If we had Communism 200 years ago, we would still have smart phones and internet and penicillin, but they would be better and probably would have happened decades earlier.
edit: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould,
idk capitalism was legit progressive at one point. it really was revolutionary
Capitalism ceased to be a progressive force as soon as the Paris workers declared the Commune of 1871.
I could definitely be convinced that a progression thru capitalism is necessary step in the evolution of human societies. Like, its just impossible to skip it entirely. And the very early stages of capitalism was legit better than feudalism and monarchy, at least it gestured towards having a sort of meritocracy.
I could also be convinced that capitalism and the evils of labor exploitation were necessary to get the materials to build a modern/technologically advanced society, too. Strip mining mountains and dying of black lung for the copper ore to build the wires for our computers might have only happened under the threat of poverty that capitalism uses to forces humans to work their entire lives.
But I can also imagine all of the same technological advancements happening under communism, but just the exploitation of natural resources being turned down ten fold. We still mined copper, or whatever, but much slower and safer. Cell phones are developed, but because they aren't designed with planned obsolescence built in, each person only buy one or two in their entire lives/they are much easier to upgrade, etc.
nearly every invention that anyone cares about and/or people consider "good" happened because some person was independently wealthy enough to just dick around and follow their interest. The most you could say is that some people were paid to research/dick around in some research lab somewhere, but they are just working a job at that point. The profit motive of capitalism is completely removed from that; a research lab can be funded any number of ways.
If that's true then why did the soviet union copy foreign car designs?
