As someone who lived through communism… you have no idea what it means to not have nice things.
Or waiting 5 years for the option to buy a car (of course no say in the color or equipment, take it or leave). Or 2 years for sofa FFS, who cares you don't like the shape, color or material. If you think this is funny, I gave examples from my own childhood, and could go on for a very long time.
Centrally planned economies really don't work well. On top of clusterfuck that communism consistently was by itself.
My entire family to this day is compelled to load up on whatever discounted-because-of-oversupply items when shopping, on the premise that they will not be available in the future due to asinine production planning.
For some reason that reminds me of that arch-capitalist, Henry Ford.
I remember in which direction people were trying to escape across the iron curtain.
From countries that used secret service against it's own citizens to countries that used it to assassinate inconvenient democratically elected leaders of other countries?
And now, with the threat of "communism" (no, it wasn't one, because communism would have meant giving up state power), capitalism is slowly getting just as awful to the people in the core as it was to the people on the periphery.
The progress you so enjoy is the product of trade, truly. Across thousands of years. But best trade is free trade. One where nobody is coerced by police NOR implicitly by having choices stripped away from them by the capitalist ruling class that just wants to maintain it's position. People deep in debt, living from paycheck to paycheck, cannot make their choices freely.
Imagine running away from USSR only to have to send you kid there:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/business/child-labor-meat...
"Not real communism"
If it's only viable in theory, as shown by many practical failures, it's not worth discussing at all.
> The progress you so enjoy is the product of trade, truly. Across thousands of years. But best trade is free trade. One where nobody is coerced by police NOR implicitly by having choices stripped away from them by the capitalist ruling class that just wants to maintain it's position. People deep in debt, living from paycheck to paycheck, cannot make their choices freely.
This sounds like you'd like welfare capitalism. Bur your comment conflates and gish-gallops so many things that it's impossible to have a conversation with you.
Because the term has been perverted by both anti and pro crowds.
Capitalism isn't equal to free market (arguably Adam Smith was first to give scathing rejection of capitalism)
Communism isn't equal with state control and planned economy, no matter how much Imperial Russian traumatised politicians insisted on everyone.
Nevertheless, the reasons were because people hated being forced to do and to say things that they did not want to do and to say, and because there were many categories of things that they were completely forbidden to own.
On the other hand, among the few categories of things that they could have, many were quite nice things in comparison with what is available today everywhere.
For instance the quality of clothes and of food has been lowered dramatically after the communists lost the power, the internal market was opened to global commerce and the local factories had been destroyed by their managers (who had stolen all their assets in order to transform themselves from communist bureaucrats into capitalist businessmen).
I grew up in a capitalist country. Being poor doesn’t give you access to things just the same.
Then it came capitalism. For the first time in history, a country eliminated famines just by adopting the new of organizing production. They were still poor people who lacked things, but they lived in the only part of the world where at least they could count on not starving to death.
Then some countries organized as socialism, and they caused huge famines, that in a rare historical event, were not caused by climate or a natural catastrophe, but by wrong resource allocation.
You can criticize capitalism, but not on terms of producing what people want. In that field we don't know any other system that does it better. Capitalism is bad at distributing the wealth equally to everyone, causing that some people cannot have some things, but also we don't know a better model that does it while keeping poverty away.
If people today doesn't have unbreakable glassware (it exists!) is just because they prefer cheaper and fancier glasses from Ikea. When I need a truly unbreakable "glass" I buy a titanium made camping glass. In general we don't want all products to last a long time: we want to change our car to get the newest fancy things, we want a bigger and faster phone. We don't want a single pair of shoes that last forever, but lots of shoes to match with lots of clothes. There are long lasting shoes, but they don't sell well (i.e. people don't want them, even if they say so).
People in the west have no grasp at the level of abject poverty that communism creates.
It's always rich kids that benefited from capitalism their entire life that seem to fetishize communism the way that video does.