7 Huge Misconceptions About Communism (and Capitalism)

[baldguy]

58. And you're under the mistaken impression that capitalism has succeeded,

and that the capitalist ideology, which you're spewing out of ignorance, is simply the natural order of things. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Do you think the Africans who were kidnapped & shipped like cargo over 10,000 miles and sold into slavery didn't have capitalism forced on them? Or the Scottish people who suffered & died in the name of capitalism during the Highland Clearances? Or the various Native American nations who tried to fight off the European invasion? Capitalism has always expanded it's reach by being forced upon people, exploiting them & then bleeding them dry (sometimes literally). This has always resulted in greater inequality, suffering & death for it's victims. This isn't "trivia", it's history. Capitalist ideologues like you would condemn the world to repeat it.

The plain fact is - which has been pointed out several times in this thread - communism has never really been tried. Therefore, there's no way you can say it has "failed". (The structure of communism actually works quite well, and is used all the time. Ironically, the most successful collective institutions are Western-style corporations. Ownership is divided equally among the shares of the corporation, and strategic decisions are made via a democratic vote. Communism would simply do for labor what corporations have done for capital.)

OTOH, failure is an integral part of capitalist ideology. That's really the only thing capitalism has going for it - the system doesn't break when things go bad. It's just that people need to suffer & die. When that happens, rational people have stepped in to regulate those things which caused the suffering by introducing aspects of socialism and communism into the capitalist system. As a result of these changes you have never experienced the evils of pure capitalism. They can only be understood by studying history.