this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Neither capitalism nor communism was tried either. Capitalism has taken over by force. Totalitarians have tried the same in the name of communism. Some actual communist attempts seem to be working when left unintervened by capitalists or authoritarians.
It's anyone guess which other system could be worth moving forward. Currently the only limiting thing seems to be the lack of a mindset to progress by a critical mass.
It is disingenuous to say that communism has never been tried. It's been tried over 30 times, but it's never been able to live up to the ideal of "true" communism.
If your system falls apart as soon as people become greedy or power hungry, it's not a practical or stable system. You can't expect people to ignore those emotions and you definitely cannot bake that expectation into a system that needs to be resilient enough to sustain a society for centuries.
I'm pretty sure most can agree that communism has been tried in village and tribe sized societies through the history of humanity.
It's not the most honest claim to say that big authoritarian states like USSR or China have ever even tried it, and just used the name for marketing and support from gullible population.
Are places like Rojava and Kerala relevant examples? Maybe, I'm not an expert on the subject
Greed is an interesting topic. Capitalism creates and rewards greed and it's prominence in human psychology could be less in alternative systems.
I agree it works at village-scale, but in my opinion what we have seen is a failure of communism to scale to a nation with tens or hundreds of millions of people, and survive for decades at that.
Sounds like you'd want some kind of anarcho-communism where those smaller groups of people work together with other ones to form networks encompassing millions. Democracy at human level instead of top-down authorities
There is still a power incentive. In the proposed system we would likely factions rapidly forming to gather the most power and resources as quickly as possible. It would probably be quite bloody. (What you are describing is effectively the tribe system, which rarely ended well for most tribes.)
As long as resource scarcity exists I just don't see this working out, unfortunately.
In my mentioned system the power would be in cooperation. Fighting against that would lose power.
Resource scarcity is mostly a decision problem. Capitalism doesn't have incentive to let anyone benefit from the excessive resources so those in control won't decide for it.