Well, I think socialism (state ownership of the means of production) is the best achievable state for the U.S. and Canada. For any country, actually. Although my wife and I always vote Liberal (to protect our free health care entitlements) I would love to see a socialist party reach a level of strength where I could safely vote for them without throwing the election to the conservatives (now known as the Reform Party) and endangering our right to free medical care.
I love the idea of Communism (from each according to his ability to each according to his needs) but obviously it's run into a lot of problems in its execution. The basic problem best expressed in Lord Acton's dictum, "All power tends to corrupt, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely."
The original leaders who come to power in any Communist Revolution are men and women of great courage, strength, intelligence, resourcefulness and love of the working class. They have to be, the circumstances of their accession were such that anyone who was greedy or selfish would never have joined a movement with so little chance of success, so much risk of death and torture, when it was so much easier and more profitable to work for the existing system. But once power is gained, there is no more testing ground. Opportunists, careerists, greedy and self-interested people find it much easier to join the Communist system than to oppose it. As the old Revolutionaries die out, there is no way to know whether the apparatchiks who replace them are good, solid Communists or just careerists and opportunists.
This is the problem of Communism. To my knowledge, it has not yet been solved. In Russia, the oldest Revolutionary society, we saw how it all played out. Younger Revolutionary societies are just now entering what was the final phase of the Russian Revolution. It remains to be seen what steps Raul and Fidel and their Revolutionary compañeros have taken to avoid the same fate of their regime. China is an interesting study of a transitional regime of Communist origin which seems to have thrived by abandoning some but not all of its original Marxist precepts. My great hope is that Chinese Communism will be flexible enough to materially profit from some of the efficiencies of capitalism, but never lose its Communist heart, never abandon the weakest and poorest of its people to capitalist-style exploitation, never permit the return of religion and superstition to prey on the lives of the people.
So I don't have a clear picture on whether or not real communism (the dictatorship of the proletariat through the CP as vanguard of the working class PLUS state ownership of the means of production PLUS a state monopoly on the dissemination of information PLUS the forcible suppression of all elements of disunity such as racist, religious and anti-Semitic organizations) should be the logical next step after socialism.
Frankly, I see socialism and communism as two similar but different systems. I don't see socialism as a stepping stone either, and in fact in classic Marxist doctrine, it is not. Marx actually expected that the initial Communist Revolution would occur in the most highly developed capitalist society, which was then England. Because there is a tremendous amount of violence and killing in any Revolution, it could not be justified in North America, where there is a fairly high standard of living. If I advocated Revolution anywhere, it would be in the victim countries, countries exploited by the West or Israel, where conditions are desperate and the suffering entailed by Revolution and Communist dictatorship would not be all that much greater than the suffering that the people are already experiencing. Countries like Palestine, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras.
In China and Cuba, it might even be the case that Communism was a precursor of Socialism. That once a Communist Revolution has raised the people out of their misery, the strict controls of Communist Revolutionary government can be released and a more socialistic political environment adopted.
Sorry I seem to have rambled but there's a busy day ahead and I just can't find the time to trim this down and whip it into shape. It's the raw feed, but it'll have to do.
