Political Memes

What's the better system?

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?

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.

It’s the best system when combined with strong regulation and good social safety nets. I wish everybody would focus on those things falling down and needing to be fixed instead of pretending we’re going to throw the whole system out tomorrow.