this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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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.
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?
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.
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.