Reply #97: I feel kind of lucky that I went to college

[Yupster]

in the Seventies.

As a history major in the 70's, communist doctrine was historical fact among the professors. We were taught a theoretical understanding of communism, and its dialectics, branches and choices.

At the time the Soviet Union looked extremely strong and countries throughout the world, especially in the Third World were changing to a communist form of government.

To the professors this was seen as inevitable, and to us students it was seen as a positive for the world as a whole. With every professor in the history department a Marxist, we were all pretty indocrinated.

Anyway, the dream of communism is Marx's slogan of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to its needs."

In practicality, we were asked to envision a world where people worked at the occupations they wanted to. When you needed things you went to the store and took them.

The lack of need for money would free millions of workers from pencil pushing jobs to truly productive jobs, and therefore the wealth of the society would grow tremendously. Kind of like Star Trek.

The question would always be asked "what if people refuse to work since they aren't getting anything for their labors?"

The answer to that was that "capitalist man" would refuse to work, but through education, a new man called "Communist Man" would be created who would work for the benefit of society, not for his own.

Through the intermediary steps to "Communist Man" a government was necessary. However, once "Communist Man" had been achieved, the state would "wither away and die."

It all seems so obviously silly today, but believe me, it was taken very seriously back then, at least on college campuses.

Anyway, as you'd see at first glance, the problem comes when you take away the incentive to work, people stop, productivity declines. Without opposition parties, the government becomes punitive in forcing people to do what they don't want to do. You end up with Gulags, Cultural Revolutions and Killing Fields.

I wonder today if those same professors are still the true believers they were back then, or are they today teaching an entirely different matrix of beliefs never mentioning the silliness they once taught as inevitibility.