> Communism probably led to faster investments in education and healthcare than would otherwise have occurred in countries like Romania and Bulgaria.
I think much more than healthcare and education, investment in infrastructure, industry and research were somewhat "redeeming" features of the brutal totalitarian regimes in Romania at least.
More to the point, most ground-breaking research, especially computing and rocketry, has actually come from the state in the capitalist USA, with private capital only serving with mass-marketing of those technologies once proven out and gifted from the public to the private space.
Also, a non-capitalist society would not be investor-less. It would instead spread investment opportunities to vastly more people, and would encourage them to band together and pool their investment in worker-owned enterprises. This is in stark contrast to the totalitarian state capitalism of the so-called "communist countries".
> I think much more than healthcare and education, investment in infrastructure, industry and research were somewhat "redeeming" features of the brutal totalitarian regimes in Romania at least.
Investment in industry, infrastructure and research are not lacking in capitalist countries with the relatively minimal conditions of security of property, freedom to contract and rule of law. The Communist investment in education is just unparalleled at the same level of output per capita. Ditto for healthcare. The CCP killed more Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution than the Japanese did during their invasion of China and they still look good in terms of lives saved by virtue of bringing very basic healthcare everywhere.
> More to the point, most ground-breaking research, especially computing and rocketry, has actually come from the state in the capitalist USA, with private capital only serving with mass-marketing of those technologies once proven out and gifted from the public to the private space.
Basic research is definitely a strength of government. Development isn't. You need the R and the D and private industry is much, much better at the latter than any government ever has been.
> Also, a non-capitalist society would not be investor-less. It would instead spread investment opportunities to vastly more people, and would encourage them to band together and pool their investment in worker-owned enterprises. This is in stark contrast to the totalitarian state capitalism of the so-called "communist countries".
There's nothing to stop workers forming cooperatives under capitalism. Worker-owned enterprises abound in law and accounting and used to be common in banking. The cooperative movement is going on 200 years old. We even have a reasonable explanation for its failure in that employee owned businesses have a disincentive to expand as they maximise profit per employee not total profit.
>There's nothing to stop workers forming cooperatives under capitalism.
That's true, but it misses the point of the anti-capitalist critique, which is a critique of capitalism, the unconscious structuring of society for particular ends. When anti-capitalists criticize capitalism, they do not criticize individual capitalists, but the system in which there is predominant waged labour, alienation, commodity fetishism, and exploitation. Forming a cooperative is an admirable thing to do, but to suggest it alone is by no means a response to criticism of capitalism, a particular social formation, because the suggestion is an individualized one. It would be impossible to bring everyone on earth under cooperatives in a capitalist society.
Analogy: "Just live in a safe neighborhood" is no solution to murder, or its structural causes. Just one individual being murdered is sufficient to show the problems of the system and the individualized solution.
I still feel it is important to raise the awareness of the idea of worker cooperatives as a viable alternative to capital-owned corporations, since a lot of people think anti-capitalism implies something like larger state involvement and being anti-market.
But you are absolutely right, forming cooperatives under the current system will never be a viable path to removing the entrenched from power. It is simply a vision of what a working alternative to capitalism could look like.
I think much more than healthcare and education, investment in infrastructure, industry and research were somewhat "redeeming" features of the brutal totalitarian regimes in Romania at least.
More to the point, most ground-breaking research, especially computing and rocketry, has actually come from the state in the capitalist USA, with private capital only serving with mass-marketing of those technologies once proven out and gifted from the public to the private space.
Also, a non-capitalist society would not be investor-less. It would instead spread investment opportunities to vastly more people, and would encourage them to band together and pool their investment in worker-owned enterprises. This is in stark contrast to the totalitarian state capitalism of the so-called "communist countries".