Man, the fact that there are still fools defending Communism attests to the fact that some people never learn.
It is significant that today is the anniversary of the first printing of the Manifesto, 1848, and here are some quibbling over abstruse points when recent history shows us that Communism is counter to human nature and is responsible for more deaths than any philosophy or even any disease.
A pity that so many schools and 'elites' still think it marks them as highminded.
A pity that so many fail to understand the nature of communism, and instead conflate it with inappropriate references to Soviet state capitalism. As I've mentioned previously, the Soviet Union was not a socialist country. Socialism necessitates collective ownership and control of the means of production. Now, this collective ownership can theoretically be manifested (to some extent) through the state apparatus, as is the case in Venezuela, but they do not adhere to a "state socialist" model, and instead rely on local collectivization and governance.
The condition of the collective ownership of the means of production was not satisfied in the Soviet Union because the Bolshevik regime was extremely hostile towards the spread of democracy, as indicated by the dispatch of two Cheka agents to assassinate Nestor Makhno, or the Red Army's brutal suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. Indeed, since it was a rule of the party and the Politburo, no condition of collective governance was satisfied, and a replacement of the tsarist ruling class was instead formed that mirrored the ruling class of Western capitalist nations, and thus formed a state capitalist ruling class.
Hence, Soviet state capitalism is inappropriately conflated with socialism. Noam Chomsky has noted this far too widespread phenomenon, along with the obvious contradictions between socialism and the state capitalism of the Soviet Union in
The Soviet Union Versus Socialism.
When the world's two great propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction.
Of course, Chomsky's article was written in 1986, so you might be inclined to respond that socialists only rejected the Soviet Union once its numerous failures were apparent. (Thought that would still conflict with your claim that socialists ignore the failures of their ideology.) But this claim applies only to certain classes of socialists, and certainly cannot include all. You might mention failures of the Soviet Union when conversing with a Marxist-Leninist, for instance. (And I have many times.) But that approach will likely do you little good in a discussion with those who espouse more libertarian variants of socialism, such as anarchists.
Indeed, legitimate socialists identified the Soviet Union as anti-socialist once they became aware of its authoritarian and statist nature, which might serve as a response to your possible claim that socialists only condemned the Soviet Union once its failures became apparent. For instance, the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin recognized the authoritarian, anti-socialist nature of the Bolshevik regime immediately after the Russian Revolution. In a 1920 letter to Lenin he writes this:
Russia has already become a Soviet Republic only in name. The influx and taking over of the people by the 'party,' that is, predominantly the newcomers (the ideological communists are more in the urban centers), has already destroyed the influence and constructive energy of this promising institution - the soviets. At present, it is the party committees, not the soviets, who rule in Russia. And their organization suffers from the defects of bureaucratic organization. To move away from the current disorder, Russia must return to the creative genius of local forces which, as I see it, can be a factor in the creation of a new life.And the sooner that the necessity of this way is understood, the better. People will then be all the more likely to accept [new] social forms of life. If the present situation continues, the very word 'socialism' will turn into a curse. That is what happened to the conception of equality in France for forty years after the rule of the Jacobins.
Kropotkin quickly recognized the state capitalist nature of the Bolshevik regime and the calamities that socialism would later face if the Soviet Union was identified as "socialist." Hence, it is not only Chomsky, nor even only Kropotkin or other anarchists, but all legitimate socialists who recognize the state capitalist nature of the Soviet Union. Indeed, it could be argued that anarchists recognized the imminent failure of authoritarian varieties of Marxism long before the establishment of the Soviet Union or the Bolshevik party, as evidenced by Bakunin's observations that
"If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself" and
"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."
The anti-socialists' desperation to cling to the falsity that the Soviet Union or its state capitalist ideology was socialist reveals the fact that they have no other arguments against socialism to provide.
"How do you tell a Communist?
Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin.
And how do you tell an anti-Communist?
It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
Ronald Reagan
I've found that most who regurgitate that quote themselves have a rather shallow understanding of Marx and Engels (writhe with numerous misunderstandings), and indeed, the very act of limiting an analysis of socialism or communism to Marx and Engels is itself a behavior that necessitates a shallow understanding of the topics.
