around, and beat a hasty retreat in 1920.

[4] Putin joke.

[5] Including how the space race started because Stalin and the surviving USSR military realized that while they had nuclear weapons, no way could they penetrated US airspace with conventional bombers so they threw what for them was an enormous amount of R&D money into building longe range intercontinental ballistic missiles and that got the US in a space-dick measuring contest with them.