What is your opinion about Communism?

[Anomalocaris]

I've been a Marxist-Lennonist since I was 7 years old.

That would be Groucho Marx and John Lennon?

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There's a bit of a quandary in communism.  It would work if people played nice and shared stuff, and if they did do that it wouldn't need to be politicized.

A proportion of any population will always have stronger than usual instances of the homo sapien’s instinctive drive to seek out like bloodhounds and exploit any social and economic opportunities to advance the interests of oneself and one’s bloodline at the short term expense of the larger community;   and a proportion of those will also have the intelligence to disguise their motivation or convince the community to overlook this so as to pull this off with little or not consequence or disapprobation despite any professed ethics of the community.

Communism is doctrinally unable to fully come to terms with the above stated fact of human behavior.  Therefore it can never be systematically structured to make the best of this heretical but exceptionally powerful motivation.   Instead it must fight it or see it corrode communism’s dollhouse like ideal of happy selfless clockwork dolls.    This is what happened in the Soviet Union.   The Chinese saw this happening and decided to keep the facade of communism but abandon its underlying doctrines.   The fact that Chinese did this where as the USSR didn’t is the underlying reason China clocked 10% annual growth for 25 years since communism collapsed in the USSR.

Some iteration of Capitalism, on the other hand, is able to accept this behavior.    By establishing a clearing house of ideas through a capital market, Capitalism established an imperfect, but not entirely nonfunctional, way to evaluate the real consequences of inevitable selfish acts, and reward and promote those selfish acts which by happenstance also benefit those who were not originally intended to be the direct beneficiaries.  This is how capitalism is strengthen to a much larger degree by individual initiative and by extension unplanned innovation than ever can communism.    Capitalism can, even if not always do, better exploit the overwhelmingly powerful motivation of instinctive selfishness for greater good of the community than communism.

Incidentally, a little known fact of the history of soviet communism is that,  almost 60 years before Deng Xiaoping in China realized the intrinsic weakness of doctrinal communism stemming from its inability to exploit private enterprise, and reformed China into a quasi-capitalistic fast growing manufacturing giant,  the Vladimir illych Lenin of Leninism fame and the original leader of the Communist revolution in Russia in 1917 came to the very same realization as well.   Before Lenin died he advocated the reintroduction of many components of capitalism, including limited private ownership of means of production and capital market back into the fledgling Soviet Union.   However, Lenin was an invalid at this point, and was unable bring his program forward.  Then he died. Stalin took over and first sidelined and eventually executed lenin’s more pragmatic cronies, and introduced full and bloody full collectivization.  From here was born the 5 year plans, the rigid centrally planned economy, and the Soviet state we came to know and which collapsed in 1990.

So there was a brief window of opportunity between 1921-1924 when the Leninist Soviet Union did not have to go down the path of Stalinism, and was poised to go down a economically more liberal quasi-capitalistic authorian path more similar to what China pursued since 1990.

As Churchill quipped, that Lenin lived was russia’s Greatest misfortune.   But that Lenin died was russia’s Second greatest misfortune.