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It’s not about switching and watching it fail. Neither capitalist nor communist ideologies are so much competing, as we’re trying to figure out how to collectively make a society that works. Anarchist / Communist / Socialist theory observes that those who have power will hoard it and get jealous of it. It’s not universally true, as we’ve had kings and capitalists who understand the proletariat need to be treated well, but they are a stark minority, and sooner or later someone else inherits our power.

At the risk of sounding tankie, communism is a dream, a final outcome, a post scarcity world where we all have what we need and can attain the things we want (within reason). So the communist ideology is working out how to get there from here. And yes, this is where the USSR and China demonstrate too failures, in which an authoritarian regime shifted away from the goal towards uplifting the public and towards preserving the provisional regime.

Capitalism has the same problem. If its leaders could work alongside a public serving government without trying to control it, destroy it or supersede it, then ultimately we’d have a regulated economy where rich folk and corporations pay their share of taxes, which assures survival of the people so they can choose their own balance of effort and excess income. But again, the rich, in an interest in preserving their power look instead in enforcing a status quo and bonding the proletariat to forced work rather than striving for a mutually beneficial future.

So we don’t know how to get to the post scarcity future we want, nor how to make it resilient against efforts to game or sabotage it. The Communist Manifesto was merely Karl Marx’ notion of how to start. It’s not to say he knew and it’s a recipe that will work, rather it’s one we hadn’t yet tried.

But right now, in the US / EU markets, those are locked down to only funnel more money and power to the elites while failing to address the climate crisis and the plastic crisis. So it’s only going to get worse until it collapses, and the longer we wait, the more irreversible, long lasting damage is going to be done. So we know the current system as it presently is is borked and difficult to reroute.

Do we try to fix it, or break it and build a new one? Does the looming disaster warrant violence to affect change? These are questions well beyond my pay-grade, and are probably questions that challenge economists and political scientists. Some folks on the far left encourage forming mutual aid organizations meant to help people in the community. As those grow, laborers have more resources by which to outlast strikes or job shortages. I still need to learn more about those. News about Unicorn Riot getting arrested and tried in Atlanta Georgia (for dispensing anarchist propaganda at that) is noteworthy, telling me the state sees mutual aid efforts as a threat to the status quo. It certainly shouldn’t the kind of thing that would be disrupted by law enforcement.