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Comment by facialwipe | Hacker News Reader

Or more frightening, the Communist experiment is successful long-term and becomes the dominate model for 'stability' globally.

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At first I was terrified of this, in the short term this could cause a lot of suffering but I’ve become convinced it will fail in the long term.

Human societies have evolved a very sophisticated mechanism for moving people up and down hierarchies using a distributed reputation tracking system. This system is interesting in that they’re trying to centralise the reputation tracking system and thereby control it.

To the extent that it replicates what people, on average, think about you I think it’ll work. But planned economies loose to unplanned ones because distributed decision making outperforms centralised decision making. Eventually this system will be misused, make bad decisions, or get ridiculously complex. Then people will loose faith in it. When that happens there’s very little China’s government can actually do to control 1.4 billion people. (That’s not to say that there their remaining options aren’t very worrying though, e.g. tanks)

With enough computing power and ruthlessness it may actually be possible to control 1.4 billions. I don't know how things would have worked out if Hitler or Stalin had had current or soon to be technology. Thank God North Korea doesn't have the money to buy or develop the latest surveillance tech either. They may have succeeded for much longer. In the end I think dictatorships will always blow up but tech makes their life much easier.

This may be true for a while but eventually there will be more and more pressure until the system explodes.

Doubt, there's no pure communist states left, they all fell after killing a bunch of their citizens by "knowing what's best". The economy is a chaotic system and any earnest attempt at top down control will fail, let alone communism which historically was more about transferring power to your friends than any real belief in an ideology.

Just FYI (has been said a gazillion times on the Internet): no state on this planet was ever communist. Communism is a society without money, no such thing existed on a state level anywhere. The states you are referring to were 100% socialist, i.e. no private property in any form or share with very very few exceptions; money tightly controlled by the state; all businesses are state-owned.

The comment above though probably meant the true communism, i.e. society without money.

A society without money is even more absurd.

The Inca Civilization had no money was was pretty darn successful

http://www.discover-peru.org/inca-economy-society/

Tiny fiefdom. Think of the insane size of what we call society even 100 years ago, money is what makes us cooperate.

I wouldn't call the Inca Empire a "tiny fiefdom", at its height they had 10 million citizens and covered 2 million km2

doubt they had the absolute control on law that a modern state has, empire in the loosest/historical sense

>Communism is a society without money, no such thing existed on a state level anywhere.

While it might not be something you can compare to communism, the Inca Civilization had a centrally planned economy with no form of money at all and was HUGELY successful [1]

[1]: http://www.discover-peru.org/inca-economy-society/

Communism in practice is the unending struggle to achieve the imaginary, theoretical communism you refer to.

Couldn't the same be said for what most people call capitalism?

That's pretty much how all ideologies work. Listen to some hardcore libertarians and you will hear them longing for the imaginary, theoretical free market that never has existed and probably never will.

>The comment above though probably meant the true communism, i.e. society without money.

Why would you think that? The term "communist experiment" implies that it's one being conducted right now. There are no states with even hints of plans for this "true communism" you speak of.

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