Most people tend to write off communism and socialist ideology following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
(I hasten to add that I don’t have a left wing personal ideology.)
The surviving communist regimes in the world are either not really communist at all (China) or are in dire straits (North Korea and Cuba).
Some posters here even have fallen into the trap of dismissing a cite out of hand simply because it is sourced from a left wing or socialist organisation.
There are two points to be debated:
-
is there any aspect of socialist or communist ideology which was ever sound? Or is it simply a perspective on society and culture, which like most perspectives is neither wrong nor right? My own view on this, looking at times at which Marxism started, is that this perspective was a necessary one given the terrible working conditions of workers at the time; and
-
further to that, with the increased shifting of production to cheap labour countries like the Phillipines and Indonesia by large multinational corporations, is communism or socialism likely to spread throughout those countries? I am halfway through Naomi Klein’s book No Logo, which details the sort of conditions that workers suffered in Victorian England currently existing in numerous third world countries. Companies like Nike etc are able to say that they contract out this work to independent factories, and are not responsible. The horrible conditions described in this book make me think that a few Tagalog copies of Das Kapital would spark a workers’ revolution. I’ve spent a little time in the Philippines, and I think that those people are exploited, and could easily turn to Marxism as salvation against oppressive capitalism.