(This is not a suggestion to try anyway, nor a suggestion to eliminate humans in order to further any kind of Marxist "ideal")
At 3/4 Capitalist, your nation can prosper dramatically. At 3/4 Communist, you will know nothing but suffering and deprivation.
Countries that have gotten closer to a free market orientation have prospered. Singapore, Hong Kong, the United States; all of the success stories of post USSR Europe are stories of market economics winning (including the dramatic example of the Baltics). All of Scandinavia operates via market based economic systems. Germany is a market based economy, not a Socialist economy, and they're the economic dynamo of Europe; the same goes for Britain, and even France (which certainly has a large welfare state, and is a mixed economy but not Socialist). There isn't a single prosperous Socialist nation in the world today. There are dozens of prosperous market based economic systems by contrast (the top several dozen most prosperous economies are dominated by market systems).
Going the other direction, the closer you get to Socialism, the worse things get. And there are obviously limits to the market direction, anarchy does not work (although I'd argue that's not the market direction; market based economies in particular require the rule of law and a government to enforce it).
The only country that can be argued to stand apart from this, even if temporarily, is China. However they're still drifting on the liberalizations of Deng and the benefits it spurred, that is grinding down under Xi. Their situation has worsened as they have headed back toward Socialism (and its inevitable increased authoritarianism) and away from market liberalization.
My preference is for a social democracy, of the variety sometimes found in Europe.
Soviet Capitalism never existed. The Russians barely made any effort at enshrining a just rule of law, protecting individual rights, including protecting property rights.
One of the first things Putin did when he took power is to begin destroying individual rights (so as to bolster the power of the state), which market based economic systems rest upon.
Not sure why some commenters here saw the name Marx and immediately jumped to the conclusion it was an endorsement of Marxism.
Saying "the people own" is just a way of saying the state owns something. The state owns all the things under Communism. Every business is a state business.
The state owns nothing under Communism as Communism assumes no state, social classes, private property and money. I do not think Communism can be achieved though, maybe in prehistoric society of docile gatherers of which we are not.
But that's no reason to give up and make greed mandatory.
Under original doctrine there is no State because "the people" will have evolved enough to do without it.
Well, yes, since “capitalism” was literally coined to describe a particular then-existing system in which the instrumentality of the state not only exists but also, most particularly through a specific structure of property rights, directly serves the interests of the capital-owning class to the relative disadvantage of other segments of society, and has consistently since then referred to that system (or ones sharing some of its salient features) both for those who have advocated moving farther from it and for those advocating its adoption or a return to it in places which have moved on, in whole or in part, from it.
Other than it's gibberish? Capitalism, a system where money is used to purchase property by individuals, is a society ... without issued currency or individual property rights, you say?
Look around you, are capitalist countries stateless, and are stateless countries Capitalistic?
As you say, the difference is whose interests dictate these ends: those of ordinary citizens or those of the monopolies and international finance.
https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/expressions/influence-w...
6.7% of the country runs 92% of the boardrooms.
... If you're not a woman, gay, trans, black, poor, ...
So, yes, in the meantime, the state takes control over some amount of enterprise and manages it for its own goals rather than to generate profits for a small number of owners. Is that a bad thing? In a world where for-profit healthcare in the US is famously more expensive and less effective than nationalized healthcare in any other OECD country, where the (unionized!) USPS is one of this country's most-popular and most-reliable services even despite years of meddling from capitalists in government pushing to gut it, in a world where famously most of our R&D is publicly funded, is it really so hard to imagine that it might be an effective way to manage production?
> doesn't have the same connotation of "ruling over others without their consent".
Usually taking things by force requires violating consent. That is a very basic tenant of Commmunism. The bourgeoisie are forcibly removed from power, with arms, usually killed, and their property taken.
> whose contradictions are propped up by a force-monopoly in the form of "a state"
And how is the dictatorship of the proletariat preserved against the minority who disagrees? Hint, it involves rifles and usually firing squads.
> society can be transitioned over time into one where a state no longer needs to exist
Yes, that's gone so well up to date. Dictators with extreme powers over entire states are well known for quietly surrendering their power and moving to a form of utopic anarchy.
Even Marx couldn't answer how the utopic Communist post-state society actually continued it's existence without a state. "The vanguard" who at best are stateless secret police?
> in the meantime, the state takes control over some amount of enterprise and manages it for its own goals
Correct
> Is that a bad thing?
DMV, VA, Census Bureau, the IRS.
> USPS is one of this country's most-popular and most-reliable services
and is private but government directed
> In a world where for-profit healthcare in the US is famously more expensive
and has no waiting lists compared to 14.5 weeks in the UK at the moment and 20.9 weeks in Canada
> and less effective than nationalized healthcare
The US is in the top 10 for survival rates for most diseases/conditions (eg cancer) and we beat out the UK and Canada significantly. We have a lower life expectancy because we are too fat.
You can see similar behavior (hiding issues, lying about them) in any scenario in which punishment is tied to the failure to meet the metrics. When the metric becomes the goal, people will game the metric in order to avoid punishment and/or reap the rewards.
The only kind of measurement that doesn't cause this behavior is the neutral measurement - measurement which is guaranteed not to change the decisions directly, but only serve as information which is later used in high-level optimization of systemic processes. In context of software companies, it would mean that status reports should only be reviewed in combination to other factors, such as tool used, features implemented, deadlines tightened, etc., and only to further understand how to optimize the process to avoid human error.
It's risky to implement that, because you have to trust your employees enough to say "you won't be fired because of your metrics, ever", but I believe it's less worse than having people falsely report good metrics.
- Regularly rotate personnel
- Reward review by a random board
A review based on a blend of quantitative metrics (basics/table stakes) and qualitative metrics (everything else) prevents quantitative-metrics-gaming from dominating.
The system has a ton of flaws, is inefficient, and produces suboptimal outcomes a fair amount of the time, but damned if it doesn't scale.
Goodhart's law!
The book "The Tyranny of Metrics" by Jerry Muller talks about this phenomenon in depth, giving many historical examples of metrics making systems worse instead of better. Very good read, I'd recommend it to anyone.
Me too! Fortunately, Google was smart enough to turn it up from "law about metrics".
> The book "The Tyranny of Metrics" by Jerry Muller talks about this phenomenon in depth, giving many historical examples of metrics making systems worse instead of better. Very good read, I'd recommend it to anyone.
Thanks! I'll have a look.
Productivity (of something...) is ostensibly the intent of a capitalist venture, but the owner and ultimately prioritize anything they prefer. This is a problem for any hope of rational practice.
While that is true, the whole argument against metrics as goals is that they decrease productivity, which goes against a common interest of both capitalist and communist societies.
Productivity as a goal simply makes sense in the real world, regardless of whether there's an owner who is chasing profit, or a worker collective who has to meet their planned quota for the planned economy. The state of facts is such that binding metrics to rewards is harmful to their overall reliability, regardless of which economic system it's happening in.
Besides, why should anyone trust a leftist in power? We already know your lot will immediately outlaw and jail the opposition and pretend their uni-party system is "democratic". So I don't think you actually care about owners and power, you're just mad that you aren't in power perpetually.
I know you probably heard that one, but as long as there is a boss or a general, it's not communism.
Also, democracy is vulnerable to this as well. No politician wants to appear incompetent, leading to lying about results and taking unnecessary risks.
I believe you may be confusing communism with anarchy.
Even the “communist” government still around like China just have capitalist economies in sheep’s clothing.
In the case of tech companies reporting record profits amidst massive layoffs, it's worth exploring whether certain aspects of Marxist theory could shed light on the systemic issues within our current economic system, rather than dismissing them outright based on past examples of "communism"
As far as getting "shot" in Cuba, you're more likely to get shot by a cop in the US than in Cuba for any particular reason. Stop just soaking in wild propaganda uncritically.