Communism

All right: "1. Tends to fail: Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba" Communism is not like capitalism; it is not a system, it is not a relationship, it is not a model of organization, it is a process. It is process that will certainly procure systems, relationships, and organization of its own, sure, but defining communism on any of those grounds alone is superficial and juvenile. As Marx said, communism is not a state of affairs; the only implicit role of a communist movement is the abolition of the present state of things, and nothing more. The intricacies of a communistic society are entirely ambiguous insofar as we are immersed in a real, vibrant communist movement. What does this have to do with your argument? The failed communist movements of the 20th century were indeed attempting to manifest communism, sure, but their failures can ONLY be attributed to the conditions within their proximity. This idea that "communism" must alone shelter the blame for the failed movements that simply tried to set it in motion is inane. Take this analogy for example: If a man crashed his car trying to navigate a drive-thru, would the fault of the crash be with him or the establishment that owned the drive-thru? Obviously, the fault of the crash therein lays with the man, as whatever caused the crash manifested SOLELY within the confines of himself and his car. "2. Supresses individual liberty: doesn't allow for private property, the government controls everything, people are forced to be equal in socioeconomic status" First of all, Marxian literature refers to private property only as a connotation for the ownership of the means of production. A factory owned by a company is private property. A home owned by a family is personal property, and would stand just as legitimately in a communistic society as it would in a capitalistic society. The only "government" in communism is the one facilitating it. There is no implicit role of government beyond this; furthermore, a communist movement that has realized itself to the fullest extent will be devoid of government in its entirety. Actually, people are not "forced" into any socioeconomic category. I'm not sure what you even mean by this, so I'll just ignore it for now. Please elaborate more on what you mean by this All right, now on to the capitalism section "1: Allows for individual freedom: most democracies are capitalist" Democracy is a method of governance, and capitalism is an economic model. They are not in any way reliant on each other, so I fail to see how this argument is substantiated by anything other than circumstance. "2: Allows opportunity for upward mobility" Au contraire, the reality of capitalism procures quite the opposite effect. Sure, hierarchy within an enterprise may allow for some degree of "upward mobility," as you put it, but that is all within the direct proximity of the business. Who exists outside of that? The people who own it, referred to in classical Marxist literature as the bourgeois. There is no way a cashier can work their way up from their position to one that actually gives them ownership of land. Sure, they can work their way up in some fashion to a promotion or a job of higher ranking, but there is no way they can actually obtain ownership of land by "working hard." The intricacies and management of capitalistic businesses actually have little to do with the Marxian critique of capitalism, which is more centered around the idea of class struggle (bourgeois, those who exist outside of that hierarchy, and the proletarians, the one inside that hierarchy). "3: Despite its flaws, it is the best system in existence." Care to elaborate on that? Before capitalism took hold in Europe, I'm sure that feudal lords said the exact same thing. You can't claim that capitalism is superior to something that doesn't exist yet solely because it is prevalent today; sure, the iPhone 6s may be the "best" iphone in existence, but communist movements do not exist in the present. Communist movements exist in the future in order to supersede capitalism and to procure, analogically speaking, the iPhone 7 or some other variant. Shifting gears here, the philosophical realm was more of what I was attempting to spark debate in here; I am totally fine with this continuing in an political-economic manner, but I would like to at least touch on the philosophical/epistemological sides of both arguments at some point in this debate. Would you consider yourself to be an objectivist? Or are you aligned elsewhere