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@realcaseyrollins How would you measure a "booming economy" in the context of a communism anyway? Usually we rate the health of an economy by how much disposable income someone has. The whole point of a communism is that there is no distinction between disposable income since there is no code income needed for necessities, those are (supposedly) provided.
In that case here you go, a graph of previously communist countries showing GDP per capita. You can clearly see how the growth of GDP changed pre and post communism here as well as the cost of the transition itself.
@realcaseyrollins Perhaps, this is largely why I asked you what the indicators should be and then provided whatever that was.
Healthcare in tiny socialist countries can be impressive though, from what I've heard
@realcaseyrollins I am of the opinion that communism generally fails both economically and in terms of personal freedoms.
In the charts I provided you can clearly see that the rate of increase int he GDP is significantly higher post-communism than pre-communism for most of those countries.
@realcaseyrollins You are looking at the GDP, thats the wrong thing, you need to look at the rate of change of the GDP, the slow of the lines not their position.
@realcaseyrollins on second look perhaps its less obvious than I first thought. One would have to calculate the actual slopws here to really say I suppose. It also isnt the best graph considering it is cut off a bit too early anyway.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins there are as many flavors of Communism as there are flavors of Liberalism.
Libertarian Communists for example have little trust in the State and seek to maximize civic liberties, all that while only allowing economic systems with a republican form.
While it is certainly true there are many fgorms of communism, but definition being a communism ensures you have a very specific set of properties, and you **must** have this to qualify as a communism.
Therefore it is perfectly reasonable to say, and in my opinion correct, that any of the many flavors, if they happen to have the properties needed to qualify as communist, then that quality will ultimately lead to a much worse economy and quality of life than if that communistic property were not present.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins all Communists wish to abolish classes (through the abolition of lucrative private property in itself). No matter if you are a Marxist-Leninist or a Market Anarchist, this is a common ground you will accept as true.
However it means there are many many points on which they both disapprove; they disagree on economical planification. they disagree on how workplace democracy takes form. they disagree on at which point should the State dissolve itself.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins which is why you will very rarely see Marxist-Leninists, Trade-Unionists and Market Anarchists parade together ; their moral compass is far too different to hope for some sorta leftist unity.
Indeed. But their moral compass is less of a concern for me than the fact that the shared property of communism is a harmful factor (in my opinion) to the quality of their proposed governments.
depends how you define "shared property" -> we never witnessed Republics in which the only acceptable legal structures were worker cooperatives and citizen associations. Hell you could still have your (somewhat) free market mechanisms. and I dont see how workers (the real wealth creators) enjoying workplace democracy would be a harmful factor for wealth creation.
there are been a few attempts but they were short-lived, mostly due to external factors, such as wars.
"shared property" is not the definition of communism. Communism is most commonly defined as a system of government where the means of production **and** the means of consumption is controlled.
Contrast this with socialism where only the means of production is controlled.
The definition of "shared property" isnt particularly necessary given the formal definitions.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins both definitions are too restrictive ; it supposes only the Marxist-Leninist model exists.
Fun fact: originally "libertarian" came from the french word "libertaire", which was just a fancy word for anarchocommunist (it was mostly less scary to the average citizen)
and this libertarian model didnt rely on the State to organize production ; it relied on workers themselves, through worker cooperatives, credit unions and social-insurances.
Marxism came only much later
Neither definition is completely limited to the marxist-leninst model, but it will rule out some governments as falling under the definition, and rightfully so.
The thing about definitions is they arent meant to be "rewritten" just because you want something to be communist that isnt. The truth is if the definition doesnt describe something as communist, then it isnt communist, and we shouldnt be rewriting definitions to change that.
Its a semantic discussion, but still an important one. Its why we can actually make useful statements about ommunism and not expect those statements to become useless just because the definition is a moving target. Redefining communism serves no useful purpose as I can see it.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins my final point is ; its counterproductive to say communism is harmful when we only tried only one of its flavor.
its like saying democracy is harmful as a whole because some of them decayed into fascist states
We have in fact tried quite a few flavors of communism. There are atleast 12 or 13 countries I can think of off hand which were non-marxist communisms.
Consider the over 100 different communist countries we have tried over the years, and in many different "flavors" and forms, all of which effectively failing, I think its pretty safe to say its a deadend.
Now if you want to try a non-communist country that you think should be considering communist but isnt because it doesnt meet the definition, then I might be more forgiving in my opinion of that. We would have to discuss the details. But I would never consider those communist myself.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins may I know which non-marxist-leninist communist republics are you referring to? 
cause legit all the ones that came to my mind have been mostly victim of external factors such as fascism and foreign-backed coups d'état.
La Commune de Paris -> defeated by loyalist forces
Spanish Libsoc Republics -> crushed by fascists
Rojava Confederacy -> getting wrecked as we speak by islamist-fascists and turkish nationalists 
The following is the list generally accepted by experts on the topic as historical and present day non-lenist-marxist communisms:
Algeria People's Democratic Republic of Algeria (since 1962)
Bangladesh People's Republic of Bangladesh (since 1971)
North Korea Democratic People's Republic of Korea (since 1948)
Belarusian People's Republic (1918–1919; unrecognized)
Autonomous Republic of Crimea Crimean People's Republic (1917–1918; unrecognized)
Hungarian People's Republic (1918–1919; unrecognized)
Korean Empire People's Republic of Korea (1945–1946)
Kuban People's Republic Kuban People's Republic (1918–1920; unrecognized)
Libya Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (1977–2011)
Ukrainian People's Republic (1917–1921; succeeded by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic)
West Ukrainian People's Republic (1918–1919; joined the Ukrainian People's Republic)
Zanzibar People's Republic of Zanzibar (1963–1964)
Not always recognized as states:
Donetsk People's Republic (since 2014)
Luhansk People's Republic (since 2014)
Algeria was under state-controlled economy, which means it was marxist-leninist in nature (for quite a while at least)
North-Korea is Juche -> highly based on Maoism and ML
other countries you mention either shortly joined the USSR or simply disappeared. some tbh I dont even know (where the fuck was kuban?)
"Algeria was under state-controlled economy, which means it was marxist-leninist in nature (for quite a while at least)"
That is not the official definition of lenist-marxist communism. So not an argument for it being one.
Again this isnt my personal list. This is the list as determined by people who spent their whole lives studying and becoming experts in political science and know far better than you and I what is or isnt a particular type of communism.
I think the problem here is largely semantic. You want to talk about a specific category you have in your head of government. You feel that it depicts a type of communism in spirit, but technically speaking it does not and this causes the divide in our conversation.
The fact is what you probably want is something that may not be a communism at all (hard to say as you havent clearly defined what this might be).
Its a case of you trying to change the semantics to fit your theory, and its just not a good way to objectively reason as it creates language that is at odds with the definition of words and thus you wont accurately communicate the ideas you want to share. Even if you feel the semantics should be changed it is best to work within the current semantic structure for clear communication.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins point is ; none of them experimented with cooperatives, civilian associations and a proper prohibition on lucrative property. none of these elements require a strong state apparatus. market forces could have been tolerated to some extend.
which explains the huuuuge gap between ML and Libsoc ideologies.
The existance of cooperatives is not considered communism. WE can and do have cooperatives in the USA and we dont remotely resemble a communism. Nor would a country that makes "lucrative property" illegal necceseraly be a communism.
There are ways you could implement those that might be communistic of course, but on their own they are not things that make something a communism.
By the way the prohibition of lucrative property has absolutely been experimented with in certain countries and remains the case today. We have governments that have even went so far as to ban the ownership of property by individuals all together.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins cant blame you if u dont properly see the difference tho ; the most visible examples we had were the USSR and its allies. so ofc public opinion got stuck on these while completely forgetting about anything that wasnt Marxist-centered
@freemo @realcaseyrollins GDP isn’t the only measure of a country’s success. In fact, I remember reading an interesting blog post about it. Here: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-its-bad-to-have-high-gdp He’s a wacky right-wing memelord, but he makes a good point IMO.
@Hyolobrika Putting aside the link you shared, as I agree his conclusions arent consistent with what we observe, at least not in a cause-effect sort of way lets discuss your main point.
I both agree and disagree with where you are going. On the one hand I do agree that simply measuring GDP and using it as the metric of success of an economy is not correct. Though I disagree on saying that it is an incorrect measure overall, I simply feel it is one among several metrics that all need to be considered and in isolation wont really tell you much.
I think the prime example of how GDP alone isnt a good measure is because where and how those goods get used means everything. If a country puts all of its man power into building tanks that they promptly just dump into the middle of the ocean as they come off the supply line then the GDP would be the total value of all the tanks produced. But those tanks in no way represent a healthy economy or an improvement to the quality of living of people in that country.
Now you could say that while doing the above may not be beneficial it still demonstrates the manufacturing capability of the country, this is true, but even then it doesnt imply much of anything useful. For example what if the country just took a massive loan far beyond its ability to pay back and used all that money to build the tank factories and tanks in the first place. Well since the country isnt using that loan in a productive way then when the loan's term is over then they will just be in more dept than the value of their entire production capabilities and would ultimately need to sell all those factories to pay it back. So in the end even their temporary ability to manufacture billions worth of tanks a year is not an indication of a healthy economy and a economy with a GDP of 1/10th that would in the long term be in a better place.
The above applies to rate of change of GDP as much as GDP itself.
That said it is still a valid and valuable point int he equation. It just must be evaluated against a countries debt, as well as its store of wealth (GDP is the amount of wealth produced in a year but tells you nothing about the total wealth of a country). Lastly we need to ask if "healthy" economy is what we care about at all in a given context and if instead we might not in fact mean "average quality of life" which we often relate to healthy economies, and there is a valid link between them despite being very different measures of different things.
Cumulative wealth divided by the population and compared to median wealth? GDP? Growth of businesses?
I don't think disposable income should be the best indicator of a good economy, but rather the economy's ability to perform, grow and expand.