Hacker News Reader

Comment by tasuki | Hacker News Reader

> I have no doubt that countries in the periphery of major communist states had it worse... Just like countries in the periphery of capitalist states have it worse today.

When the Russians came to "liberate" certain Eastern European countries, they said: "We have it better than the oppressed people of the USA, and your country is even richer than Russia, so give me that watch!". Fwiw, I think they truly believed they were doing better than the US.

View on HN

My point is that both communism and capitalism have problems. Both systems have shown themselves to be corruptible. The 'ideal form' of either system can never be achieved because of corruption.

People voted with their feet, statistically speaking, and a theory that doesn't explain it isn't usable.

If there is a lesson here for followers of Marx, the ability to make jeans or coca-cola (i.e. whatever fad the lowest-denominator consumers want this month) is a very important characteristic of a system.

This leaves out the very violent wars (sometimes bordering on something like genocide [0]) that have been waged by the capitalist world against communism.

[0]: E.g., a CIA backed government killed ~1 million people with connections to the communist party in Indonesia.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/05/18/how-jakarta-became-...

Rubbish.

Look at the most pure capitalist systems in the world and you will see more corruption and 1%'ers than in the way less "pure". Like Scandinavia vs the US. It isn't rubbish at all.

Tautology, if you ask me - it's a meaningless statement that misses the point because corruptible is not binary, communism has a much worse track record re corruption than most capitalist countries. Sure, just like anything ever involving human elements, both are corruptible, but what's important is how bad does it get?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com