Except, you know, China.
They still maintain the party dictatorship.
Really what matters for dominance is a disciplined party apparatus that seizes power in some kind of coup or revolution and then rules the country with an iron fist.
The party may use a justification of envy -- appealing to people's anger that others have more than they do -- or it may use religion, or moral arguments, or national pride arguments. But those are all instrumental to the underlying aim of power.
Once you are in power, you can impose capitalism or communism or some mix. If communism doesn't work, you can discard it and look for something better.
It's interesting that many on the left just dropped working class issues like a used shirt and refocused on race with extreme ease. For me personally, that's how I distinguish between a group that wants power as opposed to a group that is advocating for some policy profile. If they can switch out the policy profile and replace it with something different, then they were never that interested in policy to begin with.
Let's be clear here -- regardless what you think of the Chinese government, they are far from a "capitalist economic model". Many major industries are nationalized, the state plays an enormous role in the economy. 60% of their economy by market cap is state-owned. It isn't Soviet-style or Mao-era socialism, but it is still a very different system than western capitalism. It's similar to the NEP era in the USSR (1921-1928)
Are you referring to Mao?
You can't just assume the existence of capital. It's not an exogenous variable.
I recommend Sydney Homer's A History of Interest Rates in which he traces interest rates from neolithic period up to the 20th Century. If you want to know what interest rates were charged in the time of ancient Egypt, or early African societies, or Native American tribes, or whatever happened to those French rentes, then this is the book for you.
Here are some excerpts:
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Paleolithic man went out to find his food. Neolithic man produced his own food through agriculture and animal culture. His capital took the form of seeds, improved tools, and especially herds of animals. Capital accumulation led to a great increase in population and the opening up of vast new areas in Asia and Europe. Such capital permitted the further accumulation of possessions, the support of chieftains, and the building of cities.
Cattle breeding has supplied us with many financial terms used in later money economies. For example, there is our own word capital and our term pecuniary, from pecus, meaning a “flock” in Latin. Sumerians used the word mas for calves and for interest. The Egyptian term ms, meaning interest, is derived from the verb msj, which means “to give birth.” Early Greeks, in fact, valued their precious metals in terms of cattle.
[...]
In Namaland, in Southwest Africa, cattle and beads were the original currencies. Debts were incurred in cattle (no rates quoted), and the difficulty of repayment often led to cattle raids into neighboring states.
[...]
In the French Sudan cattle were used until recently as currency for large transactions. Cattle loans were granted free of interest, but if a cow which was lent had a calf, the calf and the cow was claimed by the creditor.
Similarly, in Uganda and French Equatorial Africa cattle and sheep were the bases of credit. In the former the creditor expected every third new birth as interest.
In Northern Siberia, at least until recently, domesticated reindeer served as money. Loans were granted in reindeer. Among the Kirghiz of Siberia, horses and sheep served as money and were loaned out. The usual interest for such loans was 100%.
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Homer, Sidney; Sylla, Richard. A History of Interest Rates (Wiley Finance) (p. 53-58). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
Russia and China were not developed countries prior to communism. They didn't have what we would consider the rule of unarbitrary law.
Marx and Engels saw socialism as the next step a society would move into after capitalism. They predicted this had to rest on the foundation of a society which had already experienced it's 'bourgeois revolution', meaning power had to leave the aristocracy and be in the hands of the capital owning class.
They saw democracy as a necessary step for a society to progress to socialism. There is no great examples of this in the 20th century. If you read even a little Marx, how could you ever expect the kind of society he describes without first having democracy? Socialism is based on one concept: democracy in the work place. If democracy does not exist in the first place, the endeavor will always be doomed.
I could easily cite Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, EL Salvador, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and countless other 20th century totalitarian regimes as instances where "capitalist experiments were doomed by greed and sociopathy." Very easily, given that these regimes were backed by American capitalist business interests. But realistically? When you're strong enough and ruthless enough to take over an entire country, you're probably more interested in power than in ideology, one way or another.
If we're not there yet, what do we do when we are?
To me socialism is just an inevitability. We will eventually reach post-scarcity. I think if we can examine the current system and find so many ethical problems... It's worth asking ourselves what we could do to get to that ideal star trek society faster.
Are you arguing that the rapid decline in poverty in China due to capitalism is a bad thing?
There are plenty of businesses that run on a more socialist model even within capitalist countries. They are owner operated and share profit amongst the cooperative, are often successful and have motivated employees who work longer tenures than your average employee at a company where they don't see any share of the profit for their hard work.
I believe the idea behind capitalism is exchanging value for value (private property and the ability to exchange it).
Someone sitting back and skimming a tax off the top of others property, without providing value, doesn’t seem to be compatible with the philosophy.
I guess the premise here is that “capitalism better because competent managers rarer than incompetent managers” and “incentives of money alone are better than incentives that include dysfunctional personal relationships”.
Since “socialism” seems ill-defined (or has several different definitions), seems difficult to say whether it would provide better outcomes. Authoritarian “people’s republic of X”-style didn’t provide good outcomes. Seems like that was due to authoritarian politics getting in the way of actual business.
I haven’t seen the show, but why would workers who own a stake in the viability of the company voting on management have not worked? If track records of management outcomes were available like sports statistics, there’d be something better than rhetoric to guide voting.