Could Soviet-style Communism have worked if the West had not seen it as such a threat?
Communism fails everywhere it has been tried. Currently it is in it’s death throes even in China. The problem with Communism is twofold. The first is that it denies human nature. Communism is the bastardization of socialist theory. The idea of socialism is that it strives too make all people equal. The simple fact is that people are not equal, some are willing to work harder to achieve more in life, while others are content with less. By attempting to equally redistribute everything among all you take away the incentive to achieve. In short it ignores the basic human failing of greed. The second problem is that it is impossible for all people to be represented equally from a government standpoint and what ends up happening is that certain groups usurp power for themselves. Thus you are left with a proletariat party structure which imposes it’s will on the masses. The masses are not properly represented because they do not choose these leaders and are left will little control over the d
It never had a chance. Marx’s economic ideas were nonsense, and communist countries had to very quickly give them up. An example is his labour theory of value, the value of a product represents only the amount of labour put into it, completely rejecting supply and demand ie. a diamond’s value is only the cost of the labour to dig it up and polish it. His social ideas were equally erroneous. To split the whole population into two groups, proletariat (good) and bourgeois (evil) is an oversimplification to the point of stupidity. His notion that the proletariat are a revolutionary class is also mistaken. He was a bourgeois intellectual and Lenin was a minor aristocrat they just projected their own wishes on the working class, who given decent wages and working conditions are mostly content with the capitalist system. To change Marx’s quote, you could say that revolution is the opium of the intellectual. Soviet-style communism was totalitarian at heart and collapsed as much from its own in
