Communism had reforming optimists too. Understanding why they failed can help today’s reformers to avoid the same fate.
Read the full piece here.
Posted by works-in-progress
Communism had reforming optimists too. Understanding why they failed can help today’s reformers to avoid the same fate.
Read the full piece here.
Posted by works-in-progress
2 Comments
Sounds like they just need a wise benevolent philosopher king economist to set the prices and then everything would be fine!
I assume they actually mean socialist governments since communism is the theoretical end stage only seen as achievable in the far off future after a period of socialism to so-called communists. And even then it sounds like they’re going by the early Lenin and later Stalin/Mao’s particular brand of it.
I’m not trying to defend anything in particular, but it’s very common to flatten leftist ideologies into a monolith and call it communism. But there is a huge diversity amongst those who call themselves communists and those who hope to achieve communism. Plenty of free market friendly succs still see themselves as revisionist Marxists working towards communism. Hell there are liberals in the analytic tradition who see communism as a possible future given technological advances and who agree with Marx’s analysis of history and parts of his analysis of economics. Just look at Cohen and his merry band of analytixs