Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

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> the prescribed methods offered for solving the problems laid out in The Communist Manifesto haven't been successful

It was written about 170 years ago, so it'd make sense that the methods would no longer work now. Even if we count the inception of the Soviet Union as its first actual use, it was already pretty old to be relied upon as a manual.

The productivity gains I mentioned are a very important step in that direction. Capitalism and free markets work best on an economy saddled by scarcity, to the point many scarcities are engineered to extract labor from the scarcity gradients a bit like a Stirling engine extract mechanical work from a temperature gradient: you don't need an iPhone 12 (I know I don't) or a 64-core desktop (I could use one) and a lot of people will work so they can have the things they want, but not necessarily need. As the tangping prove, after you reach a certain level of abundance (a low one for them), capitalism ceases to be able to extract labor because the price of wanting more is too high for them.

These people who refuse to participate in this system are willing to live a materially constrained existence in exchange for more free time and a simpler life. I think we all could adopt a less radical position and still live with a little less and enjoy a life a little bit less complicated.

We had it in the era of America's greatest relative growth (by some measures at least) in the 1950's-60's,they were called beatnik's. The conversation around them at the time tightly mirrors that about tangping today.

I've been saying for a while now that China is undergoing a Mccarthy era politically, and that their "summer of love" is less than two decades away, and they'll be radically tranformed by it.

Thanks for the metaphor with the Stirling engine, hasn't heard of that before. Interestingly I've always considered capitalism to only work in a system without scarcity of resources (land, minerals, ect.) as it's often the most efficient way to extract those resources and convert them into more useful products (by humans subjective standards). It's when raw resources are limited that the paradigm for endless extraction breaks down, as there's nothing more to extract, and quality of life starts diminishing as we extract beyond replacement level of natural resources.

But I think your point is about scare processed resources being the motivator for capitalism, and that once the gradient diminishes and the top is warmed enough, and the heat differential with the bottom is less, certain members will opt out of further extraction. This is why inadvertently a lot of conservstive lawmakers advocate reducing entitlements, to artificially "cool" the top plate, to keep the engine turning, even if they don't know for what purpose.

Still, communism even in it's converted versions has not worked (I'm sure you don't seriously consider China's economic system one that is concerned with equal distribution of wealth among the working class right?) and has brought many horrors to those living in states that claim to be using its doctrine, and those failures must be accepted and addressed before better alternative approaches can be considered.

> I'm sure you don't seriously consider China's economic system one that is concerned with equal distribution of wealth among the working class right?

Absolutely. Quite the contrary, BTW. China proves capitalism works a lot better when there is no democracy to hold it back.

And that is terrifying, because others, in a lot of places, are getting that very same idea.

Indeed, nationalistic fascism has often had that effect on growing economies, one only has to look at the reverence for 1930's Germany many contemporary American business tycoons had to see respect for growth can lead people astray of what a society is really about.

The National Socialist German Workers Party wasn't always as unpopular as it is today, many thought they were doing a great job lifting Germans out of poverty who had experienced the devastation of the 1922-1924 inflation.

As an aside you may find the book "How Asia Works" illuminating. All the credit to China's relative success ought not be attributed exclusively to fascism, but many of the things that worked are sort of hybrid attempts at adapting to the global capitalist society with some land reforms (seizures) and protectionist measures mixed in.

> many thought they were doing a great job lifting Germans out of poverty

There is a highly prized ad for a Brazilian newspaper pretty much about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PShbxd42JN8

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