Communism is indeed worse, but that doesn't automatically make our current system 'good'. Yes it's the best we tried so far, but it's not like we tried soo many others and this one ended up being the best out of all the ones tested.
I'm sure if we took all the top math, quant, economy and finance grads in the world and book them for a few months in that fancy Swiss Alps resort at Davos where world leaders meet up every year to discuss how to screw us, they could come up with a better system than the one we currently have.
The problem is most likely the new system would not end up favoring the same winners of the current system, hence there's no desire to ever change the status quo, so we have the communist system as a perpetual boogieman to discourage any other systems being trialed as if that's the only other option.
> I'm sure if we took all the top math, quant, economy and finance grads in the world and book them for a few months in that fancy Swiss Alps resort at Davos where world leaders meet up every year to discuss how to screw us, they could come up with a better system than the one we currently have.
That isn't an obvious conclusion. To the extent the current system is one, improving it with such an approach doesn't account for:
- It having too many parts to understand without resorting to highly lossy models.
- Its non-features being far more impactful than its features.
Dismissing entire categories of systems and approaches under a multitude of different situations and circumstances speaks more to how effective you personally have been propagandized.
Even the US has had outright state-sponsored corporations at times (Springfield Armory etc) and it’s fine. The Manhattan Project literally won the war, alongside collectivization of the economy for war production.
Collective worker ownership of the means of production is extraordinarily normalized in Germany (and a frequent source of conflict with US politicians who solicit automaker facilities in anti-labor locales) as well as other european countries (Husqvarna Vapensfabrik, Royal Dutch Shell Company, etc). There is no particular slippery slope here, some companies operate for centuries like this.
The communistic nature of kibbutzim in israel were/are also extraordinarily successful.
These things generally are good for workers and bring equality and stability to their countries. You just have to get past the trite third-grade "communism is actually bad" soundbyte (and the tendency to funnel anything that's mildly pro-worker into the "communism" bucket of course).
And remember, there's plenty of Pinochets and Suhartos and Malaysian juntas to go around for all political systems. Just like there are also plenty of inefficient capitalist organizations too - capitalism is not a magic wand for efficiency either.
In fact when you get down to it... corporations are really their own small little centrally-planned economies and dictatorships. And if they become too large to fail you get exactly the same failure modes as state corporations etc. Boeing might as well be a soviet OKB for all it matters. What, precisely, is the value or merit in quibbling over such a distinction?
Human societies surviving the next century is going to require a great deal of collectivism and cooperation, let alone the obvious internal problems with social equity. But people still think “but communism is bad” (by which they of course mean anything from German cooperatives to Stalinism) is the height of political discourse like they’re in a Fox News primetime special lol. Like, they got you real good didn’t they?
I think it's also something of an X-Y problem... people identify with "capitalism = rugged individualism" and don't realize that Boeing siphoning taxpayer dollars for airplanes the doors fall off of, or pinochet giving citizens "helicopter rides" or suharto burning citizens alive in barrels or the world's most repressive prison system is just as much a feature of capitalism as OKBs or the gulag archipelago or stalin's purges were a features of communism. Because those are orthogonal problems, those are the problems with authoritarianism not the unit of economic organization.
But "communism bad" - thank you so much for that contribution to the discourse! Nobody's ever said that before! /s
> Dismissing entire categories of systems and approaches under a multitude of different situations and circumstances speaks more to how effective you personally have been propagandized.
> those are the problems with authoritarianism not the unit of economic organization
Communism requires authoritarianism. It's inherent to operating system. When you take resources from some and distribute to others, who, exactly, does the taking and giving?
Monoculture micro-communities like kibbutz don't show anything. Nation-states are diverse groups of hundreds of millions with competing beliefs, values, and goals. Communism cannot serve these diverse interests. It requires a group of authoritarians that choose from whom to take and whom to give and the abject suffering of many is the result, every time. There is no freedom or liberty, that's by design. It's a failure with disastrous consequences.
I'm sure if we took all the top math, quant, economy and finance grads in the world and book them for a few months in that fancy Swiss Alps resort at Davos where world leaders meet up every year to discuss how to screw us, they could come up with a better system than the one we currently have.
The problem is most likely the new system would not end up favoring the same winners of the current system, hence there's no desire to ever change the status quo, so we have the communist system as a perpetual boogieman to discourage any other systems being trialed as if that's the only other option.