I recently had a discussion with someone about socialism etc… I thought about countering the argument that socialism doesn’t work, because it has failed once. I came up with: “Well, the first French revolution failed, and the people still continued establishing a second bourgeois democratic republic. So why should we stop to create a second socialist republic, just because the first attempt failed / has issues?”
Does this argument make any sense, or is this incomparable (I know it kind of is, but still)?
Also, isn’t it a core value of Marxism-Leninism to learn from past failed policies and politics, and correct them in the future?
This is a correct analogy for how messy it gets when new modes of production emerge out of each other. It is unreasonable to expect a new stage of the political economy to arise fully formed, and it is even more unreasonable to expect it will instantly be able to defend against everything the old system throws at it.