The Socialism/Communism Thread

MendotoManteo

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This is a very complicated subject. I do not wish for it to devolve to pre-conceived notions of socialism/communism and capitalism.

That being said, some things I never knew before the past few years are this:

1. In 1922, Russian Empire life expectancy was around 32 years. US life expectancy was around 40. Despite Russia enduring much worse suffering from world wars and a civil war, by 1975, life expectancy in the Soviet Union was around 70. In the US, it was around 71.

2. The Soviets gave women the right to vote from the start. Despite what we see here, glorifying suffragettes, that's the only reason women got the right to vote when they did. Because of the Bolsheviks.

3. Bread lines - these did not begin until marketization was occurring throughout the 1980s. "Soviet breadlines" are largely a myth. (What the Internet will tell you on this subject is largely a bunch of bullshit. And for good reason.) Inflation was largely tied to this as well.

4. How many countries did the USSR invade/coup as opposed to the USA? I'd say, probably a ratio of 1-10?

Socialism/Communism is a fraught subject. Many people have suffered because of its ideology. "100 million dead!" That's complicated.

But how many have died from capitalist ideology? And how many aren't considered to have been killed from capitalist ideology? Was the starvation of India "capitalist"? It certainly wasn't socialist. Were the world wars "capitalist"? They certainly weren't socialist.

This is not meant as a defense of the Soviet Union. It did a lot of bad things, certainly.

It is to say, however, that the ideology of Marxism/Socialism/Communism is far more complex than we have given it credit. No less so given the fact that our own nation has led numerous embargoes against such countries. Is this because of "freedom" and "democracy"? You've seen the same things I have in the past decade. I would say, probably not.

Always judge a country by its life expectancy. It's the most crucial statistic there is. Income is a side-distraction. "Freedom" is always relative, obviously.

Anyhow, this is the thread to express your thoughts on socialism and communism. Please do so respectfully and thoughtfully.
 
Everything exists in a time a place for a reason. Ideology was merely a tool to force the world into modernity and that took on different forms depending on the location, culture, history, etc. For Russia and China that took on a form of Asiatic despotism that wasn't unfamiliar for these parts of the world. I think though ideology was the only way Russia and China could maintain their concept of sovereignty, it took on a different form in Japan with its own empirical tendencies, as it did in South Korea with a military junta up until basically the 90s (same with Taiwan). China tried to have an American style Republican government with Sun Yat-Sen and that all failed miserably once China was taken over by the Japanese, it made the Maoists inevitable by then as they had the more cohesive group of leaders.

The Russian story is far more complicated and is fundamentally tied to its relationship with Germany. Few people acknowledge just how much Nazism was a foreign import from Russia, and WW2 was a lot more about Stalin than it was about Hitler. The Soviet Union in the early years was hell on earth, and before Hitler had even become chancellor or consolidated his power, Stalin was liquidating the kulaks at mass levels. This was a terror regime unlike anything seen up to this point in human history, and its this context that makes you realize how a very civilized nation like Germany could come accept this strange Austrian guy as its leader under the banners of a bizarre occultic nationalist ideology on the country.

As for America, we're arguably not "capitalist" the way people think, its basically been state capitalist since FDR, and a lot of what America revolutionized is far more complex but has to do with how law is written and enforced away from older traditional forms via arbitrary monarchies or religious institutions running cover for what was just pure oligarchy. Capitalism for America is therefore more of a means to reinforce its original revolution in how property rights are adjudicated, along with being a vessel to perpetuate our constitutional government through maintaining longer term elite interests over generations. In some ways America is incredibly oligarchic, in other ways its incredibly democratic. America is in even further ways more akin to a religion upholding a system of law above all else, or its a place that has a longer term objective of raising the consciousness of humanity by attempting to enshrine the enlightenment into government form. But this is an on-going project, not without its own stumbling blocks, because people are people, and because America is not an ethnic based nation, therefore elites dont always stay elites, they come and they go. Furthermore, newcomers have challenges they face that they must deal with before they arrive at the enlightenment side of the country's history, so its a complicated endeavor to maintain these ambitions.
 
You might want to read up on the collectivization of agriculture before you imply there were no bread lines until the 80s.
 
You might want to read up on the collectivization of agriculture before you imply there were no bread lines until the 80s.
You know, I never would have thought such a thing during a worldwide depression - when you're having to create an entirely different material being from a society where people where shitting out in the streets and dying in their 30s - would result in bread lines, but you may have a point.

Now, let's go enjoy our Thanksgiving meal with high fructose corn syrup.
 
I know some folks who grew up in Eastern Bloc countries in the 1980s, and stories they tell are of horrible, oppressive places to live.
 
I think there is a case to be made for a robust social safety net and even an increase in the child tax credit paid monthly like it was during covid, but full fledged Socialism or Communism is not good in my opinion.
 
You know, I never would have thought such a thing during a worldwide depression - when you're having to create an entirely different material being from a society where people where shitting out in the streets and dying in their 30s - would result in bread lines, but you may have a point.

Now, let's go enjoy our Thanksgiving meal with high fructose corn syrup.
Well US food production in the 30s actually rose, but prices were down given the economic disaster and dust bowl. Quite the opposite in Stalin's Soviet Union, where food production didn't see 1920s levels until the 40s. 7-8 million dies in Ukraine alone during collectivization, with perhaps 12 million total starved across the Union.

I've already started to enjoy my Thanksgiving feasting, albeit with bourbon, which my body will turn into sugar with added benefits.
 
This is a very complicated subject. I do not wish for it to devolve to pre-conceived notions of socialism/communism and capitalism.

That being said, some things I never knew before the past few years are this:

1. In 1922, Russian Empire life expectancy was around 32 years. US life expectancy was around 40. Despite Russia enduring much worse suffering from world wars and a civil war, by 1975, life expectancy in the Soviet Union was around 70. In the US, it was around 71.

2. The Soviets gave women the right to vote from the start. Despite what we see here, glorifying suffragettes, that's the only reason women got the right to vote when they did. Because of the Bolsheviks.

3. Bread lines - these did not begin until marketization was occurring throughout the 1980s. "Soviet breadlines" are largely a myth. (What the Internet will tell you on this subject is largely a bunch of bullshit. And for good reason.) Inflation was largely tied to this as well.

4. How many countries did the USSR invade/coup as opposed to the USA? I'd say, probably a ratio of 1-10?

Socialism/Communism is a fraught subject. Many people have suffered because of its ideology. "100 million dead!" That's complicated.

But how many have died from capitalist ideology? And how many aren't considered to have been killed from capitalist ideology? Was the starvation of India "capitalist"? It certainly wasn't socialist. Were the world wars "capitalist"? They certainly weren't socialist.

This is not meant as a defense of the Soviet Union. It did a lot of bad things, certainly.

It is to say, however, that the ideology of Marxism/Socialism/Communism is far more complex than we have given it credit. No less so given the fact that our own nation has led numerous embargoes against such countries. Is this because of "freedom" and "democracy"? You've seen the same things I have in the past decade. I would say, probably not.

Always judge a country by its life expectancy. It's the most crucial statistic there is. Income is a side-distraction. "Freedom" is always relative, obviously.

Anyhow, this is the thread to express your thoughts on socialism and communism. Please do so respectfully and thoughtfully.
1. Link to those life expectancy numbers? Here's what I found for the US. It puts US life expectancy at about 60 in 1922. I am therefore exceedingly skeptical of the Russian life expectancy numbers you cite. Keep in mind that 32 is extremely low; I think during the Dark Ages, life expectancy was like 28. I will leave aside the question of whether life expectancy is really a good way to "judge a country."

2. American women did not get the right to vote because of the Bolsheviks. That's a nutso claim. "Glorifying suffragettes" is craziness. We glorify them because they fought for generations for voting rights. It wasn't just handed over because the Bolsheviks did it. Note that women already had the right to vote in about 10 states before WWI. The main impetus for voting rights was the contribution of women during the war era -- not unlike the impetus for lowering the voting age to 18 from 21 (i.e. the contributions of people that age in the military belied any claim that they were too immature to vote).

3. I don't know what to say about "bread lines" except that you are perhaps being overly literal here. I don't know if there were lines for bread per se, but material shortages were common in the Soviet Union. Maybe not for bread.

4. How many countries did the Soviets invade or coup? Let's see. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, the Baltic nations, etc. etc. There were 8 countries in the Warsaw Pact, so from that alone, for the US to have a 10:1 ratio, we'd have needed to invade or coup half the countries in the world (more than half, actually, since there were substantially fewer countries). Add in the countries like the Baltics, Georgia, the Stans that were absorbed into the USSR; also add Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Korea, where the Soviets provided support for violent coups; and of course their invasion of Afghanistan, and so forth.

In reality, the behavior of the US and the USSR toward the "Third World" was largely similar. A focus on geopolitics regardless of the actual outcomes in those countries. The myth has been that the US stood for freedom and the USSR for oppression; debunking that myth is the recognition that US foreign policy supported plenty of oppressive regimes. But I've never heard any serious argument that the US was in any way worse.

5. No, I would not say the World Wars were "capitalist" in any meaningful sense of the word. The conflict that sparked the first WW involved three countries (Austria, Serbia, and Russia -- Serbia being technically a part of Austria-Hungary) that were largely pre-capitalist (especially the latter two). The Second WW was initiated by a fascist regime, and really exploded into a world war when a) a communist country got involved and b) an imperial empire got involved. The starvation of Bengal in the 40s, which gets far too little attention for what it is, so props for bringing it up, was more imperialist than capitalist. Britain wanted more war supplies, and Churchill thought the deaths of millions of Indians was an acceptable cost. Churchill's historical reputation as a great leader has been vastly sanitized.

6. Communism can't work even in theory. Hayek proved why. I am by no means a Hayek fan generally -- in fact, I think Austrian economics is more joke than academic discipline -- but his argument against central planning is precisely right. Central planning can never work. It's really hard for a large company to execute a strategic five year plan (and usually companies use internal markets for resource allocation); it's impossible to do that for a whole economy.
 
I know some folks who grew up in Eastern Bloc countries in the 1980s, and stories they tell are of horrible, oppressive places to live.
Without a doubt. A challenge on the left is separating Stalinism and Maoism from socialism, IMO. Y’all know where I stand. I think America has a socialistic tradition in more ways than people realize. Socialism is, in many ways, the next step of liberalism. It builds on liberalism. It does not inevitably result in the sort of totalitarianism we saw in the USSR.

Like OP says: we rarely talk about the crimes of capitalism, which are responsible for far more death and destruction than socialism ever was.
 
Without a doubt. A challenge on the left is separating Stalinism and Maoism from socialism, IMO. Y’all know where I stand. I think America has a socialistic tradition in more ways than people realize. Socialism is, in many ways, the next step of liberalism. It builds on liberalism. It does not inevitably result in the sort of totalitarianism we saw in the USSR.

Like OP says: we rarely talk about the crimes of capitalism, which are responsible for far more death and destruction than socialism ever was.
1. We talk about the crimes of capitalism all the time. I mean, to the extent that we don't, it's only because those crimes are so well documented, we don't need to discuss them. I would say that 90% of the posters on this board are aware of American meddling throughout Latin America and in various parts of Asia. We know about East Timor and Pinochet/Allende etc.

2. If you are talking about socialism specifically in your last sentence -- i.e. as distinguished from the communism of Mao and Stalin -- it's quite difficult to evaluate the claim. I mean, there just haven't been many "socialist" countries ever. Israel was socialist once upon a time; some Western European countries flirted with it after WWII -- but in all cases, they were operating within a rule of law framework that had been established long prior.

Now maybe you could say that socialism (as opposed to communism) doesn't lend itself to those sorts of crimes, because it doesn't have global ambitions in the way that capitalism or communism has. I mean, sure. Maybe. But capitalism doesn't necessarily have global ambitions. US foreign policy was uniquely American. It wasn't a necessary result of capitalism. So who's to say that socialist America doesn't do the same thing?

I agree that socialism shouldn't be tarred by Stalin or Mao, but I think there's little basis for thinking it would somehow prevent countries from meddling in global affairs as the US has done.
 
1. We talk about the crimes of capitalism all the time. I mean, to the extent that we don't, it's only because those crimes are so well documented, we don't need to discuss them. I would say that 90% of the posters on this board are aware of American meddling throughout Latin America and in various parts of Asia. We know about East Timor and Pinochet/Allende etc.

2. If you are talking about socialism specifically in your last sentence -- i.e. as distinguished from the communism of Mao and Stalin -- it's quite difficult to evaluate the claim. I mean, there just haven't been many "socialist" countries ever. Israel was socialist once upon a time; some Western European countries flirted with it after WWII -- but in all cases, they were operating within a rule of law framework that had been established long prior.

Now maybe you could say that socialism (as opposed to communism) doesn't lend itself to those sorts of crimes, because it doesn't have global ambitions in the way that capitalism or communism has. I mean, sure. Maybe. But capitalism doesn't necessarily have global ambitions. US foreign policy was uniquely American. It wasn't a necessary result of capitalism. So who's to say that socialist America doesn't do the same thing?

I agree that socialism shouldn't be tarred by Stalin or Mao, but I think there's little basis for thinking it would somehow prevent countries from meddling in global affairs as the US has done.
Yeah, posters on this board know about the things you mention. My point is: no one talks about it as crimes of capitalism. No one says the Black Book of Capitalism has killed billions or whatever the fuck. Why is that?

It’s not difficult to the evaluate the claim that socialism is distinct from Stalinism and Maoism. It’s just a fact. There have been socialist countries, and you mention one in your first paragraph: Chile under Allende.

You say capitalism doesn’t have global ambitions, which seems to imply you think capitalism and imperialism are unrelated. Is that the case?

US foreign policy isn’t uniquely American, it’s a continuation of British foreign policy. It manifests itself in different ways as time has gone on, but it’s empire all the same.
 
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US foreign policy isn’t uniquely American, it’s a continuation of British foreign policy. It manifests itself in different ways as time has gone on, but its empire all the same.
Yes. Just another in a long line of empires that vary in longevity and realm but either die out completely or becomes a shell of itself.
 
1. Link to those life expectancy numbers? Here's what I found for the US. It puts US life expectancy at about 60 in 1922. I am therefore exceedingly skeptical of the Russian life expectancy numbers you cite. Keep in mind that 32 is extremely low; I think during the Dark Ages, life expectancy was like 28. I will leave aside the question of whether life expectancy is really a good way to "judge a country."

2. American women did not get the right to vote because of the Bolsheviks. That's a nutso claim. "Glorifying suffragettes" is craziness. We glorify them because they fought for generations for voting rights. It wasn't just handed over because the Bolsheviks did it. Note that women already had the right to vote in about 10 states before WWI. The main impetus for voting rights was the contribution of women during the war era -- not unlike the impetus for lowering the voting age to 18 from 21 (i.e. the contributions of people that age in the military belied any claim that they were too immature to vote).

3. I don't know what to say about "bread lines" except that you are perhaps being overly literal here. I don't know if there were lines for bread per se, but material shortages were common in the Soviet Union. Maybe not for bread.

4. How many countries did the Soviets invade or coup? Let's see. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, the Baltic nations, etc. etc. There were 8 countries in the Warsaw Pact, so from that alone, for the US to have a 10:1 ratio, we'd have needed to invade or coup half the countries in the world (more than half, actually, since there were substantially fewer countries). Add in the countries like the Baltics, Georgia, the Stans that were absorbed into the USSR; also add Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Korea, where the Soviets provided support for violent coups; and of course their invasion of Afghanistan, and so forth.

In reality, the behavior of the US and the USSR toward the "Third World" was largely similar. A focus on geopolitics regardless of the actual outcomes in those countries. The myth has been that the US stood for freedom and the USSR for oppression; debunking that myth is the recognition that US foreign policy supported plenty of oppressive regimes. But I've never heard any serious argument that the US was in any way worse.

5. No, I would not say the World Wars were "capitalist" in any meaningful sense of the word. The conflict that sparked the first WW involved three countries (Austria, Serbia, and Russia -- Serbia being technically a part of Austria-Hungary) that were largely pre-capitalist (especially the latter two). The Second WW was initiated by a fascist regime, and really exploded into a world war when a) a communist country got involved and b) an imperial empire got involved. The starvation of Bengal in the 40s, which gets far too little attention for what it is, so props for bringing it up, was more imperialist than capitalist. Britain wanted more war supplies, and Churchill thought the deaths of millions of Indians was an acceptable cost. Churchill's historical reputation as a great leader has been vastly sanitized.

6. Communism can't work even in theory. Hayek proved why. I am by no means a Hayek fan generally -- in fact, I think Austrian economics is more joke than academic discipline -- but his argument against central planning is precisely right. Central planning can never work. It's really hard for a large company to execute a strategic five year plan (and usually companies use internal markets for resource allocation); it's impossible to do that for a whole economy.
Great response. I'll try to address in time. May be another week or two. May be tonight. I'm making Thanksgiving dinner now. And I work on Mendo to Manteo time.
 
Yeah, posters on this board know about the things you mention. My point is: no one talks about it as crimes of capitalism. No one says the Black Book of Capitalism has killed billions or whatever the fuck. Why is that?

It’s not difficult to the evaluate the claim that socialism is distinct from Stalinism and Maoism. It’s just a fact. There have been socialist countries, and you mention one in your first paragraph: Chile under Allende.

You say capitalism doesn’t have global ambitions, which seems to imply you think capitalism and imperialism are unrelated. Is that the case?

US foreign policy isn’t uniquely American, it’s a continuation of British foreign policy. It manifests itself in different ways as time has gone on, but it’s empire all the same.
1. There is no black book of capitalism because there was nobody to aim it at. Most of the intelligentsia and the professoriate in humanities/social studies departments were leftists (with varying degrees of commitment to the Comintern) who spent their careers documenting the crimes of capitalism and advocating for socialism/communism as a solution. There were very few public intellectuals on the right who defended capitalism. That is why, I am convinced, God And Man At Yale became a hit. It's a very boring book that amounts to "these people don't teach religious virtue and I don't like that." But America needed someone on the right.

The Black Book Of Communism was a considerable revolt against that reigning orthodoxy in academia. Well, part of the discourse that got created by that revolt at least (it came fairly late in the game).

2. I didn't say there have been zero socialist countries ever, but if the comparison is "how much damage has capitalist government done" to "how much damage has socialist government done" (which is I think what you were suggesting), then it's important to acknowledge that there has been thousands and thousands of times more capitalist government.

3. Not uniquely American. Distinctively American. My bad. Wrong word.

4. Capitalism doesn't necessarily have global ambition. I'm too old for arguments about whether capitalism and imperialism are two sides of the same coin. Those are discussions for coffee shops among young people. I think it's not too much to insist on the possibility that imperialism was the product of a particular historical period, in which capitalism played some part but imperialism is both older and broader than capitalism. Whether that historical period has resulted in something that looks like "capitalism -> imperialism," I neither know, nor really care.

I think my point was favorable to your case anyway, given that I said socialism does not have global ambitions. Socialism tends to lean small, not big. The endpoint of socialist thinking, after all, was anarcho-syndicalism. And surely the state owned enterprise doesn't really care about having more territory to serve. So we think. But we don't really know. After all, the communists of the late 19th century didn't foresee the Soviet Union. And socialism isn't going to pop out of nowhere. It would emerge from our world, and thus would be shaped by the forces that have shaped us until now.
 
i think one of the biggest weaknesses of communism that nobody ever mentions is that it is in large part an all-or-nothing approach. (This isn’t entirely true as even in the USSR people were allowed personal property.). There isn’t a lot of room for give and take when balancing some capitalism with some communism. What that inevitably means is that only one political party is allowed and that inevitably leads to some form of authoritarianism.

Plus the transition from a more capitalistic system to communism is messy and leads to a lot of social unrest. If you try to take away my wealth after I worked for 35-40 years to accumulate it, I am not going to go away quietly. This also means that communism must be ruled with an iron fist.

As for bread lines, what about the Stalin famines that were caused by poor central management of the agricultural industry? I guess that doesn’t count as bread lines since people were just allowed to starve.
 
Everything exists in a time a place for a reason. Ideology was merely a tool to force the world into modernity and that took on different forms depending on the location, culture, history, etc. For Russia and China that took on a form of Asiatic despotism that wasn't unfamiliar for these parts of the world. I think though ideology was the only way Russia and China could maintain their concept of sovereignty, it took on a different form in Japan with its own empirical tendencies, as it did in South Korea with a military junta up until basically the 90s (same with Taiwan). China tried to have an American style Republican government with Sun Yat-Sen and that all failed miserably once China was taken over by the Japanese, it made the Maoists inevitable by then as they had the more cohesive group of leaders.

The Russian story is far more complicated and is fundamentally tied to its relationship with Germany. Few people acknowledge just how much Nazism was a foreign import from Russia, and WW2 was a lot more about Stalin than it was about Hitler. The Soviet Union in the early years was hell on earth, and before Hitler had even become chancellor or consolidated his power, Stalin was liquidating the kulaks at mass levels. This was a terror regime unlike anything seen up to this point in human history, and its this context that makes you realize how a very civilized nation like Germany could come accept this strange Austrian guy as its leader under the banners of a bizarre occultic nationalist ideology on the country.

As for America, we're arguably not "capitalist" the way people think, its basically been state capitalist since FDR, and a lot of what America revolutionized is far more complex but has to do with how law is written and enforced away from older traditional forms via arbitrary monarchies or religious institutions running cover for what was just pure oligarchy. Capitalism for America is therefore more of a means to reinforce its original revolution in how property rights are adjudicated, along with being a vessel to perpetuate our constitutional government through maintaining longer term elite interests over generations. In some ways America is incredibly oligarchic, in other ways its incredibly democratic. America is in even further ways more akin to a religion upholding a system of law above all else, or its a place that has a longer term objective of raising the consciousness of humanity by attempting to enshrine the enlightenment into government form. But this is an on-going project, not without its own stumbling blocks, because people are people, and because America is not an ethnic based nation, therefore elites dont always stay elites, they come and they go. Furthermore, newcomers have challenges they face that they must deal with before they arrive at the enlightenment side of the country's history, so its a complicated endeavor to maintain these ambitions.
This is a post with perspective. I generally acknowledge what you state in your last paragraph.

However, I do not understand why you say Nazism came from Russia. Not literally, obviously. But in terms of influence with Stalin.

I'm no Stalin apologist. I think he ruined whatever hope the revolution had. And I understand the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. I get all that. But I do not accept the conclusion that Nazism was imported from Russia. Or that WW2 was more a result of the Soviet Union than Nazi Germany. I think you need to explain that in far more detail, if you're going to make such claims.
 
i think one of the biggest weaknesses of communism that nobody ever mentions is that it is in large part an all-or-nothing approach. (This isn’t entirely true as even in the USSR people were allowed personal property.). There isn’t a lot of room for give and take when balancing some capitalism with some communism. What that inevitably means is that only one political party is allowed and that inevitably leads to some form of authoritarianism.

Plus the transition from a more capitalistic system to communism is messy and leads to a lot of social unrest. If you try to take away my wealth after I worked for 35-40 years to accumulate it, I am not going to go away quietly. This also means that communism must be ruled with an iron fist.

As for bread lines, what about the Stalin famines that were caused by poor central management of the agricultural industry? I guess that doesn’t count as bread lines since people were just allowed to starve.
It's incredibly complicated, Sooner.

It is an "all-or-nothing approach," as you state. And it appears so overbearing because it's having to create an entirely new culture. Default is money and power. Default is wealth. Default don't have to do anything, other than roll out all the pictures of attractive people in nice attire and jewelry and what-not on store windows. Portray $1 million dollar homes as the modern American middle-class way of living on all our commercials. And if you ain't got it - then something must be wrong with you. So socialism starts with a hand tied behind its back.

Regarding the transfer of wealth, other than a few weird assholes who have no idea what the hell they're talking about - and are probably teenagers on social media - ain't nobody coming for your wealth. Socialism, at least as I understand it, isn't about confiscating the wealth/property of people in the middle-class. They're not concerned about you owning a $400K or $500K home.

As regards the Stalin collectivization. Yeah, I have no defense of that. Again, I'm no Stalin apologist. Lenin, himself, told others that this guy was a problem. So, no excuses. I will say, though, that you can point to any number of similar crimes that capitalism has committed, but as another poster pointed out, doesn't get associated with capitalism. Churchill's starvation of India, comes to mind.

Just a tangential sidenote: you know why Cuban-Americans are so pro-Republican and conservative, right? It's because most of their granddaddies literally owned slaves before Castro kicked them out. They're not good people, obviously.

You my boy, Sooner! Hope you and your son still doing alright. We think about you all the time, brother!
 
It's incredibly complicated, Sooner.

It is an "all-or-nothing approach," as you state. And it appears so overbearing because it's having to create an entirely new culture.
And that in a nutshell is why it doesn't work. Much of it goes against man's natural instincts. What's mine is mine. Survival of the fittest and all that. Hard to create an entirely new culture.
 
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