What's the better system?
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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I mean there were a bunch of regulations that helped reduce these issues in the US but they've been chipped away over time so they are less effective.
This but unironically
I'm not being ironic. No one ever answers this question.
Didn't think you were and agree. Answers you will get are always the same.
"Well if we ever gave system XYZ a fair shake!"
I'd argue the problem isn't the system and never was. The problem is human nature. Any system can be corrupted.
Advocates of capitalism 50 years ago: you dont understand! Caputalism is good bevause people arent, and capitalism harnesses our vices to make us productive! It turns our vices into virtues!
Advocates of capitalism today: no we dont need to get rid of it, we just need to fix it and add virtue and decency! Oh shit, i need to go out today, where's my gas mask and iodine?
Get rid of it and replace it with what?
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.
Command-economy communism is an absolute joke and a terrible idea.
FYI, in the fifties the CIA wrote a memo where they stated that claims that Stalin was autocratic were largely exaggerated and the USSR largely had collective leadership.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
On one hand, i don't trust the cia on anything. I dont even trust them to know what those words mean.
On the other; this us hilarious.
This was an internal memo not meant for the public eye, so it probably contains accurate information.
My trust is not greatly increased, and they could be manipulating released documents to form a narrative.
If, again, they know what any of those words mean.
You lost me at "the Soviet Union was doing a communism". Hard to see a dictatorship as the workers owning the means of production.
“The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated.”
— The CIA
(https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf)
And you think that describes the Soviets and isnt just a statement about the red scare?
The document linked specifically is talking about the Soviet system and Stalin.
This is such a weird thing people believe in, no?
"USSR was communist!" everyone says, when there was nothing communist about how the country was governed. But, somehow, these same people don't consider North Korea a democratic country, even though they even have that in their name.
And every time I mention that "we don't know if communism works, nobody has tried it yet", I'm getting downvoted to oblivion...
I think it's funny that the same people who will mock us with "no true socialism/communism" are the same people who will blame all our problems on "crony capitalism"...
it's almost like there's a concept of political communism and then there's the Communist Party and they're different things but they're purposely conflated at least here in Statesia
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