Is Communism Unattainable?

[Bulls on parade]

Has communism failed? I don't understand how a system which has the ideals of equality placed above all else has not been embraced by the world. It's fairly hard to believe isnt it?

Capitalism on the other hand stresses the ideals of selfishness but has been embraced by the world as the right thing. People are exploited for the benefit of a single man.

I was thinking about why this is, and it's probably due to the fact that communism is seen as a 'failed' system. The collapse of the soviet union and the living conditions in various communist countries have always been quite bad.

So does history have a point to make about communism? Is it really a failed system and can we ever really achieve it in it's true form without having the country it is established in turn into a harshly controlled dictatorship?

Your thoughs?

[redstar2000]

There's a whole bunch of ways to tackle this; here are just a few.

The first slave rebellion that we have good evidence for took place in Sicily between 135 and 131bce; 2,133 years later, slavery has been reduced to a few rather backward places, like the Sudan.

In the west, the first peasant revolts against proto-feudalism too place in Gaul (France) in the 3rd century c.e. -- in took another 1,500 years or so to get rid of feudalism in France and 1,700 years to get rid of it in Germany.

The first clear-cut working class rebellion took place in Paris in 1871. Do the math; we have a while yet to go.

Still, that may be too pessimistic; the beginnings of modern capitalism are usually traced to the merchant republics in northern Italy around 1400 or so. How long did it take for the capitalists to assume the "permanent" status of ruling class? Historians differ in the details, of course, but I think the consensus would go something like this: England 1832; U.S.A. 1865; France 1871; Germany 1945 (!); Russia 1992 (!!!).

In other words, it took the capitalist class roughly four centuries from its first beginnings to absolute dominance as a class for itself.

The emergence of the modern working class could be dated from the first trade unions, the first efforts of the working class to organize itself for class struggle...this would pop up sometime in the late 1820s/early 1830s. If we are as slow to learn how to become a ruling class as the capitalists were, this would suggest the inevitability of communism by, say, 2230 or so.

More hopeful yet: if you look over these time periods, you may notice that ruling classes APPEAR to decay more rapidly as they become more complex (rather like unstable isotopes in particle physics). Slavery lasted at least 3 to 4 thousand years; but feudalism lasted only a little over 1,000 years; and capitalism, so far, barely 400 years...and may not make it another 200 years. I don't know that there's any real validity to this scheme; but something like this may well be happening.

But you see my real point; it takes TIME for social systems to change significantly. But change they do!