Is Communism due for a comeback?

Come on, the ’80s are back — can’t we get a new Evil Empire, too?

Anyway, I was meaning to blog about this all weekend, but I missed it. The University of London (England, not Ontario) hosted a major conference entitled “On the Idea of Communism” that sounds like it would have been really interesting:

The symposium will not deal with practico-political questions of how to analyze the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organize a new political movement. More radical questioning is needed today – this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with Communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher.

According to coverage in the Guardian, interest in the conference was so strong that the venue has had to be changed three times — and tickets are still sold out:

Although the conference seems particularly timely, it was planned last summer, well before the scale of the current economic collapse had become apparent.

“The response has taken us by surprise,” said Costas Douzinas, director of the Birkbeck institute for the humanities, which is hosting the three-day event. “It must be related to the wider political context. There is a sense that we have to start thinking again.”

He said that the gathering was about the meaning of communism and speakers had indicated that they would be very critical of the Soviet model. Among the questions to be addressed is whether “communism is still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects”.

I’m not convinced that a totalitarian political model is ever a good idea, but it’s always struck me that communism as an economic system should be well-suited to a democracy — and yet it never seems to work out that way.