Do you keep track of communist parties in other parts of the world ?
To a limited extent. I keep track of who’s coming and going in the top echelons of socialist nations. I do not bother myself with the internal politics of those Communist parties that have little or no role in their national governments.
Which are these socialist nations?
I track Belarus, Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, and Venezuela. To a lesser extent, Iran and a handful of Latin American states.
What did you learn from collapse of communist block (U.S.S.R and other european countries ), that you will apply elsewhere to prevent a repeat ?
Question to the OP:
In what way is the glorious People’s Republic, in fact, a republic?
No, no, of course English is not a difficult language at all. That’s why everyone in the sizeable Russian population over here speaks it so well … Oh, wait a minute, no they don’t!
Well, anyway, I guess it does explain why everyone I know here, Russian, Thai or otherwise, who also received their undergraduate and/or graduate degrees in the US speaks it so well. Ah, waidaminit, no, none of them do either.
Hmmm.
We learned three lessons: tyranny, treachery, and firepower.
We learned that tyrants like Stalin can undermine a socialist system for decades to come. By poisoning the trust of the people, he cracked the foundations of the Soviet Union, which directly resulted in its premature collapse. I miss it dearly.
We also learned that we are vulnerable to threats from within. Gorbachev was elected by our party to lead us forward; instead, he betrayed us and pushed us into the past.
Ultimately, we learned the lesson of firepower. Had Stalin and Gorbachev been marched out back and shot in the back of the head, as they deserved, none of this would have happened. We would still be enjoying the glorious fruits of Communism, rather than admiring the power of China from afar. We were too merciful; millions suffer now, and it is a needless suffering. Two bullets is all that it would have taken to save us…
I was with you until you talked about China’s government being a good example of communism. We have Dopers who have been to China. We know the place not only isn’t that great for a large number of people, but that it is not truly communist.
I mean, I can even consider myself a communist under some definitions, but not to the point of authoritarianism. If people are not perfect, it stands to reason that the leader of the Communist party will not be perfect, and I do not want an imperfect being calling all the shots without some way to stop him. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Vietnam, too. Communism, socialism, call you it what you want, is dead there. Even the briefest of stays will reveal the free-wheeling capitalist nature of the place nowadays. It’s a one-party capitalist bureaucracy that doesn’t have to sweat about bothersome elections or emocratic rights.
That’s because China is as it’s always been: a massive, faceless bureaucracy ruling an essentially capitalist nation. Ming, Manchu, Mao; they’re all different names for the same thing. China is first and foremost Chinese, and outsiders are not welcome.
I am with Siam Sam on this one. The OP is trolling I believe.
So, you dream of creating a society whose economic inequities (inland farmers vs coastal economic engine) is about to tear their society apart, & perhaps start another civil war in China?
Gosh.
Me too, but I hope his “emocratic” is just a typo, and he’s not advocating we have our national anthem rewritten by Weezer.
Yep. It’s worse than you think, too, the food situation is freaking horrible. Mass nigh-starvation and everything. Can’t wait till we can open relations to them and bring them into the 21st century. That doesn’t mean that, at the time of the revolution, people didn’t honestly think this way a better… or at least different… way to go. It did get them away from being dominated and absorbed by the US, so there’s that.
And communism would work in the real world if there was no such thing as scarcity. If someone consuming something didn’t take it away from the ability of other people to consume it. Right now, there is something that works like that, and that’s information. If I consume information, generally, I can add value to it, and toss it back, without removing the ability of anyone else to get that information. That’s how science (and Linux) works.
Problem is, it’s not really good for physical objects till we hit a post-scarcity society. Which is gonna take a while. In the meantime, communism seems, like anarchy, to be a small-scale philosophy that doesn’t work so well when you scale it up to country size. Not sure what the maximum size is, though. I’m betting it’s bigger than a monkeysphere, which is where anarchy is limited to.
This post has been pinked by the pinkist![/color]
What’s hard to understand? You hold up Mao as a shining example of awesome communist government when the guy was every bit the murderous, politically paranoid power tripping maniac that Stalin was (albeit on a smaller scale). What I don’t understand is how you can praise one and deplore the other when they are essentially the same thing.
I did, of course, mean “nemocratic,” which involves fishing rights.
Good. I was afraid you meant “hemocratic”, or government by blood type; or worse, “gemocratic”, which means rule by bling.
Seriously, there are still communists out there?