"Communism is always appealing to college and high school kids who have no historical context, no real life experience, and don't understand how the world works"
Yep
Hugo, please tell us your kidding. I am not a pure capitalist but the world's history of communism is very grim. It may work in a vacuum, but not in the real world.
I'm not a communist either, and the though of a government administering everything I do I find terribly appalling, but I must clarify something: The history of communism IS NOT grim. What everyone perceives as a communist "regime", eg North Korea, China or the old USSR, were and are nothing more than totalitarian states. I do not know of any states in which workers have had control of production (the # 1 premise of communism) so I can't say that it has or hasn't worked.
I do know it does work at the local level though. The pilgrims lived a communal lifestyle. Same with Smalltown America until a couple of decades ago. They may say they didn't live a communal lifestyle because of the stigma the term "communism" carries, but they are communal entities indeed. As you go up the power ladder the power concentrations tend to conspire against The People so that's probably the reason we have yet to see a purely communal state as of yet. I mean, everyone keeps talking about "the community" and all but as soon as you put together the words "community" and "organise" the capitalist police quickly move in to put out "the fire".
I've read somewhere that a form of anarchical communism was once tried somewhere in Spain and it did work wonders, but I can't really cite anything because I can't really remember where I read it. Needless to say that part of Spain (Catalonia I think it is) that I'm talking about is one of the most advanced, socially, culturally and economically, in Europe and the world by default.
I do know capitalism IS NOT the answer though.
