...One of these things is "keeping up with the Jones's." That's why communism won't succeed -- people always want what they don't have, or what their neighbors DO have.
It's been this way since caveman days. If Nguk killed a critter and brought it home, his next-cave neighbor would try to bring a bigger one home to impress the ladies.
Communism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. One may have pre-eminence at one time, and the other pre-eminence later -- but both exist simultaneously. I remember a Time magazine article in 1981 about the 17,000 millionaires in the USSR.
Capitalism, by definition, will let people slip through the cracks that it deems to be not sufficiently economically useful. Unless something is done, these people become revolutionaries. So the capitalists allow the existence of socialism as a necessary cost to provide stability. THAT is why so many of the super-wealthy seem to favor socialist stuff.
Meanwhile, communism, so far, has never been able to exist on any scale larger than a kibbutz with capitalism to provide the surpluses necessary for its operation.
Both, ultimately, concentrate power in the hands of a few.
What you are more likely to see is global corporatism in an alliance with government such that government socialist programs protect the global corporatists from the teeming multitudes.
Either way -- one can't replace the other entirely because both need each other.
The SOLUTION is to think Beyond Capitalism and Communism to economic systems that don't reduce man to an economic being only and that don't define wellbeing only in terms of goods available.
John , what rock did you find this simplistic drivel under? The mechanics seem logical but you make some statements that are incorrect . 17k millionaires in the USSR? Ordinary unemployed and poor people magically become revolutionaries? The super wealthy favor socialism? and blah, blah , blah.
Then again John, Human beings have a tendency to want life to be simple , easy and rewarding . Government is hard, complicated and inherently unrewarding. This is why power tends to concentrate in the hands of the few.
The Soviet Union never achieved true communism as advocated by Marx. Stalin took power and turned it into another dictatorship. The leaders that followed were never able to get the country back on track until Gorbachev, but by then public opinion caused the USSR to collapse. Now Putin presides over a capitalist Russia.
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