bttt
From Sunny Kalifornia of all places!
Rare gem indeed.
Thanks for posting this.
Now, if we can only put this into a sound bite. :^)
Thus, find me a deity willing to head a communist nation and i will show you how the idea might work.
However in the normal world (and not some Lib fantasy or Marxist wet dream) Communism will always fail 100% of the time. Always.
As David Horowitz has said, the left doesn't believe in the concept of original sin. We are, in their minds, just a system of government away from perfection. It's frightening how such a seemingly childish fantastical view of the world has led to so much death and destruction.
I won't go into any depth because that is obviously not what the author had in mind here, but he is quite correct that one may see in the Manifesto the flaws that eventually shatter this system of thought. If I might borrow some terminology from systems analysis, Marxism is a wonderful descriptive model, allowing the student insights into some of the workings of society that were not well illuminated prior to the mid-19th century. But as a predictive model it fails. Items clearly stated in the Manifesto such as increasing illiteracy of the proletariat, increasing poverty, increasing "alienation," concentration of wealth away from the bourgeoisie into the hands of the capitalists, etc, etc, simply never came to pass and had to be heavily redacted between the 1848 Communist Manifesto and the time Marx came to write Capital in the 1860's.
As a normative model Marxism is truly disastrous, which is to be expected given its failure as a predictive model. The economic results of every single implementation of this in the real world were uniformly stagnant, unimaginative, and uncompetitive. It is no wonder that they had to build walls to keep people in. The model failed, obviously, spectacularly, and completely.
This goes on through each of the fields mentioned above. Marxist class analysis failed to predict the rise of the proletariat into petit bourgeoisie status, its increasing literacy, and its eventual participation in capitalism as an equal partner - the working man in the U.S., for example, is the number one owner of capital in the form of union retirement funds. One can't even call him a proletarian anymore and never really could. Marxist historiography failed to explain the evolution of government into representative form. Marxist management failed completely - Lenin ended the workers' soviets in 1921. Marxist politics came to rely on bigger and bigger lies until even its own most credulous citizens became cynical and apathetic. Marxist philosophy became bloated, jargon-paralyzed and utterly incomprehensible. It goes on and on.
But I probably shouldn't...
He developed a system that benefits bitter intellectual losers (MSM, college professors).
Good post!
Communism was/is doomed to fail simply because it's anathema to human nature.
The explanation to the last statement resides in a book where the first sentence is, "Who is John Galt?"
5.56mm
Human History is full of the Rule of the Powerful. Most systems will work for a while--usually while the weapons or the personality of the ruler are powerful. Then they are over-run.
The introduction of an elective process into the economic process "impures" the pure analysis of both Marxism and Capitalism. Those poeple with ballots keep getting in the way.
I live 25% of the year in a Communist country and have visited another Communist country. These daydreamers are right (IMHO) on a theoretical basis, but, in practice, Communism has a proven track record to leading to tyranny and Totalitarianism/Dictatorial regimes. Case closed. The dreamers can dream on but they need to lose their naive attitudes.
Good points, I would also add that when the flawed bourgeoisie are in control, a pile of dead bodies usually materialize.
Each person could declare under which they would serve as citizens. I personally don't want to live under a marxist Clinton again.
Ludwig von Mises pointed out the major problem with communism, (and socialism and other designed economic systems) in the 1920s. (So well, that even Gunnar Myrdal had to agree.) A designed economy cannot calculate the price of anything; under capitalism, the involved parties haggle until a price is reached (or not).
I always have to snort at the dorm-room Marxists who say that the only reason communism failed was that no one has tried the pure form of their opiate yet - as the mountains of corpses and rivers of blood left in its wake are just some sort of clerical error.
Thanks for taking the time to post. Good article.
If you want to live under a dictator, vote for a Democrat.