Not sure if this board is suited for Q&A, but I’ll have to arrange myself as an ancap.
Is communism relevant at all?
If you think about it, Marx and many communists and socialists of his times thought that the first communist revolution would occur in one of Europe’s most industrialised places, namely England and Germany where there was a more substantial working class. Instead, the two most successful communist revolutions in history, the ones that produced lasting communist governments as opposed to the short-lived ones of Hungary and Bavaria, occurred in the heavily agrarian countries of Russia and China. Whilst the Russian empire did have some relatively minor industrial sector (albeit it still relied on serfs and their indebted descendants for most of its labor) compared to its European peers, China was still an agrarian society and even with modernisation under the republican post-Qing Kuomintang, China was by and large made up of peasants as opposed to proles. Same goes for Cuba, whose tourism and agriculture forms the backbone of its economy as opposed to industry, and Cuba is nowadays the only country on Earth to have anything approaching a genuine command economy.
Most communist revolutions thereafter heavily relied on Soviet or Chinese support throughout the Cold War, with many communist governments either falling (e.g., South Yemen) or switching to socdem/neolib economics (e.g., Angola) following the cut of Soviet aid.
For the global north, most of its citizenry work in the tertiary and primary sectors such as agriculture and IT as opposed to industry, as is the case in Britain, America, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, etc… Germany and France are the only countries one can think of with an actual manufacturing sector, but those have been on the decline in recent years. That leaves us with South Korea and Japan in terms of having a strong manufacturing sector, and even then the tertiary sector of those countries makes up the biggest share of their economies.
As for the global south, the lack of industrialisation due to both the global north disincentivising them from it as well as national governments being unwilling to risk their resources on a gamble whose dividends will only manifest after generations means that much of the global south is either agrarian, service-oriented, or in the case of India both agrarian and FIRE-oriented.
So the ideology of communism, who tries to appeal to the proletariat, is irrelevant for the majority of both the global north and global south. That’s not all, as communists to this day still haven’t been able to resolve their own contradictions such as the question of the vanguard party. For Marx, a worker’s revolution was inevitable in the industrialised world due to the contradictions of capitalism. And yet not only was that not true as capitalism continued to thrive, but the communist revolutions that Marx theorised happened in largely agrarian Russia and China, in both cases after they became war-torn and following years of civil wars. So how did his successors try to make sense of it?
For Stalin’s Marxist-Leninism, the necessity of a vanguard party was essential for a revolution, while for Mao’s Maoism peasants were prole as well. But none of those account for people’s personal motives nor solve Marx’s deterministic dilemma, nor confront how communist societies as they existed first formed. Can’t forget how the ENTIRE Soviet bloc, Yugoslavia, the Derg, communist Somalia, South Yemen, Venezuela, Grenada, etc… all fell because, at the end of the day, command economies just don’t work. That’s why all the remaining nominally communist states like Laos, Vietnam, China and Cuba have liberalised their economies to major extents that they are at most mixed economies not that much different than the social market economies of Scandinavia and Germany. North Korea only survives due to nukes and Chinese de facto aid, nothing more nothing much. Market capitalism has uplifted more people out of poverty than every socialist experiment in history, hence why all historically marginalised groups in the west like women, ethnic minorities, gays, transes, the disabled, atheists, Jews, etc… have all pivoted towards capitalism eventually. And that’s something few leftists want to acknowledge or willing to do so lest they confront their priors.
Perhaps communists should admit that their ideology was formulated by a bunch of men who made erroneous predictions about the future, and whose ideas are now practically irrelevant for anything other than geopolitics, which is why most leftist discourse focuses on geopolitics over the issues at said ideologues’ homes.
I should also note that historical materialism fails to explain deeply ideological conflicts like the Crusades. While some may appeal to Michael Hudson, two key things stand out:
- He isn’t a Marxist historian, just a heterodox economic historian
- He only explains the financial motive behind the Vatican’s crusades in Europe, but not the northern nor Near Eastern ones.
All in all, I do think commies should actually ponder on the relevance of their ideas as opposed to waffling about geopolitics. Sure, so much of the US treasurer and those of the EU are directly or indirectly going towards geopolitical ventures, but that still isn’t pedestrian enough for committing commoners to a revolution.
So, how many are willing to address this beyond theorymaxxing?