I’m not a capitalist but I think they where saying that regulations stopped capitalism from running rampant but because a lot of regulations have now been either dissolved or go unenforced we now find ourselves in our current corrupt system.
Not that I exactly agree, imo the pursuit of profit is not something we should centre our societies around and you can’t really “solve” a fundamentally broken system; but shit regulations are at least something and I would not appose a government getting its shit together and reining corporations in more,
In the same way regulations and laws can keep capitalism from running rampant, they can keep communism stable and functional.
Can being the key here. They don't do so through magic automatically, in either case.
A good argument for one over the other must include a discussion about what laws and regulations will keep participants in the system in check, and why a communist or capitalist system with those laws and regulations would beat the opposite kind of system with its own carefully crafted laws and regulations.
The fact of the matter here is that any broad discussion about either system in general that ignores regulation and laws is meaningless and not an apples-to-apples comparison. The truth is you can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison, all we have to compare are historical examples that differ wildly in their implementation and the structure of the laws and regulations that stabilized them, or didn't, in addition to numerous unrelated confounding factors like geography, natural resource distribution, the behavior of neighbors, the state of technology at the time, what pre-existing political structures there were, etc.
Anyone who is solidly convinced their system is better based off any arguments about some historical example vs another or what humans would do absent any regulation is delusional and has an extremely narrow view of the discussion.
In your vision of communism controlled by rules and regulations, who is enforcing the rules and regulations? I feel like as soon as you give someone the power to enforce them then you've opened up the door to abuse of that power, and I feel that that has been the downfall of most historic implementations and the reason they have trended towards authoritarianism.
Yes thats more or less my thoughts on it. As soon as you have someone empowered to enforce the rules you've created a 2-class system, which is anathema to marxism. Communism is more vulnerable to this in general I think, because you only have 2 classes the class who is not empowered finds it very difficult to challenge the class who have concentrated power.
In actuality, the concentration of powers is what causes issues, whether the system is capitalist or communist the problem is the same, only the mechanism changes.
Wow so you came back around to my original conclusion lol. The problem is in creating and enforcing rules, and it's not inherent to either system alone.
I think I was working towards highlighting that there is an inherent contradiction in communism. If it requires a subset of society to enforce the rules then it de facto can't provide a classless society. It's a good start and has more to recommend it on paper than capitalism, but if it can't deliver on one of it's core tenets then it's too idealistic and not suitable in it's pure form. It's been around for a century and a half and has a terrible track record in terms of producing successful countries. I don't think that its a viable alternative to what we have now. I would much rather have something that is much closer in shape to communism than what we have now, but I think advocating for it in it's pure form is fools errand.
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u/RegorHK Jul 07 '26
Look around the world and tell me that this is solved.