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The problem with Communism.

In a world where the greatest gift we have been given is freedom, which necessitates individual growth and enterprise, communism by its very name suggests a communal approach to things. There are two schools of thought here. The first is that if you take a mass energy and hope to use it to spread equality in a country, then those who are at the top of the intelligence chain are not going to like being held back. That is unless they are so compassionate that they sacrifice their individuality for the sake of struggling humanity. Very soon you will have dissent and the system will fail. All those who dissented in the former Soviet Union were sent to the salt mines; they were usually the intellectuals, such as Solsenitzein.

The obvious problem with Communism is that those who are in power don't actually practice it themselves and many of the former Soviet leaders were multi millionaires at the peoples' expense. It then assumes dictatorial powers; so much do the leaders want to hang on to their power that they crush any resistance. Look at Tienanmen Square and the brutality meted out in China. Many of the agricultural programs failed in the 'five year plans' era for lack of commitment by the leaders who just left it all to the people. It has been touted as the ideal system where everyone will benefit equally, but a more balanced approach would be to have a mildly socialist government, such as the Labour Party of Australia and Great Britain. Here there would be room for capitalist enterprise with leanings towards making the lot of the common man better.

To explain another problem with Communism we have to look at Capitalism, it's opposite. If we did not have the latter with all its avenues for invention and private enterprise then there would not be as much employment for the working class. And at least in a free enterprise system there would be room for those bright workers to move to the top.

Communism can become very radical and it is an easy platform from which to sell hollow promises to the gullible masses, especially if the economic times are bad in a country. This is one of it's major problems, in that it has been responsible for the flight of many refugees who want to flee the totalitarian system. Also there have been many famines, purges and even warfare resulting from this ideology way in excess of previous empires in Russia or China. Another problem is that it does not measure up in economic performance to market based economies, so it really defeats its own purpose in feeding the masses . It was Lenin who stated that for communism to work the proletariat had to take the reigns of power from the capitalists. The problem is when something like this happens they have to go through a whole learning process of how to govern wisely and this takes time and can be fraught with mistakes. This was evident in the Chinese communist plans of 5 year agricultural plans which if hit with a natural disaster had no back up through imports. We can see that China is now booming under globalization and a free market economy of exports and imports. Russia on the other hand experienced a huge rise in crime once the communist hard line shackles were loosed.

Small communities supporting each other on an equitable basis may work, but on a large scale communism is fraught with problems the main one we have seen in the last eighty years being the abuse of human rights. Look at Stalin and Mao- Tse -Tung, who were responsible for thousands of deaths of innocent people.

Learn more about this author, Jishi Santos.
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