Comment by throwuxiytayq
2 years ago
The article presents a beautiful, self-contained, anecdotal but representative example of why communism never worked, doesn’t work, won’t work, and wouldn’t work in your imaginary parallel spider-man universe scenario.
Is there a way to read what I wrote without getting that I'm not a fan of communism at all? There shouldn't be. I have enough family anecdotes of how bad it could be. Also I hope you meant to say "...except in your imaginary..." cause in this one it definitely didn't.
It's not really about communism, though.
You'd have to be blind not to see parallels under capitalism. Employees cannot profit from inventions and improvements, so they don't engage in them. Improving efficiency means budget cuts and animosity from under performers.
This might not be true for smallest companies, but those don't really drive the economy.
We can say with certainty that capitalist economy has a feature of an invention/idea implementation of which is funded, and pursued by motivated people with the goal of becoming rich (often known as 'startups'). Sometimes they succeed, and give a push to economy, or science. No equivalent exists in communist model.
Except employees do in fact benefit from innovations and improvements, and most inventions and innovations of the past 100 years come from capitalist, not socialist, countries. To the contrary, soviet orgs paid set awards for "rationalizing suggestions", and without the market value control 99% of them were of course bullshit.
> To the contrary, soviet orgs paid set awards for "rationalizing suggestions"
Yes, but very often someone did that rationalizing suggestion and the manager got the reward. Most people suggesting improvements stopped after one small improvement when treated like that, so whole idea was doomed to fail by poor execution.
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