It seems communism was a failure. The economic models of central planning didn’t work (China, Vietnam, Laos, etc. all started to grow much faster when they abandoned communist economics), and the nations tended to be run by evil, incompetent dictators.
But the motives for communism which include resistance to imperialism, plutocracy, fascism, poverty, inequality, etc. still exist and are going to be channeled into something. The urge to fight those things isn’t going to go away.
So what is the new philosophy that the world is open to? I was under the impression democratic socialism was the human rights friendly communism lite for the 21st century. It seems latin america and western europe have a lot of democratic socialist tendencies. But has anything like that caught on in Asia, the middle east or Africa?
Or was the 20th century a unique century that had a lot of strong ideologies. Fascism, communism, religious fundamentalism, pan-arabism, etc. and the idea of a strong ideology really isn’t as well liked this century because people saw how bad things worked out.
Or has the fact that there is no USSR or communist China that nations can lean on anymore removed a lot of support nations would have to reform their governments? Democratic socialists in Africa can’t rely on the USSR or China to help them diplomatically, militarily or economically.
It’s not a single universal movement but there does seem to be a rise in assorted theocratic movements. Islam is the most noticeable but there are other religious groups seeking political power.
A classic, and I think this is the basis for the “Weak Fukuyama Principle.” In the early 1990’s, Francis Fukuyama came in for some serious ridicule when he suggested we are at “the end of history.” It was ridiculed…because it is ridiculous…but only if you take it too literally. The “weak” interpretation of the idea is simply, as you say, we’ve tried everything else, and democracy is the least odious – and pretty much everyone has realized that now.
A few theocrats, and even fewer monarchists, still persist.
I don’t think there’s anything that really fits the bill. Radical Islam is a fairly localized phenomenon, and it doesn’t seem to do particularly well in the few places where its had a chance to move from being the opposition to actually running a gov’t.
Russia and some of the old USSR states (and some places further afield, like Venezuala) seemed to have moved to a sort of strong-man democracy, where a popular demagogue uses oil wealth and control of the media and the like to keep the people on his side. But none of those states are particularly powerful, and they probably are only stable until oil and gas prices drop. Plus they don’t really have any sort of ideological basis that could spread to other places.
China, Vietnam and a few others have single party, nationalistic, oligarchies. These have been more successful at running their countries, but continue to have a lot of problems with corruption and the like, and again, there isn’t really much of an ideology there that can be exported.
That pretty much leaves various flavours of neo-liberal democracy. Which hasn’t exactly had an easy decade either, but to some degree that just goes to show how dominant it is. Despite a decade of serious problems in the developed world: financial crisis, low growth, Euro-dysfuntion, political grid-lock in the US, etc, there hasn’t really been any roll-back of modern democracy as a political system. Rather the opposite.
You base your claim that “communism was a failure” on the fact that distinctly non-communist modes of economic organization and decision-making didn’t work?
I’d say the rebuttal is that there were literally billions of self-professed communists who were trying to make communism work. Regardless of whether they achieved communism and it then failed or they tried to achieve communism and couldn’t even get it started, I’d say it’s strong evidence that communism is an unworkable system.
What do you mean by “monarchists”? Do you mean people who support a constitutional monarchy, such as Britain or Japan, where the monarch is a figurehead, and the government is basically democratic? That system works about as well as a republican form of democracy such as Germany or the United States.
If a billion people are saying that what they’re doing is communism and you’re there saying it isn’t, I’m going to go with the consensus. Maybe you should come up with a different name for whatever it is you’re talking about. Less confusion that way.
In none of those societies you mention, was it ever seriously claimed that they had reached communism, only that they were/still are working towards it.
No…real, serious monarchists, the ones who think, in terms of real political science, that government by a single person, with much more power than the current few remaining figurehead monarchs, is a good idea and would result in better governance than by parliaments.
There aren’t many…but they do exist. I’d guess they number somewhere below communists, but perhaps above anarchists.
This is fine as long as you acknowledge that this causes serious equivocation issues. There is a technical, well established definition of communism, and there is the colloquial definition. Ad populum only lends legitimacy to a colloquial definition - the well defined, technical explanation (lets say Marxism, though there are other well defined variants of communism that predate and post-date him) is not subject to ad populum.
No matter how many people say a tomato is not a fruit - a tomato is a fruit (scientifically).
Now, communism is vague, and I do agree that it might be more productive to avoid the word. But when one person is clearly speaking from a technical perspective, and you pull a colloquial definition, you’ve equivocated (doing the reverse is also true).
The Saudi regime is pretty prominent example of a true, extant, non-constitutional monarchy. Not sure what a good description of North Korea would be, but it is a hell of a lot closer to a monarchy than to any semblance of a communist state.
No, I can’t agree with your analogy. A tomato has objective existence. But communism is a philosophy. To claim it has some objective existence outside of what people think communism is is absurd. And to claim that what a billion communists are saying is communism is not communism and that only a handful of true believers know the real meaning of communism is almost as absurd. It’s like arguing about how many days are in a week - if everyone thinks it’s seven then the answer is seven because that’s what everyone thinks. If one or two holdouts want to insist that a week really has eight days, they’re wrong.
The problem with the “communism has never truly been tried” argument is that by those standards one could just as easily say true free market capitalism has never been tried. The argument against communism in my mind isn’t that an idealized communist state wouldn’t function, but rather that getting to that point is unfeasible. The failures of self declared communist states may not be proof that perfect communism would fail, but they ARE proof that reaching such an idealized state may be impossible.
So if a billion-plus people spend a century trying to accomplish something, and all they have to show for it is poverty, bloodshed, 100+million deaths of either starvation or state-sponsored brutality, and the eventual abandonment of the idea by virtually every state that ever tried it, how much more evidence do you need before you come to the conclusion that it was probably a bad idea?
The idea that everyone who tried to run a communist state and then turned it into a bloody dictatorship wasn’t a real communist is an obscene fallacy perpetuated by diehards and apologists to dismiss the consequences of mass murder and atrocious corruption run amok.
Chalk this right up there with “Christianity hasn’t really been tried yet…” When you are the theocratic master of an entire continent for almost 1700 years, holding sway over millions of people from birth to death, no one has the right to claim their idea “hasn’t been tried.”
Communism was tried, and the result was horror and madness and death.
The Communist countries that remain except for North Korea, which in reality is not Communist but something closer to Fascism combined with Stuart Divine Right theory, are doing much better in than the rest of the world, except for perhaps the rulers of a few Gulf Sheikdoms.
I think the reason is that market forces have pretty much been turned loose (except in Cuba and it is happening even there now) for small enterprises and farmers. Even large enterprises often have private ownership, but they are watched and subject to rules that prevent the kind of gouging of the employee or the customer that private enterprises elsewhere often get away with.
The idea now is to tap private initiative and allow private interests take risks that once had to be taken by the state, and allow good profits in return, but to remain essentially socialist.
I can tell you the change in Vietnam has been astonishing; the country has come alive and poverty is way down and housing is improving and most important everyone has enough food of wide variety.