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Of course this is the problem with communism. If all of the horrors of the USSR and red China had resulted in societies five times as prosperous as the US in material terms we’d all be communists now. The fact that the economic systems failed utterly is what makes communism disastrous. The torture, the killing, the brutality, (I exclude the starvation, which is a direct consequence of communism as an economic failure state), that is all sadly very human, very common, very widespread (certainly until very recently) in every corner of the world. What is particularly communist is that on not one occasion did it achieve anything like the mass popular prosperity achieved in comparable nations under capitalism.
I fundamentally disagree.
In the first place, if the USSR and Red China could actually produce five times the prosperity as the US, they likely would not have needed to resort to the violence. This is the basis of plausibility for "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism".
In the second place, I don't think torture, rape and murder can or will ever produce superior prosperity to their absence, so I don't think the question is actually meaningful. If we're going to chase the hypothetical, though, I'll happily reject the idea that economic abundance and moral justice are mutually fungible. It is not immoral to be poor. It is immoral to murder, rape and torture. This does not change even if the torture, rape and murder are enormously economically productive. Those who think otherwise and manage to make a go of it should be properly categorized as hostis humani generis. No mortal man is fit to prey on his fellows. Those who forget this should be reminded of their mortality.
I am skeptical that Communist Russia is actually typical in its rates of torture, murder and brutality. I think we can find other regimes that were similarly brutal, but those regimes are likewise unusual.
What is particularly communist is that it created notable brutality more or less out of whole cloth. We can accept that the Aztecs, in the end, gradually devolved into a society built on slavery and murder. What is surprising is that the Communists built such a society from scratch overnight, out of otherwise reasonably decent, peaceful human beings.
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