<<We tried it. It didn't work. No reasonable person disputes this.
Karl Marx would argue that his ideas might have worked if someone else implemented them.
Karl Marx would argue that his ideas might have worked if someone else implemented them.
Meanwhile capitalism in whatever form it's tried has proven itself to be an incredible engine of poverty reduction and human/social progress. There's always been tension between capitalism and democracy and we may be at a point where some of the cracks are showing.
For their KGB, we had our J. Edgar Hoover. For their political purges, we had our House Committee on Unamerican Activities. For their later economic struggles, we had our great depression.
That people, included in the UK elected representatives, make a case for the Soviet Union and Communist China having done more good than bad is a a terrible failure of history.
I suggest taking the notion that communism is always bad with a grain of salt, given that our nation has been propagandized to despise communism much as the Soviets were propagandized to hate capitalism.
The Soviet Union went from a third world country of farmer peasants to becoming the world's first spacefaring civilization in only 40 years. Considering where they started, I believe that is quite impressive.
During the cold war, each side's media focused exclusively on the other's shortcomings, turning molehills into mountains, so to speak. To not acknowledge the reality distortion field around reporting of the era is an assault against the historical record.
Was the breaking of the kulaks - causing the Holodomor which killed an estimated 2.5m-7m Ukranians let alone deaths across the rest of the USSR - a necessary step in the industrialisation of Russia?
Capitalism industrialised - and indeed created industrialisation, with some pretty nasty consequences which led to unionisation and the growth of the middle classes. However none of those nasty consequences were anything close to what Communist regimes have brought us - that isn't bias, historical propaganda, it is just fact on whatever measure you choose to adopt.
Democracy is relatively new, and has proven hard to establish in most of the world, so there isn't a lot of evidence that it's stable.