Guardrails are only enforceable by the state. Without the state to smash capitalism and enforce guardrails against corruption and the power of greed, capitalism and authoritarianism will always step in to fill the power vacuum.

This is why communism has always failed within a few months to a few years of initiation: lack of guardrails and laws that are effectively enforced against capitalism or authoritarianism. It’s why every “communist” state in history devolved into an authoritarian, anti-communist political structure very, very quickly. Hell, even in Russia communism was effectively dead by 1918.

We are so close to having the technology to implement direct participatory democracy (A.K.A., political communism), where things like presidents and premiers and politicians in general just don’t exist, and only minor functionaries and coordinatinative councils remain to carry out the people’s directives.

What is still needed, however, is a highly educated and literate population that values education, facts, and meritocracy - thereby suffocating conservatism and strangling it to death - and for that population to have an exceedingly tiny level of economic inequality, such that the wealth is returned properly into the hands of the Working Class that created it, and most people can then acquire the mental headspace to focus on more than just daily survival needs (as in, focus on community-level or even nation-level subjects).

A strong state is not necessarily a dangerous one. What makes ours dangerous is that power is concentrated at the top, with those who have money (capitalists) calling the shots. A distributed, citizen-directed state that is utterly immune from money and power hierarchies can be built that will only ever feel oppressive to those who are inherently abusive, greedy, and malicious.

we don’t have capitalism.

🤦 To say that is to say you don’t have even a Wikipedia-level understanding of capitalism.

People think there’s one trick, one system, one thing that will fix shit.

No, people don’t think that.

Nothing will but work, time, effort, good judgement.

Correct.

What worked yesterday, won’t work tomorrow, at least without updating it.

Correct.

I don’t want to put in another fucking ism, I want to buckle the fuck down and fix the shit that’s wrong.

People who don’t learn or develop theory can buckle down all they want, but they’re not going to get very far because they don’t understand anything.

It is a lot of work, time, and effort, and some of that is necessarily intellectual work, if you actually want to succeed in changing the world. Otherwise it’s like saying you want to be able fly without developing theories of physics, aerodynamics, and internal combustion engines.