We need only look at the Soviet Union to see how that turned out.

We're at a similar brink, though via dissimilar circumstances. While we properly are looking for ways to repair and improve, I hope that there is a strong resurgence of both Democratic and Capitalist principles. The alternative, as some are leaning towards, has a well-documented trajectory. It would condemn us to inferiority.

Just look at any other developed country in the world to see more reasonable social welfare programs

However the neoliberalism, deregulation and privatization (good ideas in itself) started by Reagan-Thatcher-IMF swung the pendulum too far after 40 years.

No one is suggesting collectivization of farms, central planning, high defense spending at the expense of low consumption = Soviet style socialism/war communism. Rather something close to New Deal - Eisenhower era 'socialism' with stronger labour force participation, more state regulation and taking on new monopolies (Google?).

For all its horrors and atrocities, the Soviet economy grew, and worked. Oh, not very well. But better than 0% growth. In 1910 the average Russian was an illiterate peasant. In 1980 the average Russian was a literate urban dweller with electricity and indoor toilets on their floor with twice the life expectancy of their great-grandparents.

This is, again, not intended as a defence of that monstrous system. It can be condemned on purely moral grounds alone, in my opinion. And it was not as efficient by most analyses, either. Still, I bring it up because, as a counter-example, it complicates both of the commonly made assertions mentioned in the article: that poverty hasn't decreased in any meaningful sense, and that the capitalist system is the only means of greater than 0% growth in material production.

The Soviet Union had a lot of problems that prevented the people there from the life they deserved. There were many monkey businesses from the US side, too.

Gorbachev tried to fix it and steer the system from a shitty corrupted communism to a more western socialism. Unfortunately for him the russians and honestly the rest of the world, he failed.

Remember it's never either this or that. The best system takes the good part from every attitude. The rigid, dichotomic attitude of the last century is the root of the problem, not communism or capitalism.

Most pro-socialist talk in the US today is probably talking about a market economy with a better social safety nets for the regular population (at the cost of the wealthy), something like the Nordic model[3], not a re-imagined Soviet Union.

There's no way any discussion of Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Whateverism on the internet will bear any fruit today. No one even knows what they're talking about.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

The main point where I will agree with you is that USSR and FORCED anything is wrong. But what would be so wrong in expanding and evolving the cooperative model and letting workers owning their companies become the norm? To me it is all about making that the more efficient way to run a company, so people do it voluntarily. This could be accomplished by changing some of the laws regarding liability, taxation etc to reflect their intended purpose (or by going full way to corporate personhood and making something like a transnational impossible, i.e. if you want to do business in that country, you need to get a "corporate passport"). The current US system is broken. USSR was broken. Let's try to mix and match and add new things. Marx was probably right in his diagnosis of the fatal tendency of capital to consolidate and turn free market capitalism into crony capitalism. The efficient solution to this seems to be the german, scandinavian, canadian mixture of the two. Heck, even china on the more dystopian side "works" because they combine the two

The time after the Berlin wall fell is one of neo liberalism, privatizations, destruction of civil and social rights etc. And my thesis is, that this is not just by accident but due to a lack of competition in the systemic field.

The autocratic systems that called themselves socialist turned out to be so elitist and corrupt in their core that people are so afraid of going anywhere near it they will go full circle and come back on the other side.

In the US even centrist social democrats are labled socialists, people we Europeans would call a moderate conservative..

You can have a mixed economy with a lot more socialism than the US and still have a great society (see Europe for examples).

Now the Soviet Union was pretty horrible, and it’s a shame we’ve decided that it should be the poster child / cautionary tale for any socialist policy in a mixed economy. It’s a shame because I think the Soviet Union was actually a poster child for some things far worse than, and not necessarily intrinsic to, careful application of socialist policies:

- Command economy where production was governed by a combination of ideology and information systems (human and technological) that were comically ill-equipped to attempt such a thing.

- Horrible autocratic leadership. I’m open to the possibility that an economy, past some hypothetical ratio of socialism, results uniformly in autocracy. But... in the Soviet Union’s case, I think we need to consider the proud, nearly homogeneous, legacy of horrible autocratic rule and horrible living conditions in Russia.

But maybe we will soon have the IT capability to efficiently run a command economy. Imagine a world in which Amazon captures an even larger share of global sales... eventually handling the vast majority of all economic transactions: Amazon insurance payments to Amazon networks of doctors. Homogeneously decent quality inexpensive Amazon Basics cookware, clothing, televisions. Amazon News Network. How would that be different than a command economy?

Maybe no one corporation would ever capture anything like the full economy. But maybe an oligopoly of corporations could...

I actually think we need to figure out some form of (partial) socialism that is compatible with a democratic society, because the capitalist economic end-game starts to looks rife with potential for exploitation. If Amazon and Walmart carve up the world’s economy and resources, I want damn sure I can have equal representation in electing their leadership.

I think what I would advocate is a third type of system that isn’t capitalism or heavy handed state communism- but as you point out the same criticisms I made of really existing capitalism can be applied to other systems as well.

I wish I had a simple, concise answer to what we ought to do.

Workers unions in socialist countries were basically illegal, there was only one legally allowed union pretty much. In the Soviet Union the role of labour unions were mostly for the state to resolve interpersonal problems, and in theory to allow the state to receive feedback from employees to optimize production, but not in practice due to dysfunctions because of the broken political and economic framework.