I see this way too often here on Lemmy, so I want to post this. Starting a commune is legal in most countries. If you believe in communism, you can found a commune and show us all how great it is.
You lack money? Well, that is literally what stock markets and venture capitalists (capitalism) are created to solve. If you are ready for an IPO, you can sell shares to raise funds. If you are not, you can get Venture Capital in exchange for shares until you are ready for an IPO.
Getting rid of capitalism means you need to find a different way to obtain funding for new ventures. And if your system relies on government charity (some government board handing you money) or taking resources violently, than your system sucks.
Edit: I don’t mean that this is a replacement for full communist system. I mean this as a way to get some of the advantages while showing sceptics (like me) it can work and is better. A first step.
I trust the greed of rich people. If people are willing to pay for something, at least some will invest in it to profit off of it.
Also, unlike with a committee, I don’t need a majority of them to do so. That’s the advantage of the capitalistic solution, you don’t really need much trust.
There is one problem with this: what’s profitable and what’s beneficial for society do not necessarily align.
Am I saying that we should give corporations a free run of the country? No, we should legislate them until they look like a models of virtue comparatively to now.
But the smart way to do it is to align their greed with our interests. As an example, creating a carbon tax is much better then government trying to implements specific green initiatives. The corporate greed will find efficient and innovative way to reduce emissions compared to the heavy handed and inefficient regulations the governments do.
If that is not possible, then just legislate them normally. Or even make a government run/funded competitors. In Slovak republic, insurance companies are private except one that is government run and serves as a lowest bar that others have to compete with.
Let corporations do what they do best, which is optimizing the economy and let governments regulate what needs to be regulated.
One example where that doesn’t seem to work is public infrastructure. There is just no way to make this profitable and simultaneously provide a service that actually meets the needs of the public in terms of availability and price.
Did I say it always worked? IMO USA is definitely too capitalistic right now. There are things like healthcare, utilities, emergency services, infrastructure and many more that are better of government run (or as mentioned above, at least have government compete), either because it is impractical to have real competition in these areas or because they are so important it is better for them to be inefficient than cutting corners.
But making the leap from this to communism is ridiculous IMO. Gradual improvements to the system that we know works because we live in it is the way to go.
Socialism light? There’s a beginning point somewhere.
Sure, if you want to call it that. I like managed capitalism, since it captures that you should regulate what needs to be regulated and not more.
We used to actually do that.