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Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

I think a major problem with communism isn't that it's so difficult to determine what needs to be produced, but that changing resource allocation becomes a political problem.

In a capitalist system, if something looks like it's going to be a big economic hit people are ready to sell off other assets and pour billions of dollars into it. Under communism, there's a guy who doesn't want to lose funding for his department who might have more power than his rivals. To make a techie metaphor, it's why a lot of people have moved to the cloud: you can choose whatever resources you want on the fly, instead of having to battle IT.

To go off on a tangent, I think there's a huge false choice between "free market economic policy" and "bureaucratic centralized economies." If we could just create a market that has an incentive structure that buoys the poor up instead of pushes them down, it would be huge. People still buy and sell based on prices, but we introduce slightly different weighting.

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It's also the case that, in practice, we regulate and politicize much - maybe all - of the free market. So really, we're not having an argument about "Free market vs total centralized system", it's "how much centralization is appropriate".

So maybe we don't today need to work with the Department of Widget creation, but we need to hire lobbyists for the Senate Committee on the Widget Sector. I'm not prepared to say that informing/influencing/steak-dinnering the Senators' aides is per se better than having a nasty political fight in the Company Of The People.

The history of the US farm bill and food safety is a great example of how we don't have a genuine free market in the US. I don't argue for a free market, by the way. Regulation has done a great deal of good. It's just very important to speak with care about topics, and use words that are true to the reality.

> It's also the case that, in practice, we regulate and politicize much - maybe all - of the free market.

Do we? Perhaps you do in the US. Where I live, Australia, it's true most of the noise from the echo chamber is about what sort of regulations to impose on markets. But if you stop and look, they are invariably markets that aren't functioning well. The classic things that we appear to be always arguing about are things like power, landline internet, and water. But that isn't a surprise - they are the things that tend towards monopoly, so the market for those things is always broken or teetering on the edge of broken. We are now seeing the same effect for internet search and social media, where again network effects drive the markets towards monopoly.

At the other end of the scale, here in Australia we've toyed with creating market's to solve political problems. One perennial problem in the driest continent on the planet is water. So they created a market based on virtual water, so rather go and haggling with your local pollie for water access right you have to buy it. It's been pretty successful from what I can tell, but now there are political stouches over how much virtual water there is. I guess that the water market could be viewed as yet more rules imposed by a central authority, as indeed could rules about regulating monopolies, and rules about truth in advertising and honouring warranties and the like. But I think that's miss leading. Rules about truth in advertising are really about setting up the conditions a market needs to flourish - equal access to information from the buyer and seller.

While politicking on those rules is indeed a discussion about rules being imposed by a central authority, the purpose of those rules is to enable efficient decentralised decision making, not about "how much centralization is appropriate"

AU has slightly different framing and expectations. I've had a few conversations with people from AU, or who spent significant time there. It is different there in certain base assumptions about the role of government.

I don't want to say you're wrong, and I don't want to admit I might be wrong. ;-)

Many of us think that that freer markets do buoy up the poorer, I think Schumpeter put it well:

>"Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to a rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort."

I think it is a moot argument if you know the history of silk and nylon.

Nylon stockings were on par and better than silk stockings until they pushed silk stockings out of market. Then they became what we know them today - wear once or twice and buy new.

You’re missing the point; Nylon stockings did not exist until capitalists invented and popularized them. Only the rich had silk stockings in 1900; now anyone can get a superior product!

It's ridicolous to suggest that nylon stockings could have been invented only under capitalism. Plenty of inventions and discovery happened also under communism.

Yeah, but only focusing on the largest of megaprojects, and even that failed horribly after some time. Products for the normal people were of horrendous quality and mostly no innovation happened.

I think I should point your attention to the MIR (МИР, Машина для Инженерных Расчётов - Engineer's Computer) [1] and Setun [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIR_(computer)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

The first one had pretty much high level language programming circa 1965 (Elbrus came later and iAXP432 much later). The second one used ternary logic which is closer to exp(0) and is more efficient.

The "products for people" innovation in USSR was to make sure that everyone has heated home - and heating was centralized in USSR (and now in Russia too), which made it much cheaper and affordable. It was in different direction and without pervasive advertising.

Many inventions happened also before capitalism.

Inventions are one thing, but mass availability and affordability are another. I recall seeing an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev where he talked about how embarrassing it was that the Soviet Union could send men to space, but failed to produce pantyhose (of quality , in quantity).

Mikhail Gorbachev, as a person somewhat responsible for collapse of USSR, had an incentive to paint USSR in a certain light in his interview, wouldn't you agree?

I grew in USSR (I was born in 1971 in Moscow) and I do not remember any scarcity of stockings.

What about the blue collar workers that are living in RVs in the Bay Area? Are they buying silk socks?

I feel like capitalism is overly celebrated by those who benefit from it, to their detriment. The meritocracy is failing, capitalism is failing, and I’m concerned about will replace capitalism if we continue to brush off the harsh realities of its failings.

Our perspective is that others are prevented from enjoying those same benefits by the regulatory interference that is ostensibly intended to help them. We don't see it as capitalism failing, but the regulatory state failing and capitalism being distorted thus.

we are also concerned about capitalism's replacement. except we fear the continued suppression of market action to lead to authoritarian totalitarianism because the regulatory state appears to have been captured by oligarchs.

Thank you for your honest perspective, I’ll spend some time contemplating it.

Capitalism requires the state to function. If you don’t have violent enforcement of property rights, how will capitalists make money?

Violence as a tool exclusive to the state is a social construct much like property and so I expect the norms surrounding private property to be maintained like other constructs, through intentioned participation.

> What about the blue collar workers that are living in RVs in the Bay Area?

Not a failure of capitalism. If you make building more housing illegal the price of the existing stock will get bid up. Remember, Tokyo has grown 50% in population over the last two decades and rent and house prices have been basically flat throughout. Zoning makes housing expensive, not capitalism.

Exactly. Zoning and rent control laws like they were recently introduced in Berlin, Germany.

The number of available apartments on the market has declined ever since that law was introduced.

But that's not true. Building new housing, no matter how large, would be a losing proposition, as you'd have to pay for the land, which is expensive, and building lots of apartments would increase the supply, reducing the value of your land and building.

I've lived in a european city without rent control and mostly even without zoning laws (less than 20% of kiel are affected by Bebaungsplänen) and yet rent was even higher and supply even lower. Hundreds of hotels, lots of luxury apartments, but for the average citizen, nothing got built.

Capitalism doesn't optimize for producing the most supply, it optimizes for increasing the value of your assets. And if the best way to do so is by artificially limiting the supply, that's exactly what's gonna happen.

> Capitalism doesn't optimize for producing the most supply, it optimizes for increasing the value of your assets. And if the best way to do so is by artificially limiting the supply, that's exactly what's gonna happen.

This is very well said.

Here’s an article specifically talking about how fashion brands destroy their own products to drive up prices: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/17/17852294/fashion-bra...

This is the kind of stuff that makes me think society is in late stage capitalism.

Yes, we've all heard that one before. I'm hardly anti-capitalist.

There are two separate issues here, and the distinction is often missed. It is one thing when commodification brings to the masses what was once accessible only to the rich. It is an entirely separate and independent thing to make the economy more egalitarian, and some would argue just.

Capitalism seems to consistently do the former phenomenally well and make the latter catastrophically worse.

I think that's why we keep having absurd arguments about "the poor having microwaves" while we live in a grotesquely unequal society.

Once upon a time, free-market capitalism did the 'make egalitarian' part just fine. In the 1960s, the USA had a 91% marginal tax rate for the highest income bracket (91% of income over 200k went to the government). In 2019 it's 37%.

Something I picked up that seems to have been dropped down the memory hole. Under Truman the US was running a hot consumer command economy from the end of WWII to the mid 50's. In some ways very much like China is doing now.

Also mid 1980's to 2000 saw the depression era limits on accumulating wealth via pure capital machinations removed one by one.

Were now in the reverse situation. from 1950. Where it was possible to make money producing consumer goods and impossible to make money via rent seeking. Now rent seeking is how you make money. And it's obvious looking at the government response to the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic this year that's being enforced via policy.

I think part of the problem is that money is a proxy for political power, causing a tendency for legislative devolution like you describe

there will always be some resource scarcity, and there's no egalitarian economy that resulted in increased availability of luxuries across the board, on the contrary, all attempts at egalitarianism just pushed the average luxury availability to the people down.

"and make the latter catastrophically worse" Wrong: https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality#global...

What you are describing is often called market socialism and it is something very much worth considering, at least the libertarian socialist models of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_market_anarchism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory)

Thanks for that.

More importantly, there is a false choice between socialism + central planning on one hand, and capitalism + free market on the other.

In fact, all mainstream socialists and Marxists today are in favor of some kind of free market. Also, none of the centrally planned, soviet style economies had any feature of socialism - they were capitalist societies, where all of the power was concentrated in the hands of those who controlled capital. Sure, workers were paid lip service, but their power and control over their work was in fact even less than in the European or American capitalist countries. They were just as much socialist countries as they were democratic - in that it was simply a title they assigned to themselves, void of any meaning whatsoever.

The main difference between an actual socialist market-based economy and the capitalist market-based economy that we have today would be that essentially all enterprises competing on the market would be co-ops, where workers democratically decide how the company is run and get to share the profits (and losses), instead of getting a pre-determined (sometimes negotiated) wage.

> all enterprises competing on the market would be co-ops, where workers democratically decide how the company is run and get to share the profits (and losses), instead of getting a pre-determined (sometimes negotiated) wage.

The problem with co-ops, partnerships and the like as a firm structure is that (1) they can't easily provide access to outside capital. Maybe they can issue debt, but that comes with a lot of drawbacks wrt. equity investment. (2) most workers have their job as their main source of income, so they don't actually want to incur the excess risk that's inherent in "sharing in the profit (and losses!) of their firm" because that literally means putting all your eggs in one basket. Outside investors can incur that risk more easily, whether by diversifying it away or by investing only part of their assets in a risky endeavor.

"All enterprises as co-ops" is a nice idea but doesn't actually work in the real world. Co-ops and partnerships are totally fine for very low capital intensity businesses like law firms, but quite unsuitable elsewhere.

Co-ops have rarely been tried out, so you really can't say that with that authority. There are also many ways for a co-op to organize, the pure profit-sharing model is probably not the most popular for the reasons you outlined.

For example, the largest company in the Basque region of Spain is the Mondragon corporation, a 12—billion euro yearly revenue, 60 years old federation of co-ops with about 81,000 members+employees, working in industry, finance, retail, and knowledge - hardly low-capital areas. They are currently the 10th largest company in Spain. They do have traditional employees as well as worker-owners, and there are concerns about the percentages of each, but overall they are a true co-op at a huge scale, proving that it can be done.

If there were government policies to encourage this type of business, especially by providing better credit access, and if this was closer to the beaten path, I don't see any reason that it couldn't be at least a major part of the economic landscape, even if not easily becoming dominant.

Communist systems took poor and often feudal countries or colonies and made them into regional powers or superpowers. The liberal narrative that we've reached the end of history because of their "failure" is absurd in the extreme, particularly given the outside pressures and violences they (usually) weathered.

Instead of, "what's wrong with communism!?", we should be asking, "if communism doesn't work, why was it necessary for capitalist countries to direct the entirety of their foreign policies into violence and sanctions against communists in their own communist countries and anyone who so much as requested aid from them, despite capitalist countries refusing to supply such aid?"

The reality is that communist countries actually did work and worked better than the prior state those countries were in, but were targeted for systematic erasure by the rest of the planet. When communist countries fell, life did not get better for those who lived there. It got worse. Pensions were privatized or canceled. Public programs eliminated. Promises of multi-party democracy were amended to disclude communists or anyone like them, with violence. Quality of Life indicators plunged and with no option to return to the former system (a certainly authoritarian condition imposed by the newly-in-power, Western-supported governments), these countries languished for decades and were and continue to be subjected to new depravities and exploitation even as they claw back some semblance of dignity.

Look at polling in the former Eastern Bloc. In Russia. In China. It's still very popular and it's not because of the chauvinist (and often contextually racist) idea they're all brainwashed goons. They saw the changes and often have a critically supportive view of a return. They say that most things were better, but acknowledge those that were worse, and when they say they'd support a return it's not to an identical state, just a similar one. But their political systems prevent this. One must wonder why.

> Instead of, "what's wrong with communism!?", we should be asking, "if communism doesn't work, why was it necessary for capitalist countries to direct the entirety of their foreign policies into violence and sanctions against communists in their own communist countries and anyone who so much as requested aid from them, despite capitalist countries refusing to supply such aid?"

The Cold War would be an answer, unless you somehow deny that communists were equally dedicated to subverting and overthrowing the west.

> The reality is that communist countries actually did work and worked better than the prior state those countries were in

I disagree that this is a valid generalization. There may have been some Pareto improvements and its clear that certain people benefitted and others did not.

> When communist countries fell, life did not get better for those who lived there. It got worse.

This is because the centrally planned economy depleted vast amounts of capital in their desperate struggle to keep the economy moving and competitive with the west.

> They say that most things were better, but acknowledge those that were worse, and when they say they'd support a return it's not to an identical state, just a similar one. But their political systems prevent this. One must wonder why.

Cynically I could offer the same answer a communist would offer when asked why people weren't permitted to own factories in the Soviet Union: because that would put "the wrong people" in charge of the means of production.

Less cynically, its not clear how a centrally planned economy would know how to correctly allocate resources, so there's no reason to return to the central planning model in the absence of a solution to the problems that caused it to fail in the first place.

> The Cold War would be an answer

That's not the answer, it's the mechanism of that violence.

> unless you somehow deny that communists were equally dedicated to subverting and overthrowing the west.

I will absolutely deny that. Note the number of capitalist governments coup'd by communists. Note the number of invasions and constant wars of The West. Look at Vietnam. Western involvement was long-reaching, direct, violent, and generally within other countries fighting grassroots revolutions / civil wars or throwing off colonial it imperial influence.

When attempting to find similar situations started by communist countries, we find important differences. Dragged into conflicts on their borders. Literally fighting a genocide directed at themselves. Long-standing territorial disputes on their borders.

> I disagree that this is a valid generalization

Feudal backwaters subject to regular famines became superpowers that eliminated homelessness and hunger. And the fall of those systems corresponded to drops in QoL over and over and over again.

What other tests would you want?

> This is because the centrally planned economy depleted vast amounts of capital in their desperate struggle to keep the economy moving and competitive with the west.

Capital is just stuff or money tradeable for stuff. The stuff didn't go away after color revolutions. But public programs were absolutely privatized or abolished by liberal capitalist governments in moves aligned with their ideologies - ideologies you can find throughout this site, in fact.

> Cynically I could offer the same answer a communist would offer when asked why people weren't permitted to own factories in the Soviet Union: because that would put "the wrong people" in charge of the means of production.

Ah, but in that case there's a consistent ideological position: bourgeois democracy and ownership must be curtailed because otherwise it will grow and eat you and those you love. According to liberal democracy, you're supposed to be able to seek and form a representative government in a multi-party setting - yet they restrict those parties to force bourgeois options to be the only ones available.

The supposedly core ideals of The West clearly bow to capital when push comes to shove and one should question the propaganda that it's these ideals that won or were even the actual goal.

> Less cynically, its not clear how a centrally planned economy would know how to correctly allocate resources, so there's no reason to return to the central planning model in the absence of a solution to the problems that caused it to fail in the first place.

But the vast majority of several countries want that return, with support increasing with age - the people who actually lived under communist party rule. They are prevented from doing so by their political systems. It cannot be voted in. Democracy clearly doesn't mean that much to The West, right?

What communist countries are you referring to here specifically? It would help to look at specific cases.

> I will absolutely deny that.

I'm not sure it will be fruitful to discuss this issue with someone who denies the international ambitions of communism :)

> Note the number of capitalist governments coup'd by communists. Note the number of invasions and constant wars of The West. Look at Vietnam. Western involvement was long-reaching, direct, violent, and generally within other countries fighting grassroots revolutions / civil wars or throwing off colonial it imperial influence.

"the state is always an instrument of class warfare" I'm justifying western imperialism by referring to the nature of the class struggle as characterized by communists. You're not going to convince anyone by denying that communists were interested in spreading their ideology to other countries tries by force and you're not going to convince capitalists by pointing out how successful we were at stopping communist aggression.

> Feudal backwaters

how patrician of you

> Feudal backwaters subject to regular famines became superpowers that eliminated homelessness and hunger. And the fall of those systems corresponded to drops in QoL over and over and over again.

quality of life was pretty bad leading up to the fall, that's why it fell. observing that you can conscript a bunch of farmers to invade outlying countries and steal their grain, then feed those of the survivors you haven't tortured to death in gulags is hardly an argument. I'd be more impressed by the superpower claim if it wasn't the case that the USSR went bankrupt trying to compete as a superpower.

> What other tests would you want?

can you sell your labor or the product thereof for a price of your choosing? Can you buy tools for work and control them as your own property, inclusive of charging rent for their usage? These are QoL issues that are relevant to workers.

> Capital is just stuff or money tradeable for stuff. The stuff didn't go away after color revolutions. But public programs were absolutely privatized or abolished by liberal capitalist governments in moves aligned with their ideologies - ideologies you can find throughout this site, in fact.

Capital is the means of production and it requires maintenance and planning, if capital is not maintained and replaced it wears out and breaks and is no longer capital. The planners in the USSR knew this well and that's why they had so much trouble keeping the system going when they wielded authoritarian powers. They couldn't keep the capital running because they lacked price signals in order to obtain information about scarcity relative to demand. Those public programs had run out of value to reallocate.

> Ah, but in that case there's a consistent ideological position: bourgeois democracy and ownership must be curtailed because otherwise it will grow and eat you and those you love.

Yes, ideology is good for justifying terrible things. Thats why we require that people are allowed to criticize ideology.

> According to liberal democracy, you're supposed to be able to seek and form a representative government in a multi-party setting - yet they restrict those parties to force bourgeois options to be the only ones available.

Yet liberal democracy still falls victim to the paradox of tolerance. Hence the desire to prohibit ideas and ideologies that would overthrow civil society.

> The supposedly core ideals of The West clearly bow to capital when push comes to shove and one should question the propaganda that it's these ideals that won or were even the actual goal.

Actually I question your grasp of the foundational ideas of "The West", whatever that is.

> But the vast majority of several countries want that return, with support increasing with age - the people who actually lived under communist party rule. They are prevented from doing so by their political systems. It cannot be voted in. Democracy clearly doesn't mean that much to The West, right?

I'm not sure your criticism of The West is apt when it is those several countries that fail to heed their respective majorities in returning to authoritarian central planning. Perhaps you are falling victim to the authoritarian's paradox here. Perhaps those democracies are simply engaged in the sort of central planning that is necessary to sustain a society, the kind of central planning that the communist republics they replaced were unable to stomach.

> I'm not sure it will be fruitful to discuss this issue with someone who denies the international ambitions of communism :)

I'm not denying that communists have had international ambitions, only that your description was accurate. And the actual internationalists (Trotskyists) have never had power or organized around it. Extant communist countries were/are part of the idea of "socialism in one country" and tended to fight battles of national liberation or build up arms without actually invading distant countries (in contrast to Western countries).

> "the state is always an instrument of class warfare" I'm justifying western imperialism by referring to the nature of the class struggle as characterized by communists. You're not going to convince anyone by denying that communists were interested in spreading their ideology to other countries tries by force

I would challenge anyone to name a communist country that attempted to export their ideology by force subject to the following reasonable conditions:

(1) They can't be really weird dictators supported / propped up by a Western anticommunist power dead-set on killing other communists.

(2) Can't name the Eastern bloc, as it was a product of a defensive countering of a genocidal campaign by Nazis (Lebensraum).

> and you're not going to convince capitalists by pointing out how successful we were at stopping communist aggression.

What aggression?

> how patrician of you

Not really, I'm referring to a literally feudal monarchy that had very limited regional power.

> quality of life was pretty bad leading up to the fall, that's why it fell.

It very much isn't.

> observing that you can conscript a bunch of farmers to invade outlying countries and steal their grain, then feed those of the survivors you haven't tortured to death in gulags is hardly an argument.

Do you believe that's an accurate summary of the USSR becoming a superpower?

> I'd be more impressed by the superpower claim if it wasn't the case that the USSR went bankrupt trying to compete as a superpower.

It didn't. It was eaten from the inside by a political power grab. However, spending on the military vs. everything else did contribute to support for that power grab.

> can you sell your labor or the product thereof for a price of your choosing? Can you buy tools for work and control them as your own property, inclusive of charging rent for their usage? These are QoL issues that are relevant to workers.

Just to be clear, you're listing examples for why communist countries didn't work or significantly improve over their past ways of being? I don't see why this constitutes not working or improving.

> Capital is the means of production and it requires maintenance and planning, if capital is not maintained and replaced it wears out and breaks and is no longer capital. The planners in the USSR knew this well and that's why they had so much trouble keeping the system going when they wielded authoritarian powers. They couldn't keep the capital running because they lacked price signals in order to obtain information about scarcity relative to demand. Those public programs had run out of value to reallocate.

How convenient that the capital ran out at the exact moment that color revolutions occurred and liberal parties took power, years and years apart from one another!

> Yes, ideology is good for justifying terrible things. Thats why we require that people are allowed to criticize ideology.

My point is, of course, that the ideology I'm referring to is consistent, in addition to having a rationale, whereas the alternative being discussed is incoherent.

> Yet liberal democracy still falls victim to the paradox of tolerance. Hence the desire to prohibit ideas and ideologies that would overthrow civil society.

I'm referring to days, weeks, months after deposing communist party rule. Unless you grant that "civil society" existed there already, then there's nothing to overthrow. In reality, it is an illiberal power grab dictated by servicing of capital, a ridiculous farce of the multi-party democracies that protesters had demanded.

> Actually I question your grasp of the foundational ideas of "The West", whatever that is.

I think it's pretty clear what "The West" refers to relative to communist countries.

But thanks for the personal jab!

> I'm not sure your criticism of The West is apt when it is those several countries that fail to heed their respective majorities in returning to authoritarian central planning.

Seems apt to me. Good talk, good talk.

> Perhaps you are falling victim to the authoritarian's paradox here. Perhaps those democracies are simply engaged in the sort of central planning that is necessary to sustain a society, the kind of central planning that the communist republics they replaced were unable to stomach.

Those "democracies" were privatizing, not pushing a different form of central planning.

Unfortunately, there is a very selectively-enforced limit on political content that has resulted in me being rate-limited, so I'm unable to respond to you in a timely manner anymore. I'd point you at some resources but I feel like that's condescending. Hilariously, this is pretty relevant to your civil society comment - online spaces have no public commons, they are all dictated and censored by whoever owns them, with serious networking effects that place them under the control of large (and censorious) corporations that treat liberal (capitalist) views as normative and non-political.

> Can't name the Eastern bloc, as it was a product of a defensive countering of a genocidal campaign by Nazis (Lebensraum).

Nonsense. When Nazis attacked Eastern Europe, Soviet Union was their ally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

> Those "democracies" were privatizing, not pushing a different form of central planning.

that's the central plan. The planners (in their wisdom and beneficence) have decreed that private property is "ok", subject to regulation. No authoritarian can criticize this except on the basis that the authority didn't carry out their preferred dogma.

> I would challenge anyone to name a communist country that attempted to export their ideology by force subject to the following reasonable conditions:

Unless the “Eastern bloc” includes all global allies of the USSR (and therefore almost all self-described Communist countries) instead of just those located in Eastern Europe, then Cuba is pretty much the obvious answer. (hostile-to-the-existing-government interventions aimed at spreading the revolution stretch from the 1950s into at least the 1990s and took place in at least: Panama, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Congo, Guinea-Bisseau, Yemen, Angola, and Ethiopia, some of them multiple times, and some alongside other Communist states that would be valid, though less significant, answers to your challenge, as well.)

What do I win?

> Can't name the Eastern bloc, as it was a product of a defensive countering of a genocidal campaign by Nazis (Lebensraum).

The Eastern bloc, insofar as it was notionally a defensive response to something, was a response to the formation of NATO (and, specifically, the integration of West Germany into NATO), not to the Nazis, who had already been defeated.

I read a book that argued that the primary thing communism accomplished was smash horribly unjust feudal states and clear the way for liberal capitalist democracies.

I'm still under the belief that too much centralized planning can severely hurt an economy but that organization is way better for the economy than everything being locked down by a narrow class of land owning elites.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/GDP-per-capita-ppp-selec...

even disregarding the other issues with communism, the central premise is wrong: it's quite apparent that what growth centralized economy countries enjoyed was far at a lower rate than free market counterparts, up until they opened up to private initiative.

I grew up in Socialist Poland. What you're saying is absurdly far away from reality.

Very few people say that things were better. It was a miserable time back then, and the life has drastically improved for the vast majority of the society.

When there was toilet paper delivered to the stores, it was a big deal. And by "toilet paper" I mean a gray, thin, one-layered, recycled one. It's weird we didn't switch to the asian water-bidet style then.

There was literally nothing available in the stores. Imagine your local supermarket, but with literal empty shelves, just vinegar on some of them.

There was even a joke about a guy who comes to a hardware store: - I'd like some screws - We don't have screws - I'd like some nails then - We don't have nails either - Well, what do you have? - Nothing. - Why don't you close the store down then? - We don't have the locks either.

This was a reality for dosens of millions of people back then. Saying that anyone misses that time, and that many people had it better is some kind of a sick fantasy.

Also, it wasn't due to US politics (although it didn't help). With the private enterprise being trashed, and people demotivated to do any sort of work (what for? "If you sit, or you stand, 100zł payment is your right" - another common joke), it was bound to collapse.

If anything, people in Poland saw West world as the one that was fighting to get us out of it all (and as a place of freedom and possibility).

And really - the crazy 90s after the communist rule fell, we saw a huge increase in the quality of life for almost everyone.

It is also a political problem in capitalist societies. Look no further than the military-industrial complex.

> but that changing resource allocation becomes a political problem.

Resource allocation is always a political problem. (On a large-scale, anyway.)

> In a capitalist system, if something looks like it's going to be a big economic hit people are ready to sell off other assets and pour billions of dollars into it.

1. In a Capitalist system, most people have little assets; and most assets are under the control of a minority (which becomes relatively smaller over time.

2. A "big economic hit" is not necessarily in people's interests anyway.

3. The USSR was not a Communist society (and didn't claim to be). It was ruled by "The Communist Party" but that's really not the same thing.

> there's a guy who doesn't want to lose funding for his department who might have more power than his rivals

Not entirely different from divisions within a large corporation who vie for funding and/or power over their peers. (And the managers of such divisions.)

> In a Capitalist system, most people have little assets; and most assets are under the control of a minority (which becomes relatively smaller over time.

do you have any evidence for this?

Uh, the world as it is right now?

The one where the capitalist system commoditized ownership of assets? So more people own capital than ever before? That one?

Yes, that one, where most assets are held by the top few percent of the population.

Globally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth

In the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

That doesn’t appear to be the case from the article you posted. Moreover its the case that more people have access to wealth than ever before because the capitalist system has commodified the ownership of wealth through stocks. So I’m not convinced about this claim. Look at the graph from the article. The amount of wealth owned by the top 0.7% is dwarfed by the next bracket.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Distribution_of_wealth_gl...

> > there's a guy who doesn't want to lose funding for his department who might have more power than his rivals

> Not entirely different from divisions within a large corporation who vie for funding and/or power over their peers. (And the managers of such divisions.)

Sure. It's just that we can get rid of large corporations if they blunder enough (see, for example, Kodak). When it's the government, and they restrict elections to one party, you're a lot more stuck.

Glad to see these takes on HN. Keep it up!

History has shown that even workers can become wealthy in a capitalist country while they will stay poor in socialist countries.

Just compare the history of West and East Germany. There is a reason why East Germany and all other socialist countries in history had to lock their people up in their own country.

the first point stands but the second line is not the best example, the West German economy was built on top of the Marshall Plan money, not on it's own merits.

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