London protest today

[Fungus]

Wrong. Communism is a global phenomenon not a national one. One one has ever experienced communism in full throttle they've only experienced haphazard attempts to create it and then bungling it completely. What we seen in North Korea, or what was the Soviet Union, Communist China is not communism at all. Not even close to it.

All of these countries operate a state capitalist model (or State socialist model, as it is often inappropriately called).

If we all genuinely lived in a state of communism or true socialism (which is the same as true communism) we wouldn't have to worry about self-reliance, ambition, individualism because everyone would genuinely be free because the concept of property ownership, trade, scare resources etc. would be obscolete.

Okey dokey. Utopia here we come then.

And what would motivate us to do something? And who would decide who had what and when? And why would I take responsibility for an item if a few hours later Joe Bloggs will take it for his use? What you propose is naive and simplistic idealistic nonsense that fails to take into account how real people behave. Something tells me that you are in your early 20's.

A friend now in his early fourties revealed to me that he voted for Arthur Scargill (I forget the party name) in a fairly recent election. He is an academic. Surprise surprise.

Actually you say that we have never had true Communism, but I would have thought that the Kibbutz movement in Israel was close, and some isolated tribal societies probably also come close.

Unfortunately that is unlikely to happen - at least for a while yet, if ever some may think, depending on your view of human nature.

Thank goodness. It's a frightening thought.

While I'm in political theory mode: what some of you often call socialism, under the Labour Party or in the worst examples, Blairism, is not socialism at all. The old Parliamentary Labour party was about Social Democracy. Blair doesn't even concede to that model even.

I suspect you are not the first to express that idea. Even Blair said in his interview by Tame Lacky on TV that he has not been called a Socialist for quite a few years.

[AlfredJPruffock]

And pleanty of non-communist dictators have done the same. Perhaps the issue is that they were dictators, not that they were communists.

Totalitarianism under any guise , whether under the banner of Communism or Capitalism tends to, sooner or later leads to mass murder.