For example it needs the firm rule of law to be established, yet it is not clear there's anything the US could have done to prevent the divvying up of state resources amongst clever individuals who appropriated vast wealth, through usually dishonest means, becoming today's oligarchs. Nor could the US do anything to eliminate the Russian pride that remained in their former empire, which placed fairly unique pressures on Russia's leaders ("we may be poor but at least everyone else is afraid of us" was not as much of a fringe attitude among the common people as one might think).

So I don't think the conditions were at all similar between Germany and Japan on the one hand, and the Russian Federation on the other, and I don't think any kind of Marshal plan could have ever worked without these missing conditions.

After all, for decades we thought of China that if we just made them all rich, they'd all see the benefits of Western democracy and become more like us ideologically. So the West encouraged open trade with China and... the end result was a country which now had the resources to reäffirm their state ideology. Today we see a China pushing to strengthen the Maoist values it was founded on, rather than dismantling them.

Unfortunately, without utter national humiliation that completely breaks the people's belief in their former state ideology, I just don't think ideological transformation in any kind of short period of time is possible.

China, by contrast, has a totalitarian system but a much more free-market economic system (a lot of big companies are all or partially state-owned, but the economy as a whole is not centrally planned like in the Soviet system).

Russia was the only real attempt. The 1917 revolution was about it, and then the coup by Stalin to overthrow Lenin and Trotsky threw out any shred of attempt to reach any kind of utopia and just turned the country into a dictatorship with a globalist coat of paint.

Russia itself can absolutely be used as an example of the failings of Marxism and Communism, but I don't think any other country can, for the sole reason that once the Soviet Union was established and the Cold War underway neither side was going to let an ideological uprising happen anywhere on Earth in isolation. Every single socialist / communist state from the Eastern Bloc countries that were conquered by Russia to puppet states in the Middle East to sponsored uprisings in South America and Southeast Asia were all done with Soviet support to create Stalin style dictatorships. I don't think for a second that Mao ever thought China would become some stateless utopia where everyone owns everything in public. Mao took power to be a king, in the same way Fidel did, in the same way Kim Il Sung did. And they all did it with Soviet support financially and militarily.

The US were well documented kingmakers in that era too. It is why most of the Middle East has such deeply instilled hatred of the US that they are willing to give their lives to attack the US. The difference is that the Soviets demanded loyalty by labeling yourself a Peoples Republic and modeling your government after Stalin's - the US just wanted puppet states that did what the US said, be they democratic or totalitarian, it didn't really matter to Washington.

But that isn't something that is going to change, either. Revolutions without foreign support always degrade into dictatorships to fill power vacuums when the unorganized hoard of revolutionaries dissipates - France, Russia, and more recently Egypt all demonstrate what happens in those circumstances. The US had a successful revolution only because it was the elite casting off a foreign power with the support of another, and without Frances help or the support of the American aristocracy the US would have never been founded. Internal wars for revolution fail, revolutions without international support fail, and new governments post-revolution that are too "different" from the global status quo also fail because the world powers will cut you off if you don't play by their rules in international trade. And you can be sure almost every government on Earth today with few exceptions function and exist with the blessings of the United States. If anyone tried to overthrow those "for the people" like the Iranian people did to their Shah you can bet the US will have nothing nice to say about the pursuit of liberty if its against American economic interests.

So no, communism doesn't work, but its not because of some tautology that you can never reach this post-state utopia, but more because nobody can change their government in isolation - the influence of foreign actors will always either push you towards their favored ideology or sabotage your attempt. The world is too interconnected now for an upstart band of ideologues to depose the king and try something new.

Capitalism lends itself more towards authoritarianism, in my opinion, as the compound interest function of accumulated wealth works similarly with power. For example, wealthy Republicans support Republican politicians who lower their donors' taxes and entrench their party's power through gerrymandering and voter suppression (such as purged voter rolls, or deliberately understaffed polling places in areas with more opposition party voters).

We now know not only did that not stop China, it's not clear that the ceiling of economic success of their system has been determined.

Its intrinsic economic woes were overplayed by western elites who were terrified of communist contagion.

Western ideology is about the primacy of property ownership. It's not economically efficient in the slightest but it's the only game in town these days.

The Chinese tried the Communist model, with their own modifications, and it failed! And they have admitted that it failed.

The kids today talk as if these things have never happened. They haven’t learned!

Yes, failures of the Soviet Union are known. Totalitarian state murdering its own people, systemic corruption, weak exports and weak consumer goods, and of course, the arms race, made the quality of life in SU fall beyond that in the West significantly.

Not that it proves anything about marxist ideas. In the beginning, marxist ideas were incredibly successful in Soviet Union. Prof. Wolff account of the history of Soviet Union is more informed and more interesting than "millions awful deaths".

Also, in China we have an example of how big socialist state can work economically, those mistakes about consumer goods and exports were fixed.

We're at a similar brink, though via dissimilar circumstances. While we properly are looking for ways to repair and improve, I hope that there is a strong resurgence of both Democratic and Capitalist principles. The alternative, as some are leaning towards, has a well-documented trajectory. It would condemn us to inferiority.

In the 30s (yes, during the Great Depression), 40s, and 50s, the Soviets achieved rapid economic growth, largely because they were starting from such an economically backward situation (ring any bells when it comes to China?). But when growth on the basis of "catching up" started to plateau, they could make no further progress.

There's this idea that one of the reasons that US workers (and workers in the West more generally) had a relatively good standard of living during the Cold War, was that Western countries were facing competition from the Soviet Union. Would Britain have built all that social housing? Would it have created the NHS? Would America have permitted as much unionization as existed? Possibly not, if it weren't for the Soviet threat. And is it a coincidence that we had waves of privitization in the West at the same time that the Soviet Union was collapsing? So goes the thinking.

Now, the reality was that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, and it's unlikely that you'd actually want to live there. Granted, they may have done certain things well, like putting up Khrushchevkas. But the political situation was terrible and the material quality of life was not very good.

Nevertheless, maybe the existence of a competitor did spur the US and other countries to do better.

(There are other more cut-and-dry examples of this, e.g., much earlier, Bismarck outflanking the Socialists in Germany with state healthcare.)

And, for all the negatives of the Chinese system today, it's hard to argue that they don't build a lot very quickly. (Quality may be an issue sometimes, but I'm still impressed by a lot of what's accomplished.)

So, my half-tongue-in-cheek proposal is that China use its known strengths to offer a better deal than Western governments can, not just to e.g. African nations via BRI, but also to Western and even US citizens. It's not really that I think Westerners would be wise to go there (I know full well that there must be a propaganda element to the example of the Australians that I used). It's that Western leaders seem entirely content to let lucrative problems like the housing crisis fester, and it would be fantastic if there were some credible alternative to spur action.

Basically, life should be better for citizens if governments are competing for legitimacy with them.

China is interesting. It's theoretically communist, but in practice mostly capitalist now. It's authoritarian, but more by constant bureaucratic pressure than random hits by goon squads. There's central planning, and five-year plans that have real effect, yet most of the movers are private companies. Finance is tightly controlled; manufacturing less so. People move up in the government by starting in low-level jobs and getting promoted; there is not much movement between business and government. So far, results are reasonably good.

The key difference was western companies were happy to (quietly) transfer expertise and technology to the Chinese. In the late 80s the international oil giants were helping the Chinese drill for oil while the Soviets were going (more) broke trying to drill theirs on their own, while Bush claimed “no bailout for Gorbachev”.

The west squandered a chance to implement a “Marshall plan” and make a strong ally out of the Soviets. Instead they chuckled at its collapse and danced on its grave, while rewarding the Chinese for choosing the path of authoritarianism, and here we are.

Small nations that have stayed with old-school communism and are mired in poverty - North Korea and Cuba at this point - have been almost totally isolated from the rest of the world for decades, unable to trade with large, obvious, prosperous neighbors. Is it the five year plan, or the sanctions?

The USSR eventually failed, but they did improve a great deal over the economic situation Russia was in at the time of the revolution. And honestly, there's no guarantee that a financial collapse won't wipe out the world of western capitalism, either. The US came perilously close to that in 2008.

I really have to be honest I see unregulated capitalism moving into its own failure modes now.

Maybe both systems suck and fail when they become too successful / dominating?

I see this proposition 22 thing as an example of this, it’s not cool and it’s sad people are being forced to support it while trying to earn a living.