[Boogieman]

Yeah, it really triggers them when I tell lefties that the Soviet, Korean, Cuban, or Chinese dictatorships are “true Communism” because dictatorship is the end stage of Communism. It is “working as intended”.

Sure, the Communist Manifesto posits some fairy tale utopia after the dictators step down, but, as you say, dictators never actually step down in real life. So that gives us two options:

A) Karl Marx knew dictatorship was the end stage and that’s what he intended. The rest was just a marketing ploy.

or

B) Karl Marx was a moron and too stupid to realize that dictators would never voluntarily surrender power, because they don’t want to end up in front of the inevitable firing squad.

So there are only 2 choices for the leftie: admit that Communism always ends with a dictatorship, or admit that Karl Marx was a moron. There’s no third option.

[The Toll]

Option 3 is to scream Nazi and hit you with a bike lock. That’s where we are now though.

[chajin]

According to Marx, feudalism pitted the nobility against the peasants, leading to capitalism, which led to the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, leading to socialism, in which the state miraculously supports the people, rather than causing what happened in the earlier systems, pitting the state against the people.

Marx was a unicornist, or a pseudo-Christian heretic, thinking that the millennium could occur without a Second Coming, and that the state could be Christ.

[robowombat]

Yes, this is what is meant by ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The communist party is the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’ and thus gets to run the dictatorship for an indefinite period as ‘socialism’ is being ‘constructed and protected’. This is stuff everyone who was half literate picked up from anticommunist instruction from school and the media circa 1950-60.

[otness_e]

“Sure, the Communist Manifesto posits some fairy tale utopia after the dictators step down, but, as you say, dictators never actually step down in real life. So that gives us two options:

A) Karl Marx knew dictatorship was the end stage and that’s what he intended. The rest was just a marketing ploy.

or

B) Karl Marx was a moron and too stupid to realize that dictators would never voluntarily surrender power, because they don’t want to end up in front of the inevitable firing squad.

So there are only 2 choices for the leftie: admit that Communism always ends with a dictatorship, or admit that Karl Marx was a moron. There’s no third option.”

Well, technically, there’s three choices, and that’s making it an anarchistic hellhole a’la the French Revolution and either the Reign of Terror or the September Massacres (and the latter was actually something Michel Foucault cooked up due to being so anarchistic and anti-government he wouldn’t even tolerate Socialist People’s Courts to make rulings, preferring “popular justice”, ie mob rule and outright lynchings). Let’s not forget, the French Revolution and ESPECIALLY the Reign of Terror played a very key role in Karl Marx’s creation of Communism, to the extent that Marx in at least two of his writings outside the Manifesto explicitly stated that when they’re in power, not only are they obliged to repeat 1793, referring to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, but also make it even more of a bloodbath (and let’s not forget, that period was particularly infamous for the Jacobins just slaughtering the heck out of each other for kicks, or as General Grignon put it, “Anyone they find in Vendee is to be killed, even if they are Republicans [Jacobins]”, meaning if they found fellow soldiers there, they kill them without batting an eye and maybe a couple of chuckles). Something that’s arguably even WORSE than a dictatorship and if anything is more like how Joker views the world in many Batman stuff (case in point, Gotham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHFwBhZniiQ ; Joker ending in Injustice 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWcUKpePyf0 midpoint more specifically). He may have envisioned dictators “stepping down” in the same manner of how the Jacobins basically behaved before Robespierre got the axe. In fact, this method was shown point blank in Operation Parricide from Culture Wars: https://web.archive.org/web/20050309031846/https://culturewars.com/CultureWars/Archives/Fidelity_archives/parricide.html And heck, was even made blatant in I think New American magazine.

But I agree, Soviet, Korean, Cuban, Chinese, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laosian, and Venezuelan dictatorships are true communism, and it works as intended. And even if it weren’t true communism, it’s certainly close enough that it really doesn’t even matter.