this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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I’m getting a bit tired of seeing the communism/capitalism dichotomy. Guys let’s be pluralistic or at least see these two as a scale. There are a lot of solutions in between. Government failures exist just as much as market failures. Let’s focus on the actual root causes of our problems: externalities, rent seeking, private land ownership, too long patents, public good provision, overly complex legal system, information asymmetries in labor markets. We need unions, free health care, cheaper education, carbon taxes, land value taxes, simplified legal system that can’t be taken advantage of. Stop this capitalism vs communism bullshit. That’s not the cause of all this. Your real enemy is “rentier capitalism”.
Yeah. Historic communism has the same problem as capitalism. People in unchecked power at the top. Doesn't matter what ideology we follow if we refuse to fix root problems.
It's also a problem that people love to gather around either worshipping or hating a certain individual, party or political direction. I wish people would focus more on the politics beneath, facts, statistics and causality
I don't think that's an accurate assessment of Socialism as it exists in the real world, or Capitalism as it exists in the real world. Further, I think the idea that Communists don't focus on the politics beneath, alongside facts, statistics, and causality to be extremely far outside the norm. If anything, ask any Communist for a source, and they likely keep a laundry list of books and links for you to check out, a flood of information. That has been more true in my experience, and is part of what led me to Communism.
To be clear, I favor communism as an idea. It's just the implementations of the idea historically have been flawed. I don't know anything about communistic subgroups. Take China for example; changing historic events by pushing an alternative "truth" is not focusing on facts. A list of books is a good indicator, but the contents of the books are also relevant
If you could elaborate on what you designate as "flawed," that would be more useful. However, all systems, inevitably, run into struggles, both internal and external. Evaluating how these struggles are solved in different ecomomic systems is more important than the idealistic and fruitless quest for a "pure" and "sinless" system; no such system exists and to pursue it is to pursue unicorns and fairies.
As for China specifically, as you brought it up, what do you mean by "changing historic events to push an alternative truth?" What exactly is the PRC guilty of obscuring or changing? If I were to venture a guess, you may be referring to discrepancies between Western reporting and reports within China, but without specifics all I can say is that it is indeed true that those discrepancies exist, but that doesn't mean Western accounts are correct and Chinese are not.
By flawed I mean that there is a hierarchy where power consolidates at the top between a small number of humans. The reason why I call this a flaw is based on three premises:
As for China; take Hong Kong and or Tiananmen Square. Or something more straight forward; their conflict with Taiwan. They are pushing a narrative that Taiwan belongs to them, even though Taiwan clearly does not belong to them, which then reduces the statement to propaganda and an attempt to reframe what is true
I don't think materialist analysis of Socialist societies backs your assertion that power is consolidated between a small number of humans. That's certainly an assertion made by free-market advocates like the Heritage Foundation, who seek economic freedom for the bourgeoisie, but if we analyze the historical systems at play based on modern records we find an expansion in democratic power over the economy in Socialist states.
Secondly, I don't agree that "power" has a supernatural corrupting factor. I agree that humans work in their self-interest, but I don't agree that positions of administrative superiority inevitably cause the occupant to "break bad." Your childhood schoolteacher has authority, as does the post office manager. Ultimately, administration and management is a necessary component of modern and future society, therefore it is important to ensure democratization and accountability are prioritized, not to claim they can't be. Socialist societies have made good strides in these departments over Capitalist ones.
To return to China, I don't see how they are practicing historical revisionism on Hong Kong or Tian'anmen Square, if you could be specific we could discuss them. Since you were specific with Taiwan, though, I can offer some assistance.
In 1895, the Qing dynasty was forced to cede Taiwan to Imperial Japan as a colony, following their defeat. After Japan lost its colonies in Taiwan and Korea, and the Chinese Civil War came to a head, Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang, the Nationalists that lost the civil war against the Communists, and who previously held sovereignty over all of China, fled to Taiwan (then called Formosa). They slaughtered resistance to their takeover of the fledgeling Taiwanese government, and asserted sovereignty over the mainland, hoping to retake it one day.
When the PRC says they have sovereignty over Taiwan, it is because Taiwan was Chinese before Japanese colonization, and the current government is made up of the former government of the mainland. Taiwanese and Chinese share a common history and heritage, and is just off the mainland, so this is a point of contention. The KMT still asserts that it is the "real" government of China, ergo this is an unresolved contradiction left over from the Chinese Civil War.