China at one time tried to move towards a social economic system. It was optimistically labeled their 'Great Leap Forward.' We can debate whether it was socialism or communism, but it's irrelevant. And indeed during this time there was little to nothing in the way of lingering and emotional poetry being widely shared bemoaning the conditions of work and the lesser relevance of the individual. And that's because people had more pressing matters. Some 30,000,000 - 50,000,000 Chinese starved, to death, in a period of about 4 years. That is upwards of 5% of the country. To put a face to those numbers, imagine every individual you've ever seen or known. And now imagine 1 out of every 20 of them starving to death in the next 4 years.
The current huge progress in China has been because they've become a capitalist nation in every way except name. Capitalism does not create utopias. It results in massive inequality, and there will always be a demand for the worldwide lowest common denominator of labor costs. But at the same time it creates a system where individuals can achieve immense success through their own merit and one where you don't have people dying of starvation.
The point of this is that you can't compare what we have to utopia. It's almost certainly literally impossible to achieve utopia with our current resources and technology. Instead you need to compare what we have to what else we could realistically have. And the current system is pretty bad. It just happens to be better, by a pretty wide margin, than every other system we've been able to consider and trial.
The current huge progress in China has been because they've become a capitalist nation in every way except name. Capitalism does not create utopias. It results in massive inequality, and there will always be a demand for the worldwide lowest common denominator of labor costs. But at the same time it creates a system where individuals can achieve immense success through their own merit and one where you don't have people dying of starvation.
The point of this is that you can't compare what we have to utopia. It's almost certainly literally impossible to achieve utopia with our current resources and technology. Instead you need to compare what we have to what else we could realistically have. And the current system is pretty bad. It just happens to be better, by a pretty wide margin, than every other system we've been able to consider and trial.