Why communism doesn't work?

[integral]

This is my current level of understanding.

Capitalism pits all the actors against each other, a division of power, its only when it consolidates to one authority that we get catastrophe and what trump is trying to do. Communism always leads to dictatorship because the state owns everything so all someone has to do is reach out there hand to sieze it all for themselves. the genius solution is to make all the whores compete with each other and get into each others way.

Edited 12 hours ago by integral

[Ulax]

Thing is though, capitalism is also really a catastrophe.

You have people dying on the streets, many dying in opioid crises, many homeless etc.

Capitalist nations like the US wage illegitimate wars like Iraq which cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

[enchanted]

10 hours ago, Ulax said:

Thing is though, capitalism is also really a catastrophe.

You have people dying on the streets, many dying in opioid crises, many homeless etc.

Capitalist nations like the US wage illegitimate wars like Iraq which cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

So true. We have been told capitalism is the best thing there since childhood. No wonder many don't see it's negatives. 

[Topspin715]

Centrally planning everything in an economy is also very difficult because the market mechanism provides very useful information about what to produce and how much.  It doesn't allocate resources fairly and it tends towards wealth concentration, especially when wealth can be used to overpower competitors, but the market tends to be much more resilient and efficient than a purely centrally planned economy.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but part of the reason that the Soviet Union collapsed was that its economy became very bureaucratic and unresponsive to things like a collapse in the global oil price which had been bringing in a lot of revenue for the USSR.

Central planning can be preferable in situations where you know exactly what you need to build and need to mobilize a lot of resources quickly like if you have an outdated economy and need to quickly modernize.

The Soviet Union and China both used that power to modernize quickly. 

[Ulax]

1 hour ago, enchanted said:

So true. We have been told capitalism is the best thing there since childhood. No wonder many don't see it's negatives. 

Yes, and also capitalism is so naturalised for us. Its 'just the way things are', and so when bad things happen we don't even associate them with capitalism. Reality is blamed instead.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

29 minutes ago, Ulax said:

Yes, and also capitalism is so naturalised for us. Its 'just the way things are', and so when bad things happen we don't even associate them with capitalism. Reality is blamed instead.

Incidentally, this is the exact same line of reasoning 4th wave feminists use for "patriarchy" 

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Yes, and also patriarchy is so naturalised for us. Its 'just the way things are', and so when bad things happen we don't even associate them with patriarchy. Reality is blamed instead.