Structural flaws of communism?

[nathan]

If Soviet communism was an inherently flawed ideology which "collapsed under its own weight," why did it take so many decades of constant opposition from the West (e.g. wars, arms race, political pressure, space race, espionage, etc.) for it to succumb?

The opposition can of course be explained partly by the desire of the West to check the spread of communism (e.g. Afghanistan). But I was struck by the implicit contradiction in what I had been told about communism (that it is inherently flawed and cannot sustain a society) and what our reaction to it was (essentially ensuring that it could not succeed).

Anyway, that just popped into my head. Am I missing something? Does it just take a long time for inherently flawed ideological structures to fail? Or could the Soviet Union have thrived if the West would have laid back? How do we deal with Cuba, China, and Vietnam?

[AGS]

China proves that a certain brand of communism can work - somewhat.

There is two flaws with communism that dooms it to failure IMO -

Communism promises equal status to everyone. Yet it needs a hierarchy to maintain control. It promises a freedom that it is not willing to provide.

Second - it dismantles the very things that has provided prosperity to the previous regime and replaces it with an economy that does not benefit the very people it is for.

Other than that there are of course ideological arguments re freedom etc

[ggeezz]

My understanding is that economists predicted the USSR would fail because it would become impossible to manage an economy of such complexity from the top down. At the beginning you just produce whatever was being produced before, so yes, it would take both time and largess for the inherently flawed system to fail.

But there's an important distinction. They weren't saying it was ideologically flawed. It was technically flawed, like giving a human air traffic controller to large and complex of an area to manage.

I don't know about Cuba and Vietnam except that they are too small to exhibit the same problem. But China isn't much more economically communist than we are.