I don't understand why these American commies don't just move to a real communist country

wreckem: Do you, or do you not, support the USA military?

Why don't you move to Russia or something just to make sure

I support our troops

Russia is not a communist country. North Korea works though.

They will never have the communist country they want. Thats what they all say! "it doesn't exist!" Thats because it is fantasy.

Here's a fantasy: Different Victoria's Secret models find me daily, ask for sex, and give me money. I'd vote for that!

Well, largely because Russia is a capitalist hellscape. Putin and his oligarchs are capitalist actors. What year do you think it is? Russia is uber-capitalist these days. LOL.

I assumed so, but I wanted clarification. As a US troop supporter, you should be aware of the centuries of murder, exploitation and atrocities committed by US troops and their allies. You're simultaneously condemning child murders and supporting the side that has killed exponentially more children than the other side.

Sick. Where are those worker-owned factories and businesses in North Korea? Where are the communal living situations for the homeless that fulfill those citizens' basic needs? I'd like to check them out.

Communists support things like socialized work benefits, universal health care, and strong labor rights. None of this is happening in North Korea.

Darn! I guess you are just stuck in shitty ole America. What a tragedy

In my lifetime, I have yet to read a story of the US military going out of its way to capture and behead children. If they did, I would condemn it.

You don't know what you support other than fantasies. You are a confused and miserable fake victim

No, it's because capital controls all the power. Check out what happens in South America whenever they democratically elect someone on the left. The CIA and its proxies swoop in and destroy them.

I don't believe I will live to see a developed nation become truly Communist in nature. Capital is too powerful. I guess I'll have to settle for the pseudo-socialism of the Scandinavian states, which oh-so-coincidentally are the states seen as the happiest, least impoverished, and doing the best in many various quality-of-life metrics.

Then pick up "A People's History of the United States" and just pick a random 10 pages to read, and you'll learn all about American atrocities, including the intentional murdering of children.

Or read about My Lai, which I so helpfully posted a link about from Wikipedia. Or read about what we did in Chile, El Salvador, etc., etc.

You know nothing of the history of the nation in which you reside. The troops you support are a part of The World's Foremost Terrorism Organization.

Right. So, despite multiple attempts in the last 150 years, this vision has failed to materialise. What does this tell us?

While wreckem is usually dead wrong about, well, everything, this is pretty spot on:

The first thing this post tells me is that you are implicitly admitting you were wrong about the nature of the government of North Korea. The second thing is that Capital controls the levers of power worldwide and will do everything possible to prevent socialist governments and worker-based economies to form in developing states. Forget Communism, just look at what "we" (the CIA) do to various South American nations who democratically elect even relatively moderate left-wing politicians.

We bombed anti-capitalists in South (and Central!) America because a goddamn fruit company told us to.

North Korea is widely considered to be a communist country. It clearly doesn't meet with your utopian vision of a communist country, bur newsflash, Utopia doesn't exist.

The fact that every attempt at communism has devolved into a despotic police state should tell you something.

What does the wake of destruction left by capitalism tell us?

A lot of places are incorrectly considered to be a lot of things by a lot of idiots. I don't care.

At its roots, Communism is an economic platform that states that businesses should not be controlled by a very small number of "owners"; instead they should be owned collectively by the workers themselves. On a more macro scale, the spoils of society should be distributed to those in need so that they might at least be able to meet their basic human needs, instead of hoarded by an ever-more-wealthy tiny group of "elite capitalists".

One fleeting look at North Korea is enough to see that none of this is going on there. If anything, the polar opposite is happening. NK attempted some collectivization reforms in, like, the early 50s, as it was recovering from full-scale war, but that has been dead and gone for many decades. North Korea is Communist-In-Name-Only. Frankly, I think that many of the leaders of the upstart revolutions of the time called themselves Communists simply because they thought it sounded cool.

(Marx believed that such a "Full Communist" state would inevitably arise out of the outrage of workers. I think he was wrong on that count for a couple different reasons, but he was still a bad-ass writer who was centuries ahead of his time).

Every sufficiently powerful society in history has left a wake of destruction regardless of its political system, so it tells us something about human nature, but nothing specifically about capitalism.

Yes. I am aware that North Korea is "communist" (in your sense of the word) about as much as the DRC is "democratic". You conveniently skipped over the actual question I posed though. I imagine you started responding to it, and then soon realised that every attempt at "real" communism, as you have described it, on a scale beyond a few dozen hippies, invariably ends in misery, suffering and abject failure.

This is because capitalism is a system which reflects human nature and the innate selfishness of people, whereas communism runs contrary to it, therefore has to be forced upon them.

I don't agree with "nothing", but that's more or less where I was heading. I don't think the outcomes of the few communist experiments tells us definitively that totalitarianism is what communism always leads to. There are confounding factors. Capitalism is not synonymous with democracy and we've got examples of domestic and external expressions of a deficit of democracy in capitalist countries and not all in past either.

I don't necessarily agree depending on what you mean by selfishness. Communism is what's practiced naturally in smaller circles even if the motivation may be inherently selfish. You're hopefully not exploiting your friends and family even if your care and concern for them could be considered selfish in a way. We're just not wired to extend empathy to people outside our immediate "tribe" but that's not quite the same thing as selfishness.

Families don't own means of production. And if you think a family isn't a dictatorship, you must have never been a child.

I live pretty much communally with my best friend/roommate, but I've never known anyone who has done so in a group of more than two adults. And tbh she has dictatorial powers over the dogs. To thrive in the world you need to be able to completely trust one person, but it's nearly impossible to do more than one.

Nuclear families also aren’t capitalist but I think you know what I meant vis a vis selfishness and communal care. I don’t live with my friends, adult siblings, parents or extended family but our interactions more closely resemble communism than capitalism or selfishness.

Po-tahto, poh-tato. The bolded is what matters. The model just doesn't scale.

Do you think North Korea is currently ran better, economically than the US? I'm not trying to make a point with that question because you wouldnt be the only person who would think that they are.

I don't know man. When you try, try again and again, and get some variation of North Korea 100% of the time, maybe communism isn't for you.