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Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

> Do you view India as a failure too?

You realise this is a platitude, right?

I hear this all the time, but in virtually all situations its irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

Historically, communist countries have had terrible standards of living; this is extremely well documented; some (actually, just china as far as I know) have stepped away from an entirely government controlled economy to a government directed economy, and that seems to be working out for them pretty well.

Being a democracy doesn't mean you'll have a great economy and a high standard of living. There are plenty of examples of that not working as well.

...but we've got a few more examples of that working out, than we do of communist regimes working out, historically. You think perhaps there might be a bit of causation there?

Certainly, and importantly, this is totally irrelevant to India.

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  Historically, communist countries have [..]

never existed. The USSR, China, Cuba, North-Korea: none of those countries is, or has ever been, communist. If they called themselves communist, it was to legitimize themselves.

In what ways are they not-ever communist? This sounds a lot like a no-true-Scotsman claim, but I'm genuinely curious.

Marxism and Leninism disagree on what communism is. The major difference being the existence of a ruling party.

Also, if i call myself "Chinese," (I am not of Chinese descent) can I defend my claim by invoking the no-true-scotsman fallacy?

> Certainly, and importantly, this is totally irrelevant to India.

India is a huge (by population) with a similar start point to china also a huge (by population) country, they have some similarities in their culture, but a large defining difference is their way of government, and there reactions to "The West". It isn't totally irrelevant, and meaningful comparisons can be made, but they must be considered.

> Historically, communist countries have had terrible standards of living; this is extremely well documented

You mean "Historically (Except China)"... That's like excluding the US when talking about Democracy.

> ...but we've got a few more examples of that working out, than we do of communist regimes working out

Actually I think you'll find the poorest nations are mostly democratic (of some form). [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage...

> That's like excluding the US when talking about Democracy.

Speaking of which, western countries, with very few exceptions, aren't democracies. They are representative governments. Well, that's if what I call "democracy" is what the Athenians had in mind a few millennia back. Remember, the custom there was for citizens to vote for their rules, not their rulers. Some people did take charge sometimes, but they had to be picked by random trial, not elections.

Come to think of it, Alan Kay did not have Java in mind when he coined the term "OO". And Karl Marx certainly did not have USSR nor North Korea in mind. And so on.

You're all agreeing on the facts here, which are: every government that have thus far claimed to be "communist" where mostly dictatorships where only the establishment had any wealth to speak of. And this outcome is undoubtedly very different from the ideals of those who used the term before that.

The only contentious point here is the definition of the word "communism". Does it apply to the ideal, or to the outcome? Well, who cares?

Unless…

…someone is trying to push arguments behind our back by using a definition over the other. The actually important question is not a matter of definition, but a matter of prediction: what chance do we have to properly implement communism-the-ideal, while avoiding communism-the-outcome?

Choosing a definition for "communism" does not help us on this one. It only shows our respective opinions.

> You mean "Historically (Except China)"... That's like excluding the US when talking about Democracy.

I think you should do some background reading. The history of the standard of living in China is especially well documented.

You mean it improved dramatically since the beginning of communism? What's your point?

  | You realise this is a platitude, right?

So is pointing out that there are some small villages in China that live in poverty.

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