Handre on X - "In 1968, while teenage Red Guards beat their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao's Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament. Consider what he was endorsing. Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between 500,000 and two million people. Schools shut down across the entire country. Students dragged teachers onto stages, hung placards around their necks, forced them to kneel on broken glass, then murdered them. The historian Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a girls' school in Beijing, died on August 5, 1966, beaten by her own students with nail-studded clubs. Sartre called this the people governing themselves. You should understand why a man this intelligent got it this wrong. Sartre believed knowledge served power, that truth was whatever the revolution required, that the individual existed to be dissolved into the collective will. So when Mao abolished the distinction between teacher and student, between expert and mob, Sartre cheered. He had spent decades arguing that bourgeois reason was a class weapon. Here was a regime taking him at his word and clubbing the reasoners to death. This is what economic illiteracy buys you. A university, a price, a contract, and a peasant's grain stockpile all carry knowledge that no central planner can seize or replicate. Mises explained the calculation problem in 1920. Hayek explained dispersed knowledge in 1945. Sartre had access to both and chose the dunce cap of the collective instead, then handed out its propaganda on the Rue de Rennes. He died in 1980, mourned by 50,000 followers, never having retracted a word about Mao. The professors of Beijing got no such funeral. They got a ditch, and a philosopher in Paris explaining that their murder was freedom."
Rothmus 🏴 on X - "Sartre’s defense of totalitarianism ended his friendship with Camus. And the irony is that it wasn’t Camus who walked away from Sartre branding him an immoral monstrosity. It was Sartre who ended it because Camus DARED to criticize the intellectual habit of excusing tyranny when it wore the right ideological colors. That break exploded after Camus published The Rebel. The book drew a hard line between (1) genuine revolt that begins with a moral “no” to injustice and respects human limits, and (2) revolution, which by contrast, treats history as an absolute that justifies any crime today for a perfect tomorrow From the French Revolution’s Terror to Stalin’s Gulags, Camus showed how revolutionary logic always produces new tyrannies that consume their own. On the other hand, Sartre embraced a Marxist framework where history and class struggle demanded “engagement.” Revolutionary violence was often a necessary tool for liberation. In addition to Mao and the Red Guard’s atrocities, he defended or contextualized Soviet crimes, dismissed reports of labor camps as bourgeois propaganda, and drew closer to the French Communists. For him, refusing to get your hands dirty while the oppressed suffered was the real betrayal. The Rebel directly challenged the intellectual tendency to look the other way on mass murder when the killers claimed “the right side of history”. Sartre’s circle responded with a vicious attack in his own journal. Camus fired back. The friendship was over."
Handre on X - "In 1994, Fidel Castro's government did something no Marxist textbook prepared anyone for. It legalized the U.S. dollar, the currency of the imperialist enemy, and built a parallel money around it called the convertible peso, or CUC. Cubans now lived under two currencies: the worthless national peso (CUP) they earned in state wages, and the CUC they actually needed to buy anything worth having. A doctor pulling 20 CUP a month and a taxi driver pocketing CUC tips occupied two different economic universes. You can guess who ate better. Think about what a dual-currency system confesses. A government that claims to abolish markets and prices still cannot escape the fact that its own money is garbage. The CUP did not buy soap, beef, or working appliances at any reliable rate, so the regime created a second money pegged to the dollar to capture the tourist trade and remittances from Miami. The state needed hard money it could not print at will. Socialist planners cannot calculate without real prices: this is the discipline Mises described in 1920. You cannot run an economy on slogans. You run it on prices, and prices require honest money and private property. Castro abolished both and then spent decades quietly importing the dollar's price signals through the back door because his planners were flying blind. The CUC was a parasite feeding on Federal Reserve credibility, which tells you the planned economy could not generate a unit of account anyone trusted. The system limped on until 2021, when the government finally killed the CUC under the "Tarea Ordenamiento" unification. The result was instant. Inflation tore through the island, the black-market dollar exchange rate exploded past 300 CUP, and shelves emptied while the state printed pesos to cover its deficits. Unification removed the borrowed crutch and let the patient collapse. Cuba spent 27 years admitting that a worker's salary was a fiction and that survival depended on touching the enemy's money. Socialism filed its own bankruptcy paperwork in two denominations."
Northern Barbarian on X - "I could have sworn I was told Cuba is socialism done right. Except US sanctions. But why would a worker's paradise be reliant on the capitalist nightmare across the Straits of Florida?"
It's telling how the same people who keep demanding sanctions on Israel keep protesting the sanctions on Cuba
Meme - "In 1987, Castro once again asked a team of scientists to genetically engineer cattle, this time hoping to create dog-sized cows to live in people's homes and produce enough milk for each family. This idea never came to fruition"
cheyenne @evilvillain1231: "My Romanian mom just told me that Ceausescu had at one point announced plans to build apartment buildings "with wheels so they could move around""
Iivana Lemmetyinen | Lemmetöin Vana @ALemppu: "My favourite was Soviet Union trying to domesticate moose for farm work, but the mooses were not impressed by Marxist dialectics."
Handre on X - "Marx built his entire economic system on the labor theory of value, and the labor theory of value is wrong. He claimed that the value of a good equals the socially necessary labor time embedded in it. This collapses the moment you ask why a bottle of water sells for ten dollars in the Mojave and fifty cents in Vienna. The labor is identical. The price is not. Carl Menger settled this in 1871 with his "Principles of Economics." Value is subjective. It arises from the ranking each acting person assigns to units of a good at the margin, not from hours sweated in production. A diamond commands a high price because the marginal unit satisfies an urgent want, while water, abundant, satisfies a trivial one. Marx never answered Menger because he could not. The "Capital" volumes he left unfinished circle the transformation problem endlessly: he could not reconcile labor values with the actual prices markets generate, and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk demolished the attempt in 1896 in "Karl Marx and the Close of His System." Then there is the matter of capital itself. The capitalist advances present money against an uncertain future return, absorbing the risk the worker avoids by demanding payment now instead of after the product sells eighteen months later. That premium on present goods over future goods is interest, and it reflects time preference, not theft. Böhm-Bawerk named this in 1884. Marx had no theory of interest because he had no theory of time. You see the same blindness in his monetary thinking. Marx assumed value was an objective substance you could measure and centrally administer, which is precisely the fantasy that justifies a central authority printing the money supply. Hard money like gold or Bitcoin imposes discipline because no planner sets its quantity by decree. Easy money is the Marxist instinct dressed in a suit: someone in a committee decides what your labor is worth and dilutes it at will. Every socialist calculation since 1917 has crashed into the wall Ludwig von Mises identified in 1920. Without market prices, you cannot allocate capital, because you cannot calculate. Marx never priced anything. He counted hours and called it science."
If you follow left wing logic, either the third world worker is being underpaid by evil capitalists or the first world worker is being overpaid. Of course, the cope will be that both are underpaid, even though the first world worker's wages wouldn't even be covered by the revenue associated with the third world worker's labour
Anti Kommunistic on X - "Every communist government starts by identifying a group to blame for society’s problems. Then it promises extraordinary powers to fix those problems. History shows what usually comes next."
InfantryDort on X - "Communism has always appealed because it offers a morally simple answer to an impossibly complex human problem.
>Life is unfair.
>Therefore someone must be guilty.
>If we punish the guilty, justice will follow.
It replaces responsibility with resentment. Most importantly, it tells ordinary people they can become virtuous without becoming better. That is why it returns every generation. Not because it works, but because it flatters. History’s warning is not that these ideas begin with prison camps. They begin with moral certainty and the belief that society can be perfected if only the “right” people are given enough power to identify the guilty and reorganize everyone else’s lives. Today, that temptation is more dangerous than ever. Never before have governments and institutions possessed so much data, so many surveillance tools, so much influence over information, and such extraordinary capacity to shape public life at scale. Every generation inherits more powerful instruments than the last. Whether those instruments preserve liberty or erode it depends on the ideas guiding the hands that wield them. The lesson of the last century is not merely that communism failed. It is that no society is immune from believing that concentrating power in pursuit of moral perfection will finally succeed. History has already rendered its verdict; 100 million+ dead. Our responsibility is to remember it before we convince ourselves that this time will be different."
Thread by @sfliberty on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 1825, a rich Welsh industrialist bought an entire American town to prove that socialism could work. He had the money, the buildings, the theory, and hundreds of eager followers waiting to move in. Two years later, it was over. 🧵
Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year. Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.
In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the "Boatload of Knowledge." Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here. It collapsed almost immediately. The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn't they? Production dropped and food ran short. Buildings decayed because no one owned them and no one was responsible for maintaining them. Endless meetings replaced actual work. Owen wrote seven different constitutions in two years trying to fix it. None of them worked.
American inventor Josiah Warren, one of the country's earliest libertarian thinkers, was there. He watched the community fail from the inside and later wrote about why. His conclusion: "The difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity." The more the community demanded unity, the more it fractured. Warren identified the deeper problem almost a century before Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek made it famous in academic economics. When everyone owns everything, no one owns anything. When labor earns the same reward regardless of effort, effort disappears. When prices vanish, no one knows what anything is worth.
Owen finally admitted defeat in 1827. In his farewell address, he blamed the settlers themselves, saying they were "unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality." Translation: the system would have worked if only people had been different. Every socialist regime since has offered some version of that excuse. His own son, Robert Dale Owen, put it plainly years later: "All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle must work their own downfall." He had lived through the collapse. He knew what killed it.
Every socialist experiment since New Harmony has ended the same way, and for the same reasons. Prices communicate what things are worth. Ownership creates responsibility for maintaining them. When both are abolished, production collapses because no one can calculate what to make or repair."
When I went to New Lanark, they glossed over this epic failure, of course
Meme - "THE CONTRADICTION OF THOSE WHO CLAIM... "Capitalism allows wealthy oligarchs to accumulate power, serve themselves, and control the lives of ordinary people." THEIR SOLUTION? Give political elites control over the economy, production, and the distribution of resources. SOCIALISM DOES NOT ELIMINATE CONCENTRATED POWER, IT MERGES ECONOMIC POWER WITH THE POWER OF THE STATE."
Handre on X - "Angola sits on some of the richest oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, pumping over 1.1 million barrels per day at its peak, and managed to keep the majority of its population in grinding poverty for decades. This is a policy outcome, not an accident. The MPLA took power in 1975 and immediately began doing what Marxist-Leninist governments do: nationalizing industry, collectivizing agriculture, and funneling resource wealth into the state apparatus rather than allowing it to circulate through voluntary exchange. Sonangol, the state oil company created in 1976, became the regime's personal treasury. By the 2000s, with oil prices surging, Angola was posting GDP growth above 15% annually. The average Angolan saw almost none of it. Isabel dos Santos, daughter of longtime president José Eduardo dos Santos, accumulated a personal fortune estimated at $2.2 billion while overseeing state enterprises. Socialism operates exactly as designed: concentrate control, and the controllers enrich themselves. The coercion is the point. When you strip away the revolutionary language and the five-year plans, the state is an institution that extracts wealth from some people by threatening violence against others. Angola's ruling class did not stumble into predation; they organized around it deliberately, and the MPLA's ideological scaffolding gave them moral cover to call it liberation. Free market economists have explained the resource curse clearly enough: oil wealth flows to whoever controls the state, and that control becomes worth fighting over, so you get civil war (27 years of it, ending in 2002), institutional decay, and zero incentive to build the legal and economic infrastructure that actually produces broad prosperity. Diversification never happens. Manufacturing never develops. Farming collapses after collectivization destroys price signals and private incentive simultaneously. Angola began modest liberalization after 2002, and private sector activity did grow. But the MPLA never surrendered structural control over the commanding heights of the economy. The lesson the regime drew from the Soviet collapse was not that central planning fails: it was that you need better PR and a sovereign wealth fund to quiet foreign critics. Current poverty rates above 40% are the tuition fee ordinary Angolans pay for that lesson."
Damn colonialism!
Karlyn Borysenko, anti-communist cult leader on X - "Last week, I secretly recorded the Party for Socialism and Liberation calling to abolish the constitution and overthrow the government. This is a private training they held for their members. When will they be arrested? The longer clip is in the QT below."
Meme - Students For Liberty @sfliberty: "Modern commies, you're not smarter than Lenin. You won't work harder than Stalin. Whatever you think of them, we're talking about two of the most competent political organizers in modern history. Both were true believers in communism in a way only someone living in the 1920s could be. They tried to make it work. They used the full power of the state. They pushed it to its limits. And it still failed. The attempt ruined entire societies and cost millions of lives. If Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Stalin couldn't make communism work, you won't either. It's over. Turn the page. Happy New Year from Students For Liberty."
Unmoving Great Library: ""A Communist is someone who reads Marx and Lenin. An anti-Communist is someone who understands Marx and Lenin." -Ronald Reagan"
Meme - Radio Cobasna @coandaeffekt: "never will not be funny how the USSR had so many tropicalian client states and that did not improve the fruit and coffee availability in the slightest"
Out Of Context Communism @OOCcommunism: "Average pole"
"My dad never had a banana until he was 26, fuck communism."
Meme - Triploi @triploi.bsky.social: "It actually doesn't matter how you feel about communism. if we don't destroy capitalism it will destroy the planet. Communism is the ONLY force that can defeat capitalism. So you either learn and become a communist. or you sit around and wait for the billionaires to destroy the world. Your choice"
The left wing agenda is all connected. This is also why Greta Thunberg went into the Palestine grift after finishing her climate change grift
Meme - Punished Rosesark @FreeRo...: "What will be your position after communism is achieved?"
Alejandro @ASG_ML: "I will write books on the mornings, playing football on the afternoon and drawing in the evening without ever becoming a writer, an athlete or a painter."
Penitent One @Penitent_One: "Coal mines"
Meme - "EASY MODE: BEING A COMMIE IN A FREE COUNTRY *Masked man in black with Palestine flags in background*
HARD MODE: BEING FREE IN A COMMIE COUNTRY *Tiananmen Square Tank Man*"
Ashton Cohen on X - "Every communist leader you can think of was a downwardly mobile loser from the elite class. Not surprisingly, the people most in favor of communism today come from the “high-education, low-income” crowd."
Daniel Priestley on X - "11 logical steps that take you from fair-minded socialism to totalitarianism and economic collapse …
1.The desire to reduce inequality requires redistribution. You can’t equalise outcomes without taking from some and giving to others. This is definitional, not sinister.
2.Redistribution requires measurement and control of production. To redistribute wealth, the state must know who has what, who earns what, and increasingly, who produces what. Surveillance of economic life becomes a prerequisite.
3.People respond to redistribution by changing behaviour. Capital flees, high earners reduce effort or emigrate, assets get hidden. The policy underperforms its projections.
4.Underperformance is blamed on sabotage, not incentives. Politically, admitting the model failed is impossible. So the shortfall must be someone’s fault - speculators, hoarders, the rich - an enemy class is named and blamed.
5.Closing the loopholes requires expanding coercion. Exit taxes, capital controls, mandatory disclosures, criminalising avoidance. Each patch requires more state power than the last, because each patch creates new evasion.
6.Economic control becomes control of livelihoods. Once the state directs capital, sets prices, or dominates employment, your income depends on political compliance. Dissent now has a career cost.
7.Central planning cannot adequately process information without real price data. Prices are compressed knowledge; abolish or distort them and the government planners are blind to reality.
8. Shortages appear. Shortages require rationing. Rationing requires deciding who gets what - pure discretionary power.
9.Discretionary power selects for ruthless administrators. The worst authoritarians get on top: a system requiring people to override individual choices for the collective good attracts and promotes those most comfortable doing so. The scrupulous exit; the zealous ascend.
10.The project can’t survive open opposition, so speech narrows. If the plan is morally mandatory, opposing it is immoral. Criticism becomes sabotage; media, education, and civil society get conscripted to defend the project. The single goal crowds out pluralism, because pluralism is disagreement about goals.
11.Reversal is now impossible through normal politics. The state controls jobs, capital, information, and enforcement. Institutions that could check it depend on it. What began as compassion has become a machine that no one can switch off - and everyone must pretend is working
… until it collapses and adherence to reality is restored."
The Revolution That Makes Everything Worse - "Under capitalist systems, anti-capitalist activists chant, “The only solution is communist revolution!” and “Soak the rich, make them pay their fair share!” When you step back and look at the historical record, however, communism may be the greatest grift of all time. It does not merely risk concentrating power and wealth, it structurally encourages it. It is no accident that almost every communist dictator and ruling class since WWII has found a way to enrich themselves or their families. Across very different countries and cultures, the pattern is remarkably consistent. Leaders of communist states have lived far better than the populations they ruled, often accumulating wealth, privileges, and even dynastic advantages while claiming to govern in the name of equality. Whether it is Stalin’s Soviet nomenklatura with its privileged access to goods and services, Mao’s insulated ruling class amid famine, Castro’s quiet access to luxury, the hereditary regime in North Korea, or Ceaușescu’s palace built during national austerity, the outcome is the same, add to that modern examples like Venezuela’s leadership and elements of Iran’s ruling structure, and the pattern becomes difficult to dismiss as coincidence. It isn’t coincidence. It is simply guaranteed by structure. In communist states, the people at the top inevitably become one with the government itself. The system collapses the distinction between the state, the ruling party, and the leadership class into a single organism. There is no meaningful separation of powers because the party is the government, and the government is the enforcement arm of the party. Once that consolidation occurs, there are no independent institutions left with either the authority or the incentive to restrain those at the top. The result is predictable. Rather than functioning as an economic system that distributes wealth broadly, communism concentrates control of national resources at the very top of the hierarchy. At that point, enrichment is no longer an aberration, it is an outcome. In a market system, wealth accumulation is at least partially constrained by competition, transparency, and legal structures that exist outside any single individual’s control. Even the wealthiest are exposed to risk, and in creating value, they tend to distribute opportunity and income across employees, investors, and entire supply chains. In a communist system, those constraints are subordinated to the party... The irony is unavoidable. A system built on eliminating class distinctions instead creates a class more insulated from accountability than traditional elites ever were. Without opposition, without a free press, and without independent courts, there is no mechanism to expose or punish abuse. The refinement of the premise is this: it is not just that communist leaders enrich themselves. It is that the structure of communism, as it is actually implemented, makes that outcome not only possible, but likely. Isn’t it ironic that the useful idiots screaming that capitalism should be destroyed because “it doesn’t work” want to replace it with a system that gives them crumbs while being guaranteed to result in the very things (and people) they claim to despise? Maybe it really isn’t ironic, maybe it is just ignorance. Communism is flawless in theory because theory never has to contend with human nature, power, or reality, unfortunately for its adherents, the real world requires all three."
