[flagged]
The problem is not that it's wrong—it's that it's repetitive and tedious, and usually turns nasty. We don't need to go around the same boring merry-go-round for the millionth time here. Please don't post like this to HN.
Here are some additional explanations that may help:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Sure, maybe the governments that tried to implement communism failed on the world stage. Some today would say the same thing about the current economic/governmental systems-that-be (the US government of pre-WWII + cold war era was much more socialistic and less democratic than it is today – up to a 90% marginal income tax and no democratic election of US senators, very different than it is today!).
This entire article is about how, at least anecdotally, someone who lived under such a regime doesn't remember it being evil – in fact, quite the opposite! Governments, economic systems, and powers-that-be are always changing. In 20 years do we really think everything will be the same as it is now?
There are examples of market economy without democracy (Russia, Saudi Arabia, and to a degree, China too) but i can't think of any, present-day, example of democracy without a market economy. I don't think these can exist, because on one hand, once people have a real say in how they are governed, they will want to enrich themselves and it requires market economy and the rule of law (without rule of law, you can have profit, but can't have capitalisation because ownership is volatile), and on the other hand, people will not want to have a say in how they are governed before they are more or less well-off, because more primary needs will dominate their minds - and without popular pressure, democracy can't form. And without market economy, people are destined to remain poor.
Cuba is perhaps an interesting case study – and maybe it would be a lot more successful than it is today if it weren't so heavily sanctioned and embargoed by the United States – given that it's in a lot of ways still in its Cold War era. But it's hard to deny that for all the resources they've been stripped of (and attempted US-backed coups, and a non-mutually-agreed-US military base / prison on their land), that they've found some modern degree of success for what they have: very high education rates due to universal education, universal healthcare that is ahead of US-aligned peer-countries in the Caribbean, a respected culture of exporting medical professionals around the world, developed their own (effective) covid vaccine because the US sanctioned them from receiving any significant doses and now have the highest vaccination rate in the world, rising per capita gdp and household wealth... and they are, technically/in-name and more-so since the passing of Castro, a democracy (though the US government would say otherwise, but in my opinion if you'd consider modern-day Turkey, Ukraine, Hungary, or Poland a western democracy then so is Cuba), and yet also communist in most facets.
Russia form? Russia already existed, as the Russian socialist federal republic, a part of the Soviet Union. What would have been the alternative to letting Russia inherit the Soviet Union by being the last one remaining?
Sadly, time and again humanity has proven unable to do good at the scale of a country. The laudable ideals of any political system will need to resist man's evil nature or they're doomed to fail, and the communist regimes have all proven to be to easy to corrupt.
Communism isn't evil, it's foolish. The same way the idea that unrestricted capitalism is foolish if you strive to make everyone's lives better.
Marx argued that those who wanted to create socialism or communism through altruism were fools - his argument was that socialism was only possible once a society was well developed enough that it was in the self interest of the working class to force distribution of wealth.
He repeatedly criticised attempts to argue for equality for the sake of it rather than redistribution that would benefit those demanding it.
That's a tautology: Anything would be great if people were actually good[1]. That you need to rely on some external force of good for Communism to look good says more about Communism than any propaganda machine ever could.
[1] Other -isms would work even better than Communism if people were good.
Communism replaces a multitude of small, localised optimisation problems with a single, centralised, completely intractable optimisation problem, and at the same time destroys the very information required to tackle that problem at all.
Communism cannot work on any but the smallest scale, and is utterly doomed when applied to any modern nation state.
J. B. S. Haldane - himself a socialist - pointed this out as far back as 1928.* Whether communism is inherently evil or not, we know for a fact that it cannot ever work.
> The laudable ideals of any political system will need to resist man's evil nature
The solution to that is not to permit the government the ability to cause great harm to its citizens in the first place.
* See "On Being the Right Size", an essay mostly on scaling in biology, but also touching on related subjects.