The thing about communism is it's only ever come about through a violent revolution. The only people that can pull that off are thugs, who make bad leaders of state as a rule. Ironically, the USSR was almost an exception to that, being a revolution led by intellectuals. Then the bolsheviks swept in and hijacked the new state, and then Stalin, a thug that would have better suited a mafia than a state, hijacked that state, and proceeded to make a royal mess of things with his purges of anyone who had a clue what they were doing. They did manage to turn a rural agricultural backwater into a (then) modern industrial state, despite their constant bungling of things, and managed to win their side of WWII through sheer weight of numbers and the incompetence of the Nazi leaders. One can only wonder what might have been had Lenin died before he could raise the Bolsheviks against the moderates who overthrew the Czars...
Of course, that's not to say that (actual) Communism isn't inherently flawed at its heart, holding as an ideal a peasant revolution to instill a "Noble Proletarian" dictatorship, with the aim of facilitating the transition to Anarchism, at which point the transitional government would be expected to stand down. But, it was a fresh ideal at the time, and the hellish conditions the working class lived and worked in (in industrial nations, it had jack shit to do with farming peasants, ironically the only ones to ever take up its banner en masse).
Now these days, of course, "Communism" has become conflated with a centrally organized economy, which could work, provided it had proper popular backing, wasn't sabotaged by Ayn Rand worshiping assholes touting a perverted version of Adam Smith's (already flawed) principles (I cannot recall the source for this, but I quite distinctly reading that Adam Smith also supported humanitarian actions by governments (such as healthcare, worker safety, etc), only believing that the economy as whole should be left as untouched as possible while preventing catastrophic collapse (as has been repeatedly shown to occur in particularly free markets)), and was carefully orchestrated by experts armed with modern technology to streamline the necessary bureaucracy. But those three oh so fucking simple requirements can't currently be met, so it's not a feasible solution.
Limited capitalism, despite its flaws and excesses, manages to work decently, being what is effectively a massive evolutionary algorithm playing out in a chaotic, semi-intelligent environment. It's no worse an organization solution than humanity's had, and a far sight better than some. Those actions which lead to success in it (which generally are beneficial to the society as a whole (a non-profit driven organization is required to prevent the actions which are not beneficial, but still lead to success for those performing them)) will continue to be performed, and the massively distributed nature of it means that there are fewer oversights (which might be missed by an insufficiently capable organizer in a centralized economy), and while it ruins those whose actions don't happen to hit upon what works (purely by chance, mind you: it is a chaotic, largely incomprehensible system despite all the research put into its functions; the best you ever get are mildly favorable probabilities of success), most manage to keep on going relatively untouched.
It must be said that to worship any theoretical style of governing a state is to embrace folly and ruin. The proper actions are determined less by grand ideals than they are by practicality. Yes, a properly run centralized economy could far outstrip the chaotic results of capitalism: the USSR, despite being a horribly run centralized economy still managed to last the greater part of a century, with all the world aligned against it, and managed to accomplish some absolutely staggering feats of progress. But we're not going to get a properly run centralized economy, and so it must be disregarded as a possibility. One must work with the conditions one has, and account for ideologues and criminals who will muddle everything up in the name of their damned philosophies, or just to see it all burn in the case of people like News Corp's Murdock.
And that's why I can only define myself as a pragmatist. Ideologies be damned, do what will work with the conditions you have. I suppose that technically is an ideology in and of itself, but my meaning should be clear as day regardless.
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Topic: Politics (Read 9222 times)