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I'm very new to the concept of communism. Just 2 weeks ago I started diving into actual theory and concepts instead of being too scared of it to care.

Through all my life, I've heard the phrase "communism looks great on paper, but it's never worked in practice." I've seen enough communism YouTube to know that this phrase is constantly clowned on, but this has been my reality for over 2 decades now so obviously I wanted to understand the refutation of this claim.

I took to r/communism's anti communism mega thread and read the abstracts of all the pieces regarding the USSR (I had a particular interest in the USSR because I wanted to understand the motivations of the Great Purge). Perhaps I should spend more time in those sources than just the abstract, but what I've gathered from them so far is that the commonly cited death count is a grossly over exaggerated statistic originating from the propaganda piece that was The Black Book of Communism. But the fact remains that there were political prisoners executed, and any argument against this feels like sugar coating to me.

I have a particular distaste against the argument that capitalism has killed far more people than socialism ever has due to wars and the like. On one obvious hand, capitalism has existed for far longer than active socialism ever has. The USSR alone killed many people in it's relatively short span of existence. Perhaps there's an argument to be made about the proportion of time to number killed, but I actually believe this is beside the point. Socialism is put up as this grand solution to capitalism, a system which condones these wars, but socialism seems to turn this terrible amoral violence against its own people, so is it even really a viable solution? Perhaps it's true that socialism is better than capitalism, but can we actually really say it was successful in what it set out to do?

The Soviet Union was able to bring society to the degree of global superpower in the time it existed, there's no doubt about that, but any time I search for communist thoughts about the bad parts of it's existence, I don't really see solutions to the problem, I see excuses. If I search Google for information on the great purge, I see page after page after page telling me the same widely agreed upon information. The only time I see any conflicting information is when I specifically search for it, or it's given to me by people who have already found it (like the anti communist mega thread). Furthermore, these pages I find are clearly bent towards communist thought. This makes me feel like an anti vaxer who searches for information specifically to conflict with commonly accepted thought, on sites obviously against commonly accepted thought, and once he finds something after searching says "Aha! I knew it!"

This makes me feel like it's not worth digging any further than the abstracts on the mega thread. I value my time and I don't mind spending hour reading to further my understanding, but not if it's just propaganda, and I feel like that's all it is.

Most communists refer, in one way or another, to Marx’s analytical tools to describe the contemporary economy.

Why is this?

Take, for instance, Marx’s theory of value—one that shares a lot with other classical economists like Smith or Ricardo—and its contemporary counterpart, the subjective theory of value emerged in the marginal revolution. Why, do you think, is the former better than the latter at describing our world?

Failure to justify this choice might lead to unsound claims that rely on that same theory. The idea that worker’s labour has higher value than the salary received for that labour is sensible only in a classical theory of value. In a “neoclassical” (I don’t really like this word) framework, this statement is meaningless. It is not wrong, it just conveys no meaning.

So, why do you use Marxist tools and ideas instead of others from whichever school of thought you can think of?