Comment on Why do companies always need to grow?

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hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

what ideas exactly?

Well, let’s take 3 non-standard examples:

Yugoslavia nationalised industry and introduced worker self‑management after it broke away from Stalin and the USSR. Loads of collaboration with post-colonial Non-aligned Movement African nations that wanted to dabble in socialism but didn’t have a popular movement or resources or planning to back it. Taking refugee in capitalism, like China recently started to do as well, is what let thinks work for a time. Tito, however, was the only thing that held the county together, and once he was gone, the whole place collapsed slowly over a decade. There was no evidence that the “best” socialism in the region (best, as in least totally shit) was worth keeping on its own or valuable enough to try and keep.

Albania imposed strict state ownership, collectivised agriculture (the gulags are basically Woofing, yaay!), and a hard‑line Stalinist-style paranoia-fueled regime. It assigned jobs; no one not official given the job of “driver” by the state could operate a vehicle. And it fucking shows still to this day. Hoxha held the county together with fear alone because nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep.

Bulgaria did a decent job replicating Soviet central planning, collectivisation, and political control. It all sucked and the Yugoslavs loved to leverage economic disparity over them because it was so fucking bleak in Bulgaria for theor entire stint as socialists. Which is part of why Bulgaria is shitting on their neighbors now about EU accession, they finally have the advantage and a grudge that survived 40 years because of socialists caused economic disparity. They happily joined the EU a generation after realizing that nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep. But they have decent freeways now.

Despite three very different attempts to try socialism as a means to the end of communism, only Belgrade and it’s immediate suburbs really had a decent quality of life. Everyone else had a well-documented traumatizingly bad time.

And while I’ll happily admit that I haven’t needed a more than cursory remembrance of Marx since 2002, that literally billions of people have proven time and again that Marx’s ideas are pure fantasy, and that 19th century ideals about economies that have just stated industrialization are not needed in the 20th century any more than Adam Smith has been relevant once advertising manipulated simple supply and demand, because humans are not rational actors.

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