Dirty Rotten Commies

Anonymous wrote:

"The fatal flaw in traditional Marxist theory and practice was the notion that the revolutionary dictatorship would allow itself to wither away."

By traditional, you mean Leninist. A seemingly minor quibble that may not be altogether minor. There are a plethora of socialist theories that lend themselves to very different practices. They all owe something to Marx. http://www.dsausa.org/pdf/widemsoc.pdf

Yes, I'll grant that "traditional" is the spin applied by the societies which adopted Marxist theory and put it into practice. There were other communistic theories in play, such as Anarchism, which generally held that the state had to be done away with first. One problem with that, as the Spanish Anarchists discovered trying to fight Franco's Fascists, is that it's hard to get anything done when just about everything is put to a vote. "All those in favor of charging the machine gun nest, raise their hand ...".

I think the biggest revelation is that when people become Communists, they don't somehow become "better" or more enlightened people than the rest of us. Traditional Western democratic theory is based on trying to keep any one or faction from accumulating too much power by creating offsetting power structures. This less trustworthy view of human nature appears to be the most practical over time.