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,
Capitalism ceased to be a progressive force as soon as the Paris workers declared the Commune of 1871.