User blog comment:OreoToast555/Communism for noobs/@comment-32656-20130728032142

Not as accurate as you'd think, Oreo.

Ideally, communism is a system in which there is no government, countries, class divisions, or laws, and all are equal. More or less anarchy, with slightly more equality. How Marx intended this to happen was the government - he refers to it as a "dictatorship of the people" - would slowly remove all of these things, until it effectively ceased to exist, having nothing to do.

Why it doesn't work? Greed is more or less it. Even in such a government, someone has to be in charge. Human nature more or less dictates that they will not want to lose their power - hence, the reason why they won't give it up. Of all communist governments, only the USSR under Lenin even tried this, and he had to back-track on that to keep power because it failed, largely due to Oreo's reasons.

Another part of that is that the only way to implement it on any level didn't work. In factories in the USSR, they all got a certain amount, enough to live, for basically nothing. Their quotas were not hard to meet, and they got basically nothing extra for doing it. In such an environment, no one really does any work. This is, however, more a problem with how they implemented things, rather than Communism itself.

Not really why they become dictatorships - most of which were not actually violent. As I noted, someone has to be in charge, and Communism, while not too bad in theory, is horrible in practice, so they even have an excuse to stay in control. When someone is in control of a political party, and that party is more or less the state itself, it is going to be a dictatorship. Happens all over the world, and in far more than just communism. Only bright side of it is that the communist governments - and not the outright dictatorships that claim(ed) to be communist, like North Korea - did/do have a mechanism for transfer of power that is more or less peaceful between leaders.

That isn't why the USSR failed - really, Stalin, despite his brutality, extreme paranoia, and the millions he killed, is why it lasted so long, as his programs gave it the resources and industry to survive. And it lasted decades beyond him, as well. You are right about the only attempts at real communism being in the very early USSR, however.

The USSR failed because of two things. One, its economy basically went south - the industry fell behind with regards to technology, and their military started to go the same way, though it kept up fairly well until the end. Trying to correct this was simply not possible - they couldn't afford it and their military. Gorby tried to fix this, and while his reforms in this direction would, had they been allowed to work, led to it going the way of otl China (to some degree), they failed overall because of the second thing.

That second one is that he let dissent out in the USSR after the pullout from Europe itself. Was more or less pressed into it, and it was impossible to manage both reforms and keep it intact. Best-case scenario would have been something along the lines of Nuke's timeline.

The PRC is not even close to communism - really, it hasn't been communist since the early 1980s. Yes, the Communist Party rules the state, but at this point, all it is is a one-party dictatorship. The communist aspects fled the coop a long time ago. People get rich - there are many Chinese billionaires, Oreo, and millionaires too - but a lot of people are staying poor. Like every other party dictatorship, but with better economic growth.

Today, most other "communist" regimes more or less follow the China model. North Korea being the real exception, though that one is a full-on dictatorship, bordering on a very absolute monarchy.

On a scale larger than communes - not that that worked either - the only time anything like theoretical communism has ever been done is in the USSR prior to 1921. And they had to stop that because the country hated them and was in open revolt over it.

Rex, you're wrong about innovations only being from "capitalistic" nations. The Soviet Bloc had many of its own too.

On the most basic level - the idea of everyone being equal - Communism isn't a bad thing. However, there is no way that that is ever going to happen, because of human nature and how such an "equal"society would have to come about. Marx had a very naive notion of humanity, lol. It is just not possible.