Quote Originally Posted by Eric C. View Post
And none of these is what the heavily advertised communism (by the Soviets) was supposed to look like. The first one's just a temporary union of a few hunters, that was to ease the food obtaining process. The second one is robbery of private property by the state. The third one's the perfect family, but even if there are those, that relationship never goes out of the family. The human nature isn't really ready to love themselves and everyone else equally, to make those principles work. The way I see it: everyone would be trying to benefit at the cost of everyone else (the easiest way to do that - do nothing and claim your needs to be as high as you can imagine), and that would make the economy collapse very soon.
I cannot answer for those who highly advertised communism to you, I didn't. As for "just a temporary union of a few hunters" this "temporary" state lasted for hundreds of thousands years, comparing with the history of capitalism, which is hardly more than 3 centuries, it's almost an eternity. As for a state "robbing" its citizens, when the very survival of the nation is at stake, the "robbery" can be justified. And as for families - it's not a bout "perfect" ones, it's about ordinary ones. A family cannot be built on any other type of relation, otherwise it's not a family, maybe a partnership of a kind, but definitely not a family.
Now, what about the place of communism in the ideology of the Soviet state, it never declared it achieved building communism. When I was a schoolboy my teachers said we were living in a society of "developed socialism". And communism always was regarded as a vague remote perspective for the future. The only Soviet leader who dared to promise to "build communism in a 20 years term" was Khrushchev, and he was not famous for adequate behavior.