I have a bit of respect for people that based on ideals, initiate movements, revolutions and so on since they are willing to fight and die for their ideals even if later on, history shows that they were actually wrong; in Marxism-Leninism, I particularly have a certain level of respect for Trotsky and Lenin (certainly not for Stalin), but that being said, the legacy of ALL communist regimes has been that they created a new class, a class of bureaucrats that are in power and stay in power by force and by and large, their typical characteristics are inefficiency, incompetence and corruption. There isn't a single communist regime where that does not apply. They are all basket cases, where everything that the ruling bureaucracy touches, they mess it up. Vietnam is certainly no exception to the rule and in the end ALL those countries had no alternative but to reform in a way where communism is nothing but a name.
There will
ALWAYS be a class of something.
Back in 'the old days', the classes were clearly defined and the barriers between them were nearly impossible to breach. If the Crown was appointed by God, then it literally took the proverbial 'Act of God' to move a person out of one class and into another. But even with and despite all sorts of political emancipation, freedoms clarified, and rights enforced, people naturally created their own classes. If someone have more of something than his fellow citizens, he is in a different class. Without nobility (birth) and/or money (capitalism), the item that delineate a certain kind of people from the rest is political --bureaucratic. The currency being exchanged composed of political connections and influence peddling. No better or worse than collusion between a duke and an earl, or between a millionaire and a politician.
The fools that believed in Marxism-Leninism either missed or ignored the usual results that you pointed out: inefficiency, incompetence, and corruption. But I believe it is more of deliberate apathy that gave communist countries their (in)famous entrenchment and level of all those three items because it is beneficial for the existence of the bureaucratic class. Yes, The gears of a government must be kept moving but if I can benefit from them stopping once in a while -- why not ?
The original ideas were not necessarily bad, but they have been proven unworkable in practice. There are only 5 communist countries left, lets see for how long.
Those ideas are not bad in theory but in scale they are unworkable because they cannot deal with the human character of selfishness.
I have always said: That to date, the only successful Marxist community is the monastery and the only successful dictatorship is the family.
With the monastery, which includes the nunnery, all members are adults, intellectually and physically. Before each entrance, he/she knows exactly what lies over the threshold, as what sacrifices are expected and what responsibilities awaits. The monastery is exactly what Marxism expected of 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' The members are volunteers and serves what they believes to be a set of higher ideals set by an all powerful being.
With the family, there is a benevolent dictatorship -- the parents -- that tends over a group of immature members who are immature in intellect and physical being.
Communism is the political expression of Marxism that married the structures of the monastery and the family into what we know for the past few decades, and with disastrous results that added bloody oppression to inefficiency, incompetence, and corruption. Each communist country had ostensibly a 'benevolent dictator' where instead of a supernatural deity there is the elevation of a human into the godhood and every member of the country is treated as a politically immature 'child' that must not be allowed to question the political god. Look at the veneration of Mao, then and today, in China. The history of Mao contains of quasi-supernatural events that border on Jesus turning water into wine. Cuba was and is no different with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and for the latter, naive Western women gushed. Do we need to even discuss the absurdities of North Korea ? And in every communist country, the bureaucratic class prospered, if not financially, then in political influence that occasionally stopped the gears of state from moving just to teach the political peasantry a few lessons and kept them in their places.
That is precisely the point that many people here usually miss. The US military has been at war non stop for decades and even that we are usually talking about low intensity warfare, still, what that does in terms of training, readiness, sharpening skills, fine tuning weapon systems and tactics etc, etc its something that a country like China could only dream of having.
The usual childish response is -- nuke. That is essentially the sorry state of intellectual discourses this forum sees from the Chinese camp.
