At 08:50 09.11.2002 -0800, Costin Manolache wrote:

On the contrary, this particular analogy is pretty good even many of analogies aren't.

I wrote:

On a wider scale, it was very hard for the West to fight Communism because the communist ideology sells much better to the unprivileged. Yet 75 years later, the West won, not because of its persuasiveness but because it had much more to show on the store shelves than the communists. Communism is a great idea but it doesn't work. Capitalism is hard to sell but it ends up having better results on the long run.

We are talking about different aspects. My point is that on paper Communism *looks* much better than Capitalism. The fact that in the West Capitalism is exercised within a liberal democratic system is an orthogonal aspect.

After WWII many developing countries, actually most of humanity, entertained the idea of switching to Communism. China did switch. During much of the cold war many of the non-aligned countries were far friendlier to Russia then to the West.

Communism is a very attractive and modern ideology. Here is a presentation:

Communism is a society without money, without a state, without property and without social classes. People come together to carry out a project or to respond to some need of the human community but without the possibility of their collective activity taking the form of an enterprise that involves wages and the exchange of its products. The circulation of goods is not accomplished by means of exchange: quite the contrary, the by-word for this society is "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs".

It almost sounds like us if you ask me. :-)

Source: http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/

The Libertarian Communist Home Page addresses precisely the point you raise. The link is: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Embassy/8970/

On paper, Communism presents much better than Capitalism. This does not mean that the implementation of a communist system has bettered the condition of the countries were it was implemented. Not all that glitters is gold. One must be wary of ideologies, *all* ideologies, because they have a tendency to see only selected parts of reality.

This is orthogonal to my argument.

-- Ceki

TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. -- Jon Postel, RFC 793