You're right, it was Yugoslavia. A failed experiment in equality if there ever was one.

Tell us more about how you experienced Yugoslavia. Many of us come from capitalist countries and although I know from textbooks how communism is not a good idea, I never lived it.

Neither has zmaj.

Economy was state-run, but things weren't so bad. However, it was due to purely political reasons: the Great Leader was taking loans from both sides of the Iron Curtain so that Yugoslavia wouldn't go bankrupt.

In order to enforce equality among different nations within the same state, they had to falsify history and language. In those areas, there were things you couldn't say in public unless you wanted to do time in jail and lose your job. It was actually called "verbal crime". But, to be fair, if you quietly accepted the loss the freedom of speech and a few other things, you had a fairly secure existence: everybody had a job, a flat, free health insurance and free education.

However, imagine if the UN took over the world and told everybody that they couldn't refer to themselves as Americans, Germans or Italians, but only as "Earthlings". Anyone who broke that rule would end up in prison. Would you be ready to live in such a world?

I just noticed I steered away from the topic. Sorry.

Would you agree with Bob that Yugoslavia wasn't a communist country?

Not nearly as communist as the Eastern Bloc, that's true. The system was officially called "socialism". Factories and companies had "worker's councils" which were supposed to decide about their own future, but everybody knew it was a farce.

Actually the hypocrisy you mention I hear a lot when I talk to people from Eastern Europe. I remember a Hungarian who started to understand this when he was an adolescent and really found it difficult to accept that that was the society he lived in.

And when Western adolescents start to see through the lies of capitalism, they are at least entitled to publicly whine about it. I remember a French political poster: under the title "DICTATORSHIP", there was the cartoon of a political leader saying "Shut up". Below, there was the same guy, but the title said "DEMOCRACY", and the leader was saying: "Talk to the hand." Lol.

The French author Houllebecq, a staunch communist, wrote an essay where he argued that capitalism was indestructible because it was like a chameleon, eventually adapting to any political system. The developments in China seem to support this theory.

Zmaj, thanks for posting the real world experience.

You're welcome :)

Thank you for reading it, I mean.

With pleasure!

There is no such thing as a communist government, you could have a socialist one, but not a communist.

Lol Emac crying about private property. Do you know what it is? It is the means of production: land, capital, tools, etc. What you described is a person's labour power.

Bob, regarding scarcity and unlimited resources, it's kind of difficult to debate whether Marxism can work if you have to basically say, "OK, now imagine a world in which everyone has everything, THEN Marxism can exist." It's like, fine, Marxism can work, if we can remove the constraints of reality from consideration.

"it's kind of difficult to debate whether Marxism can work if you have to basically say, "OK, now imagine a world in which everyone has everything," Uhhh....NO IT IS NOT. HIS DEBATE ****FAILS*** BECAUSE HIS PREREQUISITES ARE ASININE! Good god....why do you people waste your time arguing with IDIOTS!!!

The real problem with Marxism is that it is rooted in a Hegelian worldview. Marx believed in the Hegelian "march of history", to his detriment. The Hegelian, and subsequently Marxist, dialectic never materialized. There's just not a direct line of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in intellectual thought or political development. Any rigid rule for history, society, or existence is not going to hold up to reality. The dictatorship of the proletariat turned into just that: a dictatorship. That being said certain parts of Das Kaptial where he is critiquing laissez-faire capitalism are quite good. Of course, this was in the late 1880s where labor laws stopping 80 hour work weeks and 5 year olds from working heavy machinery were chalked up to "lazy poor people".

...I don't know. We do seem to be slowly edging our way to a proletariat class, as more and more things are moved to massive corporations.

I read a really interesting theory that said that Marx's analysis of history was correct he just got the timeline wrong, and that the collapse of capitalism is taking much longer then Marx expected.

I found it quite compelling. I certainly don't think Marxism realize itself in my lifetime, but I also think Capitalism is slowly but surely headed down into oblivion. So I guess I'm biased.

The premise of the question is under what conditions could Marxist communism work. I answered that if you remove scarcity from the human condition, it's possible. Obviously, this claim does not apply to the present-day earth. But it's not impossible to imagine a way that scarcity would not be a central fact of the human economic condition.

Krellin, everyone has a different perspective, there's no reason not to flesh it out. I tend to learn about other people's perspectives by engaging with them which improves my ability to communicate and interact with people. Anyone can be called an idiot, but there are valid thoughts and perspectives that are worth dealing with, if no other reason than any given perspective tends to have armies of people all over the world who share it.

"The premise of the question is under what conditions could Marxist communism work. I answered that if you remove scarcity from the human condition, it's possible."

Even if scarcity is removed, it wouldn't be possible. Why? Because people DON'T want to be equal. That's why capitalism is so successful. It builds on the ingrained need of every human to be above others.

Capitalism is successful? I have a hard time looking at an economic philosophy which has resulted in the vast majority of the species living in poverty to support the Tiberian lifestyles of a few as "successful".

I knew Zmaj the snake was some Croat or Slovene. When are the Slovenes going to return the money they stole when they went independent?

You socialist Yugoslavia was a hellhole? How have the Germanized independent Yugoslav states worked out for people? How has IMF been treating you?

It is successful in the sense that it's still victoriously spreading across the globe. China has turned into a mock-communist country which is actually capitalist. How is that not successful?

Capitalism is successful at keeping people poor, broke, unemployed, and illiterate, while desecrating the planet for the handful of gangsters & thugs.

China is a socialist country. Stop stealing credit for them.

Putin33 is trying to enflame nationalistic passions like the troll he is. Please don't encourage him, everyone.

You're the nationalist. I'm a socialist. I think Yugoslavia was a great country. You'd rather live as a vassal of the Eurobanks and Germany.

When are they ever going to charge the Slovene war criminals for shooting JNA soldiers when they were surrendering?

I think what you're doing makes the discussion about Marxism pointless. We can't evaluate an idea based on a hypothetical and far off future, or if we do, it has little to do with the idea under discussion and it becomes all about this hypothetical future. Regardless I'll extend my point about individualism as a feature of psychology and say that an implication of individualism as psychologically essential is that it introduces in many the need for superiority and betterment - resulting in hoarding and hierarchy. People will want to run the methods of distributing these infinite resources to get a leg up, and even if the administration of the resources was collective, there would be those who use creative power to seek to do it better. Social dynamics even in abundance will reintroduce private property again and again, whether on the small level of a child wanting a toy and not wanting to share it or the large level of people seeking to run the channels, wires and tubes that keep society running, for reasons of vanity and ambition and desire to distinguish onesself from others.