this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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So when the communist party came into power after the Bolshevik revolution, Wilson went to the League of Nations to negotiate a common embargo of the Soviet project, essentially sanctioning Russia the way we might sanction a nation for humanitarian wrongdoing.
This is to say Wilson was afraid of it actually working, which would jeopardize the industrial moguls who were already running the US.
This is also to say, the Soviet Union was doing a communism in hostile circumstances, much the way European monarchs pressured France to raise a new king after the revolution (leading to Napoleon's rise to power, the Levée en masse (general conscription) and the War of the First Coalition (or as is modernly known, Napoleon Kicks European Butt For A While ).
Historians can't really say, but the fact the red scare started with Wilson (and not after WWII) might have influenced events, including the corruption of the party and the rise of Stalin as an autocrat.
Also according to Prof. Larry Lessig, Boss Tweed in the 1850s worked to make sure the ownership class called all the shots in the United States, eventually driving us to Hoover and the Great Depression. FDR's New Deal (very much resented by the industrialists) was a last chance for Capitalism, which then got a boost because WWII commanded high levels of production and distracted us with a foreign enemy. Then the cold war.
So communism was really unlucky and didn't get a fair shake in the Soviet Union, and US free market capitalism got especially lucky in the 20th century, and we don't really know if either one can be held together for more than a century or two. EU capitalism is wavering, thanks to pressure from the far right, and neoliberalism failing to serve the public.
In the meantime, check out what's going on in Cuba, which isn't perfect, but is interesting.
Putting aside it is a baseless speculation, how is a system that falls into authoritarianism under a little bit of pressure a good system? If it wasn't capitalists, wouldn't it be something else? Drought? Covid?
It's not baseless speculation, and it's not a little bit of pressure. I'm saying it was a lot of pressure. And I'm saying we don't know what could have happened if the early Soviet Union was left alone to flourish or fail on its own merits.
I'm not sure if we can leave an experimental state to do its own thing, since it is really popular among commercial interests and aristocrats to meddle with establishment systems in order to procure more power, lather, rinse, repeat. All for freedom and for pleasure; nothing ever lasts forever
Regardless, it appears that we're just too tempted when creating our state constitutions to lend favor, at least, to the petite bourgeoisie, who take advantage of that power to secure more power until the state collapses into an autocratic regime or factions into warlord states.
If left alone, it would do the "world revolution" aka military expansion. And that is exactly what it did all the way up to ww2, including the start of ww2 - occupation of Poland together with nazies.
By then, Stalin had seized power. Again, as with democracy, there's a difference between the model of government and the
And it's not like containment was passive. In fact, the US notoriously put down democratic states to erect autocratic regimes that were aligned with ~~US based companies~~ American interests, sparking the development of NGOs who resort to terrorism to fight oppression by NATO-aligned interests. Again, if we're going to compare actual nation states, let's compare actual nation states. Wilson supported the White Army (the monarchists) so there were ill feelings between the Bolsheviks and the US, but Wilson didn't even try to negotiate with the nascent Soviet Union. He just decided (in line with his corporate buddies) that the notion of Marxist communism was evil, and USSR was by fiat.
When we get to strategic nexus regions like Poland or Korea, yes, all the major powers that surround them end up fighting over control of the territory, which sucks when you're indigenous to that borderland. We've yet to establish and enforce the right of sovereignty of weaker nations.
If you want to compare command economics, you contrast it to capitalism. If you want to compare USSR, you do so to USA. The point isn't that they suck, the point is that we need to work out how to get them to suck less
In Das Kapital Marx gets into the weaknesses of capitalism, in which those with power will exploit it to consolidate more power, which is what we've seen.
If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to preserve a public-serving (not commerce-serving) government, that regulates products so that they are safe to use, are offered in good faith (counter-example: AAA games that are really just micro-transaction market fronts), are made without abuse of labor, resources, or environment, and are priced based on their value rather than their scarcity.
If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to get upper management to regard its laborers as human beings rather than props or parts of a machine. (Not just because it's moral, but because well-treated workers are productive beyond the additional cost).
If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to assure a minimum standard of living for everyone in the state, whether they allegedly work or don't work. (The US relies on a lot of labor that is not compensated for, and fails to recognize skills and services that are essential, as we discovered at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown and after it was lifted.
If you want a capitalist system, solve the problems that are consistently endemic to markets. Likewise, if you want a communist or socialist system, you have to solve the problems that come with those models.
Or we can wait until the fascist autocrats of the US purge everyone else (likely into mass graves or ash dumps) and starts cutting into itself. Or until they go to war, and ultimately Chinese bombers blot out the sun over Washington.
If a system ultimately leads to negative outcomes, either you fix it, or you turn to other systems. But saying that we've tried something in the past and it didn't work is not a cause to rule it out.