Two three
A, maybe the, problem with communism is that it prescribes a revolution and then invites everyone who has been dispossessed by said revolution to live with it. In a world where capitalism still exists, that presents obvious hurdles for the communists. Not least that the dispossessed people won't just live with it and they are going to resist because no one likes to be dispossessed, and they can't be convinced by your very rational and obviously correct political philosophy. So the problem is what you do about them.
Of course, the outside capitalists are a large part of the problem, because they are full of people who also don't want to be dispossessed, and plenty of other people who you don't really have the means to convince that they won't also be dispossessed.In most respects, it's rather successful. But the revolutionary problem has this same issue of not preparing the ground sufficiently, so you end up needing a secret police to make sure that people aren't discussing how they can possess more. They mostly can't but propaganda is a strong driver of the horses. And it's hard to convince people that American jeans and Coke will not in fact make them happy -- have they never met Americans? They're the most miserable people you've ever met on the whole and being fat doesn't make them any more happy. They are raised in a society that values nothing except money and the main "value" that they are imbued with is a disregard for other people that really if you think about it is quite astonishing.
So really you need to build the regard for other people before you have a revolution and that isn't easy among people who grow up learning that others are there to be used and discarded as they feel fit.
Another problem is of course that there are sociopaths in every society and you really do need a mechanism to make sure you can deal with them before they attempt to make themselves kings. I mean, everyone knew Stalin was a piece of shit but no one thought, well, in that case, I should just whack him now and spare everyone a lot of problems. Part of it was that no one quite believed that Stalin could rise to the top, because everyone thought he was an arsehole and why would anyone want him in charge?
Well, people see arseholes as people they can use for some reason, and by the time they've realised that they made a mistake with the likes of Stalin, he's executing them for "treason".
Not that I'm saying that communism would have worked but for Stalin. There's always a Stalin. There's always a guy who's convinced that no one else can do it as well as he can, and maybe for a while, he seems to be right. But it's part of the human experience that people mistake skill at one thing for skill at all things. So you get Castro -- genius revolutionary, bad king -- or Pol Pot -- great theorist and look, theory would be great if it had a separate universe in which to work -- or Mao -- another genius revolutionary whose ideas about everything were terrible when they were his own work and great when they were cribbed from Lenin.
And look, many of us think, maaaaybe Trotsky, if he had been just a bit more personable and a bit better at politics... well, we'll never know, because he wasn't. That, ultimately, is the problem. Humans are never infallible. We have strengths and weaknesses, good and bad. But many of us, looking at ourselves, see pure gold and never quite grasp that our good, your good, their good, altogether is that gold.
posted by Dr Zen @ 8:07 pm
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