I think most real-life examples have been plagued by corruption to the point that they fall into a different category altogether.
That goes for anything, every system ever made by humans. Even the first forms of democracy, including direct democracy, falls under this umbrella. After all in the theory-world, where everything is ideal, humans do behave good so communism (but any form of good government is possible, even anarchy or a good autocracy).
In the real world, though, humans behave like humans so you get corruption and weird power play. So even if you got a nice working system where every human support society, it will inevitably fail under corruption after the first generations of those who put in place such a system die; which is exactly what happens throughout history each time, even in Athens.
Tldr: theoretical perfect system cannot exist in practice since we are flawed creatures
I think we should learn from that. Maybe all forms of power solely resting within the governing function invites corruption.
I haven’t given up yet on it because capitalism is definitely not working right now but there is a form of communism that you can have an informed and rational fear of.
Generally, if you have a system where more powerful people are more influential, you invite yourself to corruption.
In Capitalism, this expresses itself in Capitalists buying politicians.
In Marxism-Leninism, this is expressed in the upper Soviets becoming more entrenched and corrupt.
The solution for Socialism is to make the upper rungs directly accountable to the masses. The solution for Capitalism is to abolish Capitalism.
The solution to corruption is to stop being human. There, I said it.
Nah, just make systems that are resistant to it and more accountable to the masses. Simple.
Like ancient Athens! It failed obviously.
Or like Ancient Rome! It failed, obviously.
Or like any modern democracy! It failed, obviously.
The problem is that “masses” are truly a reflection of their government and vice versa, more so in a democracy. You take for a given “the mass” takes good decisions but this, again, works only in the ideal world.
And if you think things are better than the past, think again: internet and social media spread so much crap and allowed people to talk too freely, so now you get Joe the Farmer believing he is some sort of genius cause he knows that there is big plot and the corps are covering it up; you get Dalila the economist believe she knows anything about software development; you get Dario the cheese eater believe he is a medievalist just because he read (and ate) “the cheese and the worms”. And all of this people wouldn’t give shit about the “so-called” experts, cause they studied it on eatashit.altervista.org so they must know better than the college-cuck
The problem with democracy isn’t democracy, but allowing people with entrenched power to control the flow of information in their favor, vs the masses. Democracy is a good system.
I don’t disagree with you but how do you prevent misinformation, manipulation and polarisation?
Remove power structures that are inherently unjustly hierarchical, and remove the profit motive in general.
People profit from misinformation and entrenched power, if they don’t have that then democracy works better.
Historical examples, like Revolutionary Catalonia for Anarchism, and the USSR, Cuba, Maoist China, Vietnam, etc. for Marxism-Leninism, absolutely count as Socialist and should be learned from, both the good and bad.
If you dismiss them as “not real Socialism,” you fail to learn from what did work in those instances, like literacy rates and life expectancy skyrocketing. If you dismiss the bad, you make the equal mistake of not accounting for the flaws in systems like Soviet Democracy, which resulted in a corrupt Politburo with outsized power.
Study them in detail and find what to take and what to leave behind.
