On a recent episode of Jubilee's Surrounded program, self-made multi-millionaire Patrick Bet-David took on 20 young, aspiring communists as they launched standard broadsides against the evils of capitalism.
While there were a multitude of instructive moments, this exchange highlighted one of the most frustrating realities of modern ideological debate: the ability of communism's defenders to demand it be judged by its intentions rather than its results.
For the young woman, this wasn't so much engaging an argument as it was accessing a convenient escape hatch. The "those aren't communist countries" defense is not unique to her, nor to this particular discussion. In fact, it is the most common rejoinder whenever the historical record of communism is invoked. Sensibly point to Cuba's stagnation, Venezuela's implosion, or North Korea's totalitarian dystopia, and collectivism's defenders merely bat away these examples with some variation of, "Well, that wasn't true communism."
What this does, of course, is render communism functionally unfalsifiable. If no historical case study can ever count as a legitimate implementation, if every failed experiment is disqualified after the fact, then the theory is permanently insulated from practical scrutiny. But if an ideology can only ever be judged by its aspirations and never by its outcomes, then it simply isn't a serious governing philosophy at all. It's an abstraction kept safely on the shelf of college professors.
What's absurd is the willingness of such activists to perpetually grant communism this philosophical mulligan while never extending the same luxury to capitalism. For instance, when markets crash, when corporations exploit, when wealth disparities expand, critics of free enterprise waste no time saying, "See, this is what capitalism produces." They hold it to account for its messiness in practice, but allow communism to live forever in theory.
After all, the examples Bet-David offered were not obscure footnotes from the margins of history.
Cuba openly advertises itself as a communist state, running a centrally planned economy with one-party control, rationed goods, and a press tightly under state censorship. That's communism.
Venezuela pursued wide-scale nationalization of industry and aggressive redistribution policies to the point that its economy collapsed under the weight of its own central planning, producing mass hyperinflation and one of the largest refugee crises in the Western Hemisphere. That's communism.
North Korea was literally founded on Marxist-Leninist doctrine, though it has since deteriorated (as most communist countries do) into a dynastic cult.
To claim that Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela do not count as examples of communist failure is an exercise in intellectual dishonesty, ignoring facts in favor of ideology.
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