Ultimately what matters is incentives, and I do wonder what kind of utopian scheme you could come up designing specifically for that...
Vietnam's reforms are to create the materialist basis for Communism. They're pretty up front about this, how there's no "one size fits all" socialism, etc.
Maybe you're right, I'm definitely not an expert on the history. How impactful was that?
The impression I got from conversations I had when I visited Vietnam years ago is that it was a domestic-led reform, in response to the centrally-planned, non-ownership, non-market economy not working out.
> Vietnam's reforms are to create the materialist basis for Communism
That's the hype, but what does that really mean if in practice you've changed to a market economy?
It's an interesting question, but it should be worth examining the framing; why do incentives matter so much in the discourse? Is social incentivizing the core (or should it be the core) of an economy? What have incentives looked like in pre-capitalist societies? Were they always monetary, or different for different classes, genders, or other groups of people?
The literature from sociology, anthropology and social psychology in the last twenty years has shed some light on those questions, so I'd also be interested to hear about them. There's a moral dimension too - do we want to create a kind of society where the incentive to work for a great proportion (or perhaps even a majority) is held over their heads by a wage they need to live, or defer to the totalizing administration of the state's welfare policies? Even welfare has transformed; since the 80s there's been a trend toward what's been called "workfare".
For better or worse in the real world fundamentals "leak" past the officially set incentives and may undermine them.
Monetary per-se and capitalism per say are an anchronistic terms as trade goods filled the niche for millenia be they perishables like food and furs or imperishables like gold and jewels. Communism could be called a deep retro throwback to palace economies. There is a lack of records of personal wealth or tracking and the indication there from sunken ships shows outgoing local goods and incoming foreign goods in bulk in amounts beyond personal production or usage. Essentially it is apparent that the leadership took all outputs and allocated supplies as needed to those under them. Sounds similar to "from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs". It proved in the end eventually unpopular and unsustainable given the Bronze Age collapse and their complete lack of survival of old palace economies even with other benefits. Although given bronze age standards a lot of people wanted to kill their neighbors for various reasons (revenge for theft, captures, and killings) so it may have been unrelated to the economics.
It seems you failed to register that life under communist regime also fits into the "wage slave" pattern you're describing, moreso than in democratic and capitalist societies.
In fact, back home the local communist party is rather insistent in referring to people as "workers", to underline that that's precisely their raison d'etre.
The only difference between communist regime's and non-communist regime's regarding how resources are allocated is the communist rhetoric that tries to classify the resources syphoned by the state into the regime's pocket as the people's income.
Communists in the USSR (and backed by the USSR) stole property on a vast scale and murdered or enslaved people by the millions. The CIA did many bad things but it is very hard to out-do the USSR on evil acts.
West vs East Germany was as good an experiment as anyone is likely to ever see. It was capitalism vs communism head-to-head. The communists had to build a wall to keep their enslaved population from escaping from a secret police controlled hellscape to what was (in comparison) a capitalist utopia.
The US is a fundamentally mercantile country that found out the hard way (through two world wars) that non-interference doesn't work. It very reluctantly adopted the role of world police.
In many ways it resembles the problems all policing forces face, which is that people tend to focus on the mistakes rather than the successes.
The people that spend time railing against US policing failures spend no time trumpeting its great many successes.
It's always easy to point the finger. It's much harder to explain how one would have done a better job solving such complex problems.
Both the U.S and U.S.S.R pumped huge amounts of money and resources into "their" Germany. Both sides needed to show that their economic model was the correct one. This rather pollutes the results of any experiment.
Additionally, West Germany was heavily industrialised and had much more in the way of natural resources. East Germany in contrast was mostly agricultural. In the immediate aftermath of WW2 the western allies agreed to dismantle factories in West Germany and send the equipment and materials to the east.
A better example would be one where a country divides into communist & capitalist states and has no interference from the outside world. I don't know if such an example exists.
The US and USSR were equally powerful, playing the same game, with the same population. Ideology vs ideology. Capitalism won by a mile.
Because fundamentally the US isn't driven by an all-encompassing ideology. Capitalism doesn't dictate how every citizen live their life. It only describes how the economic system will work. Anyone inside the system is free to create their own enclave. If you want to move to Oregon to live on a commune, no capitalist commissar is there to stop you. Starting a capitalist enclave in a communist country would have had to sent to the gulag.
Maybe a comparison should be drawn between post war Yugoslavia and Austria as they had comparatively less interference from the major power blocs.
Also the U.S had much greater economic power than the U.S.S.R throughout the cold war. After WW2, Stalin even considered accepting American economic aid from the Marshall Plan.
I don't know, didn't work out so well for the Rajneeshees. Or Clive Bundy.
I was being a little bit tongue in cheek, and you're right that you can fly under the radar, but it's also possible to draw the interest of the feds, and then they will fuck you up.
I spent a fair amount of my summers as a kid in a buddhist community hidden away in the woods. I think they're all above-board now, but at the time they were always fighting w/ the govt, trying to hide illegal busses & cabins out of site in the trees and stuff like that.
That's not really true. Reports of living "off-grid" make it out to be extremely diffiicult to not be part of the consumer economy. Similarly, the un-banked have a lot of trouble. Heck, even adamant Linux users report a huge amount of trouble when trying not to be part of the "Windows Ecosystem".
We've had plenty of tests of communist states becoming capitalist ones though, for reasons it would be difficult to attribute entirely to capitalist interference
This was the case throughout Latin America. Castro, Bosch, Allende, etc. Furthermore there are no examples of the KGB interfering on the scale of the US (specifically the CIA) in places like Cuba, Chile, etc.
"Communists in the USSR (and backed by the USSR) stole property on a vast scale and murdered or enslaved people by the millions. The CIA did many bad things but it is very hard to out-do the USSR on evil acts."
All of which pales in comparison to the settling of the new world, America's settling of the west, etc.
If we want to focus on the 20th century there is nothing comparable to the use of nuclear weapons or America's actions during/after the Vietnam war where they engaged in the largest bombing campaign in history and use of Agent Orange.
"The US is a fundamentally mercantile country that found out the hard way (through two world wars) that non-interference doesn't work. It very reluctantly adopted the role of world police."
This is a lie. After the US expanded throughout the continent to their heart's content (by killing/removing the existing inhabitants) they began expanding beyond their shores as evidenced by their involvement in the Philippines and Cuba as well as their deployment of the marines in other areas of Latin America from 1898 on.
Cuba, in particular, was initially ruled as a colony until it was deemed too expensive. Then Cuba was granted its "independence" alongside the Platt Amendment, which gave the US de facto control over Cuba's domestic, foreign, and economic policy and resulted in them interfering regularly in elections, deploying marines to protect American property, etc.
The communist movement ended up giving birth to the KGB. For that to be true there would have to be time travel involved.
The KGB certainly did their share of support and outreach to both peaceful movements and outright funding of many Red Army Faction terrorist groups which faded away after the fall of the USSR cut off funding and crushed hopes, but claiming they are responsible for their very existence would be an oversimplification.
For my part, I'd love to see the CIA disbanded. They're a lawless, evil organization.
(If anyone wants to see some really horrific shit, check out the CIA MKULTRA mind-control experiments.)