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Comment by peisistratos | Hacker News Reader

> a command and control society

If peacetime USA 2018 is not an industrialized command and control society, I don't know what is. The difference is all is geared towards the heirs who expropriate surplus labor time, instead of those of us who work and create wealth.

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> If peacetime USA 2018 is not an industrialized command and control society, I don't know what is.

I don't know if you're developing some difference between command economy and command society, but since you're talking about surplus labor I don't think so. The term command economy was developed to refer to soviet style socialist economy in the early days. Public ownership plus government allocation and production quotas.

It seems like a weird self own for a presumed leftist to say, "Oh yeah, capitalism is so bad we basically already have communism."

Some on the left consider both the US and the USSR to be capitalist (the term used for the latter is often "state capitalism"), not communist.

That's true, though I think mainly because of things that changed as the decades went along, but people were calling the USSR economy a "command" economy since nearly the beginning.

No, critics of the Bolsheviks, such as anarchists and left-wing communists, were warning against that since the revolution, and just a little time after people from other countries were doing the same, such as Emma Goldman in her article titled "There Is No Communism in Russia" from 1935.

I see. I was thinking of Goldman's earlier writings that more about the NEP, but I see that "There Is No Communism in Russia" has the distinction between nationalization and a true "public" ownership. (And it is true that most anarchist writing I've really just skimmed or read many years ago)

Very true, of course. I'd like to see less expropriation of labor effort, and more expropriation of unavoidable natural resource rents (as well as an institutional framework that's less vulnerable to rent-seeking in general!). But it's not clear that the radical left - even the 'pragmatic' radical left that's reflected by Jacobin Mag - meaningfully shares these policy goals.

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