Capitalism vs. Communism

This place is triggering reflections on deeply-held beliefs I've been carrying for a long time. As someone who has spent their entire career working in marketing, perhaps I'm not in the best position to offer a critique on global capitalism, but I can't help thinking about it while beholding the legacy of communism here in Russia... I was told for so many years that these ideologies were diametrically opposed, but upon examining them up close, I see the same human frailties undermining them. Walking around in a newly liberalized Russian economy is making me question the many claims I heard decades ago about the inherent flaws of state-controlled markets... It's not that those claims were inaccurate, but I'm only now really understanding how steeped in cultural bigotry my perspective was. I grew up in Reagan's America, after all... The consequences of that I'm only now fully recognizing.

I find jingoistic patriotism truly appalling. It’s essentially thinly veiled-tribalism, and while it’s often couched in language that gives lip service to specific cultural values, there’s usually an inherent claim to superiority whenever someone talks about how great their country is. I especially find it distressing when Americans do it, because I am one, and I am acutely aware of the idiocies of American foreign policy over the course of the last 30 years. I believe that any close scrutiny of the US's involvement in Vietnam, El Salvador, NAFTA, Grenada, or Iraq reveals some absolutely heinous double-standards between my country's high-minded ideals and what it actually does outside of its borders. My country gives a lot of lip service to democracy and freedom and some very evolved idea, but too often its people ignore the actual reality of our country's actions in the world.... Mark Twain captured this sentiment perfectly in this quote from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court":

“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.”

I bring this up because I find myself thinking about America’s perspective on the cold war, two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. There’s a tendency in the United States to believe that “America won” the Cold War, that the swift dissolution of the Soviet Union from 1989 onwards somehow meant that America was triumphant, and that our country prevailed and our system is somehow superior. Unfortunately, it’s really not that simple. Yes, in the century-long struggle between communism and capitalism, capitalism has clearly proven to be a much more viable form of economic theory, and a far better basis for running the world's economy. It's much more rooted in essential truths about human nature. But any deep examination of the last twenty years, comparing and contrasting Soviet Communism and American capitalism, has to arrive at the conclusion that both of these systems have failed humanity in many ways. The free market may have won the battle between the Soviet Union and the West, but unfettered American corporate capitalism has an unsustainable trajectory, and is continually creating externalities that threaten the collective health of our societies and our shared environment. It remains to be seen how this kind of capitalism will play out. The global financial crisis of 2008 is a perfect example of how unregulated commerce is essentially redistributing wealth upwards to a handful of greedy, unchecked power brokers who have no interests to tend to but their own pocketbooks. The post-Soviet World-Bank initiated "structural adjustment programs" had similar results, where publicly owned enterprises were dismantled, privatizing profits in a way that ultimately undermined the collective economic health of Russia, affecting countless Russian citizens....

Hmmmm... I don't know where I'm going with this.... Winston Churchill's famous quote about democracy comes to mind: "...democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." While that comment is about political systems, I feel the same way about our economic systems. There has to be a better way. The dogmatic voices from nations like the USA and Soviet Union ruled the 20th century, as they used us all in a proxy war between the ideologies of capitalism and communism... I'm hoping for more pragmatic, reasoned voices to emerge over the course of the 21st, and hopefully, we'll stumble on a system that is more equitable for the billions of people we share this planet with...