Obviously communism doesn't work, that's why America spends trillions of dollars squashing communist countries and installing loyal regimes :)
Or maybe because we were both trying to put nuclear weapons in friendly countries close to each other's borders
Obviously communism works. That's why every communist country tries their hardest to stop people from leaving NK.
Nothing says "classless" like the Kim Dynasty.
I don't have a comeback as good as @explodicle@local106.com's, so I'll just wait patiently for your response.
Did I mention I love living in a European country, where education and healthcare is free?
That's not socialism, that's a country with social services. I've seen multiple time when people from Scandinavia were offended when their country was called "socialist" - they are not. The economy is capitalist but the country offers strong social services.
Another funny thing - when reading about the us you realizer that it's just a broken market and snowballed problems. For example - the government invests more than any other country (per capita) in the health sector. The thing is it got out of hand.
It's a broken market because it's a rigged market. For all my endless harping, I don't think capitalism is pure evil. I think crony capitalism, and I believe that is what it means when we talk about "late stage capitalism," certain winners are allowed to buy the rule makers, which concentrates wealth, which allows more spending on rule makers, etc etc.
If we had guardrails, capitalism could do what it's supposed to - See a need/want, meet that need/want, make a reasonable amount of money which gets spent on other needs/wants.
How is crony capitalism different from regular capitalism?
Capitalism is based around the possibility of financial and social mobility and uncontrolled market. The concentration we see today goes against this idea. I'm about to respond my original conclusion about socialism in another comment, but I start to think we went too large scale here too, and some balancing is needed.
I remember watching an economic professor saying that we will never achieve pure capitalism because it's just to measure how far we are into the capitalism. Maybe that also goes with socialism.
There's a dissonance between allowing complete freedom without intervention and keeping the market truly free - if an organisation can simply buy all it's competition and expand forever, that's just a monopoly which is a closed market.
As for socialism - I grew up in a kibbutz, which is one of the only examples a successful socialist system (imo). And this too, is time limited. My reasoning being having a small group where everyone know each other and decide to join of their own volition. Most kibbutzim failed after the 3rd generation - people did not want to share anymore (and took some very bad financial decisions).
Yeah I don't want socialism
I just want the services that every human being needs to be socialised
Plenty of non socialist countries have socialised services
They export the misery to the global south instead
When trying to achieve equality, it takes far less work to drag one group down than to lift another group up to an equal level.
This is the crux of why Communism typically achieved worse outcomes than other systems.
Yes, eliminating hyper greed will result is less hoarded wealth. So uh yeah, one guy won't own 7 mansions.
Yeah, that's the part that hasn't happened historically. Usually it turns into eat the middle class.
Because with capitalism we have such a large middle class now.
Middle class is not a thing.
Uhh, OK.
I would add the religious reverence for Marx so many Communist societies had.
Marx was excellent at analyzing the problem. But his ideas how to solve it were bad.
Most Communist countries stuck to ideological purity to an extreme and never tried different approaches.
The uh...
The fucking Evergrande thing. They Ponzi schemed the whole real estate market.
There is now more housing in China than there is demand, yet houses still cost money.
Because they want housing to be profitable to investors.
Maybe stuff that people need to live shouldn't always be a for-profit endeavour?
Communism isn't about equality though.
And I wouldn't say communism achieved worse outcomes. Countries adopting some form of communist ideology experienced some of the most rapid increases in industrialization, QoL, and education. They weren't perfect, but they definitely didn't drag everyone down to the previous minimum.
Most of the communist regimes people use as examples rose to power at a point in history when new technologies and industrialization were having a huge impact on the way people lived.
A mix of capitalism and socialism that made a point of educating and upskilling their population would have achieved the same goal without the brutal massacre of a chunk of their population.
Industrial technologies helped capitalist countries succeed just as much as communist ones but you attribute capitalist success to economics and communist success to the technology. Capitalism hardly uplifts, it sabotages the growth of previously colonized countries, extending imperial rule. Even in the countries on the benefiting side of that imperial relationship most of those benefits are going to owners and not workers. The exploited country could get most of the benefits with few of the downsides by just having an open trading relationship, but historically countries trying to achieve some level of self determination are met with a combination of military force, espionage, and embargos.
One of the big problems with communism is that economic prosperity is framed fundamentally as a zero sum game. When that's a foundational axiom of the system you build you wind up not building systems of growth, only of redistribution. It has rippling effects throughout the culture and the philosophy of a nation that attempts it.
This is a good point. I agree.
No way, being a capitalist in a capitalist system is better by the metrics of that system than not being a capitalist in a capitalist system?
I do the same with the average communist, so i do it every day.
