hehe, woah. I know quite a few socialists, but I don't think i have ever met a communist. Not a believer anyway. I don't think we will have the energy/time to really have an actual conversation on this point, I think it would take quite a bit!

Still I can't resist a couple of thoughts:

First I am not a defender that present capital systems are some kind of utopia, nor that we cannot do better, though I think it is quite tricky to create the kind of dynamic system of incentives, checks and balances in order to get good societal outcomes.... I think it is hard as heck to get right. And not claiming our present system has them.

But communism as a starting point seems problematic to me. For get the rah-rah I would rather be dead than be red attacks on the system. And (at least for me) forget for a moment about the moral sides of the systems, and what "ought" to be (whatever that means).

As a scientist, I think about political systems, societal systems as mechanisms that achieve certain outcomes. Then we can look at outcomes and judge systems that way. There are many negative outcomes you can point to against capitalism, and many I probably would not dispute ---- so probably not worth going down that route.

Still here are a few axioms that I think all systems must respect since all systems are constructed on top of human beings with a pretty known social tendencies. Here are three that come to mind for me when I think about communism as a basis for organanization:

(1) people are selfish. That's not the end of the story, I also think they can be selfless, and need a purpose bigger than themselves. But still most folks are quite driven to improve their own personal lot and the lot of their immediate family. one needs a system that accounts for this and indeed leverages it to reasonably good ends for society as a whole.

(2) people are tribal. I think about Tutsis and Hutus, but really anytime a large enough group is together we start creating cliques, clubs and such. Race is a natural division, but if we don't have that, we will find another. The primary way that an entire nation strongly bonds is when it finds itself as a whole in opposition to another nation.

The only organizations where people really strive for the betterment of all of humanity are religious organizations, or when humans feel very very secure in having all their needs met. Both are great aspirations to strive for, but seeing even one person "cheating" the system and gaining great benefit w/o hard work, will disillusion many around them. We have seen it many times across cooperatives of all sorts. Such societies can only function where all members are zealous believers not practical on the scale of a nation --- unless it is a nation of enlightened bodis or such.

(3) Society is crazy crazy crazy complex. Even just trying to marshal the energies of a single corporation in an effective way is far beyond any kind of centralized planning. I worked for years in the gov, and I have worked years within companies massive and small. I left gov being far less liberal than when I joined.

I do agree there are certain needs (like healthcare) where a simple capital system wont work well. Still large corporations work much much much better than government because the profit mechanism provides an effective way to divide and conquer the complex decision of how hundreds of thousand of individuals can work collectively in somewhat effective ways. Each VP, Executive VP, or first line manager is part of a system, where they are making local decisions about local people they know intimately about how to delegate power and authority and decision making in order to drive the whole company.

one simply cannot operate sizable org w/o a decomposable and independently testable measure of effectiveness. Now I think one can develop other kinds of incentive structures and get other kinds of outcomes. And I think real change comes when society can see such an objective the are willing to back. (e. g. like CO2 credits or such). But the idea that we can somehow manage from the middle, is really a non-starter.

Indeed all communist countries (except North Korea) have dramatically embraced market mechanisms, and minimized their use of central planning.

but anyway, i didn't mean to dive in the deep end.... it just does not seem a very workable starting point

Cheers!