“Real communism has never been tried”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

It's been tried, and it ends the same way every time. It starts with hope and ends with a bread line and a secret police. The Communist Manifesto sums up the whole theory in one phrase: abolition of private property. You can't take what people own without force, so every serious attempt needed a lot of it. Mao's Great Leap Forward ended in a famine that killed tens of millions. East Germany had to build a wall to keep its own people from leaving. Venezuela tried socialism in our lifetime, and more than seven million people have fled. You'll say Marx promised the state would wither away. First came the dictatorship, and nobody hands that back. Let me ask you this: how many tries does an idea get before the problem is the idea? When every recipe burns the kitchen down, stop blaming the cooks.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

The regimes didn't betray the core idea. They carried it out. Abolishing private property was the plan, and it takes overwhelming force to seize what people own.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: abolition of private property.
The results are not a footnote. Collectivized farming and central planning produced mass starvation.
Historian Frank Dikötter documents that the famine caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962 killed tens of millions of people.
People vote with their feet. A system that has to wall its citizens in is telling you what they think of it.
East Germany built the Berlin Wall in August 1961 to stop its own citizens from fleeing to the West.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Marx described a stateless, classless society, and none of these countries ever got there, so you can't blame communism for what authoritarian states did.

Nate: Marx himself said the road runs through a dictatorship of the proletariat. It's in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. Hand total power to a few people to remake society and they never give it back. That's a flaw in the design, not an accident of history. Human nature doesn't wither away because the theory says the state will.

What he grants the other side

Marx was pointing at real abuses in early factory labor.

The lines

“When every recipe burns the kitchen down, stop blaming the cooks.”
“Free countries build walls to keep people out. Communist countries built them to keep people in.”

Sources

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (2010)
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, The Berlin Crisis, 1958-1961
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, Venezuela Situation (2023)