Tag: International relations

Communism stood for certain principles,namely equality,eradcation of the difference between the Have’s and Have nots;distribution of wealth;work accoding to capacity and be provided for what you need;classlesssociety.
The collapse of Communism is mainly due to the fact that it assumed work and needs can be quantified.They can never be for needs are subjective, and ‘work according to capacity ‘ can not be defined-who defines capacity?-
Secondly it assumes human beings are mere numbers.No doubt man needs material comforts the most;however that is not the Summum Bonum of His existence.He has his feelings,emotions and ambitiuons and a constant desire to to move up.
Thirdly,the premise that ‘That all are born equal’ is a wrong one.Human beings are similar, not identical.No two individuals are equal in that their predispositions,drives, level of competency,and their definitions of needs and happiness.This, communism has failed to make allowance for.
Fourthly,too much of academic discussion on the means to achieve their ends,socialism;democracy,revolution etc;while achieving, the goal should have been accorded priority by sticking to one process, say Socialism and not dithering beacuse of impatience, and switching over to Arms.
Fifthly,Distribution of wealth without creating it.
Sixthly, confusion as to which comes first,their Nation or their ideologies.This led to international friction among the practitioners of the same system
Seventhly, dogmatic adherence , bordering on Religious fervour that anything other than communism is evil.
Eighthly, systematic destruction of the fundamental units of Society, Family,Religion,Philosphy,free thought and criticism.
While creating classless society ,they have created elite in the form of members of the party ,politburo Members and the common man.
Yet the principle of communism is sound and is needed even today-especially to day-as Keynesian Economics is not delivering the goods and the divide between the Rich and the Poor is widening.
What is needed now is the elimination of the mistakes mentioned above and provide Communism with a more Human face ;fight for injustice ,in a democratic way, with out being impatiennt.
Lastly what was the quip about’oriental despotism”-Typical Occidental reaction;if things go right,it is due to them;if wrong,orientals.USSR, oriental?
Story.
‘Few occasions are more propitious for forgetting the past than moments of historical commemoration. Amidst fond recollections of the fall of the Berlin wall, and in a time of, at least temporary, improvement in relations between Russia and the west, few may spare a thought for what it was that ended two decades ago. On two issues history has given its ultimate verdict: the cold war, the third and longest of the three chapters that made up the great global civil war of 1914-91, will not return; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as a multinational state and as a global ideological and strategic challenge to the west, is indeed dead. However, on a third component of this story – the worldwide communist movement – the verdict is, as yet, less clear.

Fred Halliday is ICREA research professor at IBEI, the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. He was formerly professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. He is a widely known and authoritative analyst of middle-eastern affairs who appears regularly on the BBC, ABC, al-Jazeera television, CBC and Irish radio. Among his many books are Revolution and World Politics: the Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Palgrave, 1999), The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (2005) and 100 Myths about the Middle East (2005)

This article is based on a more extended essay, “The Cold War: Lessons and Legacies”, to be published in Government and Opposition (December 2009-January 2010)Communism, embodying the ideology and the social aspirations underlying the Soviet challenge, and the worldwide echo that challenge evoked remains to be interred. But to bury communism can only be done on the basis of recognising what it represented, why millions of people struggled for, and believed in, this ideal and what it was they were struggling against. It can also only be done when the legacy of this ideology and movement is assessed and not simply forgotten, or conveniently, and in violation of all historical evidence, dismissed as an “illusion”.

Judging from the politics and intellectual debates of today, neither those who celebrate the end of communism, nor those who are now articulating a radical alternative, have carried out such an assessment: between (on one side) the still resilient complacency of market capitalism and an increasingly uncertain world of liberal democracy, and (on the other) the vacuous radicalisms that pose as a global alternative, the lessons of the communist past remain largely ignored. And so, as they say, they will be repeated. ‘
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/what-was-communism