[geeks] can't wait for Vista

[Mike Meredith]

On Thu, 9 Nov 2006 19:02:25 -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Wed, 08 Nov 2006 @ 17:40 +0000, Mike Meredith said:
> 
> > Er ... no. One example doesn't demonstrate anything conclusive about
> > communism. In a limited sense, communism worked reasonably well for
> 
> I don't see that as communism, at least not in terms of a form of
> government.

In another email I referred to it as 'anarcho-communism' although it was
probably closest to 'primitive communism' (a more or less theoretical
example of hunter-gatherer communism although some real life examples
have been found) ... and obviously it isn't a form of government in the
conventional sense of a centralised state government. But as an informal
local government ? Sure.

> Are you saying those Russian villages formed a centralized state that
> owned all production resources?

No, in fact the villagers didn't even own *themselves* for much of
history.

Communism isn't necessarily simply a centralised state owning the means
of production. There are many different kinds ... the Bolsheviks who
took control of the Russian Revolution were actually in a minority, and
Lenin's 'soviet of soviets' was an innovation that some Bolsheviks were
suspicious of. Doctrinally, the eastern block countries were
transitional dictatorships of the proletariat and not true communism at
all.

Yeah right (I don't believe in communism).

> Yes, but rarely because of the form of government.  Mostly it was just
> because it was very hard.

Well whilst I was concentrating on attacking the notion that communism
doesn't work because one colony that was initially organised along those
lines began to fail, 'because it was very hard' was sort of what I was
implying.

> For example, several were obliterated by a hurricane.
> 
> I wouldn't count that as a failure of government, although there are

Well it's the fault of government that they didn't invest in weather
control to stop the hurricanes :)

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  sigmonster: core dumped