Here's the trouble with communism. Marx and Engels WERE brilliant, observant, and educated. And they, I believe, genuinely cared about the plight of the workers. (It was bad, and still is in many placs of the world.) Their modern day counterparts are equally sincere, motivated, and compassionate. I admire their energy and enthusiasm. True communism is a beautiful ideal that nobody can argue with in principle.
However, their "answer" to the problems of industrial societies doesn't actually address the problems. While I understand the emotion that makes a young person want to throw up their hands and abandon everything in favor of a revolution, what such people ignore is that such revolutions do not fix the problem and often create NEW issues. And, disturbingly, many of the so-called communist leadership is exactly the opposite of true communism (fascist) and are cynically manipulating the young (who naturally hate war, as any rational person does) into betraying the very guarantees of the freedoms we have won over such a long time. Edmund Burke argued against revolutionary action (except in extreme cases) for the very reason that much of what is good is destroyed.
Lenin's caustic painting of such young revolutionaries is revealing. "Useful idiots" is what he called them, usable only to overthrow the existing capitalist societies and will be disposed of as soon as they turn their moral clarity onto the so-called "communist" nations. Don't believe me? Ask Trotsky. Do you know that communist governments have killed more of their own citizens than were killed by other nations armies? We deplore the fact that 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam, but did you know that more Vietnamese peasants were killed in the first three years of the communist "peace" than in all 13 years of American involvement in Vietnam?
A so-called "communist" revolution merely creates a new elitist society that makes a god of the state and its functionaries, and gives them the ultimate power of life and death. Don't believe me? China executes 10,000 people a year! The US executes I believe around 40.
This countries leftist elite would have you believe that such abuses of communist power are unusual, but it happens in every nation that has embraced the communist idea. It is one thing to claim that the Soviet experiment improved the lot of average workers, but it simply did not. Number after number, from consumption of red meat to average grain harvests to infant mortality, the Soviets made things worse. Central planning is disastrous, because it assumes that the educated elite will be able to predict the economic changes. They cannot. We don't expect the weatherman to be right all the time, and we don't mind because his miscalculations are no big deal most of the time. But a wrong economic forecast, and putting all your faith and your money in a wrong economic forecast, can ruin a nation and starve millions. The Soviets at the end of their mad career had ruined their environment, killed more of their own than Hitler did, and had a vast Rust Belt of useless industries decaying slowly into gray oblivion.
I wish the left would pour their energy into building this nation and quit embracing the fool's gold of the communist dream.
CZAR