JensSpahnpastaThe Productivity Paradox: Why Technology Makes the Economy More Efficient But Most People No Richer
CosmoNovaThey don’t. Schools teach that “Karl Marx didn’t want anyone to have any money, and to be owned by the state. They quickly ran out of food because no one was motivated to work.”
Why do you think guys who purchased “Truck Nuts” all screech on Twitter about “socialism is when you do all the work and they take all the profits” when that’s exactly what capitalism is and they are too dumb to notice? Why do you think the Tetris movie wasn’t really about Tetris but instead about “Soviets bad”?
Your comment only works for those who don’t live in ex-Soviet countries. Because it’s western rose-tinted glasses of how USSR just had problems, but was generally fine.
USSR wasn’t really communist though, was it? They tried and failed to make a communist state, no?
No country has managed a transition to communism, all of them got turned into various types of authroritarian dictatorships. There is no known method for transitioning to communism and maintaining it.
Would you know whether or not democratic socialism is a good prospect in that regard? A flavor of which that remains capitalistic, but using worker coops instead of the top down monarchistic approach?
Communism in its true form is unsustainable economically and defies basic human sociology and psychology.
Humans lived for 10s of thousands of years under communism. Capitalism was invented and within a couple of centuries the human race is commiting collective suicide with falling birth rates.
For family units but it quickly breaks down in larger groups and as complexity increases.
There were a few years of war communism during, well, the Civil War, but due to all the hunger deaths it might not be what your usual USSR fan wants to think about.
Marx’s view was that socialism would develop as an emergent phenomenon (a modern term, not one he used) to correct the contradictions of capitalism. But in both Russia and China, they tried to impose socialism on what were essentially feudal societies. The result was state capitalism, the industrial revolution imposed at gunpoint with no control of the means of production by the workers. And, as capitalist societies, both countries continued the imperialism and nationalism of their predecessor regimes.
And this isn’t an after-the-fact critique: contemporary socialists such as Rosa Luxembourg made these observations at the time.
Skipping a developmental stage doesn’t work.