> Why not just seize the means of production?
I wonder if anyone has tried that before. I guess I will go read a history book and find out.
I wonder if anyone has tried that before. I guess I will go read a history book and find out.
You might eb surprised by the relatively steady rate of economic growth in the former Soviet bloc, contrary to popular stereotypes of a collapsing economy. The wiki article below is an OK summary as a) I don't want to demand you read a long paper on the subject, and b) I definitely don't want to advocates for the authoritarian central planning approach that prevailed under Stalin and for decades afterwards, at tremendous cost to human life, liberty, and dignity. Lefty types like myself often refer to that dreadful approach as state capitalism.
I cite it here to suggest that slow & steady growth might be better than highly disruptive unstable maximum growth. Of course, graphs of aggregate or per-capita GDP suffer from inaccuracy in that they conceal the distribution of economic benefits; as we know you can have a country that's very rich on paper and still has catastrophic poverty problems when you dig farther down into the data. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to easily synthesize data on distribution, economic mobility, the value of public goods, and so forth within a simple metric. Perhaps using multiples of the median rather than currency units would be a better yardstick, but I'm not an econometrist.
In these terms, what if capitalism is simply the natural outcome of x amount of freedom? Therefore, shifting away from capitalism means shifting toward either anarchy or communism (even if both of those options are far away in absolute distances).
This makes it hard to discuss things calmly and rationally, of course: Few people want actual anarchy, and few people want actual communism, but a move in either direction is a move toward one of them, even if it's not intended to go all the way. And if you do move one way or the other, some of those few people who do want to go all the way will try to capitalize (ha) on the opportunity.
Incidentally, this may be an argument for leaning more toward capitalism, i.e. toward less state control: because people as a whole will never agree on a single course of action, and because there will always be those among us who want to achieve more power and wealth for themselves at others' expense, leaning toward less state control reduces the potential damage and power/wealth accumulation that "rogue" actors can achieve.
Or, to put that another way, it reveals an inherent weakness of leaning toward more state control: that power corrupts, and humans desire power, therefore using the force of law to concentrate power in the hands of fewer people (ultimately backed by the use of force, as all government power is) results in more corruption, and therefore results in more suffering for those not in power. Capitalism certainly causes suffering as well, as the robber barons demonstrated many years ago, but at least that suffering is not enforced by the state--it merely arises opportunistically, and each instance is temporary and localized, not permanent and universal.
Of course, globalism greatly increases the scale of that localization, which demonstrates that theories about economics, government, etc. must be revised and kept current with the times. Our governments and economies are largely built upon ideas whose foundations were laid centuries ago, before any of today's technologies could have even been conceived of. For example, the American Founders could not have foreseen the kinds of rapidly changing, global corporations that exist today, and so we should expect their ideas to have some vulnerabilities which may be exploited by newer technology (to think in infosec terms).
Anyway, if you are wanting to move away from capitalism and not toward anarchy, you necessarily are moving toward less freedom and more state control. I think the important point to note is that state control of economic means cannot be isolated from other facets of life. It necessarily influences all other parts of life, for the economy is that from which human sustenance flows.
To look at it another way, capitalism allows for greed, which has very negative effects--but it also accounts for greed, which is part of human nature, and which motivates. Specifically, it accounts for it by allowing everyone to be motivated by it. In contrast, giving the state more control concentrates the greed in fewer people, by law. And I think it's better to allow the evil of greed to be evenly distributed (which does not guarantee the even distribution of wealth, health, or happiness, but allows it to be pursued), than to use the force of law to concentrate it in fewer people, expecting them to rein it in for the sake of the greater good, because that fails to account for human nature--it's essentially a GIGO system.
Food for thought. :)
It's far more then the mysterious criticism above deserved as an answer and the "criticism" of this comment goes the same way. There is a certain fear in left Utopism from the realization of what you've described. That fear is being drowned in endless derivations of what already failed in hope to cloud the meta problem.
To me, it's a wasted effort. This energy all those bright young people invest there could be directed towards coming up with something really new or at least making what we have more social. I hope they'll get there one day.
> To me, it's a wasted effort. This energy all those bright young people invest there could be directed towards coming up with something really new or at least making what we have more social. I hope they'll get there one day.
Indeed. This seems to be the troubling outcome of their long-term efforts in academia. It often seems like humanity is doomed to repeat the horrors of history, not only because our memories are so fragile, but because there are always a few dedicated to systematically erasing them. What a tragic waste of human resources. We could stand on the shoulders of giants, but instead we are pulled back into the crab bucket.
Keep fighting the good fight, my friend. :)
Wow, project much? I don't see that argument made in his comments, nor is it evidenced in the comments of others. Considering that I drew attention to the authoritarian pitfalls of communism and their destruction of 'life, liberty and dignity' before you joined the thread, your complaints about systematic erasure are baseless. Perhaps you didn't bother reading the comments you were replying to; I hope not, since the alternative possibility is that you were engaged in deliberate mischaracterization.
I greatly enjoyed your analysis and appreciate the time you spent making it, but I reject this premise as a matter of theory. The intent of communism was to create a distributed system of governance in which workers would delegate some of their number as administrators, who were subject to recall at any time and who were expected to both legislate and administrate. These conditions obtained in the USSR for a short time after the 1917 revolutions but fell apart under two pressures: the Russian civil war, in which dispossessed aristocrats and armies from other countries teamed up to attack the new worker's state, necessitating total mobilization of the economy for war; and following Lenin's death, Stalin's seizure of power and exile of Trotsky. Stalin, as we know, went on to purge political enemies left and right, and then implement an appallingly cynical pact with Hitler to carve up Poland. (In contrast, Trotsky and Lenin had hoped to systematize the Russian revolution and then support similar uprisings in Germany, France, and other industrial powers of the time.)
Clearly there was something structurally wrong about the way the Russians implemented their scheme of governance that made it vulnerable to authoritarian takeover. I'm not an expert, but my personal take is that in both Russia and to some extent in China, the combination of a primarily agrarian economy and the lack of a democratic or capitalistic tradition made authoritarian subversion far more likely; Marx was correct about the necessity of a primarily industrialized society as a necessary precondition for communism, and he would have pointed to the capital-intensive nature of modern agribusiness in the US as the inevitable consequence of same. You might be surprised o learn that prior to his exily Trotsky had been engaged in a battle of ideas with Stalin where Trotsky was arguing for the maintenance of markets in grain and agricultural equipment because he considered market mechanisms superior to central planning and much more likely to reflect the goals of the people doing the work. Had his advice been heeded, at least one disastrous famine might have been avoided.
Anyway, if you are wanting to move away from capitalism and not toward anarchy
But anarchy is the end goal of communism - the withering away fo the state, and its replacement by voluntary mutualism, abundance through industrial production, and an equitable distribution of time with the goal of minimizing work and maximizing freedom. This is anarchy in the definitional sense of 'without rulers' as opposed to the propagandistic sense of general mayhem and disorder. The internet qua self-routing persistent network was/is anarchic in many respects; sadly I don't have a general theory of distribution v. resource concentration that allows for concentrations of resources for industrial production without concentrations of authority or its proxies - yet.
Apologies if this seems nitpicky. but to begin from the premise that communism is about increasing state control without acknowledging the explicit aim (in the Communist Manifesto, no less) of deconstructing state power undermines your whole argument, notwithstanding your many correct observations.
Well, I see that you wrote this response after your others, so I guess you realized I wasn't talking about you earlier. :) I also appreciate your thoughtful response.
> but I reject this premise as a matter of theory.
And I, yours. :)
> The intent of communism was to create a distributed system of governance in which workers would delegate some of their number as administrators, who were subject to recall at any time and who were expected to both legislate and administrate.
This is the fundamental problem with communism, which I addressed in my first comment: its theories do not work in practice, because they do not account for the realities of human nature. Therefore, it is GIGO: theory is built upon incorrect hypotheses, and when put into practice, it leads to poor results. The intentions of medieval alchemists are irrelevant, because their theories were wrong. In the same way, the intentions of Marx, et al are irrelevant; what matters is end results. And the end results are 100 million dead people in the 20th century, as well as significant suffering among those who survived. In contrast, capitalistic nations have achieved prosperity and liberty far beyond any others in human history.
It would be one thing to advocate communism 150 years ago, but now we have real data proving that communism produced more human suffering than any other ideology in history. There is no excuse for supporting it now. It's not much different than claiming that Earth is flat when we have circumnavigation and photographs from orbit.
> Clearly there was something structurally wrong about the way the Russians implemented their scheme of governance that made it vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.
I think every form of governance is vulnerable to authoritarian takeover. The best defense against it is a strong constitution, but even that is vulnerable if it can be amended, or if it outlives its society's respect for it.
Again, this is a matter of human nature: humans desire power, and there will always be those who will strive to achieve it at others' expense. Therefore the best way to mitigate authoritarianism is to compartmentalize to reduce the potential authority that can be accumulated. This, of course, is not generally compatible with communism. In theory, it could be, because free people can freely enter agreements and pool resources. But communism only works in theory at a large scale, and that necessarily means enforcement, not liberty--and by so doing it sows the seeds of its own destruction. Humans are not machines, yet they are the "workers" of communism, and communism destroys its workers, and thereby itself.
> You might be surprised o learn that prior to his exily Trotsky had been engaged in a battle of ideas with Stalin where Trotsky was arguing for the maintenance of markets in grain and agricultural equipment because he considered market mechanisms superior to central planning and much more likely to reflect the goals of the people doing the work.
But markets are not communism.
> Had his advice been heeded, at least one disastrous famine might have been avoided.
Or, had communism not been enacted in the first place, over 100 million lives could have been saved. I don't know where you stand on this, but I don't subscribe to the "you must break a few eggs to make an omelet" theory. Those deaths can never be justified, especially not in the name of communistic trial-and-error.
> But anarchy is the end goal of communism - the withering away fo the state...This is anarchy in the definitional sense of 'without rulers' as opposed to the propagandistic sense of general mayhem and disorder.
As I mentioned in another comment, that is not stateless. The system does not function, does not even exist, without rulers.
> and its replacement by voluntary mutualism,
There is nothing voluntary about it, because it's enforced by the state.
> abundance through industrial production
"Abundance" is, not to be rude, but a useless platitude, a distraction, and begging the question. It's entirely theoretical, and the theory was completely disproven by the 20th century. Again, intentions and theory don't matter--only results matter.
> and an equitable distribution of time
What is equitable is necessarily defined by an entity, which is the state.
> with the goal of minimizing work
The goals are decided by the state. The state is not a computer program--it is human beings, who have different opinions, different goals, are greedy, etc.
> and maximizing freedom
Communism is incompatible with freedom, because the system necessarily requires compliance. Compliance != freedom.
The real question is, freedom as defined by whom? The answer is, as the 20th century demonstrated, as defined by the Party, whose members live in luxury, while the People live in squalor--the opposite of all the promises they made to the people.
But communism isn't supposed to work that way, right? Theoretically, the people in charge are all good and selfless and fair and experts in their fields who apply their knowledge impartially to benefit all people equally. But in practice it results in unprecedented evil and suffering, therefore it's a disproven theory.
> The internet qua self-routing persistent network was/is anarchic in many respects
The low-level protocols (theory) are anarchic. The network (practice) is not. Without, e.g. ARIN, ICANN, etc, the Internet as we know it would not exist. Someday there might come to be a usable kind of mesh network with automatic addressing, routing, and naming, but of course, such a system would necessarily be vulnerable to DoS attacks. TANSTAAFL.
> sadly I don't have a general theory of distribution v. resource concentration that allows for concentrations of resources for industrial production without concentrations of authority or its proxies - yet.
I encourage you to not go down that road, friend. Don't waste your time, falling into the same trap that Marx, et al did. It would be like trying to create one enormous computer to take the place of every computer on the Internet. Distributed, federated systems work, the same way that markets and individual liberty work. Build on that, stand on the shoulders of giants; don't go backward into the crab bucket.
Or, another way to look at it is, we already have such a theory: it's called capitalism. It is not perfect, but nothing is, and by impinging upon it, you necessarily increase state control, reduce individual liberty, and increase vulnerability to authoritarianism.
These problems are political, not economic. They are people problems, not resource management problems. To fix these problems you must fix people, which is ultimately impossible. The best we can do is try to create good, selfless people, who make the system good from the bottom, up.
I've never met you, so I'm not accusing you of having this trait, but: don't have the hubris to think that you can create a general theory to "solve" economics and society and governance. Such a task is beyond anyone. The closest we have ever come is to do the opposite: to compartmentalize and allow individuals to freely associate and govern themselves, to the extent practical; to allow each group to choose the systems most appropriate for their circumstances, and bargain freely with other groups, rapidly iterating freely, borrowing good ideas and discarding bad ones.
This is even more important because of technology. For millennia, technology changed very little, and everything happened very slowly. Just in the last 100 years, the pace has increased by orders of magnitude, and it appears to be continuing to do so. Whether it will ever plateau, no one knows. So while ideas and theories conceived hundreds of thousands of years ago could be valid for a long time, that is no longer the case. The pace of change is now so fast that the useful life of any such theory is far shorter than we expect. The most effective theories will be ones that operate on a small scale, not a universal one.
> Apologies if this seems nitpicky. but to begin from the premise that communism is about increasing state control without acknowledging the explicit aim (in the Communist Manifesto, no less) of deconstructing state power undermines your whole argument, notwithstanding your many correct observations.
No, it's not nitpicky, it misses my point: that communism is fundamentally flawed. Your argument is undermined by your not recognizing that explicit aims are irrelevant--what matters is only results. Early attempts at flying machines failed; it does not matter that the explicit aim of their inventors was to fly. Their aerodynamic theories were disproven, and in the same way, communism has been.
It's false that it deconstructs state power, because it does not exist without state power--it merely reforms and repurposes it. To say that it deconstructs state power is to misrepresent it, and this is what the "anarchists" do to obscure their real intentions. This is how the communists manipulated masses of people into thinking that they were on their side, when what they really wanted was to replace the government and take power for themselves.
That they just want to help; that they want to be fair; that they are altruistic; that it will work this time; that they know how to do it--it's all a big lie, and it always was, full of hubris that men could effectively be gods, omnipotent, solving every problem, making everything optimal.
100 million people dead--that's the truth.
If after my clarifying that you still disagree, please explain, otherwise what's the point of saying so?
>Communism means more state control of people, capitalism means less.
In comparison to what? Eachother? Because western-europe has more control than the US, china has more control than western-europe (and let's not pretend china isn't capitalist). These are economic systems and are seperate from political systems.
Yes, that is the point I tried to make with all those paragraphs.
> These are economic systems and are seperate from political systems.
I directly addressed this in the penultimate full paragraph.
> and let's not pretend china isn't capitalist
It depends on how you define "capitalist." Some industries in China are state-controlled--is that capitalist? Is "capitalist" 0% state control, or < 100% state control? How does China's capitalism compare with capitalism in the rest of the world?
> It still is not correct
I realize that you're not the first person I replied to, nor the last, but I wish you would say why you think I'm wrong, because otherwise what's the point of saying so?
The quote I used to have an example of what I think was not correct.
The problem is your reasoning is based on these 'wisdoms' that aren't actually real facts or which are simply misunderstood, for example:
> toward either anarchy or communism
Communists and anarchists have the same end goal, these two 'groupings' are one and the same in the end.
> which is part of human nature
Is there such a thing as a fixed human nature? Our strength is that we adapt.
>It depends on how you define "capitalist." Some industries in China are state-controlled--is that capitalist? Is "capitalist" 0% state control, or < 100% state control?
There is no state in communism so that would not be a good measure.
Then you seem to imply that communism is full on state control while the opposite is true and communism (and anarchism) stands for a stateless and classless society. A country that is full authoritarian is just that, authoritarian, regardless of what mix of state-ownership of the economy is involved. Your whole post is more of an argument against authoritarianism than anything else in my opinion.
This is what communists always say: "Communism is just misunderstood and has been poorly implemented. We'll get it right this time." 100 million people in the 20th century say otherwise--well, they would, if they were alive to do so, but they were killed by communism.
I'll try to be concise:
1. Communism and anarchy are not the same thing, because in communism, sharing is not optional.
2. Communism is not stateless, because the laws are enforced to enact communism, and whatever entity enforces the laws is the state.
I guess you're thinking that communism is "the people" rather than "the state," but that is a false distinction, because whichever of the people dissent are forced to comply by the other people, i.e. the state.
This is like saying that there is no "state" in the United States, because it is "of, by, and for the People." However, this is a false distinction, because the state is not the People, rather it is authorized by the People, and its powers are delegated to it by the People. It remains a distinct entity.
3. Therefore, anywhere there is a government, there is a state. The only stateless society would be total anarchy, like nomads roaming the plains thousands of years ago. Even then, they had tribes, which were essentially mini-states. So to claim that communism is stateless is essentially playing semantic games.
4. You said, "Communists and anarchists have the same end goal, these two 'groupings' are one and the same in the end." This is interesting, because most of (if not all of) the "anarchists" we see today are actually thinly veiled communists. They advocate anarchy to destroy the existing society, hoping to then create a new communist state afterward. But you seem to think that communists and anarchists are the same because you think that both are advocating for a stateless society (which is not the case). So we agree on your conclusion, but apparently for different reasons.
5. Communism is not classless. Whoever is in charge is in a class above the rest.
> Your whole post is more of an argument against authoritarianism than anything else in my opinion.
Yes, it is--and communism is authoritarian.