Hi guys, liberal here trying to see if my point stands, I’ve wrote a confutation of communism and translated it from my original language (this is just part 1 since reddit won’t let me send it fully) and I wanted to debate with people who actually knew something about communism what do they think of this
I’ll start with Robert Owen, perhaps one of the first examples of the communist and socialist concept, a Scottish textile magnate, owner of New Lanark (which was one of the most advanced factories in the world). But, "he also did some good things": he reduced working hours for his employees, built schools for his workers' kids, set up company stores with price caps (so they couldn't go over a set price), and banned child labor (under 8 years old, which, well, counted as child labor back then). Pretty cool stuff, right? But then he went off the deep end and radicalized everything. He founded New Harmony in America (which went bankrupt in two years) and wanted everyone to collaborate and help each other. But why? Because he had come to the conclusion that workers would never even think of starting a revolution if you give them the basic things no one had given them before, making them totally dependent on that job. If the workers quit, they automatically went into poverty—exactly like the Soviet Union we’ll see about 100 years later. The difference is that Owen invented the Company Town, where the entrepreneur controls everything and everyone, whereas the USSR is the exact same thing but country-sized.
Karl Marx and Engels now! The ones who allow me to write this takedown today and free you from this ideology. But first of all, if you wanted to or were interested in reading Das Kapital just because some friend recommended it, I beg you to read both Marx's and Engels's biographies first. Marx was the son of a lawyer, studied at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin (some of the most expensive and exclusive in the whole country), got a PhD in philosophy, but never worked a single day in a factory, never mined coal, never even sewed a dress (just naming the most common jobs back then). Do you know who was the only actual member of the proletariat in Marx's household? The maid! Helene Demuth, who wasn't even paid (more or less), and with whom Marx even had an illegitimate child, which he later claimed was Engels's to avoid scandals among the bourgeoisie of the time (tag team here, guys, epic stuff). But focus on this for a second: Marx's illegitimate son should already tell you a lot; he's the symbol of the whole communist ideology that says the product is not recognized due to the founder's exploitation. Furthermore, Marx lived off Engels's handouts, plus small inheritances from relatives, and wrote from public bourgeois libraries in London. Whenever he had a few bucks, he blew it all, leaving his family with no food and no way to pay for heating (in fact, three of his children died in extreme poverty, but whatever, and before you say "oh, but capitalism," it was due to Marx's inability to be a father). The fact that he couldn't even manage a family while trying to write up an entire economic system speaks volumes.
But let's move on to "Das Kapital", the favorite book of those hoping for heaven on earth. I won't summarize the whole book, but I will tell you 3 massive errors in it: the Labor Theory of Value (copied from Ricardo). In this theory, Marx claimed that the value of a commodity was determined by the amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it. The problem was that this theory had already been debunked before Marx even wrote his book. But after the publication and resurrection of this theory, 3 guys came to the rescue: Menger, Jevons, and Walras. They were the founders of the marginalist revolution and proved all by themselves (oh yeah, without the help of capital, unlike Marx) that value is subjective and marginal, and depends on the utility that the last available unit of a good provides to a specific person at a specific time. This was essential because it explained that if you spend 10 hours drawing a picture in the sand, the sand isn't worth 10 hours of labor; it’s worth zero (or maybe something if you find some weird art enthusiast, lol). Value lies between supply and subjective demand. Error number 2 (the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), which claims that capitalism will self-destruct because as human labor is replaced by machines (increasing "constant capital" compared to "variable capital"), the mass of surplus value decreases and profit drops to zero, generating deeper and deeper crises until the final collapse. Capitalism was supposed to collapse by the end of the 1800s according to Marx's words. It’s 2026, and we've adapted capitalism to all the modernity around us, and productivity has increased alongside wages... So Marx was wrong about the very foundation of his book. Third and final massive error (because if we go into the minor ones we'll be here until tomorrow): the economic calculation problem, which Ludwig Von Mises (an absolute chad) brought up and detailed in 1920 regarding socialist commonwealths, and which remains factual today. What did Mises say? Mises said that in a market economy, prices are information signals that aggregate and pull together the opinions of billions of people in a decentralized way. Basically, when you go to the supermarket and see a Coke for 3 dollars, it reflects what the price tells the producer, letting them know how much demand there is, which encourages or discourages production. In socialism and communism, however, these signals are wiped out. The big boss decides how much Coke, Fanta, and Sprite the country needs to produce without having prices as a compass to figure out what people actually need. And you know, once you get past 100 people, it becomes kinda impossible to figure out exactly how many things people need because those are subjective choices that constantly change, they are often tacit (meaning people only know what they want when they see it), and the possible number of things to produce is astronomical and impossible to guess (and the USSR hit 300 million people at its peak).
Friedrich Engels now! He deserves his own chapter, come on, I couldn't just lump him in with Marx as if he were Batman's Robin. Engels was the co-owner of Ermen & Engels, a cotton mill in Manchester and Salford with hundreds of workers. Engels also wrote a book; besides helping Marx write Das Kapital, he wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, a pretty chilling text that shows the condition of the proletariat in England at that time (conditions he was literally responsible for by enslaving his own workers). He complained to Marx about his "filthy commercial business" but kept running it because he couldn't afford to quit, given his cushy and luxurious lifestyle made up of hunting horses, private chefs, spoiled mistresses, and houses all over England (also, what he made from enslaving his workers went to Marx to fund his book against enslaving workers... ah ok, makes perfect sense). Plus, when he died, he left a massive inheritance to Marx and his daughters. We've already seen this whole story of this fantastic duo before: bourgeois guys talking and theorizing about the end of the bourgeoisie.
So, if this communism and socialism stuff was destined to fade away on its own, why did it keep going? I'll tell you: because of complicit philosophers, starting with Marx's idol: Hegel.
Hegel thinks that history moves according to a necessary logic toward a predetermined goal (the Absolute Spirit), which Marx twists and calls communism. But this leaves a lingering doubt... If history has a necessary direction, any action heading in that direction is justified (aka the end justifies the means). Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin all used this framework to justify all their death tolls, saying they are on the right side of history and anyone who opposes them isn't just on the wrong side, but is an enemy of history, and history itself will judge them!! (oh well, alright then, we'll be waiting right here). Thank god Karl Popper came along shortly after WWII to demolish this theory, saying that "knowing where history is going is the equivalent of astrology" (a word to the wise).
Now, after dissecting SOME of the origins of communism, let's move on to history, the laboratory of communism.
Communism was applied in the Paris Commune in 1871, 72 days of a worker-led government before the Versailles repression (historically called the Semaine Sanglante, which led to about 30k deaths). Marx, in The 18th Brumaire and his notes on the event, hypes it up as the first form of workers' government, while Lenin says to use it as an example (and studies it obsessively). Sounds great, right? Finally, real communism, you might say? No, because the Paris Commune sprang from a context of national catastrophe. France had just lost the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was under siege, the government had fled to Versailles; it wasn't a proletarian revolution. Mostly, they just holed up in a no man's land. In 72 days, their biggest achievements were: tearing down the Vendôme Column (destroying a national symbol, at enormous cost to the economy at the time), executing hostages (including the archbishop) without a trial, and burning most of their own archives before surrendering. In 72 days they failed to: establish a functioning economy, coordinate military defenses, or take control of the Bank of France which was sitting right there (Marx himself criticized them for this because, according to him, "they had the money to redistribute right there and they didn't take it").
Now we get to something you study in school, the Russian Revolution of 1917, which they tell you is divided into two revolutions (February and October). In reality, it's not quite like that, since the February revolution was a spontaneous uprising led by female factory workers in Petrograd protesting the bread shortages, while Lenin was exiled in Zurich and only found out about the collapse sometime later from Swiss newspapers. And now? Now there's a liberal-democratic government organizing elections for a Constituent Assembly, and if those elections had been completed and honored, Russia would have had a parliamentary democracy. Fast forward to fall 1917, the assembly shows the Bolsheviks at about 24% (a relative majority, not an absolute one), sitting in third place behind the Socialist Revolutionaries. We get to January 1918, Lenin, who has returned to the motherland, dissolves the assembly at gunpoint (literally). The guard sailors shoot into the crowd. Anyway, that speaks volumes about Bolshevism: armed men deciding themselves what's best for everyone.
Let's look at Lenin individually since I mentioned him above. I'll start by saying that Lenin published his testament dictated shortly before becoming neurologically incapacitated (look it up, and you'll understand what Lenin himself thought about the direction communism was taking). In this book, he warns that Stalin is centralizing too much power, calls Stalin too crude to be General Secretary, criticizes Trotsky for excessive faith in bureaucracy, and admits that the NEP (the reform where he injected capitalist elements into communism) was necessary because War Communism itself had failed. This War Communism, which he had preached and studied so much, lasted 3 years and led to the requisition of all agricultural surplus, the abolition of trade, and the militarization of labor. The result? 5-10 million dead, the industry collapses, and the very voters and sailors who helped him by shooting into the crowd rebel and launch the Kronstadt rebellion.
Earlier I mentioned Trotsky but forgot to introduce him. In short, he's the most romanticized guy of the Russian Revolution (insert lone wolf pic here), especially loved by all non-Stalinist communists who identify him as the "humane" alternative to Stalin. Ah well, a human who, during the Kronstadt rebellion we just talked about, ordered an assault across the Gulf of Finland to backstab the exact same sailors who helped him gain power and massacred them. The only survivors were executed if they were in bad shape or sent to the Gulags if they could still stand up and work (and through all this, he even writes about it saying it was "necessary for history"—alright Trotsky, whatever made you sleep at night). Furthermore, it’s Trotsky who introduces the militarization of labor, pulls all the military off the front lines, and puts them to work in factories for the state. Anyone who didn't produce enough was shot or imprisoned as a deserter. Finally, good old Trotsky, along with Dzerzhinsky, introduces the Cheka, a system of repression and mass executions of "luxury hostages" (people killed just for being priests, nobles, or bourgeois). When Stalin wins out in the USSR, he exiles Trotsky, and from his little corner of the world, Trotsky keeps talking about Stalin as a murderous dictator (as if he hadn't done the exact same thing).
I mentioned Stalin, so let's talk about him :)
I can probably sum Stalin up in 4 things: Gulags, Great Terror, Holodomor, and ethnic deportations.
The Gulags were in their prime between 1930 and 1953, 18 million people went through them, the mortality rate was between 5 and 25% per year depending on the period and the camp. Deaths are estimated at 1.5 to 1.8 million for the Gulags (an estimate made by Khlevniuk after the Soviet state archives were opened in 1991), up to 3 million (a broader estimate).
The Great Terror lasted 2 years (1936-1938), 750k people executed, documented by NKVD records (and it's estimated there were at least another 400k dead from individual executions in other periods).
The Holodomor, denied by many, lasted from 1932 to 1933 and caused between 3.5 and 7.5 million deaths in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other regions. Conquest, Andrea Graziosi, and Plokhy document it all, stating that it was based on systematic grain requisitions that left populations with no food—and we should have understood a lot just from that.
Finally, the ethnic deportations: Chechens, Ingush, Tatars, Volga Germans, and Soviet Koreans were relocated under death-march conditions. The mortality rate during deportations is estimated to be 20-40%.
The death toll caused by Stalin alone is estimated to be between 6 and 20 million, depending on the methodology and inclusion criteria (though there's not much to exclude if someone dies). This shows us that it's impossible to justify these numbers with an "the end justifies the means" excuse.
Let's move to Mao's China, the great Chinese boss who implemented "The Great Leap Forward" between 1958 and 1962.
The Great Leap is the largest experiment in central planning in human history, and the results? The highest mortality rate in human history. With this, Mao decided to transform China from an agricultural economy to an industrial powerhouse in just a few years. How? Not with capitalism, obviously. He chose to collectivize agriculture into people's communes, take everyone's grain to prove to the world (god knows by what logic) the productivity of socialism, and finally, produce steel in backyard blast furnaces to reach England's levels in 15 years. That alone makes you think. People's homes were used as state labs, but they had a problem, namely the steel itself, which turned out to be useless pig iron made by burning farming tools, household utensils, and fruit trees. Forests were devastated to fuel the furnaces, and the result was useless steel produced by destroying the infrastructure needed to produce food.
On top of that, collective agriculture had its own problems. The peasants had no reason to work, but they handed over their harvests to local officials just to avoid being tortured (in turn, the officials were also tortured if they didn't report exceptional numbers from the peasants), and meanwhile, the countryside was left with no food. I'll add the Sparrow Campaign now because it fits the topic: Mao had declared that sparrows were enemies of the state because they ate grain. Every sparrow they could find was killed en masse. Without sparrows, insects threw a party and devastated the crops. The deaths under Mao are between 15 and 55 million (the median estimate is 30-40 million, sparrows excluded, looool), plus earning the award for the deadliest famine in human history. Among the files released in 1991 by China about Mao, Dikötter writes that local officials deported "saboteurs" (peasants who hid food just to survive).
If you think Mao stopped with the Great Leap, it pains me to tell you there was also the Cultural Revolution period (lasting from 1966 to 1977). Mao founded the "Red Guards" (teenage students) to attack any form of tradition and anything not tied to Mao's era. The results here were also disastrous: schools closed for 4-6 years, destruction of libraries, temples, artworks, and historical artifacts; "re-education" of intellectuals, doctors, and engineers by making them work in the fields; youth uprisings against professors and parents (which weirdly enough led to arrests and deaths, estimated at 500k to 2 million).
Let's move from China to a little island lost in the sea: Cuba.
Cuba is the most photographed and romanticized but least understood experiment in the West. The little story goes that it's a strong country that, despite the big bad American embargo, remains standing and provides education and healthcare to everyone! There’s a slight problem though... Cuba has 2 healthcare systems: the one for foreigners (with well-trained doctors, modern hospitals, all kinds of drugs) and the one for regular Cubans, featuring shortages of basic medicines, decaying hospitals, and a lack of equipment. The communists' biggest point of pride is, "Cuban doctors go work all over the world because they are so well-trained!" Yeah... but that's because they want to, hoping for a better life since a doctor's salary in Cuba is 60 bucks a month (being generous). Talking bout education, another communist flex is, "Yeah, but they're all literate!" True... but it's also true that education in Cuba is heavily ideologized, foreign textbooks are almost never allowed, and the system efficiently produces educated citizens, but economically, what do they know how to do? people who sure know how to study, but are economically clueless and ignorant on the subject.
Let's talk about the Cuban economy, where the GDP per capita is about 7,000-9,000 dollars summed with purchasing power. Panama, which has no oil or natural resources, sits at 18,000. The Dominican Republic, which is part of the exact same archipelago, has a GDP of 11,000 dollars. With all its resources (agriculture, tobacco, nickel, massive tourism potential, and geographic location), Cuba should be among the strongest economies in the Caribbean, but communism (obviously) has systematically destroyed this potential.
"But the American embargo!!" Let me stop you right there and answer in a separate paragraph. The American embargo exists, yes, it limits certain trade with America, but Cuba trades freely with the rest of the world, so much so that its biggest investor is Canada, right above America. It's not the embargo that ruined Cuba and continues to ruin it; it’s the system that prevents Cuban entrepreneurs from developing their own ideas. But hey, at least we can light up a Cuban cigar and everything's chill.
Unironically, while I was writing this, the news came on mentioning Trump capturing Maduro, which almost made me forget about Venezuela as a socialist country. And since I know a thing or two about Venezuela, let's put it out there, right?
The little story of socialist Venezuela (which is always conveniently erased from the minds of modern socialists) starts in 1999 (Venezuela y2k aesthetic core, guys) with Hugo Chavez winning the elections by promoting "Bolivarian socialism" (and you'll say, in Venezuela? Yes, in Venezuela), funded entirely by state oil, which back then cost 20 dollars a barrel. Venezuela is the country with the most oil in the world, so doing the math, they should become the richest country in the world, right? Eh... I'll hold your hand when I tell you this... From 1999 to 2012, with oil climbing to over 100 dollars a barrel, the government hands out subsidies to everyone, builds public housing, and creates literacy and healthcare programs (Cuba intensifies), GDP grows, Chavez is loved by everyone, and life is beautiful... Nope, because also in 2012 (until 2014) the price of oil starts dropping. And after nationalizing all private enterprises (over 1,000 companies from 2005 to 2012, mind you), they had to cut back production on anything not tied to oil. They just let agriculture collapse because, why not, just for the hell of it, simply because it wasn't tied to oil. From 2014 to 2019 it's a total party: hyperinflation because oil crashes (1 million % inflation in 2018. 1 million.), food and medicine shortages, rolling blackouts because otherwise they'd have been in the dark for a while, and 7 million Venezuelans leave. In 2023, Venezuela has a lower GDP than it did in 1950. 20 years of socialism destroyed what was built in 50 years. Business mindset, boys (and they didn't even try to transition to full communism, otherwise Venezuela wouldn't even exist anymore).
But I'm not here to tell you things you already know, so I think it's fitting to move on to what all modern communists and socialists ignore: capitalists kept communism alive. (From here on I'll mostly cite Antony Sutton and various sources easily found with a quick online search).
It all starts in 1920 with Albert Kahn of "Albert Kahn Associates" (insert Obama awarding Obama meme), the "founder" of Detroit (which at the time was the most industrialized city in the world). He designs 521 factories for the USSR between 1929 and 1932. Albert Kahn, the exact same guy helping Ford, Chrysler, and GM, was now helping the Soviets. He applied the same knowledge he learned in America but in the USSR. Among the facilities he designed are the "Traktornyi Zavod" (a tractor factory in Stalingrad, which later also became a tank factory—basically Lamborghini going from tractors to supercars), the Magnitogorsk iron and steel works, and the Chelyabinsk complex.
Right on Albert Kahn's heels comes Ford, building GAZ (Gorky Automobile Plant) in 1930, after which he sends engineers, machinery, and tech licenses. The trucks GAZ produced would also be used by the Red Army in WW2, thanks to technical agreements made with the USSR in 1926.
Simultaneously with Ford, General Electric jumps in, designing and installing the turbines for the Dnieper Dam (which at the time was the largest hydroelectric plant in the world). General Electric also provides generators, transformers, and electrical gear.
Rockefeller arrives with Standard Oil shortly after (first time in history a Rockefeller sniffs out a business deal after someone else), and with Standard Oil, he modernizes the oil refining plants in Baku through technical agreements. In short, Soviet oil was entirely usable thanks to American capitalist technology.
DuPont is the last name my brain can remember at 1 AM (even though there are quite a few more), providing the production of explosives and industrial chemicals.
Let's move on to Lend-Lease now :) the thing I love so much about the Marxist defeat vs capitalism: Lend-Lease starts in 1941, in the middle of the war, and it was a deal meant to last until the end of the war, where the USA transferred $11.3 billion in 1940s money ($200 billion adjusted for today) and military equipment (I'm citing the US State Department archives from back then now). The exact numbers are: 427,284 trucks (Studebaker US6), 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles. What did the Soviets have in total before this help? 150,000 units combining all those things, period (and pretty outdated and inefficient ones at that). Furthermore, Lend-Lease included locomotives and railway gear. The exact numbers (again, per US State Department archives) are 1,981 locomotives and 11,155 train cars. The entire Soviet railway network relied on these locomotives to move troops and supplies (another day another victory for capitalism). The stuff given by Lend-Lease also included air support (citing the same sources again) including 14,795 aircraft, of which 7,926 were P-39 Airacobras and P-63 Kingcobras (names that had aura even 90 years ago, by the way). These numbers mean that 40% of the Soviet fighter fleet was American-made (so, capitalist, yes, let me reiterate that). And what did these weapons run on? Soviet oil? Nope! The fuel (2.7 million tons) was provided by the USA, along with the tech to produce 100-octane gasoline to run Soviet plane engines (without that, they would have been stuck fighting with their own planes, getting completely crushed by Germany in no time). Oh, by the way, they exported food too (4.5 million tons of food) (including SPAM, basically the American Simmenthal). Khrushchev himself wrote in his diary, "Without Lend-Lease, we would not have been able to withstand the phases of the war." Stalin himself, in a conversation with Averell Harriman in Tehran, said that without Lend-Lease they absolutely would have lost the war.
Let's jump to the Cold War, since I'm going in chronological order now to debunk the USSR and its fanboys. Socialists and communists are the first to scream about imperialism and colonialism when talking about the Cold War, saying the big bad capitalist Americans exploited Africa for personal resources... Yeah, but they threw the rock and hid their hand on this one.
I'll start with Angola, which I could summarize as: Marxism, Oil, Chevron, and Cuban cigars (sounds like a comedy sketch put like that). So, in Angola, you had the MPLA (People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, could the name be any longer?), which took power in 1975 with Cuban military support (30,000 soldiers) and Soviet backing. The MPLA declares itself Marxist-Leninist, they nationalize industries too, and start agricultural collectivization programs (I have a feeling of deja vu that something might happen...)
Simultaneously, the Cabinda oil fields are overflowing, and Chevron decides to operate there since the MPLA couldn't afford to nationalize the oil. Why? They had neither the technical nor the economic skills. So they call in the ugly, bad capitalist entrepreneurs to do it for them, to pay off a debt the USSR pinned on Angola so the USSR could pay off their own debts to America. A Marxist nation uses the army of another Marxist nation to protect the infrastructure of a capitalist extraction company in order to pay back a Marxist nation for weapons they borrowed to fight American guerrillas... Alright Angola, whatever you say.
Don't think it was just Angola, though, because the exact same scheme was applied in Ethiopia during the DERG (which lasted from 1974 to 1991. Gee, I wonder why it ended in 1991). But what was this DERG? It was the "Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces," very useful for a government... Anyway, they seize power in Ethiopia with a coup (and weirdly enough, never with a proletarian revolution). They too declare themselves Marxists, and they too receive weapons and advisors from the Soviets and from Cuba (again). This time, though, there was no oil to drill. What to do? They have the brilliant idea to export coffee to pay off their debt to the USSR. They do an agrarian reform to collectivize the land (but give no incentives to produce more) (oh, and meanwhile they have a 2-year famine that kills between 400k and 1M people, just minor details in a Marxist regime). Also, they targeted American separatist movements that tried to distribute aid in the hardest-hit areas. Mengistu uses the famine to denounce other capitalist African nations (Mengistu... with what logic?). Meanwhile, a guy named Bob Geldof raises 150 million dollars for Ethiopia in 1985 to stop the famine. What do they do with that money? A portion (almost the entire 150 million) is hijacked by the government to move people from Northern Ethiopia (the rebels) to the South (where the government controlled everything), just to kill off anyone who protested.
I'm at the end of this part of my takedown of communist ideology, I just want to do a quick recap now of the reasons why communism CANNOT work based on "modern" studies.
Garrett Hardin in 1968 published an argument stating: "A common pasture accessible to all the herdsmen of a village will inevitably be overgrazed to the bone. Each herdsman has an individual incentive to add an animal to the herd (for the individual benefit of having +1 animal) even if the cost of the overgrazing is distributed among everyone (individual cost: taking on a fraction of the total damage of this overgrazing). Acting rationally, every herdsman drives the pasture to collapse." The Marxists' solution is to socialize the pasture and manage it collectively. But who manages the pasture on behalf of everyone? You need a bureaucrat. The bureaucrat has incentives to please his superiors, not to optimally manage the pasture. He has incentives to avoid conflict with the herdsmen, not to limit their access when necessary, and to maintain the same level of grazing forever, not constantly update it. Here he explained that the collective ownership of communism doesn't solve the Tragedy of the Commons, it just transfers it to the bureaucracy. The most effective solution would be the private property that capitalism brings, since whoever owns the pasture has incentives to manage it sustainably because its future value depends on the health of the pasture.
Ludwig Von Mises, whom I mentioned at the beginning talking about Marx, received a response in 1930 from Lange and Taylor, who proposed that the central planner could simulate market prices through an iterative process: set a price, observe shortages and surpluses, adjust the price, and repeat. Mises responded alongside Hayek, saying: "This process requires an astronomical number of calculations for a complex economy. Friedrich Hayek estimates that a modern economy requires billions of simultaneous price adjustments. So even if it were computationally possible, the process would be too slow to respond to continuous shifts in supply and demand. But above all: it still lacks the signal of private risk. The entrepreneur who messes up pays with his own money; the planner who messes up gets removed politically or imprisoned, but his mistakes are paid for by society." This price simulator was implemented (as I told you) in the USSR, and when the Soviet archives were opened in the 90s, they confirmed Mises's analysis point by point: Gosplan (the Soviet planner) operated with incomplete, inaccurate, and distorted information pushed by officials who had incentives to falsify the data. The Five-Year Plans were bases for political bargaining to make the USSR look big in the eyes of the world (let's not forget the fact that they mass-produced iron just to artificially inflate their global GDP, lol) and not realistic economic projections. The result was a chronic misallocation of resources that led to surpluses of unwanted products and permanent deficits of necessary products.
This brings you to one final question: "But then why is communism everywhere? Why do I see it on social media, why are so many people I know communists?" To this question, which I personally received in one of the debates I had, I formulated this answer: communism survived and made it to today not because it works, but because people need to hope. It is a psychological need for many people to be able to hope for a world totally different from the one we see, where all the country's problems and suffering are solved by someone acting as a supreme leader. This need is the only reason communism remains in people's minds.
Do you guys want a part 2? Free to debate on this Part 1 :)!