[cmarschner]

Communism failed because of human nature. It is incentives gone wrong. If there is no pressure to become more efficient, or even remain efficient, things will become less efficient and everybody suffers (to the point of starvation). Central planning failed due to complexity of the task.

Free market / small government doesn't work because a) it is inherently unstable due to power laws (rich get richer), b) lots of externalities (e.g. environmental damage) not being priced in, c) lower overall wellfare without government spending on infrastructure etc. In the end, it won't work because of human nature (incentives gone wrong).

So the challenge is to design the system for a society such that incentives are set right, such that a) there is efficient production such that the society can survive in the short run b) it is sustainable such that it and the whole ecosystem can survive in the long run. The past 50-100 years made a lot if progress on a), and the next 50-100 years need to solve b).

[vidarh]

> Central planning failed due to complexity of the task.

Central planning is not a requirement in Marxism or even Marxism-Leninism. Lenin tried it during the civil war, and promptly reversed it in 1921 with the introduction of New Economic Policy, which he indicated he believed needed to be in place for decades (NEP involved re-introducing limited market economy). Stalin then reversed Lenins reforms and went much further shortly after Lenin died.

There are many left wing ideologies including anarchist and communist ideologies that explicitly promote the use of market mechanisms for resource allocation, and many more that take a "whatever works" approach.

The idea of a planned economy is attractive to some because it seems "tidy", while for others it's strongly unappealing because it involves a central authority, which is anathema to a lot of communist ideologies.

[colechristensen]

Communism or something like it can easily work post-scarcity.

You can't trust human nature to toil away in factories and hard jobs and do so efficiently for 1/2 of waking life.

Make that fraction a lot smaller... say the only people that needed to work on whatever were the ones that actually wanted to... and suddenly communism works. Open source software works and so much of it is done because people just want to do it. Some day automation and efficiency will get to a point where nerds who have interests will end up doing all of the work because it's what they want to do. Imagine a 3d printer capable of making complex metal/plastic/ceramic/electronic/whatever objects. You'd get hordes of people designing and sharing things just because they wanted to. Design a 3d-printer that can print copies of itself (as well as most of the things a person could want) and suddenly a huge chunk of capitalism is just unnecessary.

50 years after the creation of Star Trek, we should be able to at least imagine the Star Trek economy being technically feasible in the not too distant future.

[CPLX]

Communism failed? Someone should call the Chinese Communist Party and tell them, they're still acting like they run the place.

[colechristensen]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform

What the party calls themselves is irrelevant. "communism" as anyone would define it, is not what China's economy looks like today.

[CPLX]

Indeed. The implied point being that capitalism didn't win either, regardless of what we call ourselves.

In both cases what seems to have emerged from the 20th century as the successful governing model is varying degrees of democratic socialism.

[colechristensen]

There's a long elaborate etymology and syntax argument I want to make here.

The gist of it is that capitalism and communism aren't exactly two instances of the same class, communism implies a form of government that capitalism doesn't. Likewise communism implies a precise extreme economy where capitalism is more vague.

Most of the world is mostly capitalist. The presence of extensive social welfare programs doesn't really take away from this in the way that adding a market economy and entrepreneurial opportunity takes away from communism.