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Comment by andruby | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the thoughtful post.

I hope that the current circumstances trigger a renewed interest in thinking about how we organise our society. It would be great if that could be done rationally, without taboos. I don't have high hopes though. The people in power want to stay in power, and any hint at socialistic or communistic ideas are quickly shot down.

Communism as implemented by Soviet Russia was pretty bad and failed, but that doesn't mean that the ideas of Karl Marx are all terrible.

I like the idea of a centrally managed economy but I don't think it's a stable system. There's too much opportunity for abuse by the central power.

I hope we explore the spectrum between extreme capitalism and extreme communism.

Does anyone have any reading recommendations that explore these kinds of economic and societal system?

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I suggest actually reading up on how past or existing Communist countries worked. The Soviet system eventually failed, yes, but not before great strides in a lot of areas. There is an incredible amount of nuance lost in how the west generally talks about these systems, some from general misunderstandings, some from Orientalism, some from downright nationalism.

For example, the "soviet" system was a bottom up democratic system where labor unions effectively formed the foundation. There was a lot of thought into how the system was formed and even the CIA admitted Stalin was more of a team captain than a dictator. Hell you can get a lot of interesting tidbits into declassified reports on the Soviet Union. There's the famous one about how the soviets were better fed than their American counterparts, despite the claims of breadlines.

It's really quite sad that we are basically not allowed to learn from the positive aspects of these projects.

For example, people hate on Stalin a lot, but his 5-year plans were so wildly productive and successful, even a young South Korea deep in a western backed dictatorship copied the idea in order to boot strap their industrial base. China continues to use this idea, the simple method of setting goals in the short, medium, and long term in order to use resources effectively.

>For example, people hate on Stalin a lot, but his 5-year plans were so wildly productive and successful

you mean productive as in Holodomor?

Yea, it's insane OP went from a really great comment at the top to this. Weird.

I mean, Op started right off the bat with the idea that op would love to live in a communist society.

By all means Op can say that they agree with some Marxist ideas, but when the real human costs of that model are very well proven out by now it should be a red flag if someone doesn’t acknowledge those costs from the jump. I’m not surprised this quickly went to suggesting Stalin wasn’t so bad.

Churchill purposefully starved the people of Bengal yet he is still revered. The Bengal famine had a similar death toll to the holodomor, yet one is ignored and the other used as a constant point to discredit.

You literally proved my point, One can't say "Stalin's 5-year plans were overall successful and copied by other countries" without "but holodomor". Yet you can say all you want about Churchill or Britain's policies without a smug "Bengal famine" appearing.

Bro you cannot just call famine "smug", nobody here is honoring Churchill as well, so stop using whataboutisms, there is tons of cases of leaders that didn't kill milions of people with their policies

…And how quickly you get to praising Stalin. Wow.

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