@TruthSandwich @BobCollins Saying capitalism is good, communism is bad is ridiculous too. That was cold war propaganda, just the other side of those who said communism is good, capitalism is bad.
USSR was hell, but the USSR wasn’t communism. Just another form of capitalism (state capitalism), that was pretending to be communism. Today China is pretending to be communist too, it’s absolutely not in practice. Cuba isn’t either. A lot of people are still believing that communism = USSR, China, Cuba…
In fact, there are no states that are entirely communist or capitalist (although the US is not far from the latter), even through history. Instead, it’s often capitalist/socialist/communist measures, mixed at differents levels.
The health system of France for example was set up by the communist party, and is being destroyed by the neo-liberal capitalists. Nordic European countries are mixing a lot of socialism with capitalism, and have globally better education and health systems too.
Historically, most social progress has been made in spite of capitalism, not because of it. Through unions, strikes and revolts.
That said, some technical progress could be attributed to capitalism, but without a proper distribution of the gains it brings, that's not always a good thing. And there's nothing to say that this technical progress wouldn't have happened under a different economic regime: it has never been tried.
Now, Keynesian capitalism for example, or simply a little more socialism on top of capitalism without becoming entirely socialist, or things like Georgism, or juste better regulating like you said could bring enormous progress without leaving the capitalist system, and that would already be a first step.
But many people think that real communism (and not the USSR, but things like a universal income¹ for example) might be even better. It has never been implemented on a large scale, so we don't know whether it would work or not, but in principle there's no reason why it shouldn't: there are enough material and human resources to provide a decent living for everyone, the problem is the distribution of wealth and work.
¹ : I’ll use that as an example: one expected result of a universal income is that many jobs would be of much higher quality. Indeed, today's priorities are housing and food. So we'll take any job we can get, including a job whose purpose is pointless, and wastes resources, because we can't choose - it's that or death, literally. And even in useful jobs, managers will tend to push short-term profit to the detriment of safety, quality or working conditions. With an universal income, all these constraints disappear: we can decide to do our job properly. Some fear that no one will work anymore, but many people would enjoy working. Just not on the same things or under the same conditions. As for jobs that are short of manpower, we'd be able to attract people with higher salaries: in exchange for less pleasant work, we'd get a bigger reward.
The balance is to be found between basic income, and the wages of these unpleasant jobs, so that the reward is sufficiently interesting for enough people to do it, but that nobody die of hunger or cold whatever happens (a society where this kind of thing happens is not functional), but it should be tried and adapted according to the results over time. And obviously it isn’t that simple in reality, there is a lot of things to change beside it so it can work, it’s just an example.
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