[Preechr]

Davin, I doubt anyone willing to discuss communism and Communism seriously is unable to distinguish between the two. You seem to believe the two divergent paths can meet again, which indicates your own understanding of their relationship with one another is flawed. Both small "c" communism and capitalism are economic concepts that can be extrapolated to form societal organization constructs without actually having to be capitalized.

Generally speaking, the problem with capitalizing either one is that the lowercase version of the other ideology always manages to sneak in and corrupt things. This is only natural, because the two are naturally and inseparably two parts of a single concept. People are inherently self-interested, placing their individual needs ahead of anything else. Large "C" Communism attempts to ignore this and bend nature to place the needs of the group over the need of the individuals tht compose it. Conversely, Capitalism tends to allow natural self-interest to become greed at the expense of the group.

We exist as individuals in a group, in that order. As individuals we compete on aggressive, capitalistic terms. As members of a larger group, we submit to communal agreements with those with which we share interests. It's a yin/yang type of duality which should be pretty easy to grasp, but most people still seem to struggle with the idea that the two natures of us are not mutually exclusive or even in conflict. Achieving is just as important as sharing. The problems begin when either is forced upon the less-than-willing-or-able by a government pretending to be based in only one nature.

Anyone who cares to know already is aware of why Communism, in the form of the USSR, has failed. Most people have yet to realize that America was not unique in it's formation because it was a strictly Capitalistic nation in concept. It wasn't meant to be that. You would not achieve that effectively with a loose federation of independent states subject to a weak federal government. Now that it has developed a powerful central bureaucracy at the expense of it's member states' sovereignity, what America was designed to be... a balanced mixture of yin and yang... has ceased to exist, replaced by the opposite of Stalin's USSR: a Capitalistic, individualist's government with a state run black-market in charity.

Old Soviet nomenklatura and black-market free-enterprise are the equivalents to New America's ineffective nanny-state and lionized poor. All are seen as impurities in the system by the true-believers in the idea that the group can exist independently from or regardless to the individual.

This is running long, and I need to check my e-mail before the end of my lunch, so I'll leave it here.

HAVE A NICE DAY.