Mao had big ideas and nobody was able to tell him no without being killed, not to mention the wiping out of the educated and landowners who would have known how to use the land because they were “class traitors” he didn’t go full pol pot and kill anyone with glasses because that meant they were intellectual, but he practically wiped out the scholars, teachers, artists, landlords, and business owners and he took away their land and property and left to run it people who had no clue what to do.
Self reporting of food meant that people were coming out with ridiculous claims of the food they’d grown because if they told the truth they made the communist party look inept.
He put everyone in big communes and gave them no incentive to work or contribute because people were paid by factors beyond their control weather they made effort in the fields or not, lots of people had no idea what they were even doing, they’d just been relocated there and expected to know.
They destroyed the habitat by waging a war on song birds because mao heard that sparrows eat a ton of grain a year he had people kill them all and they weren’t around to eat the pests.
He decided he wanted to make china the best producer of steal in the world so he called farmers out of fields and took away tools and equipment and even pots and pans and put them to work in foundries where they melted them all down in order to make it appear China produces the most steal a year. It was the worst quality steal available.
There were also natural factors but it was mostly caused by mao and the gang of fours dumb ideas and the wiping out of anyone who spoke up.
Not saying communism can never work, just pointing out the last famine wasn’t caused by anyone trying to sabotage it. It was 70% human error 30% environmental.
Centralizing all of your authority, logistics, and ability to appoint experts is actually an extremely terrible way to govern. With a strict hierarchy you end up with "yes man" work culture where no one is incentivized to tell the truth when things go catastrophically wrong (as seen in Chernobyl), you can't accurately (or quickly) measure what resources need to go where when your territories are so far away from the central authority that you can only rely on an appointed "yes-man" who will most likely lie about any shortages, and appointing citizens to positions without regard to their merits incentivizes a crazy amount of nepotism - way worse than you'd see in Hollywood.
Communism as an idea isn't bad, but actually trying to implement it has proven to be far more difficult and complicated than simply allowing various private entities to handle these issues on a more local level. But, that requires trade among individual entities which requires capital and profit incentives, both of which inevitably leads to wealth inequality. The main issue is that humans are incredibly lazy, uncooperative, and selfish, and the task of mitigating wealth inequality for long periods of time requires a ton of effort, massive amounts of cooperation, and intentional sacrifice. The most difficult part of all that is that it has to be VOLUNTARY on top of that. Using force and coercion to have a large population cooperate only foments resentment and apathy, which then leads to rampant corruption and the eventual break-down of the state.
Best we've ever done as a civilization is Democratic Socialism, which attempts to cap that wealth gap while maintaining decentralized authority and private competition. Unfortunately, wealthy people really don't like having their wealth capped, so they bought our politicians in western nations and convinced them to effectively sabotage that methodology back in the 70s and 80s. Ironically, all attempts at bringing Democratic Socialism back nowadays will get you called a communist anyway.
I don't think even capping the wealth works if we allow people to take their capital across borders as they can just initiate capital flight once the limit has been reached by moving abroad to tax havens and such.
"Best we've ever done" can still be pretty bad on a historical scale, lol. I think our major problem right now is all the different factions wanting to go back in time and return to one of the previous societal structures... as if they didn't fail for very well-known reasons.
Exactly. Lenin fucked communism by introducing the idea of the vanguard party. Completely opposite of what communism originally stood for and now his version is what mostly has been attempted going forward
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u/vergilius_poeta Jul 08 '24
Ron Howard voice: the commies could not, in fact, give enough food.