There is no such thing as communism, socialism or capitalism. There are only problems we face, and policy solutions we propose.
Labels like Communism and Capitalism exist as mere conveniences. In reality, societies are nothing more than an accumulation of policies, designed to solve particular problems. Sometimes they are designed with some ideological impulse in mind, but the problems themselves are objective. And whether policy solutions work is also objective. Ideological impulses bare little on what works, and what does not.
Between each system, measures of success may differ. Capitalists might use gross domestic production as a measure of success, while Socialists might use inequality and standard of living as measures of success. Regardless, measures are just as open to scrutiny and criticism as the solutions that are proposed. Thus they too, are objective and are therefore independent of ideology.
What are your thoughts? In particular, I want to here what
@Ren and
@charlatan has to say.
'Ideologies' or
'Weltanschauung', or whatever you want to call them, typically aren't just 'labels' applied to arbitrary groupings of ideas and policies, but descriptors (albeit imperfect ones) for systems of thought which exhibit an internal logical accordance and help to structure the understanding and experience of the people who subsist within them.
There is, unfortunately, no getting 'out' of having some kind of 'ideology' or 'worldview' (or whichever of its many synonyms you wish to invoke), simply because the axioms we adopt have natural affinities with other ideas and perspectives, leading to the creation of the epistemic structures we might term 'ideologies' over time. Suggesting that 'having no ideology' is possible is like imagining that the fish can live outside the water, or the man outside the atmosphere - these are the physical substrates within which they exist, and ideologies are simply their epistemic analogues.
Suppose that you believe in 'evidence' - in doing so, you've already invoked all of the concepts upon which 'evidence' is founded: causality, the reliability of observation, the existence of an objective reality, &c. Before you even blink you are swimming within an ideological substrate which in this case we might call a 'scientific paradigm'.
I do not see the utility in pretending that 'ideologies' don't exist, or that we can avoid them - this just leads to the implicit acceptance of more subterranean and unquestioned ideologies like individualism, consumerism, or what have you. There is no 'ideological vacuum' to which you can retreat.
Even if you manage to divest 'capitalism' and 'socialism', say, of their political associations, and to utilise them as something like 'technologies of statecraft', you will still have to apply them from within the logical strictures of another, more basal ideology (otherwise how would you even have 'political goals'?).
The policy 'problems' you refer to are only 'problems' as such because the logical descision-making matrix within which we live has pumped out that answer. Indeed, if we engage in the counterfactual exercise of imagining scenarios whereby these aren't 'problems' at all, actually we find that the process is quite easy, and, again, ultimately ideological at bottom.
For instance, one of our 'policy problems' might be that half of the population are dying of plague. That's only a 'problem' if we value these lives; if we submit to the idea of living in states; if we submit to the idea of a social contract, &c. &c.
ad infinitum. We might just as easily say that we believe in Malthusian population controls and leave them be. The point is, however, that in
every case, the 'problems' are only construed as such because the unspoken, ideological substrate within which we live have deemed them as such, and that this substrate can
never be escaped.
