Well communism has been tried and it didn’t work. It was trounced by the capitalist world which, nevertheless, adopted some socialist ideas, especially in Europe.
So no, it’s not time to do better. Communism isn’t the next step after capitalism. It clearly isn’t remotely capable of competing with capitalism in the long term. No matter how many thousands of pages of theoretical wishful thinking people have written about it, if it doesn’t work in the real world it doesn’t work. It always ends up in authoritarian, repressive regimes that are economic backwaters. To the extent that they desire secular growth they have to open up markets like China did, and simply become authoritarian and somewhat economically free.
The biggest issue is that this is a doomer self defeating argument. If you don’t believe something is possible, then it isn’t. Even if total communism is an unreachable goal, why not try to move closer to it? Liberalism is a walking contradiction, with economic liberalism being almost incompatible with social liberalism. That hasn’t stopped it from having drastic positive and negative effects on human history from people trying to live by it.
Furthermore, the idea that communism is a dead end reinforces the toxic view that anyone attempting to strive closer towards it is a threat that must be eliminated. Anti-communist sentiment has led to and enabled some of the worst atrocities of all time. The best part is that many of the people accused of being communists merely wanted liberation.
The fact is, if communism was wiped from existence and Karl Marx erased from history, the same ideas would evolve out of Christianity, or liberalism, or any ideology that isn’t a fucking death cult. This is because Marx did not make a unique and unprecedented observation, he just put the pieces together first. Egalitarianism and sharing is as important to human success as territorialism and self interest.
Finally, Marx did believe communism would come out of industrialized societies with enough resources to go around. That is not the state that the Soviet Union or China were in when they declared themselves communist. Making absolute statements about the end state of all attempts at something is setting yourself up for failure far more than trying a new way to make something theoretically possible happen.
Well communism has been tried and it didn’t work. It was trounced by the capitalist world which, nevertheless, adopted some socialist ideas, especially in Europe.
So no, it’s not time to do better. Communism isn’t the next step after capitalism. It clearly isn’t remotely capable of competing with capitalism in the long term. No matter how many thousands of pages of theoretical wishful thinking people have written about it, if it doesn’t work in the real world it doesn’t work. It always ends up in authoritarian, repressive regimes that are economic backwaters. To the extent that they desire secular growth they have to open up markets like China did, and simply become authoritarian and somewhat economically free.
The biggest issue is that this is a doomer self defeating argument. If you don’t believe something is possible, then it isn’t. Even if total communism is an unreachable goal, why not try to move closer to it? Liberalism is a walking contradiction, with economic liberalism being almost incompatible with social liberalism. That hasn’t stopped it from having drastic positive and negative effects on human history from people trying to live by it.
Furthermore, the idea that communism is a dead end reinforces the toxic view that anyone attempting to strive closer towards it is a threat that must be eliminated. Anti-communist sentiment has led to and enabled some of the worst atrocities of all time. The best part is that many of the people accused of being communists merely wanted liberation.
The fact is, if communism was wiped from existence and Karl Marx erased from history, the same ideas would evolve out of Christianity, or liberalism, or any ideology that isn’t a fucking death cult. This is because Marx did not make a unique and unprecedented observation, he just put the pieces together first. Egalitarianism and sharing is as important to human success as territorialism and self interest.
Finally, Marx did believe communism would come out of industrialized societies with enough resources to go around. That is not the state that the Soviet Union or China were in when they declared themselves communist. Making absolute statements about the end state of all attempts at something is setting yourself up for failure far more than trying a new way to make something theoretically possible happen.