Ah, yes. "No true Scotsman".

Nope, not going to play that.

Edit:

At this stage, enough so-called "Marxist" governments have descended into slavery, starvation, and mass murder that the burden of proof should lie on those who advocate such governments, and that burden should be heavy indeed.

But nope, it's always "but that wasn't REAL Marxism".

After a century of trying, with dozens of attempts, it is quite clear that either those hellhole governments are "real Marxism" or, conversely, that "real Marxism" does not and cannot exist.

Otherwise someone would've gotten it right by now.

Leninism directly reverses fundamental premises of Marxism, including the required initial conditions and path. It's not Marxism.

There has been real Marxism, though it's never been absolutely dominant in any society. Particularly, it has been a key driving force in replacing the system of Capitalism that 19th Century socialists identified and critiqued with the substantially different modern mixed economy as the dominant economic form of advanced societies, even though Marxists would claim that as far from a complete success, as the modern mixed economy is far from their desired end state.

> Ah, yes. "No true Scotsman".

Refusing to back up certain or all interpretations of an idea by no means amounts to NTS.

You're making a fallacy by saying that these problems you mention are core to Marxist thought. Modern Marxist philosophers are almost dedicated to finding flaws in 20th century Marxist implementations, and doing research on other models such as anarchism, post-left anarchism and technocracy.

Dismissing this research as "lol no true scotsman, not playing that" is incredibly ignorant and facile.

"You're making a fallacy by saying that these problems you mention are core to Marxist thought."

Nope. I recognize that "Marxist thought" doesn't specifically advocate such things.

Nonetheless, those things always happen.

So far the scorecard is about Murderous Hellhole: 100, Utopia:0.

Usually one only needs to be burned once or twice before deciding that touching a hot stove is a bad idea, even if that glowing burner does look really pretty.

I don't think they must necessarily "always happen"; capitalism is much more developed now, much more advanced, and the conditions for revolution are more pertinent. I think you should move out of thinking of the way hitherto "Communist" states have been thought of. If you think that the kind of society Communism wants to acheive is desirable, I would also suggest that you help research and develop ideas for how to reach it.

You may be interested in anarchist writers, or Murray Bookchin.

I sometimes wonder if there are Neo-Nazis out there who argue that Hitlers regime was not real National Socialism.

The "interesting" thing about capitalism is that it kills millions of people every year and people defending it don't need to say that this isn't real capitalism. It is. And it made it common to die, kill and fight wars for money and resources.

> The "interesting" thing about capitalism is that it kills millions of people every year and people defending it don't need to say that this isn't real capitalism.

Actually, defenders of capitalism, when confronted with problems attributed to it, frequently argue that the problems are "the State" or "crony capitalism", and that the problems would not exist with "real capitalism".

Of course, both the State and cronyism are features of the system for which the name "capitalism" was coined by its critics, but that doesn't stop the defenders of capitalism for saying that those are separate and opposed things to "real capitalism".

> And it made it common to die, kill and fight wars for money and resources.

That was common long before capitalism.

The two most murderous regimes in history have both been socialist ones. Capitalism has proven itself to be less deadly and more prosperous than both socialism and feudalism (which I assume you must be referring to with your "it made it common...", as if there was some idealistic pre-capitalist society to emulate).