Main Reasons for the collapse of Communism

'One drop rule', 'passing' and all that.

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If someone has just "one drop" (and not much more) of "Black genes", then you won't even be able to tell this (even though light skin - just like blond hair or red hair - is a recessive trait, IIRC, and therefore mixed Mulatto children of Black-White couples more frequently tend to be darker rather than whiter).

In NYC people who are "Non-Latino Whites" in censuses have on average 10% of Sub-Saharan African Y-DNA Chromosomes (see the study I linked).

This is probably due to large scale of interracial marriages in NYC, but it might be also due to some "rather Black" people declaring Whiteness in censuses.

In Brazil there is also a mix of races, and on a much larger scale than in the USA. All three groups - Whites, Blacks and Pardos (Browns) - have been proven to have various degrees of both European, Sub-Saharan African and Amerindian genetic ancestries. Statistically these groups differ on proportions - people who describe themselves as Whites have (on average) larger % of European genes than people who describe themselves as Blacks. Pardos tend to be the most mixed group, with most similar levels of European, Amerindian and Black ancestries. I actually already wrote about this some time ago in another thread:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardo#Ancestry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardo#History

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3040205/

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Mexico is also very mixed (most of the population are Mestizos) and groups are statistically different only in terms of proportions.

Nevertheless, it was not an obstacle for Mexican government to introduce a "racially-based" caste system:

The Caste War of Yucatán (1847–1901), during which Mayans created an independent state, which existed for some 50 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_War_of_Yucatán

Background

In Spanish colonial times, Yucatán (like most of New Spain) was under a legal caste system, with peninsulares (officials born in Spain) at the top, the criollos of Spanish descent in the next level, followed by the mestizo population, then the descendants of the natives who had collaborated with the Spanish conquest of Yucatán, and at the bottom were the other native indios.

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Again, this is all totally irrelevant.

bhsup said:

Yes. That is what happens when you're born in a country/are a citizen of a country. It is so frustrating that you old world people won't let go of your stupid ethnicity lines. It causes more death and misery than anything else in the world.

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And yet people persist. So must there not be must be some reason for doing so?

Maybe old worldeans are concerned about ethnic affiliations and national identities - both of which exist independently from citizenships and to some extent from each other - but at least we don't understand them in some genetically-biological terms, as new worldeans do (and many of them are obsessed with it).

According to American person in order to be ethnic Scottish you must be light-skinned with light hair, preferably red, brown or blond, etc.

This is how you understand ethnicity, confusing it with ancestry or origins. In the old world we understand ethnic groups as linguistic-cultural groups.

That is what happens when you're born in a country/are a citizen of a country.

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"Just because one is born in a barn does not make one a horse." - Duke of Wellington

I'd have an easier time believing that Europeans all have a relaxed, constructvist view of ethnicity if we didn't keep electing honest-to-god Nazis.

I'd have an easier time believing that Europeans all have a relaxed, constructvist view of ethnicity if we didn't keep electing honest-to-god Nazis.

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And this is yet another statement which confuses ethnicities with races and views of ethnicity with racist views.

Racists in Western Europe elect Nazis because they are concerned about massive non-white, non White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant, etc., immigration

To some extent they are also concerned about immigration of whites from Eastern Europe but this is also racially motivated, in their own understanding.

In countries like Hungary they elect such parties because of their racist views about Gypsies (who are, by the way, people of Indian origin).

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There was hardly a Nazi person in history who believed that racial borders correspond entirely to ethnic borders.

Nazi Germany's racial policies assumed that racial borders overlap with ethnic borders. In some cases to a larger in other cases to a lesser extent.

The Nazis obviously did not believe in existence of pure races (though of course they wanted to create such a race).

My point was that Nazis and their fellow-travellers don't tend to see ethnicity in fluid, constructvist terms.

Nazis and their fellow-travellers don't tend to see ethnicity in fluid, constructvist terms.

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Why do you think so ???

In "Mein Kampf" Hitler explicitly writes that he doesn't believe in pure races. He also acknowledges that ethnic groups are fluid and mixing with each other.

He considers this a big problem (i.e. "racial degeneration" of superior ones due to mixing with inferior ones), but he doesn't deny this.

When you read portions of "Mein Kampf" you can see that Hitler saw the history of humanity as that of a near-constant degenartion due to conquerors mixing with subjugated peoples. This theory kind of contradicts what we know about human history (i.e. humans developed from hunter-gatherers to modern industrial globalized society, rather than declining from modern industrial globalized society to hunter-gatherers - as should probably be the case if Hitler was right).

On the other hand he writes that after one civilization collapses due to degeneration, another rises.

So maybe he saw it as short periods of "fast progress in evolution" made by some groups, separating periods of overall degeneration.

I'm not sure if you understand what "constructivism" describes, or at least now what I'm using it to describe. What you're describing here is a view in which ethnicities can "mix", but in which the ethnicities themselves remain permanent and essential. In which a person might be half-French, half-German, but their Germanness and Frenchness are separate characteristics set side by side, their Germnaness same as the Germanness of every other German and their Frenchness the same as that of every other Frenchman, the two simply occurring within the same body. But what you earlier attributed to Europeans was a constructivist a viewpoint was a view in which ethnicities are themselves fluid, variable and layered, a product of peculiar personal circumstances rather than the working-out of an ancestral arithmetic. In the former, ethnic groups may not be pure, but the ethnicity itself is pure, and the group may aspire towards purity. In the latter, the concept of ethnic purity is simply absurd. Those are two very different and most usually opposed viewpoints, regardless of a shared awareness that ethnic interbreeding occurs.

What you're describing here is a view in which ethnicities can "mix", but in which the ethnicities themselves remain permanent and essential.

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I just forgot to describe everything.

Ethnicities can both mix and they can also evolve, as well as they can become assimilated by other ethnicities.

Hitler also understood this about ethnicities.

The problem was what he thought about races being carried by some ethnic groups.

Prior to WW2 racial anthropology was very popular in Western Europe, also in Britain. They were limited to measuring skulls, bodies, etc. and guessing dubious conclusions from those experiments, because they didn't know anything about DNA (so they could not check from where ancestors of a particular person really came). Today we know that racial anthropology is unreliable because a person inherits genes from all of his or her ancestors, not just from parents - therefore "Aryan-looking" parents are not always going to have "Aryan-looking" children, nor do "Aryan-looking" people have only "Aryan genes" in their DNA, etc.

But if you check any pre-war study by racial anthropologists, particularly those about anthropological types in Europe, you can see that all of them recognized that all varieties of European "races" can be found in all European countries. They just classified ethnic groups basing on proportions of those varietes.

For example some of them thought that English people had a higher percent of individuals with "Nordic features" than Irish people. Etc.

See, this is what I'm saying: you're talking about ethnicities as Things, entities unto themselves, independent of the particular persons who carry those identities. That isn't a constructivist view, it's nineteenth century ethno-nationalist theory dressed in sociological garb. And while this is certainly typical of Old Worlders, it's also very far from the enlightened standpoint you earlier attributed to them.

you're talking about ethnicities as Things, entities unto themselves, independent of the particular persons who carry those identities.

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Ethnicity is mostly an objective quality of a person (but it doesn't mean that it is inherent). Nationality is the matter of choice.

Therefore I write about ethnic affiliation, but national identity. You are perhaps confusing the two things.

Ethnicity is mostly objective in the sense that you don't choose your language and culture.

As an adult person you can add another ethnicity to your original ethnicity, by adopting a new culture. But your first ethnicity exists objectively.

You are being raised in a particular culture by your parents and you learn a particular language from them. Therefore ethnicity is not about self-consciousness. Unlike in case of nationality, you don't need to be conscious of your ethnicity in order to belong to a particular ethnic group.

For example a very little child who can speak but is still not capable of abstract thinking, or a severely mentally ill person, or an elderly person with Alzheimer disease - all of whom are not capable of being conscious of their ethnic affiliation - still belong to an ethnic group (or to a few ethnic groups - because having more than one ethnicity is also possible, for example due to being raised by parents of two distinct ethnicities).

Ethnic consciousness is not required to be part of an ethnic group or of a few ethnic groups.

Thus, an elderly ethnic Polish person with advanced level of Alzheimer disease does not stop to be an ethnic Polish person.

On the other hand, nationality (do not confuse with citizenship, which is just a legal situation of a person) is mostly about self-consciousness. Therefore a severely mentally ill person is not part of any national group. Neither is a person with advanced Alzheimer disease, or a very little child.

Ethnicity is objective, but it is not inherent because you are not born with it - you acquire your "basic ethnicity" in childhood. Example - a child born to Polish parents but immediately abandoned by them and shortly later adopted and raised by German parents, will become ethnic German.

I hope I explained it well enough.

Refresh the website because I edited it a few times before posting the final version.

What you're describing here is a view in which ethnicities can "mix", but in which the ethnicities themselves remain permanent and essential. In which a person might be half-French, half-German, but their Germanness and Frenchness are separate characteristics set side by side, their Germnaness same as the Germanness of every other German and their Frenchness the same as that of every other Frenchman, the two simply occurring within the same body. But what you earlier attributed to Europeans was a constructivist a viewpoint was a view in which ethnicities are themselves fluid, variable and layered, a product of peculiar personal circumstances rather than the working-out of an ancestral arithmetic. In the former, ethnic groups may not be pure, but the ethnicity itself is pure, and the group may aspire towards purity. In the latter, the concept of ethnic purity is simply absurd. Those are two very different and most usually opposed viewpoints, regardless of a shared awareness that ethnic interbreeding occurs.

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By "ethnicities can mix" I mean intermarriages between people from distinct ethnic groups, as well as assimilation processes (ethnic shift).

Whether a person raised by a German-French couple will be just German, just French, German-French, French-German or a totally new ethnicity, is of course open to discussion (it also depends how such parents raise their children - do they raise them in both cultures, or prefer just one of them).

I never wrote that ethnicities remain permanent and essential. If that was the case, we would still be divided for Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, etc. And as we know these ethnic groups are long gone (well, maybe except for Assyrians - some of whom still exist as Assyrians).

What you described above is frequent for ethnic borderlands, in which different ethnic processes and different interactions between neighbouring ethnic groups can take place. Either ethnic boundaries can become sharp and the population sharply divided for A and B, or the boundaries can be more fluent with many people being either A-B or B-A people, and finally - resulting from interactions between A and B - there can emerge a new ethnicity C.

A very good example of such a messy ethnic boderland was the region of Polesye, which was the melting pot between Belarusian, Ukrainian and Polish ethnic groups. People in Polesye were often considered as a separate ethnic group, being neither fully Belarusians, nor fully Ukrainians nor fully Poles. They were called Poleshuks (from the region where they lived), but they often considered themselves as just "locals" (which doesn't mean that they were not an ethnic group, because being aware of their ethnicity by members of this ethnic group is not a required condition for this ethnicity to exist).

Ethnic borderlands can be messy regions.

But the fact that messy processes take place in ethnic borderlands does not undermine the rest of what I wrote about ethnic groups.

Something like 25%* of the population in Australia identifies as being ethnic Australians. A significant number of those people wouldn't be English speakers or have been born in Australia.

* turns out to be 33%.

So does 7.5%* of Americans identify as ethnic Americans, including bhsup (which is probably why he doesn't like our Old World identities so much).

BTW:

Most of Americans (except recent immigrants) are in fact "ethnic Americans", even if they don't realize this fact and don't identify as such.

But "Americans" is a very young ethnic group. It is still shaping and forming itself. It is at most 200 years old. A blink of an eye.

In the Old World we have well-established ethno-linguistic-cultural groups, which are much older than this.

*And in Kentucky over 20% up to even 21% (Kentucky - The Most American United State!).

you're talking about ethnicities as Things, entities unto themselves, independent of the particular persons who carry those identities.

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Your approach to ethnicities is just too individualistic.

Ethnic groups are things related to entire societies, not to individual persons.

Humans are social creatures, they live in societies.

And this is another reason* why ethnic groups exist objectively, regardless of how much their individual members realize this fact.

*In addition to those I mentioned in previous posts.

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Your individualistic approach to ethnic groups is popular in the USA, because they understand "ethnicity" as ancestry, physical appearance, etc.

They understand ethnicity as a quality rooted mostly in the past rather than a quality rooted mostly in the present.

So each person - even within the same family - can have a different "ethnicity" if we define ethnicity as Americans do it.

But real ethnicities are not things related to individual people, but to entire groups of people.

Ethnic groups exist objectively just like languages exist objectively. Of course languages are not a 0-1 thing because there are multiple dialects, etc.

Neither are ethnicities a simple 0-1 thing, as I explained above. They are complex, dynamic and flexible things.

Ethnic groups can also have structures consisting of many degrees (like in case of many other social groups). There can be an ethnos which is part of larger ethnos, and which is part of an even larger ethnos. They can split and merge. They can even overlap. There can be common parts for a few ethnoses.

In ethnic borderlands you can have a sharp division (either A or B), or a continuum (A gradually goes into B, with A-B and B-A in between), etc.

I really wasn't asking for a lecture.

Communism collapsed because it was decreed so by the cosmos. The misty-eyed utopianism of socialism was always destined to fall abjectly at the feet of human nature and the pragmaticism of the heroes of liberty. The bones of its dead lie at the foundation of the modern world, a great temple to market democracy and the rule of the meritocratic herrenvolk at its helm. Accept the world as it is now, it is all that is both possible AND good.

Alternatively, it never succeeded because it was only adopted by one 'developed' power, and never acquired the resources to supplant its competitors.

Domen said:

Of course Communist ideology included the "social engineering" policy which aimed at creating a new species, suitable for Communism - Homo Sovieticus.

So indeed that ideology was the tail wagging the dog - because it wanted to create peoples for the system, rather than system for the peoples...

And this is why Communism failed.

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It's one of the reasons Soviet communism failed, but it's not a necessary part of communism and so cannot be used to explain why communism 'will always fail'. Communists still run the world's most populous state.

Ajidica said:

China is communist to the extent that they haven't gotten around removing the hammer and sickle from their icons and how the CCP is intertwined with Chinese modernization.

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Trying to handwave away the fact that a quarter of the planet's population is still living under a communist party by claiming that China 'is capitalist really' smacks of wishful thinking...

It's not that China is "really" capitalist, as if it's some closely-guarded secret that only those with the arcane arts may divine. It's just a plain fact that the People's Republic of China is as much a part of the global capitalist system as anywhere else. If it isn't capitalist, what else could it be?