This system was never completed because of the (US backed) coup by Pinochet.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/
In a capitalist system, if something looks like it's going to be a big economic hit people are ready to sell off other assets and pour billions of dollars into it. Under communism, there's a guy who doesn't want to lose funding for his department who might have more power than his rivals. To make a techie metaphor, it's why a lot of people have moved to the cloud: you can choose whatever resources you want on the fly, instead of having to battle IT.
To go off on a tangent, I think there's a huge false choice between "free market economic policy" and "bureaucratic centralized economies." If we could just create a market that has an incentive structure that buoys the poor up instead of pushes them down, it would be huge. People still buy and sell based on prices, but we introduce slightly different weighting.
So maybe we don't today need to work with the Department of Widget creation, but we need to hire lobbyists for the Senate Committee on the Widget Sector. I'm not prepared to say that informing/influencing/steak-dinnering the Senators' aides is per se better than having a nasty political fight in the Company Of The People.
The history of the US farm bill and food safety is a great example of how we don't have a genuine free market in the US. I don't argue for a free market, by the way. Regulation has done a great deal of good. It's just very important to speak with care about topics, and use words that are true to the reality.
Do we? Perhaps you do in the US. Where I live, Australia, it's true most of the noise from the echo chamber is about what sort of regulations to impose on markets. But if you stop and look, they are invariably markets that aren't functioning well. The classic things that we appear to be always arguing about are things like power, landline internet, and water. But that isn't a surprise - they are the things that tend towards monopoly, so the market for those things is always broken or teetering on the edge of broken. We are now seeing the same effect for internet search and social media, where again network effects drive the markets towards monopoly.
At the other end of the scale, here in Australia we've toyed with creating market's to solve political problems. One perennial problem in the driest continent on the planet is water. So they created a market based on virtual water, so rather go and haggling with your local pollie for water access right you have to buy it. It's been pretty successful from what I can tell, but now there are political stouches over how much virtual water there is. I guess that the water market could be viewed as yet more rules imposed by a central authority, as indeed could rules about regulating monopolies, and rules about truth in advertising and honouring warranties and the like. But I think that's miss leading. Rules about truth in advertising are really about setting up the conditions a market needs to flourish - equal access to information from the buyer and seller.
While politicking on those rules is indeed a discussion about rules being imposed by a central authority, the purpose of those rules is to enable efficient decentralised decision making, not about "how much centralization is appropriate"
I don't want to say you're wrong, and I don't want to admit I might be wrong. ;-)
>"Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to a rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort."
Nylon stockings were on par and better than silk stockings until they pushed silk stockings out of market. Then they became what we know them today - wear once or twice and buy new.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIR_(computer)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
The first one had pretty much high level language programming circa 1965 (Elbrus came later and iAXP432 much later). The second one used ternary logic which is closer to exp(0) and is more efficient.
The "products for people" innovation in USSR was to make sure that everyone has heated home - and heating was centralized in USSR (and now in Russia too), which made it much cheaper and affordable. It was in different direction and without pervasive advertising.
PS
Many inventions happened also before capitalism.
I grew in USSR (I was born in 1971 in Moscow) and I do not remember any scarcity of stockings.
I feel like capitalism is overly celebrated by those who benefit from it, to their detriment. The meritocracy is failing, capitalism is failing, and I’m concerned about will replace capitalism if we continue to brush off the harsh realities of its failings.
we are also concerned about capitalism's replacement. except we fear the continued suppression of market action to lead to authoritarian totalitarianism because the regulatory state appears to have been captured by oligarchs.
Not a failure of capitalism. If you make building more housing illegal the price of the existing stock will get bid up. Remember, Tokyo has grown 50% in population over the last two decades and rent and house prices have been basically flat throughout. Zoning makes housing expensive, not capitalism.
The number of available apartments on the market has declined ever since that law was introduced.
I've lived in a european city without rent control and mostly even without zoning laws (less than 20% of kiel are affected by Bebaungsplänen) and yet rent was even higher and supply even lower. Hundreds of hotels, lots of luxury apartments, but for the average citizen, nothing got built.
Capitalism doesn't optimize for producing the most supply, it optimizes for increasing the value of your assets. And if the best way to do so is by artificially limiting the supply, that's exactly what's gonna happen.
This is very well said.
Here’s an article specifically talking about how fashion brands destroy their own products to drive up prices: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/17/17852294/fashion-bra...
This is the kind of stuff that makes me think society is in late stage capitalism.
Capitalism seems to consistently do the former phenomenally well and make the latter catastrophically worse.
I think that's why we keep having absurd arguments about "the poor having microwaves" while we live in a grotesquely unequal society.
Also mid 1980's to 2000 saw the depression era limits on accumulating wealth via pure capital machinations removed one by one.
Were now in the reverse situation. from 1950. Where it was possible to make money producing consumer goods and impossible to make money via rent seeking. Now rent seeking is how you make money. And it's obvious looking at the government response to the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic this year that's being enforced via policy.
In fact, all mainstream socialists and Marxists today are in favor of some kind of free market. Also, none of the centrally planned, soviet style economies had any feature of socialism - they were capitalist societies, where all of the power was concentrated in the hands of those who controlled capital. Sure, workers were paid lip service, but their power and control over their work was in fact even less than in the European or American capitalist countries. They were just as much socialist countries as they were democratic - in that it was simply a title they assigned to themselves, void of any meaning whatsoever.
The main difference between an actual socialist market-based economy and the capitalist market-based economy that we have today would be that essentially all enterprises competing on the market would be co-ops, where workers democratically decide how the company is run and get to share the profits (and losses), instead of getting a pre-determined (sometimes negotiated) wage.
The problem with co-ops, partnerships and the like as a firm structure is that (1) they can't easily provide access to outside capital. Maybe they can issue debt, but that comes with a lot of drawbacks wrt. equity investment. (2) most workers have their job as their main source of income, so they don't actually want to incur the excess risk that's inherent in "sharing in the profit (and losses!) of their firm" because that literally means putting all your eggs in one basket. Outside investors can incur that risk more easily, whether by diversifying it away or by investing only part of their assets in a risky endeavor.
"All enterprises as co-ops" is a nice idea but doesn't actually work in the real world. Co-ops and partnerships are totally fine for very low capital intensity businesses like law firms, but quite unsuitable elsewhere.
For example, the largest company in the Basque region of Spain is the Mondragon corporation, a 12—billion euro yearly revenue, 60 years old federation of co-ops with about 81,000 members+employees, working in industry, finance, retail, and knowledge - hardly low-capital areas. They are currently the 10th largest company in Spain. They do have traditional employees as well as worker-owners, and there are concerns about the percentages of each, but overall they are a true co-op at a huge scale, proving that it can be done.
If there were government policies to encourage this type of business, especially by providing better credit access, and if this was closer to the beaten path, I don't see any reason that it couldn't be at least a major part of the economic landscape, even if not easily becoming dominant.
Instead of, "what's wrong with communism!?", we should be asking, "if communism doesn't work, why was it necessary for capitalist countries to direct the entirety of their foreign policies into violence and sanctions against communists in their own communist countries and anyone who so much as requested aid from them, despite capitalist countries refusing to supply such aid?"
The reality is that communist countries actually did work and worked better than the prior state those countries were in, but were targeted for systematic erasure by the rest of the planet. When communist countries fell, life did not get better for those who lived there. It got worse. Pensions were privatized or canceled. Public programs eliminated. Promises of multi-party democracy were amended to disclude communists or anyone like them, with violence. Quality of Life indicators plunged and with no option to return to the former system (a certainly authoritarian condition imposed by the newly-in-power, Western-supported governments), these countries languished for decades and were and continue to be subjected to new depravities and exploitation even as they claw back some semblance of dignity.
Look at polling in the former Eastern Bloc. In Russia. In China. It's still very popular and it's not because of the chauvinist (and often contextually racist) idea they're all brainwashed goons. They saw the changes and often have a critically supportive view of a return. They say that most things were better, but acknowledge those that were worse, and when they say they'd support a return it's not to an identical state, just a similar one. But their political systems prevent this. One must wonder why.
Very few people say that things were better. It was a miserable time back then, and the life has drastically improved for the vast majority of the society.
When there was toilet paper delivered to the stores, it was a big deal. And by "toilet paper" I mean a gray, thin, one-layered, recycled one. It's weird we didn't switch to the asian water-bidet style then.
There was literally nothing available in the stores. Imagine your local supermarket, but with literal empty shelves, just vinegar on some of them.
There was even a joke about a guy who comes to a hardware store: - I'd like some screws - We don't have screws - I'd like some nails then - We don't have nails either - Well, what do you have? - Nothing. - Why don't you close the store down then? - We don't have the locks either.
This was a reality for dosens of millions of people back then. Saying that anyone misses that time, and that many people had it better is some kind of a sick fantasy.
Also, it wasn't due to US politics (although it didn't help). With the private enterprise being trashed, and people demotivated to do any sort of work (what for? "If you sit, or you stand, 100zł payment is your right" - another common joke), it was bound to collapse.
If anything, people in Poland saw West world as the one that was fighting to get us out of it all (and as a place of freedom and possibility).
And really - the crazy 90s after the communist rule fell, we saw a huge increase in the quality of life for almost everyone.
The Cold War would be an answer, unless you somehow deny that communists were equally dedicated to subverting and overthrowing the west.
> The reality is that communist countries actually did work and worked better than the prior state those countries were in
I disagree that this is a valid generalization. There may have been some Pareto improvements and its clear that certain people benefitted and others did not.
> When communist countries fell, life did not get better for those who lived there. It got worse.
This is because the centrally planned economy depleted vast amounts of capital in their desperate struggle to keep the economy moving and competitive with the west.
> They say that most things were better, but acknowledge those that were worse, and when they say they'd support a return it's not to an identical state, just a similar one. But their political systems prevent this. One must wonder why.
Cynically I could offer the same answer a communist would offer when asked why people weren't permitted to own factories in the Soviet Union: because that would put "the wrong people" in charge of the means of production.
Less cynically, its not clear how a centrally planned economy would know how to correctly allocate resources, so there's no reason to return to the central planning model in the absence of a solution to the problems that caused it to fail in the first place.
That's not the answer, it's the mechanism of that violence.
> unless you somehow deny that communists were equally dedicated to subverting and overthrowing the west.
I will absolutely deny that. Note the number of capitalist governments coup'd by communists. Note the number of invasions and constant wars of The West. Look at Vietnam. Western involvement was long-reaching, direct, violent, and generally within other countries fighting grassroots revolutions / civil wars or throwing off colonial it imperial influence.
When attempting to find similar situations started by communist countries, we find important differences. Dragged into conflicts on their borders. Literally fighting a genocide directed at themselves. Long-standing territorial disputes on their borders.
> I disagree that this is a valid generalization
Feudal backwaters subject to regular famines became superpowers that eliminated homelessness and hunger. And the fall of those systems corresponded to drops in QoL over and over and over again.
What other tests would you want?
> This is because the centrally planned economy depleted vast amounts of capital in their desperate struggle to keep the economy moving and competitive with the west.
Capital is just stuff or money tradeable for stuff. The stuff didn't go away after color revolutions. But public programs were absolutely privatized or abolished by liberal capitalist governments in moves aligned with their ideologies - ideologies you can find throughout this site, in fact.
> Cynically I could offer the same answer a communist would offer when asked why people weren't permitted to own factories in the Soviet Union: because that would put "the wrong people" in charge of the means of production.
Ah, but in that case there's a consistent ideological position: bourgeois democracy and ownership must be curtailed because otherwise it will grow and eat you and those you love. According to liberal democracy, you're supposed to be able to seek and form a representative government in a multi-party setting - yet they restrict those parties to force bourgeois options to be the only ones available.
The supposedly core ideals of The West clearly bow to capital when push comes to shove and one should question the propaganda that it's these ideals that won or were even the actual goal.
> Less cynically, its not clear how a centrally planned economy would know how to correctly allocate resources, so there's no reason to return to the central planning model in the absence of a solution to the problems that caused it to fail in the first place.
But the vast majority of several countries want that return, with support increasing with age - the people who actually lived under communist party rule. They are prevented from doing so by their political systems. It cannot be voted in. Democracy clearly doesn't mean that much to The West, right?
I'm not sure it will be fruitful to discuss this issue with someone who denies the international ambitions of communism :)
> Note the number of capitalist governments coup'd by communists. Note the number of invasions and constant wars of The West. Look at Vietnam. Western involvement was long-reaching, direct, violent, and generally within other countries fighting grassroots revolutions / civil wars or throwing off colonial it imperial influence.
"the state is always an instrument of class warfare" I'm justifying western imperialism by referring to the nature of the class struggle as characterized by communists. You're not going to convince anyone by denying that communists were interested in spreading their ideology to other countries tries by force and you're not going to convince capitalists by pointing out how successful we were at stopping communist aggression.
> Feudal backwaters
how patrician of you
> Feudal backwaters subject to regular famines became superpowers that eliminated homelessness and hunger. And the fall of those systems corresponded to drops in QoL over and over and over again.
quality of life was pretty bad leading up to the fall, that's why it fell. observing that you can conscript a bunch of farmers to invade outlying countries and steal their grain, then feed those of the survivors you haven't tortured to death in gulags is hardly an argument. I'd be more impressed by the superpower claim if it wasn't the case that the USSR went bankrupt trying to compete as a superpower.
> What other tests would you want?
can you sell your labor or the product thereof for a price of your choosing? Can you buy tools for work and control them as your own property, inclusive of charging rent for their usage? These are QoL issues that are relevant to workers.
> Capital is just stuff or money tradeable for stuff. The stuff didn't go away after color revolutions. But public programs were absolutely privatized or abolished by liberal capitalist governments in moves aligned with their ideologies - ideologies you can find throughout this site, in fact.
Capital is the means of production and it requires maintenance and planning, if capital is not maintained and replaced it wears out and breaks and is no longer capital. The planners in the USSR knew this well and that's why they had so much trouble keeping the system going when they wielded authoritarian powers. They couldn't keep the capital running because they lacked price signals in order to obtain information about scarcity relative to demand. Those public programs had run out of value to reallocate.
> Ah, but in that case there's a consistent ideological position: bourgeois democracy and ownership must be curtailed because otherwise it will grow and eat you and those you love.
Yes, ideology is good for justifying terrible things. Thats why we require that people are allowed to criticize ideology.
> According to liberal democracy, you're supposed to be able to seek and form a representative government in a multi-party setting - yet they restrict those parties to force bourgeois options to be the only ones available.
Yet liberal democracy still falls victim to the paradox of tolerance. Hence the desire to prohibit ideas and ideologies that would overthrow civil society.
> The supposedly core ideals of The West clearly bow to capital when push comes to shove and one should question the propaganda that it's these ideals that won or were even the actual goal.
Actually I question your grasp of the foundational ideas of "The West", whatever that is.
> But the vast majority of several countries want that return, with support increasing with age - the people who actually lived under communist party rule. They are prevented from doing so by their political systems. It cannot be voted in. Democracy clearly doesn't mean that much to The West, right?
I'm not sure your criticism of The West is apt when it is those several countries that fail to heed their respective majorities in returning to authoritarian central planning. Perhaps you are falling victim to the authoritarian's paradox here. Perhaps those democracies are simply engaged in the sort of central planning that is necessary to sustain a society, the kind of central planning that the communist republics they replaced were unable to stomach.
I'm not denying that communists have had international ambitions, only that your description was accurate. And the actual internationalists (Trotskyists) have never had power or organized around it. Extant communist countries were/are part of the idea of "socialism in one country" and tended to fight battles of national liberation or build up arms without actually invading distant countries (in contrast to Western countries).
> "the state is always an instrument of class warfare" I'm justifying western imperialism by referring to the nature of the class struggle as characterized by communists. You're not going to convince anyone by denying that communists were interested in spreading their ideology to other countries tries by force
I would challenge anyone to name a communist country that attempted to export their ideology by force subject to the following reasonable conditions:
(1) They can't be really weird dictators supported / propped up by a Western anticommunist power dead-set on killing other communists.
(2) Can't name the Eastern bloc, as it was a product of a defensive countering of a genocidal campaign by Nazis (Lebensraum).
> and you're not going to convince capitalists by pointing out how successful we were at stopping communist aggression.
What aggression?
> how patrician of you
Not really, I'm referring to a literally feudal monarchy that had very limited regional power.
> quality of life was pretty bad leading up to the fall, that's why it fell.
It very much isn't.
> observing that you can conscript a bunch of farmers to invade outlying countries and steal their grain, then feed those of the survivors you haven't tortured to death in gulags is hardly an argument.
Do you believe that's an accurate summary of the USSR becoming a superpower?
> I'd be more impressed by the superpower claim if it wasn't the case that the USSR went bankrupt trying to compete as a superpower.
It didn't. It was eaten from the inside by a political power grab. However, spending on the military vs. everything else did contribute to support for that power grab.
> can you sell your labor or the product thereof for a price of your choosing? Can you buy tools for work and control them as your own property, inclusive of charging rent for their usage? These are QoL issues that are relevant to workers.
Just to be clear, you're listing examples for why communist countries didn't work or significantly improve over their past ways of being? I don't see why this constitutes not working or improving.
> Capital is the means of production and it requires maintenance and planning, if capital is not maintained and replaced it wears out and breaks and is no longer capital. The planners in the USSR knew this well and that's why they had so much trouble keeping the system going when they wielded authoritarian powers. They couldn't keep the capital running because they lacked price signals in order to obtain information about scarcity relative to demand. Those public programs had run out of value to reallocate.
How convenient that the capital ran out at the exact moment that color revolutions occurred and liberal parties took power, years and years apart from one another!
> Yes, ideology is good for justifying terrible things. Thats why we require that people are allowed to criticize ideology.
My point is, of course, that the ideology I'm referring to is consistent, in addition to having a rationale, whereas the alternative being discussed is incoherent.
> Yet liberal democracy still falls victim to the paradox of tolerance. Hence the desire to prohibit ideas and ideologies that would overthrow civil society.
I'm referring to days, weeks, months after deposing communist party rule. Unless you grant that "civil society" existed there already, then there's nothing to overthrow. In reality, it is an illiberal power grab dictated by servicing of capital, a ridiculous farce of the multi-party democracies that protesters had demanded.
> Actually I question your grasp of the foundational ideas of "The West", whatever that is.
I think it's pretty clear what "The West" refers to relative to communist countries.
But thanks for the personal jab!
> I'm not sure your criticism of The West is apt when it is those several countries that fail to heed their respective majorities in returning to authoritarian central planning.
Seems apt to me. Good talk, good talk.
> Perhaps you are falling victim to the authoritarian's paradox here. Perhaps those democracies are simply engaged in the sort of central planning that is necessary to sustain a society, the kind of central planning that the communist republics they replaced were unable to stomach.
Those "democracies" were privatizing, not pushing a different form of central planning.
Unfortunately, there is a very selectively-enforced limit on political content that has resulted in me being rate-limited, so I'm unable to respond to you in a timely manner anymore. I'd point you at some resources but I feel like that's condescending. Hilariously, this is pretty relevant to your civil society comment - online spaces have no public commons, they are all dictated and censored by whoever owns them, with serious networking effects that place them under the control of large (and censorious) corporations that treat liberal (capitalist) views as normative and non-political.
that's the central plan. The planners (in their wisdom and beneficence) have decreed that private property is "ok", subject to regulation. No authoritarian can criticize this except on the basis that the authority didn't carry out their preferred dogma.
Unless the “Eastern bloc” includes all global allies of the USSR (and therefore almost all self-described Communist countries) instead of just those located in Eastern Europe, then Cuba is pretty much the obvious answer. (hostile-to-the-existing-government interventions aimed at spreading the revolution stretch from the 1950s into at least the 1990s and took place in at least: Panama, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Congo, Guinea-Bisseau, Yemen, Angola, and Ethiopia, some of them multiple times, and some alongside other Communist states that would be valid, though less significant, answers to your challenge, as well.)
What do I win?
> Can't name the Eastern bloc, as it was a product of a defensive countering of a genocidal campaign by Nazis (Lebensraum).
The Eastern bloc, insofar as it was notionally a defensive response to something, was a response to the formation of NATO (and, specifically, the integration of West Germany into NATO), not to the Nazis, who had already been defeated.
Nonsense. When Nazis attacked Eastern Europe, Soviet Union was their ally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
even disregarding the other issues with communism, the central premise is wrong: it's quite apparent that what growth centralized economy countries enjoyed was far at a lower rate than free market counterparts, up until they opened up to private initiative.
I'm still under the belief that too much centralized planning can severely hurt an economy but that organization is way better for the economy than everything being locked down by a narrow class of land owning elites.
Resource allocation is always a political problem. (On a large-scale, anyway.)
> In a capitalist system, if something looks like it's going to be a big economic hit people are ready to sell off other assets and pour billions of dollars into it.
1. In a Capitalist system, most people have little assets; and most assets are under the control of a minority (which becomes relatively smaller over time.
2. A "big economic hit" is not necessarily in people's interests anyway.
3. The USSR was not a Communist society (and didn't claim to be). It was ruled by "The Communist Party" but that's really not the same thing.
> there's a guy who doesn't want to lose funding for his department who might have more power than his rivals
Not entirely different from divisions within a large corporation who vie for funding and/or power over their peers. (And the managers of such divisions.)
> Not entirely different from divisions within a large corporation who vie for funding and/or power over their peers. (And the managers of such divisions.)
Sure. It's just that we can get rid of large corporations if they blunder enough (see, for example, Kodak). When it's the government, and they restrict elections to one party, you're a lot more stuck.
Just compare the history of West and East Germany. There is a reason why East Germany and all other socialist countries in history had to lock their people up in their own country.
do you have any evidence for this?
Globally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth
In the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Distribution_of_wealth_gl...
As the thread article says,
> the second serious issue with a centrally planned economy was data quality: Central planners’ knowledge about the input requirements and output capabilities of individual factories was simply not as good as the people actually working in the factory.
Solutions to that aspect of the problem constituted most of Cybersyn's real-world achievements. But they're sort of boring. They mostly consisted of installing voice and data lines to the management offices of factories and cajoling them to send, on a daily basis, their production numbers along with short-term expected input requirements.
Yes, the Cybersyn experiment was cut short by the coup. But the mention of the U.S. is gratuitous. The coup was driven by industrialists and a fear of communism. Orders for the coup were given the imprimatur of the most powerful senators, and tacitly by a majority of the senate. (The leftists' thin margin eroded as moderates broke rank.) Allende's original vision, after nationalization of a small number of key industries, was harmonious cooperation between central planners and the rest of the free market. But there was too much resistance, as reflected in the difficulty Project Cybersyn had in simply collecting data. Part of the resistance was cultural (it's just not how people were used to working), and part of it was deliberate, politically motivated opposition. In frustration Allende increasingly turned to more forceful measures for "controlling the means of production", reneging on some of his promises regarding the extent of nationalization. Eventually he pushed the country too far and he was assassinated by, basically, the capitalist class. (Especially for a South American country, Chile historically was and remains quite conservative. Just as in the U.S., much of the lower classes are as capitalist as the elite, especially when faced with concrete socialist policies, as opposed to the promises.) The U.S. had no hand in any of it. It's only role, AFAIU, was placating the fears of the coup architects by promising asylum if the coup failed, and those promises came after planning for the coup was well underway.
Claims about it failing for theoretical reasons seem... odd.
and immediately after
Allende’s biggest challenge (and the challenge of all socialist revolutions generally) was to turn private business into public entities.
Difficult to take it seriously after such cognitive dissonance.
In any case, socialism was never a technological problem. I truly doubt the USSR didn't have the technological prowess to make it work. It's a fundamental economic one. You can't remove prices from the loop, as indicators of the human desire. It doesn't matter how many machines you throw at it. You can't replace human preferences.
Even in East Germany, the country’s economists admitted in 1989 that the free market works far better and the centralized economy results in wrong allocations of resources and money.
Google “Schürer-Papier” if you understand German.
Leninism didn't, but there's a reason why non-Leninist Marxists have been calling Leninism state capitalism since well before it's failure was obvious.
Socialism, specifically a form of what Marx referred to as “bourgeois socialism”—though not so much by conscious design but as a compromise between Marxist and other proletarian socialists who were instrumental in labor, abolition, suffrage, and other social justice movements and more moderate forces within and outside of those movements—was completely successful in the environment (advanced democratic capitalist states) for which Marx prescribed his form of socialism, being so successful as to entirely displace the late-19th Century system for which Marx coined the term “capitalism” with a system in which the rent seeking power of capital was significantly more constrained in favor of broad (varying from country to country) guarantees for the basic necessities of the general population, which has been referred to by a variety of names (the “modern mixed economy”), though it's so completely displaced the original system called “capitalism” in the same states where that systemmwas once dominant that it is now most frequently just called “capitalism” despite being very different from it.
- food
- housing
- clothing
And all those needs can be satisfied in a cookiecutter way for everyone. It's unclear to me why such a system cannot be centrally planned without reference to subjective human preference.
IMHO, the 'human preference' counterargument to communism is a red herring to throw things into subjective, logic free land.
Or are you going to just feed everyone the food that you've decided that they should eat? If they want olives, they're just going to have to make do with cucumbers instead?
Do you see why actual human beings might have a problem with that?
Lack of accounting for wants can make for an annoying, boring economic system, but that's a much lesser charge than the system is intrinsically genocidal. And if it's the difference between a boring system and a system where the rich oppress the poor, and many are forced to live miserable lives according to their less subjective needs like food, clothing, and shelter, then the former would be morally superior. Nor is it obvious why not accounting for wants would make an economic system less successful. I.e. if you have the best of the best bringing to bear the best technology and thought to improving the lives of everyone all at once, that seems superior to everyone trying to figure it out themselves. So, the 'subjective preference' objection does not seem very strong.
This is a much more serious charge than saying communism results in a bunch of products that people don't like very much.
As to why it is genocidal, and whether this is intrinsic or just a factor of having the wrong people in charge, I think the computational complexity of the problem gets at why genocide is an intrinsic property of communism. Namely, it is just way too innefficient to supply the actual needs of a nation, and so millions starve, or must be killed to make the system work.
- You can have free press without private businesses just like we can have a Judicial branch that's paid for by the government but is independent of it. It comes with challenges, but it's not like privately run news are perfect either.
- Civil liberties can be protected in any form of government and economy, even a dictator can decide to do that
- increasing employment is a no-brainer, it's a prominent feature of socialist countries.
- agrarian reforms are similarly commonly observed, it's probably one of the defining things of the USSR (and China, where it famously didn't go as smoothly)
There's also no real reason why you can't have prices in socialism (and as far as I'm aware most socialist systems have prices). The loop looks a bit different since the supply side is typically centrally managed, but even that is technically an implementation detail and not a required feature of socialism.
There is: you can't estimate how much people will want something new.
Imagine the new macbook air with Apple Silicon.
What should the price be, in a socialist system?
Set it too low and there will be shortage because you will not be able to produce enough as you wont get profits that would allow you to build extra factories and by extra components.
Set it too high and there will be surpluses rotting in factories because nobody will want it.
You need to guess right in advance. In a capitalist system, companies hold the responsibility: if they are wrong too often, they go bankrupt.
In a socialist system, the responsibility is diluted, resulting in a cumulative overall inefficiency, with both shortage (ex: food in the USSR) and surpluses (ex: cotton in the USSR again).
I used "new things" to simplify the reasoning, but the same logic apply to existing things: do you want more or less say phones compared to last year?
You can't say "just as much", because the optimal amount will be impacted by a lot of things that change every year.
Unless they're banks, or auto manufacturers, or any other huge corporation that would get bailed out by the government. Wonder why that bailing out is a problem for socialist governments, but not capitalist ones.
In Germany, the Hypovereinsbank which got bailed out became state-owned.
Socialism cannot estimate this any better or worse than capitalism. Contrasting the two is actually a bit absurd, given that socialism has a wide range of forms and does not prescribe the form in which workers own productive capital.
e.g., market socialists exist. So do central planning-pushing communists. So do communalists...
False, capitalism successfully prices products every day. The failures are eliminated in a process akin to natural selection of species.
> socialism has a wide range of forms and does not prescribe the form in which workers own productive capital.
the only form of socialism that capitalists oppose is the one where socialists restrict the form in which people own productive capital. all those alternative forms of socialism you advocate are free to exist in a free market but they are as rare as hen's teeth (not to say nonexistent). why is that?
Capitalism doesn't do that either. This entire comparison is a category error.
In this discussion, capitalism is being conflated with markets and socialism with planned economies. Neither of those conflations are valid.
> the only form of socialism that capitalists oppose is the one where socialists restrict the form in which people own productive capital.
That is all forms of socialism. It's the only thing socialism is consistently about.
> all those alternative forms of socialism you advocate are free to exist in a free market
No they aren't. They're fundamentally incompatible with the theory of a free market. They are all focused on the abolition of private property.
> but they are as rare as hen's teeth (not to say nonexistent). why is that?
Because when they get a footing they're actively attacked by capitalists. Economically attached with sanctions, invaded, coup'd, bombed, etc.
Rojava is doing an experiment in communalism as we speak. Turkey is bombing it once the US got what they wanted from Rojava (fighting ISIS). Chile elected Allende, who was coup'd within two years by CIA-backed Pinochet. EZLN survives through the weakness of the central Mexican government and their relative irrelevance to capitalists.
Most political systems do not actually allow for the election of such parties to power. They have powerful propaganda campaigns baked into their education and mass media systems, with bourgeois infighting characterized as the extent of acceptable debate. Many force a two-party duopoly where only bourgeois parties have any chance of winning. Many outlaw socialist/communist parties or kill and harass their leaders. Many aren't democracies at all and would require an ideological military process to establish it - and have their opposition strategically funded by Western powers.
There are many reasons that ruling powers maintain that power.
Perhaps but I'm not sure it makes much of a difference. Socialism (absent central planning) doesn't have a means of allocating capital, so no one has ever tried it for long. When they do, everything falls to the tragedy of the commons. Even authoritarian socialists agree to this. Socialist anarchists have various opinions but agree that socialist organization is an unsolved problem. No one is prevented from setting up a socialist organization in capitalist countries, its merely the case that when they do, they aren't able to externalize their costs and they don't achieve very much.
> That is all forms of socialism. It's the only thing socialism is consistently about.
Then all forms of what you consider to be socialism will fail because of plunder.
> No they aren't. They're fundamentally incompatible with the theory of a free market. They are all focused on the abolition of private property.
yeah, its not cool to mess with other people's stuff. that's the problem here.
> Because when they get a footing they're actively attacked by capitalists. Economically attached with sanctions, invaded, coup'd, bombed, etc.
Maybe if "getting a footing" wasn't synonymous with expropriating the capitalists this wouldn't happen.
> There are many reasons that ruling powers maintain that power.
This is true. its also the case that rulers over a mixed economy have vastly more wealth at their disposal than rulers over a command economy and a collective that has norms prohibiting the collection of rents. This is because the market generates more wealth and rulers are able to extract more wealth because there is more wealth.
It does. Many socialists want to (and do) use markets as part of their desired transition. Capitalism is not actually pro-market by default, it just uses markets to accumulate capital. Left to its own devices, anticompetitive (i.e., anti-market) behaviors always arise.
Capitalism vs. socialism is not markets vs. a planned economy. It's about who owns the means of production.
> Socialism (absent central planning) doesn't have a means of allocating capital, so no one has ever tried it for long.
China's doing it right now via state capitalism, erring on a side where they allow capitalists to exist in an extremely controlled fashion and they regularly jail or put to death those who violate their rules - or they seize segments of industry. Socialists often create transitional plans where they maintain much of the same system but with significant curtailing of private property.
Other socialist countries / groups have operated largely by collectives, where initial capital is raised jointly with the government but once a venture is going it self-sustains as a collective bringing in new capital and divying it up by and to workers. Vietnam runs a mixed system where this is the dominant mode of production (the other is a China-style "controlled" capitalism).
Socialism is also a pretty wide brush. Rojava is communalist and local councils are the primary vehicle for regulating and controlling production. EZLN is anarchist-ish and nearly everything is a collective or co-op, with workers pooling capital to start a venture but also working within it and sharing alike. There are many ways to do socialism.
> When they do, everything falls to the tragedy of the commons.
I'm not sure what this is referring to.
> Even authoritarian socialists agree to this.
No such thing as "authoritarian socialists". That's not a self-identity or an ideology, but a pejorative produced by liberals and the folks that take that libertarian-made political compass too seriously.
> Socialist anarchists have various opinions but agree that socialist organization is an unsolved problem.
Anarchists tend to think that it isn't even a problem. Once they win, they depend on self-organization.
> No one is prevented from setting up a socialist organization in capitalist countries, its merely the case that when they do, they aren't able to externalize their costs and they don't achieve very much.
I mean, socialists can organize a party or something within a capitalist country, but you can't do socialism within a capitalist country. The entire system's function is dictated by capitalism - a co-op, for example, is still competing with all the other capitalist companies and has to follow the rules set up for them or perish.
Not sure what you mean by externalizing costs. If you're thinking of co-ops, they absolutely can and do externalize costs.
> Then all forms of what you consider to be socialism will fail because of plunder.
I don't see why.
> yeah, its not cool to mess with other people's stuff. that's the problem here.
Depends on what that stuff is. Private property is distinguished from personal property in a socialist view.
> Maybe if "getting a footing" wasn't synonymous with expropriating the capitalists this wouldn't happen.
If socialists weren't socialist this wouldn't happen? This doesn't make any sense and it doesn't address the point.
> This is true. its also the case that rulers over a mixed economy have vastly more wealth at their disposal than rulers over a command economy and a collective that has norms prohibiting the collection of rents. This is because the market generates more wealth and rulers are able to extract more wealth because there is more wealth.
So the story goes. The expropriation of value from the Global South has something to say about that, though.
Unfortunately, there is a very selectively-enforced limit on political content that has resulted in me being rate-limited, so I'm unable to respond to you in a timely manner anymore. I'd point you at some resources but I feel like that's condescending. Best of luck to you, friend.
Yes, and dictating the rules of ownership that others must follow is a feature of central planning.
> but you can't do socialism within a capitalist country. The entire system's function is dictated by capitalism - a co-op, for example, is still competing with all the other capitalist companies and has to follow the rules set up for them or perish.
Yes, they can't compete on a purely material basis. Thats why you don't see them.
> Depends on what that stuff is. Private property is distinguished from personal property in a socialist view.
yes that's it. Your willingness to disregard my opinions about what constitutes my property on a dogmatic basis is the source of conflict here.
> If socialists weren't socialist this wouldn't happen? This doesn't make any sense and it doesn't address the point.
The point being that insofar as expropriation is synonymous with socialism, socialism is a crime.
> So the story goes. The expropriation of value from the Global South has something to say about that, though.
colonialism and neocolonialism are special cases of a command economy.