Heartbreak Warfare

While no one culture is fundamentally better than all others, some are admittedly more successful. To answer to the fact that there is such a thing as success in terms of culture: can we truly call a culture that no longer has any members today successful? The ones that died out did so for a reason and, more often than not, this reason is that they were trumped by the technology or beliefs of another. Cultural success is judged by an ability to maintain the people's happiness, and through doing so reach for longevity and strength of numbers. If we look to our experience with colonization, in Africa for example, neither the native culture nor that of the Europeans was necessarily better - they were both distinctive and useful in their own rights - yet the Europeans were still the ones to succeed with colonization and spread of their own core beliefs and education. If Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart is to be believed, the people of the native culture were already unhappy - for this reason their own culture was easily dismantled. Some might say that success is based on longevity, but if you analyze the reason for this continuation, it is usually because the culture is able to satisfy its members. Unhappy people make for a short-lived culture while the opposite is true of the happy.
So while neither belief is necessarily better, capitalists do have a right to judge the communist system by the reaction of the people. Had members been satisfied with communism and all that it offered, then it could be deemed successful, but it was not. In fact it was recieved with hostility in many places as was evidenced by the Hungarian Revolution against soviet leaders during the Cold War. So, to a degree, I do believe that the success of a culture can be determined by hard, cold facts in the sense that a rebellion or low approval ratings imply dissatisfaction. Really though, the temperature of the populous must be taken to asses the success of capitalism or communism. To some extent, the statement that capitalists and communists can judge each other from the view point of an apposing cultural view does have validity.