I was reading through the thread on Marxism...

[Archae]

I'm just wondering, has a Marxist government ever worked?

Has it ever lasted and not been overthrown by fascists like in Chile?

[OffWithTheirHeads]

1. Well, there is Cuba with national healthcare and free education.

[vaberella]

4. Valid point...it's lost it's position only because it caused their shunning from society.

If the embargoes were not in place maybe Cuba. The over zealous control of the media also does not allow it to fall into Marxism. Marx supports freedom of speech even if dissenting.

[Archae]

8. Cuba is not Marxist, according to what I've read.

One party rule, severe censorship of any dissent, Cuba is fascist.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

14. corporations own Cuba? You're thinking of the U.S.A.

[vaberella]

2. It has never actually been modeled.

Warped versions of communism have been put in place but policies have gone wonky. I am not a fan of Communism as I am of Marxism that I do not find interchangeable. I do not follow Communism as issued from the Communist Manifesto. But I do subscribe to about 99% of Marx's views in Das Kapital a truer framework of what he expected a nation to do. But then again...Marx strongly believed that it is not created based on governmental policies, but sort of organically manifests as Capitalism fails. I find the closest model of this would be Argentina post their economic collapse. That now, is true Marxism in small models throughout the nation. The nation had in it's policies for a Marxist development which attests to what Marx suggested Marxism would grow from.

[ThomasP]

3. Not that I am aware of

The problem is that the countries that have tried it have generally been governed by less than honest people that see marxism as a tool for tyranny and oppression rather than a beacon of economic freedom and personal liberty. Sadly that fact has stained the ideology for the foreseeable future.

[socialist_n_TN]

6. As a Trotskyist, I blame the Stalinist bureaucracy for this..........

After it won the struggle for the soul of the Bolsheviks, it became the model for future Communist leaders.

I also think that the model actually ATTRACTED the types of personalities who WERE authoritarian anyway. It created a negative feedback loop as far as leadership was concerned.

[socialist_n_TN]

5. Well, that second paragraph says a lot..........

Marxist governments are always and LITERALLY "under the gun" from the time of thier installation by the capitalist enemies. ALL of them from the first one in 1917 on. That's going to warp what they're trying to accomplish from the get-go.

So the question might be able to be reframed as, "Can a Marxist government ever be ALLOWED to work as planned?"

And this comes from a Marxist who's most definitely NOT a Stalinist.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. You know one of the problems with that logic

is that by design they were under pressure from word one.

But at the risk of actually angering folks on the hard left (and the hard right), both are ideals, and both really do not work in the real world as advertised.

[David__77]

9. You mean a socialist government?

All the "bourgeois democracies" are "Marxist" to the extent that they implement the reforms called for by Marx.

In my opinion, you cannot have a socialist government unless there is a socialist state. There are no socialist states presently, and the states governed by Marxist political parties are, essentially, capitalist.

Socialism requires a very high level of economic development, which, in my opinion, has not yet been attained anywhere.

[Odin2005]

10. Read up on the Indian state of Kerala.

Since independence the Communist Party has been in power there almost continuously and is extremely popular. Kerala has the highest literacy rates in India.

[alcibiades_mystery]

11. Has a capitalist government ever worked?

[Archae]

12. Not pure capitalism, no.

But the US is still up and running.

Capitalism with some socialistic programs.

[girl gone mad]

13. Himeshima, Japan.

Probably as close as it gets.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

15. I wonder where the Iroquois nation would have fallen into this question.