You said, "capitalism grants power to the consumer, the worker"... R.O.F.L.M.A.O. Are you serious??
Capitalism is 100% designed around the total exploitation of the worker. It is designed to make the rich richer and inevitably the poor get poorer, this is true across the board, for whatever capitalist country you want to mention. The worker in America is paid only as much as his employer thinks he can get away with paying him, not a penny more. In such a system you are only of value to the bourgeoisie insofar as you can increase their capital; once you cease being able to do that or can in some way be replaced by cheaper labour then you will swiftly be out of a job. Do you really think it is the best system to have every worker's job at the mercy of the tycoons who are constantly looking for ways to cut costs like the latest idea is outsourcing everything that can be done (for far cheaper) overseas? Notice how the vast expanse that used to be America's industrial heartland is now called the "Rust Belt"?? It is fast becoming a nation of plumbers, window washers, mechanics etc. in other words it is a service based economy. Every worker's livelihood in America is at the mercy of fluctuations in the market. Ultimately, capitalism is an economic system that is based upon one thing only: greed. You can try to put a happy face on it but that is what it's all about. Do you really think it's in everyone's best interests that 10% of the population of this country controls over 90% the wealth leaving everyone else to fight over the crumbs?? Do you really think it's best to have gigantic corporations like Wal Mart swoop into small towns and quickly drive every mom-and-pop store out of business because they're undersold? That's capitalism though, that's what it's all about. Think Sam Walton cares how many petty bourgeois shop owners end up losing everything because of lopsided competition? Hell no, all he cares about is the profit margin. Think the big oil barons care how much you curse them every time you fill up your tank? Hell no. Again, the profit margin. And you said "Thanks to philosophy put forth by Marx and Engels millions have been driven to poverty, lawlessness and death"... No, very early on the Soviet leadership veered away from true Marxism, claiming they knew best. Lenin wanted Trotsky to be his sucessor and I think he would've been much better for them but Lenin had a stroke (actually several), and died, there was a power struggle and the shitbird Stalin and his people won, exiling Trotsky and basically hijacking the process. Ever since then it was much more about personal power (especially in the Stalinist years) than about real Communism. According to World Bank statistics Mao Tse-Tung actually saved over 100 million Chinese from untimely deaths by helping to lift them from extreme poverty, diseases etc. As for Fidel Castro's Cuba, they are lightyears better off now than under the corrupt capitalist Batista regime with greatly reduced poverty and illiteracy. But again, anyone can be a murderous dictator and call himself "communist" even if he knows as little about Communism as you do and no matter what he will be vilified by capitalists as an "example of Communism". Yet a similar murderous dictator getting up on the other side of the bed may call himself fascist or populist and support American big business interests in his country and suddenly none of you capitalists will ever mention he was a murderous dictator, he'd just be "our guy standing up to Communism". But there again, you capitalists seem to have no gag reflex whatsoever and little sense of what is hypocritical. Yes there have been terrible regimes that may have started out with the right idea but ended up getting corrupted and deviating from the path to true Communism along the way carrying out brutal excesses for personal reasons (like Stalin's paranoia) but this by no means indicates that the basic ideas of a society designed around the worker and farmer with no class antagonisms [because there's only one class then, the proletariat] as laid out by Marx and Engels in 1848 are wrong. Quite the contrary, they are as true now as ever, and steadily get proved to be even more so. Also consider that many countries, like Somalia for example, are capitalist and totally failed states but where is the indictment of capitalism there? It makes no more sense to say "See, Somalia proves capitalism doesn't work" than to say "the U.S.S.R. proved Communism doesn't work", especially since one could hardly consider the U.S.S.R. as being truly Communist. Capitalism WILL work for a while, and the bourgeois tycoons will get richer and richer, but eventually the wheels will come off of the economic car, especially the more educated and enlightened the proletariat becomes and the more conscious of its plight and its every-day exploitation it is, hastened by the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Now do I believe in spreading this doctrine by the sword? Of course not, as people will resist anything that is forced upon them out of spite. I believe in mass education in the class struggle, a process taking years but ultimately worth it. Building a better, more compassionate, more fair world is definately possible. Far better is it to try to change things for the better in the interest of the vast majority of humankind than to throw up one's hands and say "Oh well, I guess things just are the way they are" and try to "justify" a crooked, greedy, heartless economic system as a salve to your conscience.

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