But if we want to be precise, he is right - in theory, it wasn't the fault of that socioeconomic system itself, and logically you can't exclude the possibility that in the future there might be a communist system without causing millions of deaths, unfortunately in practice all such systems, including the one in Russia and China, had enormous toll.
The reason for it, in my opinion, stems from the origin: in an ideal world, the whole population would agree the system is fantastic and introduce it, based on mutual respect. What actually happens is that crowds get furious and start killing and introduce a new system by violence, so it's hard to expect a nice fruit from a rotten seed.
I think you've got it the wrong way around. All ideology is wrong, incorrect and fails in contact with reality. The true purpose of ideology (or 'the system') is to provide its adherents with the excuse they need to act badly. It could be relatively mild attempts to increase social status through hypocrisy and virtue-signalling. Or it could be to commit murder, torture and so on.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it:
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
What obscures matters is that evil tends to operate in layers with each layer deceived by the layer above it in the hierarchy (or below it, if you prefer a lowerarchy). So at the bottom there is a multitude of relatively decent people who don't want to kill and really do believe in the system.
The theory is a perfectly spherical cow - impossible in practice, laughable in imagination. We have a firm understanding from historical data of how it fails, even if it doesn't match the imagination of its proponents.
You almost had it right there at the end. Communism isn't compatible with how humans normally act. You can't introduce a system which is incompatible with humans and expect it to work.
Anyway next time you experiment with utopias, try not to bring along hundreds of millions of unwilling participants.
I think Communism is a 19th century pseudoscience idea like phrenology. There’s no evidence these things are real but phrenology was easy to discount while many people still choose to believe in Communism despite lack of evidence of it working long term.
> Communism isn't compatible with how humans normally act.
A correction: most humans. There are a few who like communism. Why not them live their lives as they want? Communities like the Longo Maï are a living proof this is absolutely possible on a tiny scale when a willing subset is involved.
> A correction: most humans. There are a few who like communism. Why not them live their lives as they want?
Because those people then starting to kill all the problematic people, as we saw in Soviet and China. They put all the blame on these "bad people" and sent them to the gulag.
You can't ever let people with this kind of thinking into power.
> Communities like the Longo Maï are a living proof this is absolutely possible on a tiny scale when a willing subset is involved.
At that tiny scale they depend on the surrounding capitalist people and therefore it makes sense they also abide by the laws of the country.
The reason for it, in my opinion, stems from the origin: in an ideal world, the whole population would agree the system is fantastic and introduce it, based on mutual respect. What actually happens is that crowds get furious and start killing and introduce a new system by violence, so it's hard to expect a nice fruit from a rotten seed.