Antifa: need to know

[Dill]

(08-22-2017, 07:11 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Snarky, I dig it.

Sure, it's a start.  Can you please explain why these ideas, although they have been attempted, have yet to actually work?

What do you mean by "work"? 

You earlier claimed that "logic" dictates drawing what works from many different political theories.  Without drawing on socialism, it is unlikely that liberal democracies like the US and Great Britain would have survived in the great depression. So some of those ideas apparently work very well.

As far as societies which have set Communism as an ideal and call themselves "Communist," we would have to include China, which seems to be doing ok as the US' prime competitor on the international stage now--though some would argue that is because it incorporates elements of capitalism, the reverse of the trend described in the previous paragraph.

As far as those which set Communism as an ideal, then became stuck in the socialist stage and stagnated--e.g., the Soviet Union--there are a number or reasons I think. The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany, then put the first man in space and stood toe to toe with the US as the world's other super power for over four decades. So by some standards it was working for a while.  But it was also a party dictatorship, neither democratic nor flexible, and excluded from much trade outside its own Comecon, which consisted of mostly developing 2nd and 3rd world countries.

I add here that the Leninist recipe for establishing Communism has some built in problems. It seems to work very well, under some conditions, as an ideology for seizing state power. But that seizure terminates in an authoritarian state which cannot respond well to changing conditions and eventually has to devote enormous resources to repression.  That happened in the Soviet Union. Attacked from within and from all sides, in order to survive, Soviet "Communism" had to militarize quickly and remain militarized. No leader was ever able to reverse that trend. The state could not "wither away" but actually had to expand.

Other "failed" Communist nations which replicated the Stalinist model after WWII, like Romania and Albania, followed the same path that most dictatorships have since Aristotle first described tyranny as a form of government. They had to define their own people, collectively, as a threat.  Also, I would argue that in places like Albania, where the party was run by one unchecked dictator, declaring virtually everything state property effectively converted it to the leader's private property.

Communist Yugoslavia appears to have "worked" until Tito died and various ethnic groups ditched the Communist ideal for ethnic autonomy. It was a favored vacation spot of Europeans during the '80s.