What is your opinion about Communism?

[The Grand Nudger]

The difference is of course communism is an artificially constructed and defined ideology called Marxism first, around which various practices claiming fealty to or inspiration from the ideology, and lumped under the catch all term of communism, then arose to take advantage of the appeal of the ideology to segmrnt of the society.   Therefore it is possible to assess how closely each instance of the practice adhered to the original ideology, and also to evaluate whether the ideology itself on the whole have succeeded in inspiring sound and beneficial practices.

Capitalism was a pragmatically and organically evolved and continuously growing set of practice first, before various academics and opinion makers attempted to fit ideologies around different portions of it.  Therefore it is not do meaningful to say whether a actual instance of the practice fit the ideology of capitalism, nor whether the ideology of capitalism inspired sound and beneficial practices.  The practice were there before there was any ideology and arose independentky of the ideology.   The practices generally predated and always arose independently of ex post classificatoon.

That's an impressive bit of revisionist history of capitalism.  Communism as an ideology is no more or less organic or pragmatic..and it seems silly to insists that the public ownership of the means of production didn't preexist it's codification as a political ideology.  It was the natural state of human beings for so long that it became entrenched in our sipirutal ideologies...simply awaiting revival and exploitation.

If the above can be used to defend capitalism gone wrong..it can just as easily defend communism gone wrong.

Personally, I;m not interested in defending one ideology over the other. I don't think it can be done, all things considered. I suspect that we'll see our love of capitalism as a temporary and unsustainable fetish in the not too distant future. I think, between the two, -as another poster touched upon...we have to determine what it is we value about some x to determine which tool is best suited to the job. There are already things that we don't think capitalism is the best answer for, even in our deeply ideologically friendly country.