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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

I was born in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and it took decades to get rid of its awful legacy.

Socialism sucks. The idea of "means of production owned collectively" tends to suck even in capitalism (too many shareholders), but if the owner is the state, it sucks massively. Any alignment of interests goes out of the window, massive white elephant projects get built in the name of ideology, "superfluous concerns" such as environmental damage are ignored, incompetent people get promoted to directors because their uncle is a Party bigwig. Nothing acts as a check on rampant corruption.

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I was born in the People’s Republic of Poland, and I think most of the suckage you’ve described are due to oppressive authoritarianism of the former Eastern Bloc countries, and have little if anything to do with collective ownership of means of production.

ANd oppressive authoritarianism is because «all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others».

They have to do with the mechanisms of the commune being used to produce a dictatorship or a bureaucratic upper class, which has happened in ever circumstance where communism has been implemented.

We should know by now that communism as a form of government appears to be better than average at enabling corruption, because the underlying mechanism of removing personal choice is so well aligned.

> which has happened in ever circumstance where communism has been implemented.

Not so; I’m not aware of this happening on a large scale in the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Mexico, for example (please point me to sources if I’m wrong).

Socialism in Western Europe stopped to be about collective ownership of means of production very long before the fall of the wall. That was maybe the goal of sub 5% far left communist parties, not even mainstream ones.

Nepotism, corruption and waste of resources are well established even in non left wing countries.

"Nepotism, corruption and waste of resources are well established even in non left wing countries."

True, and the problem gets worse with concentration of power in just a few hands; the absolute extreme is reached if all the power is concentrated in one person, or two (Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu come to mind, or Stalin).

This process is mitigated by the chaos that is inherent in markets and democracies; but classical socialism is an intellectual construct that seeks to avoid most of the chaos and replace it by central planning and predictable development.

Decentralized socialism might avoid that particular trap, but I suspect that in decentralized socialism, people in many jurisdictions would just vote for return to the older form of private ownership and so it would end.

AI will. Once we get past the hype and scam phase.

People have forgotten the alternative to capitalism and communism proposed by Veblen and others was the technocracy.

Back then there were no computers which is why the movement failed. But there already existed a tension between the Engineer and the manager/luxury/leisure class.

Veblen said the natural instinct of the Engineer is to reduce waste (ie corruption). While the natural instinct of the leisure class is to signal power and status through how much they can waste and get away with.

This tension is very much alive and is what produces Snowden. With AI do not underestimate what the next bunch of Snowdens will attempt as a natural reaction to the injustices they see.

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