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Ray Evans Harrel:
> America and Ed Weick liked to talk about the failure of Communism as if
it Yoiks!! It seems that I’ve been singled out and been put on a par with all of America! I’m not sure of what to make of that. I recognize that I’ve done more than my fair share of pointing to the failure of communism. Perhaps I should come clean and admit that I’ve done this out of a sense of profound disappointment. I’ve been disappointed about two things. One is the failure of a grand idea; that of people working cooperatively and harmoniously for the common good. This idea is much older than Marx. It has its antecedents in the Bible (Acts 4). It was central to the Anabaptist movements of the 16th Century and, I’m sure, surfaced many times before that. Recently, it was the foundation of the various communal movements of the 1960s. While it has worked for small groups, it does not seem to be practical for nation states. Russia has demonstrated this, as has China, as has eastern Europe. In nation states, people are simply too diverse, too varied in their motives and aspirations. To be workable, the common good must be a compromise, usually the minimum that holds things together, inclusive of a multiplicity of interests. Where there is no compromise, where, as in the Soviet Union, a powerful elite defines the "common good" in terms of a single ideology, force must be used, imposed by an army and secret police. My other disappointment stems from what may be human nature itself. The men who ran Russia and the communist states of eastern Europe, avowed communists, seemed far less interested in the common good, even as they defined it, than in their own power and aggrandizement. Communist ideology did not make them respectful and tolerant of their fellow men. It provided them with labels which permitted them to persecute enemies of the state. Under them, instead of a society of equals, the USSR became a society of slaves and masters, exploited and exploiters, only superficially different from rampant cowboy capitalism. Yet they were supposed to have ideals, something which cowboy capitalists supposedly lack. When I was in my teens and early twenties, I knew lots of communists, mature men who believed that the Soviet Union was something new, different and enduring – if not a workers paradise yet, then soon to be. Only a few were card carriers, but they all shared a strong belief in the great Soviet experiment. Mercifully, most of them died before the true nature of the experiment was revealed. Ed Visit my rebuilt website at:
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