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What do you think is the biggest reason...
that communism, for the most part, collapsed in the 90's. I blame most of it on the divisions among the various communist countries i.e. the Sino-Soviet split, Tito-Stalin split, Trotskyist vs. Stalinist, etc.
I understand that there are different opinions within the movement but why couldn't they see past their own differences and unite against the common enemy, capitalism!?
Revisionism
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
-James Baldwin
"We change ideas like neckties."
- E.M. Cioran
i really don't see them uniting. anything that traces itself to lenin or any sort of authoritarian "interpretation" of Marxist theory has no compatibility with Marxism as a science or economics. being against capitalism will not unite state capitalists and actual Marxists.
Communism should not be described in political, ideological or even ethical terms. it should be described mathematically as a direct observation of how capitalism subjugates humanity for the benefit of the few.
the reason i do not support authoritarian systems is because people are not animals to be caged.
we can be organized without organizers.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one
~Spock
NeIther communism, socialism, nor the DotP have ever existed.
Communism has never existed before, so therefor it has never 'collapsed.'
There was nothing to unite around. The ruling classes in these regimes had developed interests antithetical to the worker's movement toward socialism. They couldn't have united against capitalism because they themselves were very much part of it.
You couldn't have expected, furthermore, other communists to align themselves with the supporters of the regimes in question. The Trotskyists, anarchists, and communist left all had their own bones to pick with the Stalinists and their regimes and had different critiques of them, but what you are doing with the premise of your inquiry is either completely denying the existence of these groups or saying that there was something reconcilable between them.
Ultimately the answer you're going to get from each person is going to depend on what their opinions are of these regimes and what their political positions regarding what the communist attitude toward these regimes should have been. I would, for example, characterize them as state capitalist and therefore not worth any more support than the western powers were, but other people who think that they were socialist are obviously going to have more positively inclined answers, as well as those that think they were worker's states with bureaucratic deformities.
I understand the reasoning behind both these statements and I agree communism hasn't failed.
however, communism as an economic system dates back to before human prehistory and in fact, can be seen among insect colonies such as ants and bees.
we have probably as many definitions of communism/socialism as we have factions. This is an increadible limiting factor.
I won't sugar coat it, there are many factions among us that distort and undermine our movement as much if not or moreso than capitalism.
We should modernize the material into smaller bites of information easier understood and shared. Mathematically define how capitalism subjugates himanity and indoctrinate nothing except altruism.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one
~Spock
communal or egalitarian living is not the same as communism. Those societies had conditions specific to them that lead to that arrangement, communism has conditions specific to itself as well.
As ethics gradient said, those societies you are referring to are generally known as 'primitive communism.' Given the fact that they existed in pre-industrial societies, they share only a superficial resemblance to 'communism.'
Every Bureaucratic Collectivist State will either fall back to capitalism or experience another revolution which will install real socialism.
your opnions are clear, however you're not explaining how you came to such conclusions.
please elaborate?
Humans in prehistory and aboriginal groups today lived and live within economically communistic groups, free of economic oppression and politcal subversion. How are they not communist?
Is there some arcane definition of communism unavailable to the rest of us?
Does economic communism not count in your eyes because it is not itself authoritarian?
If economic and political liberation for all isn't enough to satisfy the definition of communism, then it would appear to me your angenda may encompass more than what communism is meant to.provide.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one
~Spock
It was the Bureaucracy within those countries that restored Capitalism.
Some sites I researched suggested the arms race destroyed the USSR. This race didn't consume the US because it took in imperalist profit. In addition, the support of other socialist states drained them, because as stated before, they didn't have imperalist profit to offset things.
That theory actually kind of makes sense to me too. I'll have to read more about it.
"Communism" collapsed because it was linked with the Soviet union,being the first and strongest communist nation, which lost the cold war. In my opinion,in contrast to what is generally accepted, is that it was really the Islamist guerillas fighting the soviets in Afghanistan than won the cold war. Another reason is the person of stalin who made it so easy for the US to demonize the Soviet Union and reduce support for it. The real question you should be asking is:why aren't there other models of communism in other countries besides the Soviet Union in the first place.
Socialism, or attempts at achieving it (no one has come close to actual global communism) failed, in my opinion, because there were no revolutions in advanced western capitalist nations and at the same time advanced capitalist western nations state apparatus did/does everything within their power to isolate and facilitate economic decay within any potentially communist region. For this reason alone I don't think communism will be achieved by the somewhat Leninist post 1920's strategy, the strategy of spreading or helping facilitate 'socialism' in less developed nations. It's my opinion the heart of capitalism, as far as the state apparatus used to defend global capitalist interests, resides in the west. We've seen the outcome of the cold war, nuclear holocaust awaits those who would seek to impose communism "from without" and economic ruin awaits any nation that tries to compete with capitalism in the name of communism. It's my opinion workers in the west have a lot of work to do before communism can be seriously considered possible. This may be seen as a Eurocentric view but I think there's a material basis for my opinion.
"Economic calculation problem" and "tragedy of the commons". Look them up. (Not by stalinist resources)
The Eastern Bloc was capitalist. It collapsed because it didn't restructure economically after the outbreak of the economic crisis of the late 1960s/early'70s as the Western Bloc began to. By the '80s it was hopelessly economically backward, and as Reagan pushed the (largely mythical) 'Star Wars' programme, the USSR was forced to divert larger and larger sums to its military budget. I've seen (unofficial) estimates that suggest around 40% of the USSR's GDP was going to the military in the 1980s. That's completely unsustainable, especially in a time of world economic crisis. Hence, economic collapse, leading to massive social unrest - in turn, fuelled by nationalist movements in part backed by the West. Though the crappy policies of the adminstrations in the USSR probably alienated an awful lot of people too, even without the CIA and 'Radio Free Europe' and David Hasselhof single-handedly battering down the Berlin Wall with his hair.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Pt IV: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm
No War but the Class War
Destroy All Nations
Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC): "A man whose life has been dishonorable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death."
As others have said, state capitalism collapsed in the 1990s, and was replaced by democratic bourgeois capitalism. We've never seen a socialist -- let alone a communist -- society, at least not in recent memory. The closest to such a society was probably Scandinavia from 1970-2000 and Venezuela today, but even those are still very capitalistic.
Scandinavia when they were sterilising Gypsies and 'mental defectives' you mean? I'm not sure I like 'socialism' any more if that's what you think it is.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Pt IV: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm
No War but the Class War
Destroy All Nations
Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC): "A man whose life has been dishonorable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death."
