Ed Poor wrote:
Instead of trying to run verbal rings around LittleDan, why not take a moment to consider what he *meant*?
I did.
Which was, apparently:
- putting communist ideas into effect by creating what pro-Marxists might call "building socialism" in a country.
I don't think it was at all clear that this was what he meant. *You're* the person who is rewriting Dan's comments to make them mean something different from what he actually wrote. Many people, for example, would argue that the introduction of socialized medicine in Europe and other countries was a communist measure, and it was certainly supported at the time by "pro-Marxists." Dan's statement that "communism never works in practice" is the sort of ideological argument that one hears even today in the United States as a reason to oppose socialized medicine here. However, socialized medicine is quite different from "building socialism" in a country.
The fact that these "socialist" experiments collapsed in the former Soviet bloc would seem to support the POV that communism never works in practice.
Here, Ed manages to ignore the example I provided of China, which *hasn't* collapsed. He must be using some strange definition of the word "never" that isn't in my dictionary. ;)
Anyway, the question is still whether:
- the Wikipedia ought to assert the fact that communism doesn't work, or
- the Wikipedia ought to REPORT that various observers have concluded that communism doesn't work
My understanding of Jimbo's NPOV policy is that we should not assert communism's unworkableness as fact but rather report that observers say it doesn't work.
Agreed, for the most part.