European Union Forums

[Ostoher]

Marx wrote about communism being an end result, not something that could immediately become a reality in a couple generations like Russia and China tried.

First a nation has to go through a capitalist stage where it gains a lot of resources and economic power relative to other nations that haven't gone through this stage yet, for example the US right now. Once it has sufficiently gone through that stage it tends to move onto something in between capitalism and communism, a kind of socialism which you can see in some countries like Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc).

From there it essentially "waits" for the rest of the world to experience globalization of capitalism as we are seeing right now. Once the whole world is sufficiently enveloped in capitalism and large enough consumer class develops in each nation then generally the nations will make a move to socialism for a while.

Then socialist nations around generally start sharing borders and losing political boundaries and then ultimately the result is the communism Marx spoke of.

Ironically many Marxists are anti-Capitalist when actually it is critical for proclaimed capitalists to help bring about the next stage of government as laid out in his treatise the Manifesto of Communism.

[Dixie678]

Communism only works with small towns or tribes but needs capitalism to work with a large populations. What you are not understanding is that China today is no less capitalistic then the US only the amount of state involvement is different. North Korea is a example of trying pure communist with a large population.

[Elros]

Yes.

Stalin and Mao's brand of "communism" was not real communism as per Marx. I'm glad that someone can recognize this.

[Valkerai]

Very interesting. There could be something in that argument. It's been many years since I was forced to read Marx in college, but it sounds about right.

Consider also that communism has never been tried in a country with a pre-existing democratic tradition. In Russia, Cuba, China, etc., people only ended up trading one set of despots for another set. They were not 'rich' countries with a comfortable middle class and the values of developed nations. And they were not really faithful to Marx's ideas, they ended up as they began, with a small powerful oligarchy trying to enrich themselves at the country's expense. (We have that problem now here in the US and we're not even communist!)

So perhaps Marx's predictions are coming true in reverse. Russia, China, Vietnam, etc. seem to be growing through communism to capitalism!