Can Communism work?

going to war... gets rid of the overhead, the excess population....

Communsim is not an ideal...Where it is accepted...Where it was accepted it was a practical economy with no essential difference between the economy and seelf government...Political democracy is economic communism...To impose it as an ideal guarantees suffering and eventual overthrow... There has to be room for individual differences, for individual achievement, and distinction..And yet it should be accepted that inequalities should not be passed from generation to generations, so that as much as possible people start equal, and make themselves unequal if that is their goal... Still what is considered as ideal cannot be imposed, but accepted along with the logic for it...

Sure; lets exchange our problem of over population with one of evolution... Sterilize anyone who can't pass a genetic test...Just like the Nazis used to do with intelligence tests...Two things are required...People need justice and they need democracy...When people have the sense that the resources of today will be there tomorrow, that justice will be there, and life willnot be threatened, then people will not breed themselves into oblivion... They throw up children as a form of self defense...They need to know, really know that is not necessary...

It was psuedoscience in the U.S. as well as Germany. 'Fitness' was determined by genealogy in most cases; i.e. perfectly sane and healthy people were sterilized because three generations back they had an uncle who was 'feedble-minded' and all this at the discretion of some judge who knew nothing of the 'science' anyway! The NAZIs actually sold sterlization to the German people in the early years by noting that it was already commosn practice in the U.S. There are propoganda films documenting this. The Anglo-Americna world started the practice, as the movement grew out of Darwin and his sucessors.

Good old social Darwinism. A good idea took way out of context by the powers that be.

It is power that is dangerous, because it looks for justification for what it wants to do anyway....Most people in power would sterilize the world if they thought they could get away with it ... They do not seek power because they have some respect for democracy and equality...They seek power to escape all that...If they need the brutes to protect their position they will suffer people having their nads...If it gets to be an inconvenience to people in power, you better get a cup...

Nietzsche made that all so much easier, beiing an eloquent evolutionist..But he did not understand it either..It was never common practice, but generally legal...That fact may have pssed notice in the Deutchland...

Actually Nietzsche disagreed with Darwinian evolution, ala the will to power; i.e. while acknolwedging the progression espoused by Darwin, he thought the mechanism was based not on self-preservation but on the will to power, the tendency toward expansion, conquest, etc. Anyway, sterlization was fairly common, though not as common as sauerkraut of course. :sarcastic:

I think he got evolution wrong in any event... In nature it happens through the individual; but society as we know it is only natural to us, and instead of changing our nature to adapt to new environments, we have changed our forms, of housing, technology, government, economy, etc. We have evolved quite little since then...