[QUOTE=glee]
It’s possible to argue that true Communism has never really been tried.
After all, the Soviet Communist party leaders always gave themselves privileges and luxury.
Perhaps the nearest would be a kibbutz, where the accomodation + work is shared.
[/QUOTE]
The ideology practiced in the traditional kibbutz scenerio is far closer to distributism, and really can’t be considered Communist in the Marxist/Bolshevik-Leninist /Maoist traditions (and certainly not hardcore Stalinist or KPC stylings of Communism). One could invoke similarities to the more moderate and less actively revolutionary conception fo Luxemburgism, but kibbitzes are really intended to be self-supporting without the larger goal of creating a national or international socialist movement.
To argue that the failure of Communism is that is has never really been tried is a contemptible imposture. To be certain, no genuine attempt at the imposition of a pure communist government has been sustained over a decade or more, usually degenerating from an initially and ostensibly benevolent oligarchy (although most Communist regimes have resorted to mass terror as an instrument of public policy very early on) into a totalitarian autocracy typically maintained by a cult of personality and stringent control of the military and production complexes via purges and broad security measures (i.e. secret police. However, most major Communist regimes have gone through a period of a genuine attempt to enforce Communist economic and political controls, for instance the Bolshevik Initial Decrees and GOELRO in the early days of the Soviet Union, and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in the Peoples Republic of China. These were, needless to say, unmitigated disasters in both economic and humanitarian terms, and were rapidly replaced with market reforms that moved away from Marxist tenets and into a more market driven system with private or quasi-private collective holdings which buoyed the economies against the failures of centralized planning. (The “Year Zero” plan in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea is an extreme and inhumanely brutal implementation of Communist concepts and shouldn’t be taken as representative of Marxist ideals, though it does illustrate the essential lack of consideration for human rights in Marxist political thought.)
Both China and the Soviet Union eventually implemented market reforms that brought them further toward economic market socialism while maintaining strictly authoritarian and politically repressive regimes. While its true that the successive leaders of both nations came to surround themselves with the trappings of luxury, this alone cannot be considered the essential failure of the ideology. Its miscarriage, rather, is twofold: economically it failed to provide adequate agricultural and industrial resources to support an expanding population in competition with democratic free and mixed market regimes; and politically to engender public support, particularly from the proletariat which by Marxist doctrine is the backbone of a true Communist society as bourgeoisie and landowners who would diminish in power as the proletariat gain control of the means of production The most historically successful Communist regimes (Cuba, Yugoslavia, Viet Nam) implemented mixed market economies early one and established definitive tiers of economic opportunity, i.e. institutionalizing a industrial/agrarian proletariat and a privileged upper economic and political class with greater fiscal and intellectual opportunities. Since this is an indefinite, if not permanent, stratification of these societies they can hardly be regarded as in conformance with Marxist doctrine, and rather fall under the banner of non-democratic market socialism, which thrive by competitively providing goods and services on the international free market.
So I don’t think it is fair to say that Communism has never been tried, but rather that it has been repeatedly attempted and failed in every occasion, achieving a measure of functionality only when it abandoned strict doctrine in favor of a mixed-market socialist economy. Democracy, on the other hand, while never implemented on a national scale in its “pure” (i.e. direct or Athenian) form, has functioned with a reasonable degree of success, or at least a lack of utter failure, most of the situations when it has been implemented in a representative or proportional form. The inherent inefficiencies and problems of democratic forms of government are far outweighed by the autocratic and suppressive tendencies of non-democratic socialist regimes, and while government regulation of monetary policy, trade, et cetera serves as a reasonable (if often backward) check against the dangers of unchecked laissez-faire capitalism (i.e. greed is not always good), centralized planned economies have universally failed when implemented on national levels in every case that they were attempted, often with disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences.
The modern Peoples Republic of China is Communist in name only; in reality it is an technocratic oligarchy with strongly capitalist economic polices (albeit strictly regulated by the government) and has been so ever since Deng Xiaoping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” reforms in the 'Eighties. Subsequent market reforms by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have driven the PRC further from Marxist and Maoist doctrine and into a relatively free market competitive relationship with the rest of the world, while offering only marginal increases in political and personal liberties. As clairobscur notes, what exists today is really a farce of Maoist doctrine, ironically presented with Orwellian distortions of language to make it seem in conformance with previous dictates while actually completely opposite of what Marx or Mao would have foreseen. Mao ruled the nation in peasant pyjamas and wrote aphorisms in his Little Red Book; today’s PRC leaders wear tailored silk suits and power ties, and issue press releases quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Monty Python has nothing on these guys.
[QUOTE=friedo]
Much of the western world experienced a post-WWII baby boom. Combined with huge increases in life-expectancy, we now have to deal with a large population of aging freeloaders complaining about their lawns.
[/QUOTE]
And much of Asia (specifically India and Pakistan) experienced a “Green Revolution” baby boom and now present burgeoning populations that strain agricultural, energy and fresh water resources, especially as the expectation for standards of living increases. The issue of narrowing population age distribution basis is a nominal problem, though increasing industrialization can provide for the production of real goods even with a proportionally smaller workforce, and economic restructuring may be able to cope with a greater leisure/retired population, but the true bottleneck is resources themselves; if a population is demanding resources beyond sustainable levels no degree of fiddling with the numbers will offer relief.
Stranger