jesin00 said: some weird ideas of what “good” is, here
consider China before the CCP took power, torn asunder by rival warlords and plundered by foreign states: the party definitively conquering the entire country and establishing a monopoly on violence was a necessary first step to any further development, land reform and centralisation that reduced the power of local elites created a better incentive structure, and basic health programs like vaccination and deworming campaigns combined with the end of the civil war gave a huge boost to life expectancy.
however while communist ideology played a big part in achieving victory, the actual gains were all orthogonal to that and mostly just followed from having a strong centralised state: the collectivisation experiments were counterproductive, and the fear of liberalisation holds the country back to this day.
history demonstrates that communism makes an excellent transition stage between feudalism and crony capitalism / oligarchism, but questions remain about how to build truly democratic institutions afterwards.