We were all raised to admire Thomas Alva Edison for his comment that although it took him 10,000 tries to get the electric lighjt bulb right with tungsten, he kept on going because he considered the first 9,999 attempts to be not failures, but rather lessons from which something important could be learned.

But communism?

Well, to paraphrase Sandra Bullock's character in "Hope Floats":

Russia? Failure. Check.

Cuba? Failure. Check. Check.

China? Failure. Check. Check. Check.

Yup - that's it, then - communism definitely can't work.

Just like the electric light bulb, on which research should have been stopped before 9,996 more wasted efforts were undertaken..

Makes a whole lot of sense, dnn't it? (Particularly since Marx made his own opinion clear that industrially immature societies without large proletariats couldn't possibly serve as launching-pads for the next stage in the dialectic.)

But you see, there's a key difference between the electric light bulb and communism.

In the case of the electric light bulb, folks knew that if it could be made to work, there were vast amounts of money to be amassed by a few Heroes of the Free Market.

While in the case of communism, the only thing that folks can get out of its success is the ability to look all and any of their fellow human-beings straight in the eye without shame.

And what is that worth in the long-run?

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The People Yes

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
"I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time."

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll
break loose..."

Once having marched
Over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones,
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
Once having so marched.

Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.

The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome,
a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray
of northern lights.

The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
"Where to? what next?"