There's never been a successful socialist-run state that has managed to last for any length of time?
That's staggering. The best way to govern isn't be used by anyone, anywhere?
Maybe, just maybe, it's because what in theory sounds like an ideal way to govern can't, in reality, exist. Add human nature to the socialist ideal and you end up with corruption and quite often a totalitarian state.
I think it's more to do with the fact that transitions from one stage of economic development, and one method of organising society to another tend to be fairly difficult to carry off. The ruling class always has a vested in the maintenance of the status quo, and being the ruling class it tends to wield a fair amount of power.
For some reason the people who between them own and control the commanding heights of the world economy, seem quite keen to hang onto them. I said earlier that, as any fan of the Manic Street Preachers knows, the state operates to defend the interests of private property. By which I mean that it operates to defend the principle and practice of the private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. EVERY aspect of the state contributes to this, including, to refer back to another debate with TT on another thread, the welfare state, and the media, education the lot.
The current capitalist state has been incredibly effective in acheiving an almost total hegemony, to the extent that most people seem to believe that free market capitalism, with a parliamentary democracy and universal sufferage is some kind of "natural state of being" which has persisted for hundreds of years and will last forever.
In fact we've had a fully democratic government in Britain for 80 years. Ignore the little bits of detail about who's allowed to vote and just look at the modes of production and the balance of political and economic power and still we're only really looking at something that could be described as capitalism for a couple of hundred years. In fact arbitarily take the French revolution as the signifying date and you've still got less than 250 years. It's not a huge amount of time out of the tens of thousands of years man's been on the planet is it?
Economic and social systems come and go, and the new forms that replace have to be tried first somewhere. A couple of hundred years ago you could have sneered are Thomas Paine for his ludicrous ideas about free democratic society where everyone got a vote, and asked him where had it been tried successfully.
As for your comment about human nature, I think you've got the argument twisted somewhat. Human nature doesn't prevent socialism working, it prevents capitalism working. If man wasn't selfish, if he considered the needs of others and the general good, then capitalism would work fine. So what it a handful of people owned and controlled all the factories and shops and service providers, if they could be trusted to act in the best interests of all of us. But they can't so owning and controlling those assets collectively and democratically, with the sort of controls I talked about earlier is needed to prevent people acting in their own selfish interests.
Now Marx and Lenin and Trotsky saw that sort of socialist state as being a stage in the progress towards a communist society, which is more the sort of impossible dream that you seem to be referring to. A society with no social classes and so without the need for a state. People just running things collectively between them for the common good. Whilst TT seems to think we could just all decide that's how we are going to run things and get on with it, the commie's at least grasped that there would need to be a bit of a change in the man's nature before it could work. But they believed that it is man's material conditions that determine his conciousness; that man is selfish and self serving because of the competitive nature of the society in which we live, and so thought that a socialist state was required to eliminate class society and retrain us all in how to work and live for the collective good.
