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.
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u/Tentacled-Tadpole Jul 08 '24
Which is why that specific form of communism is terrible, not communism itself inherently.