It's accomplishments are education, health care and sports. What's been sacrificed are breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Yet that overlooks the fact most of the Caribbean nations import food. They are not suitable for growing grains but sugar, which is a labor intensive crop that is most efficiently produced under a system of slave labor or share-cropping where the farmers are perpetually in debt to the landowner who has the power to set prices (to his advantage). Look at the Philippines.....

I just never believed that a government that would pump up Pinochet, The Shah of Iran and funnel millions in to Apartheid should be trusted when it came to pointing out who or what was "evil"

After all, we've seen a round up and relentless persecution of Marxist and Anarchist sympathizers three times in the US(and even those who simply wanted peace with the USSR or fight for progressive causes like a 40 hour work week) but did we EVER see a round up of KKK, Neo-Nazis and the like? Communism and Socialism are of course not perfect but neither is capitalism.

The majority of those in government power during pre-1960s America,` already viewed the speaking out by US citizens, particularly internationally, regarding civil rights for African Americans and anti-colonialism as "subversive" and "slanderous to the United States. For instance, during the McCarthy era, white supremacist and anti-civil rights members of the US Government (e.g., Martin Dies and Theodore Bilbo) and anti-Communist members of the US intelligence community, especially J. Edgar Hoover, were able to take Black artists, like the legendary international scholar and entertainment star, Paul Robeson and his unwavering devotion to the peoples of the Soviet Union and Russian culture and attach it to other causes such as anti-lynching legislation and African independence. Thus anything anti-fascist was given a Pinko label, effectively frightening many of the trade unions and mainstream African American political community, including the NAACP away from civil rights forerunners like Paul Robeson and civil rights itself.

Many US citizens who believed in Communism felt, quite rightly, that capitalism maintained a racial climate in the United States that also allowed Jim Crow, impoverished living conditions for all races and a white supremacist domination of the US government to continue. They felt the existence of a major socialist power like the USSR was a bulwark against Western European capitalist domination of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

Anyone interested in this subject further should visit www.bayarearobeson.org or the Paul Robeson wikipedia page and connected articles, which I spent over 100 hours editing this past spring.

Out of that came non-market mechanisms such as the coffee cartel, which regulated production of the world's second largest traded commodity to assure farmers a floor price. Coffee can only be grown in certain climates dominated by states with pre-industrial economies. We couldn't afford to lose 'em.

It seems to me that communism — the little "c" variety if you like — gets a bad rap as an impossibly utopian ideal.

Granted, it doesn't really seem to work out in the material world. We have seen that "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" is bad industrial policy.

But it makes for great software.

Many commentators have tried to describe open-source software projects such as Linux by appealing to various metaphors — marketplaces, gift economies, and so on.

But all of that libertarian nonsense aside, the way these projects actually work is nothing other than the ideals of communism put into practice. It turns out that in a domain free of fabrication and distribution costs, it becomes possible for each person to labor at what they love, and everyone to freely enjoy the bounty of that labor.

One could go on about Linus Torvalds, devoted cadres, and the need to maintain revolutionary discipline, but all of that is left as an exercise for the reader.

as a 1988 book by two Soviet nationals, "Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present." The title says it all: "Don't immanentize the eschaton!"

Your letter reminded me of that most Hoover-esque of American idioms — "premature anti-fascism."

The idea, of course, was that if you had opposed fascism before it was okay to — which was right around when the American right wing started to think that maybe Hitler wasn't going to be our willing tool after all — that made you suspiciously un-American.

That said, while it would be nice if we could lay racism in America entirely at the feet of capitalists, it was sadly the labor unions that did as much as anyone to perpetuate second-class citizenship for minorities in this country. That fact is made all the more dramatic when one considers that, indeed, the factory owners were only too eager to benefit from the constant availability of non-unionized scab labor created by minority exclusion.

I address your post becuse you brought up a good point. I would like to add some extra perspective.

Communism appealed to Russians based on their implementation of serfdom according to an article I heard about. But I don't remember its source. So yu can ignore this if you like.

Serfdom and feudalism are terms that are sloppily over-used. In a traditional Russian village without a rich noble the farm land surrounding the village was commonly owned and administered by a village commitee. This group would allocate the land yearly based on an informal set of rules that would supposedly maximise that year's crops. So the village leadership would divvy up the land yearly based on group needs. I'm sure that this system was subject to abuse and the like but I could also see where Communism would be a natural fit. I thnk that Communism would easily be seen as an extention of this form of feudalism.

Stalin, on the other hand supposedly ran the "state-farms" into the ground. The people there were worked very hard and didn't see much for their efforts. Most farmers spent most of their time trying to get off the farms and little time working them.

A modern industrial state without a sound agricultural sector can't happen, in my view. As an aside that is the major reason why I fear climate change. This is because I think human society will fall apart if climate change isn't firmly addressed now. When previous cultures have disintegrated canibalism has been humans' response. See the book "Collapse" for many examples.