I have no fantasies about communism. I have no illusions about capitalism. I also don't regard 'history' as the sole arbiter of what might work better in the future. It only tells us what didn't work in the past, and helps to account for what isn't working now.
Agreed. History is not the sole arbiter but it is a big factor in learning from what has worked and what hasn't and avoiding the same mistakes.
Learning is a slow process. It would be nice to think that 'mankind' is going to arrive at some place in the future where a successul ideology has been implemented that benefits all. I doubt that will happen in my lifetime, but it also won't happen by dismissing ideologies out of hand simply because the only examples available to us are failed ones.
Communism is fundamentally flawed and will never work. Dismissing a fundamentally flawed ideology, whose failure is also supported by history, is what smart people who don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past do.
The best we have had we have now in countries like Canada, Norway, Finland, for example, where socialist welfare policies work within a capitalist system. Pure capitalism works best for a minority of people (a much larger minority than communism) but capitalism mixed with social policies seems to be working for the majority. For now.
Quite. That's partly because some of the 'systems' are not systems at all. No-one sat down and 'invented' capitalism and then set about implementing it. It just evolved - differently in different societies - and has been amenable to post-hoc analysis which is why it's now a 'thing' we can talk about. The same is true of 'communism', though it has a clearer history of deliberate political development. The attempts at government in certain countries using some of these ideas has not only been imperfect, but disastrous in some very obvious cases. That does not render all the ideas behind them as inherently flawed, though that rather depends on your view of human nature.
Of course, this does not render all the ideas of communism fundamentally flawed, but the idea as a whole is fairly, evidently, horribly, flawed. Every time it has been tried on a large scale, a lot of people in the place in which it is tried die as a direct result of their own government's action; any reasonable person would conclude that, therefore, these are not ideas we should be trying again and again. The evidence is already in.
You miss the point. I'm arguing that there is no 'it'. 'Communism' - whatever 'it' is, does not entail the mass murder of its own citizens. That's something else altogether. 'Tyranny', perhaps. Or just 'mass-murder-of-citizens-ism'.
