https://redfortyeight.com/?s=marxism+failure
Democratic Market Neo-communism
We have discussed this issue here many times but the author of this piece sees the basic point: the bolshevik era never produced any socialisms at all. The stalinist brand especially was simply a socialist imposter.
There is every possibility for real socialism and in an era of approaching climate calamity we can see that capitalism is coming to an even worse failure than fake socialism. We must figure out where fake socialism went wrong and create the real thing. Part of the problem lies in Marx’s mis-analyis of capitalism and then in his stages of production theory the prophecy of the coming of communism, which he failed to define. The result was that Stalin ended up being the definer. The coming of socialism is not historically invevitable: it must be defined and then created by free agents, not historical forces. We can see that Marx equated capitalism and markets but the two are not the same: we could have socialist/communist markets if we do it right.
Although the attacks of such as Mises are propaganda the latter had a point: a state bureaucracy cannot replicate the effects of markets with their mysterious ‘clearing’ mechanisms. Thus planning so far has failed to produce a viable socialism. This issue has evolved and the rise of computational models along with AI may well solve the problem but there is no reason why communism or we should say neo-communism shouldn’t have markets. We have created a model in our ‘democratic market neo-communism’ based on a Commons where a communist market uses shared resources under a license: this is not the same as state capitalism the issue of central control is bypassed. The result could easily produce a system as efficient as capitalism but without bureaucratic tyranny.
The thinking of Marx and marxists has captured the whole field and turned the whole experiment in socialism into inexorable failure. The arena is clogged with fallacious idiocy. The first step is to rethink the problem beyond the dogmatism of the legacy cadres.
In hindsight, with the heavy ideological fog of the Cold War behind us, it is obvious that the state-run industrial systems that both sides mislabeled socialist or communist were never working class governed democracies. So actually, socialism didn’t fail—it never existed. But that doesn’t explain why the powerful state-run industrial societies of the USSR, Eastern Europe, and China—that everyone falsely branded socialist—failed to thrive
Source: Why Did Socialism Fail?
1848+: The End(s) of History 