Socialism Requires a Dictator | Hacker News Reader

Socialism Requires a Dictator

fee.org

8 pointsandrenth17 comments

No half-educated modern socialist thinks that the Soviet Union was a successful implementation of communism, much less that it has anything to do with the aims of the modern socialist movement. To be sure, there are several distinct problems faced by non-free-market economies, some of which the Soviets demonstrated through their dramatic failures, but simply pointing at these challenges doesn't support the thesis that socialist systems are automatically despotic.

Particularly for a definition of "modern" that goes as far back as 1937, when Trotsky published "The Revolution Betrayed".

I saw a video on the history of "politically correct" recently. It originated from communist groups, the ones that supported the Soviet Union no matter what were the politically correct ones.

So if there is no autocrat, how do the collective allocate resources?

Lots of possible ways. Peer review is one. It's how resources are allocated in science. If you want to do a project in science you write a grant proposal. Other scientists evaluate your proposal and if your proposal is scored more highly than others it gets funded. Obviously, peer review, like any democratic process, is not without flaws (and many scientists have written rants about how the reviewers of their rejected proposals were idiots), but it works reasonably well in practice.

This is going to be a very slow system at the very least. You don't steer a ship by a committee and this is for a reason.

A trivial answer would be; through systems overseen by elected representatives, roughly the same system that allocates state resources in the U.S.. There's more to be allocated, and allocating resources correctly becomes vastly more important, but the problem is the same.

Any place you can point to where this was implemented and works or worked?

The Scandinavian socialist countries are a step in the right direction, but no, not really. To some degree, this is because communism is a new idea that has had relatively few chances at implementation, and their implementors were either immediately corrupt or had undue faith in themselves. But also because there are fairly major unsolved problems with letting elected representatives manage resources, as abundantly demonstrated by capitalist democracies. And likewise, there are manifest (social) problems with letting corporations manage resources; humanity has yet to find a solution for governing that reliably "works," IMHO.

The Scandinavian countries are not socialistic. The means of production and ownership of capital is still in private hands.

If you think the problem is the same you simply have no clue.

Following is written as opinion for legality reasons, verify claims by yourself.

@ altstar and colatkinson

Why do you think Sweden has been burnt down to the ground as a VERY successfull alternative (using social democracy) combining democracy (weaving in plutocracy/conservatism), socialism and capitalism. The Swedish model is more relevant now than ever before though at this time the think tanks (like Timbro) in Sweden has muddled the water about what the Swedish model actually is.

The next step upwards has allready been taken and it's not the immigration brought on by conservatives (who introduced the multicultural term in sweden) or social democrats failing to handle the zero (read; population) growth economy.

Keynes > Friedman the last regressive and his followers; Thatcher (who knew about the pedophilia ring in UK and did nothing) and Reagan.

* About Sweden burning, read up on the Swedish debt and when/how the majority was attained. * Yes, Sweden had a good position after WWII, however the progress of the nation started in the 1800 not second half of 1900. * Right now the battle for democracy over plutocracy is ongoing in EU, that is the real reason people supported Brexit - not the "new" grander template for effectively being a "modern" tax haven (nor the NWO). Without borders you canno't upkeep democracy - without economical sanctions (executive power) to back up political decisions (normative power) there simply is no actual democracy.

The first step is corporativism, the key to it is having a functioning democracy first (that means roots have to rise, aka shit will pass it's tipping point), where effected groups discuss and have influence over the executive side (how should a political decision come to life) of decisions that the goverment gets elected on and that those are actually followed.

In Sweden SN (Swedish industry representatives) broke that deal and ended the joint progress in that manner, that lead to more moderate policies and companies being overtaken of global gigants - shifting work from the nation and slowly, slowly deteriorating the quality brands. It also lead to value flowing out from Sweden at an increased rate, decreasing national monetaric value.

* Don't get me wrong trading is positive, it increases the incremental technological evolution until markets stagnate alot, but some areas are better kept up to ensure other markets function - by using societal efficient institutions - aka universal institutions. Solving the tragedy of the commons.

It should be pretty obvious by now that Marx had (partly) the right diagnosis, but did not really have a clue about the cure. That's understandable though. It's easy to say what's wrong about society.. harder to predict which fixes will work.

I think the closest we can come to the socialist ideals, is to have a free market economy, but have the ownership of capital be more distributed.

The government can not efficiently control the economy directly, at least not without some powerful, yet-to-be-invented, AI. The beauty of the free market is that it's basically an enormously powerful computer which, given the right conditions (relatively fluid markets, lack of monopolies, etc.), calculates the correct prices for goods and services for an efficient economy. Not utilizing that computer, without some equally good replacement, is doomed to fail.

But the government (and by extension - in a decent democracy - the people) can be a responsible owner of capital. It requires some discipline, and low levels of corruption, but there are plenty of examples.

I do think less government involvement is a more ideal solution, but it requires better technology and better organization. I think the way going forward, is to create a harder separation between capital and income, create a system where capital more naturally tend to distribute evenly among people, and to improve the efficiency and quality of stock markets.

Ignoring the fact that this article is from a very biased source, it also shows a distinct lack of education. Marxists would argue that the capitalist system is a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." Most of the West does not have an autocratic political system, but one economic class does hold the vast majority of social and political power. The goal of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is to place the majority of the power in society in the hands of those who create that society's value through labor.

Also, there's a whole lot of Anarcho-Communists who really don't like the authoritarian left, but let's just ignore them because it makes it harder to associate Communism with imminent doom.

TL/DR: In this article, the FEE only does what it was created to do: tell us how socialism is a bad idea while liberal capitalism is a good one. No surprise here.

Liberalism is based on an egalitarian society, if that is not upkept it's plutocratic capitalism (aka aristocracy).

Liberalism capitalism is good, but not on all of the markets.

This is propaganda at worst. Misguided idealism at best.

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