I see you found The Lovely Ann, wearing her rather pretty human face mask.

or.. there's never so facile a slanderer as a self-ID'd 'Conservative'.. speakin in high dudgeon about *Them* and conservin what matters Mo$t. Can ya just imagine sayin that good old dictionary word, once applied to a kind of education of yore, spelled
l i b e r a l but spat..

as if full if sibilants? Imagine how That sounded, back in the days before Tailgunner Joe McCarthy drank hisself to death (and ya couldn't say even damn! on the Tee Vee). But you Could.. hisssss.

Maybe it's the water + a lot of whippings for not getting the manual of arms right, while growing up?



Puzzled in Peoria,

Ashton

Oh WTF why not..

What this comes down to IMhO, is whether Marx, Lenin, Engels, Trotsky et al (apart from personal proclivities and any secret desires to be a Boss) - were sufficiently excellent psychologists re what this many humans might actually do - if given the Chance [?]

Next, the obvious rebuttal to the above: the Western presumption of ~ the built-in cupidity of all homo-saps (the basis IMO for the creepy and mandatorily disingenous "dealings of business" - that which makes every biznessperson a congenital liar, merely to survive in this social-Darwin schema). Were the Western folks right or just Creeps [?]

Since neither of the protagonist groups ever had access to sterile lab-rat homo-saps for any statistically meaningful tests of their theses: I submit that all we can do with your postulate is - guess. And recall how many fav theories (and their authors) of human psych have come and gone: before, during and after the above actors. Each one believed to have been {At Last} revealed Truth! du jour.

But as it's an essay question, I'll just opine:
Homo-sap, a most machine-like creature, whenever denied the opportunity for mental growth - is infinitely malleable. Lord of the Flies IS what English schoolboys *would* have done (in that day; maybe still?). Anthro folks hold the catalog of known variants - it's a long list which still can't hold all the possibilities!

So I'll laterally arabesque and say: I don't believe that such a radical re-orienting of a large tribe could occur, in close proximity to the [highly contagious, I assert] powerful effects of Negative-reinforced behaviour: that of inducing greed and selfishness by example and inculcation, from infancy.

cf. The song in South Pacific, "You've Got to be Carefully Taught (to Hate)": *that* sort of negativity, which we see occurs all around us in 'our' milieu of perpetually dissatisfied mass consumption.

Could better sharing have been practical, accceptable and .. for want of better similes, 'deeply satisfying'? = thus set the basis for the rest of the Workers and Others' Paradise?

Sure.. I'd bet on it. From all life experience to date. But it is moot. Only decimation via whatever real Idiocy we next commit; slow recovery and freedom from inculcated habits of such cultures as today: could ever permit a genuine test.

What I cannot imagine is: 'conversion' of any but the poor and wretched - while present habits exist. And even then, once capable of hygiene, food, shelter - the seed of "endless desire for More even after having Very Much" - would have been sown. In that sense: "The USSR" might have fared better, longer - had it not morphed into a fascist regime immediately, but I believe that The West\ufffd would have found *even that* or perhaps *especially* that: a target for destruction. Why?

Because: a civilized person can act like a savage, but a savage cannot emulate a civilized one. We are savages, Armani suit or not.


HTH

Ashton