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Comment by walkhour | Hacker News Reader

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What is this in response to? Do you think Yanis Varoufakis is unfamiliar with undergrad-tier “communism has failed every time” bromides?

This is an undeniable fact, not some "undergrad-tier bromide" as left-wing grifters dismiss it as.

Even now, after a century of failure, some dogmatic utopianists won't admit that their ideas don't work.

What is most tragic in all this is that it takes experimenting obviously bad ideas - whether it be socialism, or lockdowns - on billions of people, and producing hell on Earth, before a certain class of individuals will admit they are wrong.

This is a response to the illusion that we know there's a better alternative to capitalism

Do you think we get a vote on what which flavor of capitalism we get next, or if capitalism decides to change into something else as Yanis sees it?

It can be the case that we no know better alternative while simultaneously being true that capitalism and freedom are opposed.

Opposition to capitalism consistently produces less free societies.

There might be many factors involved in this. Not least of them, the influence of capitalist countries over alternative societies.

Chile for example was crushed internally and externally when it tried to move away from the system they had at the time. Though inflation did raise there was a huge campaign against the government to purposefully make it fail. Is this a failure of socialism?

Any new system will naturally find resistance because it has to break the old one and make the new one work. Though, in reality, these experiments even if they fail change perspectives of people. When Germany had to be put back together they didn't get rid of everything that east Germany was. And these ideas then spread through out the rest of Europe. And the world.

And finally, it might be misleading to look at things from the perspective of a person in a developed society and go "yes this system is great!" When on the other hand, this very same system, is producing and reproducing extreme global inequality. El Congo and other extremely poor and unstable countries in Africa, as well as in central and south america are all capitalist countries... theyre just the other side of the coin.

And don't get me started on other externalities! I'm sure if birds and monkeys in the amazon could talk they would say they would rather see humans go back to primitivism. Though that's really a question about progress and industrialisation; but it's a question that capitalism has a really hard time dealing with.

So, I guess I simply dont think the statement "opposition to capitalism consistently produces less free societies." is a statement that should be done so freely. When something doesn't work we should ask why and what can be done better, not simply shrug and keep ourselves covered in mud.

I think the future will look closer to socialism than capitalism, but ofc, that's just my opinion. If you want to read more on global inequality I recommend pikettys book "capital and ideology".

The tyranny imposed in societies where socialist doctrines became dominant was simply staggering, and beyond anything that could be blamed on foreign meddling.

This tyranny was all-encompassing because socialism demonizes entire classes of voluntary interaction on the basis that they are inherently exploitative, and thus despite all appears to the contrary, nonconsensual. Socialism is an ideological dogma instead of a sober commentary on reality.

Because of this shoddy foundation, socialism ends up promoting subordination to the state and top-down order, and this is fundamentally less functional and more tyrannical than a society based on the principle of individual rights and emergent order.

You're really doing not much more than a correlation equals causation thing. The rise of capitalism in certain countries has occured during an increase in the enjoyment of some specific kinds of liberty. But was that caused by capitalism, or was it caused by the parallel adoption of classical liberal political thought (which by itself has nothing to say about capitalism)? Was it caused by the rise of empire and the exploitation of natural resources across large parts of the world, exploitation that is not in any real sense dependent upon capitalism itself? Was it caused by scientific and medical advances that could conceivably have occured in different economic and political systems?

And then ... what are we to make of the freedoms that capitalism does not enhance? Current capitalist societies do a (historically) good job on what has been called "freedom to", but a fairly poor job on "freedom from". There is a coherent philosophical argument that the latter are at least as important as the former, in part because you cannot exercise the "freedom to <X>" if you are forced to trade your own labor in order to live, or because you are sick with no means of accessing health care. Capitalist societies certainly do very well at ensuring that those who control capital enjoy freedom; it's not so clear that they are anywhere nearly as accomplished at ensuring and amplifying the freedom(s) of those who do not.

There's no question that capitalism has proven very effective at driving the discovery and adoption of highly efficient means of production. This has created a world of material comforts that has never been seen before, accessible in most senses to all but the absolute poorest in capitalist countries. The problem is that while material comforts may be a wonderful thing, and perhaps even in some senses a necessary component of freedom, they are also insufficient.

Dismissing human striving for something better has rarely been productive in the long run. Yes, we know that the experiments during the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Mao's China, and elsewhere should make us very cautious about any similar proposals. But to act as if this (both capitalism, and those particular sorts of responses to it) are the only options, as though this is just the best we can do and there will never be anything better ... this is just uselessly pessimistic and almost certainly wrong.

Socioeconomical systems are complex and ever evolving. Like technology.

Your strawman sounds like "All possible technologies has already been tried"

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