I`m engineer, but I love the history, the philosophy, the politics. I want to make this question, about what are the reasons because the communism failed, because the communism dissapear? I think that the answers of people that live in east europe may help to resolve this question?
Dear Daniel,
As a historian having degrees in both engineering (more precisely, industrial energetics) and comparative history, and who managed to write a book on the breakdown of communist regimes in East-Central Europe, I dare to share my thoughts with you. I think the answer resides in three major issues: human nature, ideology and economy. However, people think that communism failed only because of economics: communism is generally associated with poverty and backwardness, because communist regimes came to power in relatively backward countries: Russia, China, North Korea, Romania, Bulgaria etc. Communism is based on centrally planned economy and the decision to allocate funds for investment or consumption is political. This is the first major fallacy, which derives from ideology. Revolutionary socialism, as envisaged by Lenin, is different from Marxism. Lenin contradicted Marx and said that a party of professional revolutionaries is needed to carry out the socialist revolution. Professional revolutionaries have no mercy:those who do not want to go to revolution are even forced to do so or killed. Once in power, the party of revolutionaries does not accept political competition: is a system based on one party, headed by a single person, who is considered infallible. Who thinks otherwise than the single party and the supreme leader is either jailed or killed by the secret police. And now we come to human nature: humans are not always generous, cooperative and good-willing. They can be egotistic, cynical, opportunistic and coward. Thus, many will accept the single party rule and the everyday lie. However, always, but always, there will be daring individuals (the dissidents) willing to fight for freedom of speech, who will show the failures of the economic system and the mistakes of the power elite, and sooner or later their words are listened to. However, they cannot do much if there were not democratic countries in the West to support them. The trouble is, if democracy fails in the West (Europe and North America), fascism and communism will return in full glory.
What a joy to receive an answer so many years after formulating it!!!. Thanks Dragos. Im engineer, but very curious always. I really like you to formulate three points of view. People usually only refer to the economic issue.
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