Makes the problems of capitalism even worse. Instead of the owner class you get an even smaller political class controlling all means of production - the party leadership. It becomes even more prone to corruption than capitalism.
Adding to problems is the planned economy - it always results in misaligned incentives, bad allocation of resources, constant shortages…
Third, possibly the worst, is the constant insistence on ideological purity and severe punishment of “thought crimes”. Or as they like to call it “counterrevolutionary activity”.
Even though it was created out of good intentions, I don’t believe a lot positive aspects can be salvaged.
Everyone I’ve ever met who lived under it says it’s was fucking awful. Not a single endorsement. That’s significant because even capitalism has boosters. Not communism.
I object to the term “capitalism”. The correct term is “classical liberal” (modern liberals are something else with very little in common). I boost capitalism because it is a result of freedom, and that also informs when I will limit my support for capitalism.
You appear to be using the term “capitalism” in a confusing way. From etymonline:
The meaning “political/economic system which encourages capitalists” is recorded from 1872 and originally was used disparagingly by socialists.
Words can change meaning and all that, but when people complain about capitalism, they don’t mean what you’re talking about. You seem to mean something like “well-regulated free market”, and other people mean “broken, exploitative system that worships greed”
Our current socioeconomic system is basically built on many intersecting hierarchies of coercion, oppression and control - i.e. some measure of power you can use to make someone do something they otherwise wouldn’t want to do. A few examples of those hierarchies include patriarchy, religious authorities, the state, and capitalism.
All of those hierarchies must be abolished. If any of them remain in place, then you will end up with exploiters and the exploited. Eventually, this will stratify over time, as we’ve seen through history a number of times - the rich get richer, accumulate wealth and power until it becomes unbearable, then the current ruling class are overthrown and replaced by a new ruling class.
We need to NOT create a new ruling class. We need to abolish the ruling class and NOT EVER REPLACE THEM.
That’s the mistake made by communism in the USSR - replacing the existing ruling elite with another ruling elite. No matter how cool and revolutionary the leaders of the revolution are, as soon as they have power, they WILL be corrupted by it.
So the solution to our shared problem is anarchism. We need to abolish all forms of coercive control, oppression, hierarchies, ensure that no one has power over anyone else. We need to learn to co-operate, work together, instead of competing and fighting.
Humans are the most co-operative animals in the world. We don’t act like it, because the powers that be discourage us from co-operating. Because if we co-operated, we’d immediately realize the problems we have are coming from above.
Genuine question, what happens in an anarchist utopia when your neighbors decide that they like your land? If you fight back en masse, doesn’t that involve creating a military with a hierarchy that’s ripe for seizing power? How can you maintain the social organization for building fighter jets or aircraft carriers or spycraft without those being taken over and used against the people? If you just don’t, what happens when your neighbors are a global superpower that has all that?
It seems even more impractical and idealistic than Communism, which at least has an answer to that.
