The best I can do is make a sandwich that simultaneously has and doesn’t have tomatoes in it.

“I accidentally did something that I had to explicitly go out of my way to do, and doing literally nothing could have prevented it”

No, AES worked

If it worked we’d still have Soviet Union today.

USSR did work. PRC does work as well, and is Socialist, not Capitalist. Read Socialism Developed China, Not Capitalism and Blackshirts and Reds Cuba works, Vietnam works, Laos works too.

We seem to have different definitions of what “working” means. What I’ve got from the article, which glosses over the inconvenient facts (like how much of China’s success can be attributed to western capitalists moving all of their manufacturing to China), is that you can do whatever the fuck you want and still call it socialism. And your fans will believe you, because they don’t care to look deeper beneath the label. The party line trumps all.

Mao didn’t “starve a bunch of people,” Mao ended famines in one of the poorest countries in the world

So what is the Great Chinese Famine then? Another inconvenient fact in the sea of inconvenient facts that you chose to close your eyes to? Do you think that lying to yourself and everyone else about historical facts like this one gives you a moral high ground over Nazi sympathizers who deny holocaust?

Lemmyguessr

There’s no such thing as “true socialism,” that’s part of the point of the article.

Sure, but it provided a reason why the previous attempts of it failed, and in my opinion it’s only a part of the equation.

Why do you think Socialism cares about thinfs like self-serving people?

Socialism can not care, as it’s is not a conscious entity. Socialism can only “care” about whatever the people that are trying to implement it care about. And it failed every time in large part, IMO, because people didn’t care about things like self-serving people.

Not as gospel, sure, but they have been proven correct.

Proven correct by whom? Soviet Union which fell apart? North Korea that haven’t collapsed yet only because it’s propped by China? China which had Mao starve tens of millions people to death and is currently successful only because it’s full blown capitalist and “communist” in name only?

Thanks for linking the article. I like most of its points, but I don’t agree with this materialistic outlook that the economic development is the be-all and end-all solution to implementing “true” socialism.
I believe that the root cause of all attempts of it failing so far is that humans are selfish assholes. Unless everyone bar none starts caring about their brethren and sistren at least as much as they care about themselves, the system can’t work. It’s simply too prone to being overtaken by bad faith actors who will inevitably abuse it for self serving purposes in the name of “socialism”.

Marx and Engels were constantly hounded as “authoritarian” for advocating for central planning.

Well maybe these two guys were a product of their time and had some not-so-good ideas, so not every word of theirs should be taken as a gospel.

I’m theory, yes. In practice the idea of socialism has been hijacked and subverted by the same ruling class to serve their nefarious needs time and time again. Y’all should focus instead on how socialism is incompatible with authoritarianism. “Power to the people” my ass.

Thanks for calling tankies what they are: fascist.