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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

They didn't actually propose communism as an alternative, it's not likely that there are only and exactly two possible systems of organizing markets so plausibly they had another one in mind.

Anyway you don't even need to endorse communism per se to point out that the current setup is pretty fucked and entirely incapable of cleaning up the mess it has created.

The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either. We haven't seen a new communist state rise in a generation or more so it's not clear if that cold war logic holds. Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships, and an increasingly authoritarian swerve in a lot of solidly market-based economies so idk. Doesn't seem like a strong link to me.

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> They didn't actually propose communism as an alternative, it's not likely that there are only and exactly two possible systems of organizing markets so plausibly they had another one in mind.

What other ways are there to organize markets or the economy have there been that we've seen at a country scale?

>Anyway you don't even need to endorse communism per se to point out that the current setup is pretty fucked and entirely incapable of cleaning up the mess it has created.

I think it's easy to blame every woe that we have such as climate change on "capitalism" without offering an alternative. The reason we have emitted a lot of carbon is capitalism made us a rich, and we don't care enough to stop it. Capitalism is at fault only in the sense that it made us rich.

> The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either. We haven't seen a new communist state rise in a generation or more so it's not clear if that cold war logic holds. Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships, and an increasingly authoritarian swerve in a lot of solidly market-based economies so idk. Doesn't seem like a strong link to me.

There are plenty of market based economies that more or less function like a democracy. I'm not aware of any communist countries that function like a democracy.

>The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either.

How do you propose to implement and maintain your communism without some system of government that's up at the totalitarian end of the spectrum?

> Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships

Because even dictators realized that free markets are very effective. Just like science is very effective.

Trying to run a country without free markets is like trying to run a country without science. You can try but you'll be doomed to insignificance and pushed to the margins of the world.

When I hear stuff like this it just sounds like theological nationalism to me. "For what is a country, without God at its head?"

It's completely deranged to think there is exactly one economic structure that can function. Capitalism won, absolutely, I wouldn't dispute that. But taking its victory as inevitable and permanent is such a failure of imagination.

Like thinking cats are the only viable mammals because lions dominate their ecosystems. There are other ecosystems! Mice still exist. Carnivores are vulnerable to their ecosystems changing and boooooy are the ecosystems changing.

Funny, I think the obsession with dismantling capitalism is a religion. "First, we must dismantle capitalism" is the Communist equivalent of "first, you must renounce other gods and accept Jesus into your life".

You talk of imagination but you haven't even described your solution or why it would be better than the well studied economics concepts of free markets with carbon taxes.

Nor will I. Capitalism must be dismantled because of the horrors it perpetrates on living people today. If you want to defend those atrocities you may, but saying this is the best we can do is a kind of pessimism I don't find in myself.

At the same time I'm not a scholar, historian, economist, politician, or powerful military leader. My capacity to conceive of another future, or author it, is constrained. My ability to condemn evil where I find it is not, however.

Despite not having studied history or economics or politics or war, surely you must see the risks of dismantling an economic system that has raised billions out of poverty without any type of replacement?

It's like a diabetic stopping their insulin in the hopes something better will come along.

That doesn't feel like a particularly charitable reading of their comment. I don't think they're suggesting we just burn everything down with no plan for what comes after, they're simply stating that they believe we need to find a better alternative while acknowledging that they don't know what that alternative is yet.

They don't say "we should replace capitalism when stumble upon a better way of organizing human economic activity". Which is a pretty bland statement everyone agrees with.

They said we must replace capitalism because of the horrors it perpetrates.

That is a very strong statement.

But I guess they could be saying "we are morally compelled to replace capitalism with a system that may or not work exist that may or may not solve the problems we have attributed to capitalism without showing that any other workable system fixes these problems, only that they happen to exist under our current system."

Which doesn't strike me as the most useful criticism of capitalism.

"First, we must dismantle capitalism" is the Communist equivalent of

The person you're replying to has already expressed doubt about whether it's a simple capitalism/communism dichotomy. Responding to a communist straw man of your own creation isn't helpful.

You can have free markets without capitalism. Consider a system almost exactly like we have now, with independent companies competing for profits in free markets, but where those companies are worker-owned [0]. Such a system could have the benefits of capitalism with regards to innovation and resource allocation while reducing some of its negative effects (inequality, worker alienation, etc.)

No idea if it would work in practice, but we need to move beyond this mindset that there are only two possible options for how to structure an economy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

Sure, but by restricting ownership of companies to workers only, you've obviously made the market less free. If a worker wants to sell their share of the company to anyone else, that's forbidden, right? So workers can't diversify their risks away from their particular industry.

Which also doesn't prevent inequality. If software engineers own Google, and baristas own Starbucks, what with Google being way more profitable, the software engineers will still be much richer than the baristas.

Free markets with a tax funded social safety net seems like a much more efficient way of reducing inequality to me.

Who starts new companies and what incentive do they have to start them if all the upside is captured by the employees?

Co-ops do exist in the US, for example credit unions. But not very many perhaps because of the incentive issue you mentioned.

Or it was capitalists that realised capitalism works a lot better without a democracy limiting what it can do.

China has certainly achieved an amazing increase in wealth through its combination of authoritarianism and free market capitalism. But given they were Communist before, that's clearly a case of authoritarians adopting capitalism, not capitalists adopting authoritarianism.

History happens over long timespans: the fact we haven't seen one doesn't mean our children won't. You may be right in that it's easier to introduce capitalist practices into a highly ordered and controlled economy than the other way around - when capitalist countries face regulatory capture (as a proxy for authoritarianism, because there is still a "democracy" element, the efficiency of their economies seem to suffer while the oligarchs who effectively captured the state reap the benefits of increasing inequality. It feels like that last path is inherently unstable, but history will answer that as well.

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