Comment by elbci
23 days ago
- What capitalists did in 6 months that communists didn't manage in 50 years?
- Make communism look good.
23 days ago
- What capitalists did in 6 months that communists didn't manage in 50 years?
- Make communism look good.
It was mainly the USSR's doing. China managed to switch to state capitalism. I guess we'll see how that works out for them.
Communism and socialism have always looked good when compared to the principles of other economic and political doctrines:
- No poor people; everyone supported by the State; Everyone works for the common good; shared resources no matter how lucky or unlucky you are…
From an intentional and moral perspective, nothing can beat it.
However it fails and will always fail because of a couple of important reasons:
- it requires the sacrifice of freedom and individuality. - it needs to suppress any other political alternative - it’s finally always implemented by humans (flawed by default) that have their own benefit as a goal.
Even with constant examples of countries demonstrating why communism always ends up being a perverse system, many people still romanticize the system. Interestingly usually only people in free capitalist societies.
It necessarily increases the concentration of power in the hands of the few. Some of you may recall a statement about power corrupting, etc.
Just on the face of it: extending the idea of company towns to an entire _nation_ seems bad to me on paper.
Morally there are also a boatload of problematic assumptions behind communism. Start with its defacto assumptions that the state is entitled to the labor of everyone. It doesn't treat people as having any sort of agency whatsoever, just a commodity for the ruler. Their 'virtue' only goes as far as how they serve. That they denominate the unit of value as the toil of its subjects as something it has in abundance for granted, and thus as near worthless, and problem solving as a matter of throwing bodies into the breech. Meaning little need to improve efficiency. The produced goods are expensive and scarce. All the same problems as slavery.
In the end there is an awkward question. What separates Communism from a bronze age god-king's palace economy where everyone is a slave of the ruler?
Those 50-60-70+% of people in former communist states don't "romanticize", they just remember being better. Utopia - no, but better than capitalism. Without an example of a communist state shielded from constant attacks, sabotage and sanctions from the dominant capitalist we will never know how good it could get. We just know the imperfect as it was, it was still better.
> Those 50-60-70+% of people in former communist states don't "romanticize", they just remember being better.
Where did you get those numbers? I remember reading about one survey where the number of people with previous regime ‘nostalgia’ was around 50%. That survey had flawed methodology, and the results were probably mostly about nostalgia related to the times when we were young, and our backs did not hurt (obviously, Russian bots in my country keep blabbering about it ad nauseam as if it were actually about the quality of the old regime).
Let’s focus on the numbers that matter - the election numbers: in the 2025 elections in my country (Czechia), communists did not even get over the 5% necessary to get to the parliament. So, I guess what people actually remember here is communism not being better.
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