What have we learnt from history?

[CaptainCourtesy]

In that case I would direct you back to my troll response.

Perhaps if I made that claim, it would apply and I would respond to it.

 

[LuckyDan]

Communism can't seek to do anything as it has no agency.

People seek to transform their environments and in so doing they transform themselves.

(Troll Response: Then maybe you could point out the human nature gene to us. )

It is an ideology that can only succeed by transforming human nature. If it takes it into the equation, it can only be to transform it.

 

[Khayembii Communique]

It is an ideology that can only succeed by transforming human nature. If it takes it into the equation, it can only be to transform it.

There is no such thing as human nature in this sense, so we're good.

"In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness."

 

[PeteEU]

We have learned that "great powers" tend to implode and to become at best insignificant and at worst lost in time.

 

[spud_meister]

This is why human nature always causes communism, on a large scale, to fail.

Those bastards.

 

[Gardener]

We have learned that "great powers" tend to implode and to become at best insignificant and at worst lost in time.

and even though we have learned that cultures die by suicide rather than murder, much of western Europe is falling all over itself writing suicide notes.

 

[Mensch]

In that case I would direct you back to my troll response.

On a more serious note, I would point out that communism is not something that can "succeed" or "fail". It is not a system that is applied and tested, the most obvious reason being that history is not made by experimental design.

Further, you don't even define what you mean when you say "communism". Communism as a socioeconomic system? It hasn't existed. Communism as in Marxist political theory? That has been proven correct time and again by the historical record.

If so, it would no longer be considered a theory but a law.

 

[Mensch]

That Communism does take in Human Nature in the Equation.

What we do learn from communism is that the various adherents to the philosophy refuse to recognize the various political endeavors to apply communism, in its general theory, to a social structure such as government. All Nazis are Nazis but all Communists are Nazis masquerading as Communists.

As I've told another poster, I don't believe that just because Himmler betrayed his German/Nazi comrades towards the end of the war that he is automatically disqualified as a Nazi. He's still a Nazi and Joseph Stalin is still a Communist.

 

[Slartibartfast]

That Communism does take in Human Nature in the Equation.

It takes a part of human nature into the equation, but not enough of one to translate into a functional society. Its like many political theories in that respect.

 

[Bodi]

I pose the question, you can answer it however you like. What have we learnt from history?

That the Trojan Horse was probably a myth built around a few factual aspects.
Essentially, to not believe everything you hear until you look into it a bit better.