@literorrery Oof. I take issue with that one. Not every christian or atheist is a terrible person, but there are a hell of a lot of examples of how communism was really really bad in many countries.

@zetasyanthis I stand by my assertion. Not every communist is a terrible person, either, and communism is no more inherently doomed to fail than any other political system. The democratic republic is equally open to fail states -- we're living in one now -- but I don't hear people saying "democratic republics are a failure" because of it.

Although a lot of millennials are starting to say that of democratic republics....

@zetasyanthis Free Christiana, Denmark, is still going strong. Shinmin, Manchuria, was going fine up until the Japanese invaded from one side and the Chinese from the other after a series of local leaders were assassinated. Can't blame its failure on the political system itself.

@literorrery Okay, the first one there is a thousand people. The second lasted three years from what my quick googling said. If you want to be serious, show me something that lasted for 50 years plus with millions of people that actually worked (and obviously wasn't horrific).

@literorrery For the record, I'm lean democratic socialist, but I'm also enough of a realist that I don't think capitalism will ever truly go away, even if it's not the mainstay. Stupid self interest might be able to be driven into the black market, but you're never going to kill it completely.

@literorrery (I say that so that you know I'm not just idealistically opposed. Yes, we need to do better.)

@zetasyanthis It's not that. It's that I think A) you have an unreasonable expectation that there be prior art, B) you're pointing at things that aren't communism and calling them communism. So before I dig any deeper into this, I want to know what you think communism is.

@literorrery Okay, I want you to know I'm taking you seriously, but I am seriously considering walking away from this conversation since I don't want to drown in minutiae. That said, give me a sec to re-state what I mean here.

@zetasyanthis The political control of a political communist state comes from every commune electing a represenative for the district, which so on and so forth up to the size of a state itself. The top level of the communist state evolves emergently from below.

@literorrery Yes? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make?

@zetasyanthis You mentioned something about there being no means to establish state control of a large-scale economy without the prerequisite of political control. This is where that political control comes from in a political communist system. Also, I'm not that worried about "large-scale" economies, but we can quibble over size in a future discussion.