Alright, I am a little tired while writing this so take all grammatical and spelling mistakes with a grain of salt. I'll try to stick to my usualy brevity.When Marx was espousing communism and revolution (when wasn't he?!) he predicted that revolution would be more likely to occur in highly industrialised, civilized nations. It is for this reason that he thought that Britain would be the first to throw off the shackles of the bourgeoisie and start a dictatorship of the proletariat. The complete opposite of this has occurred, however. Russia, which was a semi-feudal quasi-asiatic/quasi-european mass that was tended almost entirely by subsistence farming peasents revolted. The same occurred in Korea, Vietnam, China, Cuba, et al. Many of these countries were not industrialised and had a lot of internal strife.
This brings me to a comment that I head from my [socialist] uncle, whichw as basically that revolutions are made by the middle class. If the middle class is happy, revolution will inevitably fail unless it is a military coup. However, as soon as middle class children start starving and families get sick and die from curable diseases, the atmosphere is charged with sentiments of revolution.
As Stoller as stated many times, socialism is predicated upon the wealth and industrialization of capitalism, so that it can create enough abundance for all of society. This would explain why all the aforementioned countries quickly slipped into dictatorships as the promised abundance never came to fruition.
So, essentially what I am asking is how you would explain the following trend? Why don't people try to institute communism/socialism in times of abundance and affluency (remember that the height of the Communist movement in the U.S. was during the Great Depression) instead opting for times of little abundance and general depression? Is this just a case of people acting irresponsibally or is it psychological? What do you guys think of all this?
