Communism is a failed form of government that should not be tried again.

While it may be true that the leaders in those countries were communist, that doesn't make the government they set up communist. Nearly all of them followed Marxist theory, which is that socialism would be used as a transitional state to communism. What they actually set up were socialist states. The letters, USSR literally stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Once again, communism would have anarchy, no states and no leaders. The fact that Lenin, Castro, and others were leaders of a nation, that means they had governments still, and were in fact not ever communist. Now, while I could argue for why Jamestown wasn't communist, I'll instead focus on how they got to the situation they did. As your wikipedia source says: "The colonists, the first group of whom had originally arrived at Jamestown on May 13, 1607, had never planned to grow all of their own food. Their plans depended upon trade with the local Powhatan to supply them with food between the arrivals of periodic supply ships from England. Lack of access to water and a relatively dry rain season crippled the agricultural production of the colonists. Also, the water that the colonists drank was brackish and potable for only half of the year. A fleet from England, damaged by a hurricane, arrived months behind schedule with new colonists, but without expected food supplies." [1] Their failure had nothing to do with the fact that they gave equal amount of reward to everyone who did equal amounts of work, it had to do with that they were dependent on outside sources for their food, and the bad weather. This problem likely wouldn't be present in a modern attempt at what Jamestown had since today, we have modern transportation. One could easily move to another location where it will be better to grow crops today. Even under a capitalist system, Jamestown probably would have had the same problem: they couldn't grow their own food. That's not a failure of an economic system at all. Regardless if they were more capitalistic, they wouldn't have been able to produce more food. Now, so that I'm not just on the defensive, I'll offer another instance of communism where it was tried, and this one I can argue was successful The example I bring is Revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish civil war from 1936-1939. The Confederaci"n Nacional del Trabajo, which was the most powerful labor union in revolutionary Catalonia at the time, constantly expressed opposition to authoritarian institutions, and worked to maintain control of the economy for the workers. [2] Similar to what happened to the free territory of Ukraine, Marxist revolutionaries opposed the anarcho-communism that Revolutionary Catalonia was instituting. They once again, worked to overturn it and institute Marxist communism, but failed and eventually Revolutionary Catalonia was taken over by the fascists and Franco. [3] None of the failure of Revolutionary Catalonia was due to anarcho-communism itself, but rather they just didn't have the population and military to defeat the Fascists and Marxists. Now, the success comes from the fact the GDP growth of Revolutionary Catalonia was significant, averaging over 6% the 3 years they were in existence.[4] While inflation was an issue, I think they were still a success because of that GDP growth as well as the declining poverty rate which went down 10% during those years. [4] You see, what Revolutionary Catalonia and the Free territory that I talked about earlier show, is that communism can be implemented in various ways. Marxist communists have traditionally been the enemies of anarcho-communists, as you can see since the Red army took over the Free territory, and Marxists tried to overthrow Revolutionary Catalonia as well. While I would argue that Marxist Communism has issues, I would say anarcho-communism is generally successful, and would have continued to be successful if the areas that tried them weren't taken over by stronger forces. So, my opponent is arguing that all communism is a failed system, but in order to do that, they must prove all forms of communism fails. So far, they have only offered evidence on Marxist communism, and whatever form of communism Jamestown might have had, but I wouldn't consider them communist. However, I still maintain the facts that I pointed out that for the Marxist communist attempts, they never actually got to the stage of communism, and Jamestown failed due to other reasons. Sources: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org... [2] See chapter 19 https://books.google.com... [3] See page 429 https://books.google.com... [4] https://books.google.co.uk... (note: this book is not available to look through online, but I have the book.)