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Comment by _vbnz | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame things ended up this way. Were it not for the May 1947 crises, we might have avoided the Cold War entirely (though perhaps not, as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR wasn't great at letting allies stay independent, and Operation Sunrise on the US side was already treating the USSR as hostile).

France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments, Yugoslavia would have had closer allies against the more authoritarian USSR. Czechoslovakia and Hungary could have remained more independent, etc. - no Vietnam war, no Prague Spring clampdown, no Cuban missile crisis.

May 1947 crises - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1947_crises

Operation Sunrise - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_I...

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> as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR wasn't great at letting allies stay independent

Same is true for the US. Allied countries whose leaders take decisions that run contra to what we want tend(ed) to be regime-changed and those leaders killed.

> that run _contra_ to what we want

I CIA what you did there.

> France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments,

The only way any industrialized nation adopts a communist regime is with Red Army tanks. There is a reason why no communist government has succeeded in any industrialized nation -- and it's not for lack of trying. But you just can't convert a liberal advanced economy into an authoritarian command economy without massive repression. There are too many people who own property and land who won't agree to be dispossessed.

There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it.

But to make that initial mass confiscation of property you need true believers and mass democide as class enemies are liquidated.

They had already been elected to the government in both Italy and France though, in a coalition with more centrist socialist parties.

In both countries they already held ministerial positions, so this just isn't true.

In practice they'd likely end up becoming more moderate, like happened in San Marino, and eventually France too.

I think 'communist regime', looking at what the comment says about the practical problems such as confiscating property, is the institution of an actual communist economic system. It's one thing to have communists in government, but quite another to actually implement communist policies.

What is a communist policy? When Lenin invited foreign investment and allowed private property to facilitate it as part of his plan to build a communist society, was that not a communist policy? Or perhaps Lenin didn't want to implement communist policies?

Communist economics is Marxist economics. Of course there have been multiple waves of revisions of Marxism, but fundamentally it's based on Marx's theory of value as it's core axiom. In practice communists sometimes play the cards they are dealt in terms of the economy they start with and what's achievable, depending on how patient they are. Lenin viewed foreign investment as a necessary evil, a temporary measure while the economy was in a transitional state. Do you think Lenin viewed allowing foreign investment and private property as being long term, essential aspects of a well functioning, mature communist economy? Of course not.

Stalin was a lot less patient on this and instituted forced mass collectivism, with catastrophic consequences.

What do you mean by private property? Do you mean that word in a Marxian sense? Or do you mean it in a classical/neoclassical sense and thus projecting non-Marxist economics on Marxist economics?

No one believes that foreign investment is anything more than a necessary evil - being reliant on foreign investment means that you can't mobilize your own capital.

The idea that markets are necessary for some industries is not at all incompatible with Marxist economics. Lenin's side of Marxist economics would be fine with markets as long as the property was owned cooperatively, until a post-scarcity society.

Stalin's turn towards state planning was out of perceived necessity, not because he was less patient. He, and others in the party, decided that it was acceptable to sacrifice overall economic development in order to develop the heavy industries necessary for war with capitalist countries, that he thought was inevitable if they were too weak. That, and he thought agricultural development was too slow. While it was a failure for agricultural output, it was objectively a massive success in its primary goal, and development of heavy industries at the speed of the NEP would have probably led to the USSR losing WW2.

> They had already been elected to the government in both Italy and France though, in a coalition with more centrist socialist parties.

Sure, communists were elected to the government of the Czech republic up until the latest election. That only tells you that a share of the nation is radicals -- enough to elect some radical candidates to represent them.

But to actually become a communist nation, you need to confiscate the means of production from the rest of the nation. First, you don't get that just by winning some seats. You don't even get that by winning a majority of seats. That's a constitutional rewrite situation, not a political party situation. Something like that requires seizing control of much of the organs of civil society -- you have to get courts to not honor private property, for instance.

> In both countries they already held ministerial positions, so this just isn't true

Holding a ministerial position does not correspond to being able to eliminate private ownership of capital. The two are rather different.

> In practice they'd likely end up becoming more moderate, like happened in San Marino

The Most Serene Republic of San Marino? The 10 square mile tourist trap? Now you've lost me. If your claim is that these communist ministers would realize that they can't actually make their nation communist and just keep the name of communism while advocating for vaguely social democratic reforms, then absolutely. But that does not make the nation a "moderately communist" nation, it makes it a social democracy. Or are you one of those people who thinks social security is "communism" and your definition of a "moderately communist" country is present-day France? Is that what you mean?

It doesn't have to happen overnight, they could just provide greater support for trade unions and co-operatives.

And nationalisation of "private property" and land reforms have happened outside of communist governments, e.g. in Nasser's Egypt, the Mexican oil reserves, Mossadegh and the Iranian oil reserves, the Shah's White Revolution, etc.

My whole point is that communism and communist parties didn't need to be seen as some radical "other" system, but could have become more moderate as society gradually accepted strong trade unions, co-operatives, and nationalised resources without the Cold War (much like the transitions to parliamentary democracy). Unfortunately the Cold War polarised everything, and now we're stuck with a society where the existence of billionaire is sacrosant.

I mentioned San Marino because they were governed by the communist party for 10 years, and weren't so extreme - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammarinese_Communist_Party

> I mentioned San Marino because they were governed by the communist party for 10 years, and weren't so extreme - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammarinese_Communist_Party

Because they never tried to make San Marino into a communist economy, seeing as how it is not really an independent nation with any kind of economic sovereignty. The only thing it does is sell its own postage stamps and sell some commemorative gold coins. It's a big castle surrounded by some vineyards. They make money from tourism and duty-free shopping, and of course tax-avoidance.

It's like if you elect a communist to be the leader of your Elks Lodge, and then praise his moderate communist rule.

They certainly did try to make San Marino a communist economy. It's just that they didn't think that this meant the immediate nationalisation of all property.

They were far from alone in doing so, notably Marx and Lenin agreed and advocated for similar trajectories, so it was far from a fringe position.

A popular communist program for developped countries is to remove all political influence as a result of money, encourage cooperatives, nationalizes key industries (as in China), and manage productive surpluses to provide for everyone, removing markets where they are zero sum of negative sum (housing, etc...), and coordinating markets for optimum growth, until the economy is developped enough that the entirety of the local economy can be ran as either part of the nationalizes sector or by cooperatives.

It's a fairly mild program when compared to Stalin. There is not really any reason to abolish private property until the economy is large enough that it can be fully run by the workers from a communist point of view - Stalin did it because he judged that heavy industry was not developing rapidly enough, which was a strategic judgement mostly on grounds of the preservation of the state (and therefore himself). Otherwise Lenin's policy of managed capitalism/socialism for a hundred years or so was in place.

> There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it.

As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance.

> As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance.

I don't think so. So what makes this work for, say, a Kibbutz, is that it's a voluntary association of people donating some wealth, and they can also leave the Kibbutz when they want and new people can come in whenever they want.

Thus the individual Kibbutzniks are almost all capitalists, as they continue to have bank accounts, brokerage accounts, pension funds, land holdings, etc on areas outside the Kibbutz.

Rather the Kibbutz is like a big coop. It's one business run cooperatively for the staff, and it's like a summer camp for the visitors. But each individual person still has their own bank account, and that bank account consists of private ownership claims on productive capital outside the Kibbutz.

But in a communist economy, you would not be able to privately own capital. The "true" communist Kibbutz would have its own currency, its own bank, and you would need to sell all your assets and donate them to the Kibbutz, holding accounts only in the Kibbutz bank that were backed only by the business in the Kibbutz. Then you couldn't spend the day picking oranges but receive dividends from Walmart at the same time.

BTW, in many countries there are coops of all sorts. Housing coops, business coops, agricultural coops. Capitalism, as a system, is not about banning corporate (e.g. group) ownership according to some agreed-upon bylaws. But communism is about banning private ownership. So capitalist societies have wide varieties of ownership structures.

There are different flavors. You're broadly correct that communism (and, in general, actual socialism, as opposed to social democracy that is often mislabelled as socialism) is opposed to private ownership of the means of production - but it doesn't necessarily translate to banning them. Authoritarian varieties generally advocate for that. Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place.

(Anarchists would also add that protecting property rights by violence is one of the primary functions of any state.)

> Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place.

Right. That is basically how primitive societies (not meant as a value judgement) worked. You could own whatever you could physically defend, or convince your allies to help you defend.

Unfortunately that means that political considerations will decide who owns what, at which point a hierarchical group will form, and it will be well organized, and it will conquer the decentralized society of individuals and small communities. So you are left with the eternal problems of decentralized societies, which is that they are just weaker than centralized societies.

So then you say, we will have a strong hierarchy, but the sole purpose of the hierarchy is to guarantee our values, and now you are back in the authoritarian camp, and very quickly the party that runs the society will be more interested in domination than preserving whatever founding values they had before.

There is just a big gap between what is intellectually appealing, and what is stable and defendable in a hostile world.

Not quite. We're not talking about a free-for-all here, in a sense that if you can forcibly take it, it's yours. We're talking about what kinds of property are recognized (and enforced) above that by society at large. Abstract property rights, where "X owns Y" is true if there's a central registry that says so, are one thing. Property rights based on use and occupation are another - but they still have to be enforced by the society to be effective. And this all is actually orthogonal to whether the society has centralized governance or not - you could have a strong central government that still refuses to recognize & enforce some property rights.

As for defense against organized authoritarians in general - the middle ground is a decentralized federation, where (relatively) small communities run their own day-to-day affairs, but band up together for defense. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is an example of that kind of framework, and Rojava is trying to build something like it. They seem to have fared quite well in combat against their more authoritarian opponents who are on a similar technological level (mostly ISIL and other Islamist groups, and very occasionally, Assad's forces). Not so much against Turkey, but the disparity in resources there is extreme.

Cuba is going on 4 generations now, and so is North Korea. It depends how you define a generation, though, I guess.

With Cuba, it's more about how you define communism. China has successfully transitioned into a mostly capitalist economy while keeping the one party control.

Cuba has also liberalized their economy but is trying to keep one party in control. Cuba recognized private property in 2018, but even before that time there was a huge black market that was tolerated because it provided necessary goods and services.

" China has successfully transitioned into a mostly capitalist economy while keeping the one party control."

Well, so have we. I'm being 70% sarcastic.

Can't really argue

The USSR liberalized their economy in 1919 and recognize private property exactly the same way as Cuba (and even China) does now.

North Korea is a straightforward feudal monarchy decorated with communist trimmings.

While the USSR was effectively a dictatorship it had no mechanism for inherited leadership. It was actually more like Imperial Rome, with the nominally elected leader acting as Emperor until death, in charge of a semi-loyal but fractious Senate (Politburo).

Putin reinvented this recently, but without the friction.

The omens strongly imply that Trump would have followed the same playbook if he'd won the last election.

USSR was something else, more akin to oligarchic theocracies: a state where the means of production are owned collectively by the ruling elites. So party functionaries enjoyed a significantly better standard of living - the higher in the hierarchy, the better - but all of that was strictly conditional on being in the party (and helping maintain that state of affairs).

In comparison, Imperial Rome had full-fledged private property, and it was entirely possible to be rich outside of politics, or for a politician to retire and still make use of all the capital accumulated by their application of power.

(One could also reasonably argue that this is why USSR was ultimately dismantled from the inside by the very bureacrats who ruled it: they all wanted to secure their slice of the pie.)

NK is Japanese Fascism in practice with Communist propaganda as a showoff to "calm" China and make it their ally.

Well, I have no sympathies to communism but the US also has not let any communist country alone without meddling in its affairs. So it’s hard to assess the true outcome, for better or worse.

It’s like running a performance test while constantly unplugging some instances or knocking out power to the data center. The results are tainted.

The Soviet bloc was sufficiently large that if communism was even moderately functional it would have succeeded even if the US had managed to stop it from trading from any country outside its bloc.

The destruction wrought by any kind of communist policy is so devastating as to make its true effect obvious. This is unlike social democratic policies which are a weaker economic poison and thus can cause decades of stagnation/deindustrialization without total collapse.

That's pretty ridiculous on its face. It was impossible for the communist bloc to outproduce the rest of the world by its size alone.

Without being able to outproduce rivals, all it takes are a few arms races and your economy rots, no matter the system.

The destruction wrought by "any kind of communist policy" still led to outcomes that were above the global average. Yes, they eventually lost, but they were very much in the same order of magnitude as the rest of the world, and were slowly catching up until political factors caused destruction, which was arguably the greatest weakness from a competitive point of view.

Economic policies that are immediately devastating don't cause 60 years of frenetic existential anxiety. If communism was as obviously devastating economically, the USA wouldn't have spent so much time worrying about losing its economic dominance.

As far as attributing deindustrialization to social democratic, all I can say is that this is laughable. Exporting your capital to countries where the wage share will be lower is the cause of deindustrialization, and it's simple economics. You need government policy in the form of direct or indirect capital controls to prevent that from happening.

What's ridiculous is claiming that the Soviet bloc had to outproduce the rest of the world in order to survive. There was no need for the Soviet bloc to maintain military parity with the US and its allies to maintain effective deterrence. Nuclear weapons, and their massive destructive potential, were the great equalizer and made it so the Soviet bloc could spend a small fraction of what the US and allies did, and maintain MAD.

>>The destruction wrought by "any kind of communist policy" still led to outcomes that were above the global average. Yes, they eventually lost, but they were very much in the same order of magnitude as the rest of the world, and were slowly catching up until political factors caused destruction, which was arguably the greatest weakness from a competitive point of view.

No, the Soviet bloc's economic statistics were over-stating their performance. They were seeing continuous depletion of intangible capital like work ethic, social trust, etc. The corruption in their societies grew to enormous proportions, with party insiders amassing huge amounts of power through their positions, and the privileges it gave them in the undergdound econonomy, including the blat system of favor-trading where high up officials who could bypass government controls on currency and goods had the most favors to sell.

Many of the current crop of billionaire oligarchs in Russia are former Soviet officials or relatives of these officials: https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/organized-crime-russi...

The lack of diversification and economic complexity was also obscured by the lack of a market economy to assign goods/services with prices. If such a market existed officially, then the extreme scarcity in basic consumer goods like toilet paper would have been reflected in high prices, and in lower inflation-adjusted income.

>>As far as attributing deindustrialization to social democratic, all I can say is that this is laughable. Exporting your capital to countries where the wage share will be lower is the cause of deindustrialization, and it's simple economics. You need government policy in the form of direct or indirect capital controls to prevent that from happening.

You finding it laughable while regurgitating a layman's understanding of deindustrialization is pretty egregious. Advanced economies can and ofter-do see more rapid growth of their manufacturing sectors than developing economies, and this is because other factors besides labor costs, like logistic costs, which are affected by infrastructure and proximity to the supply chain, access to abundant energy resources (e.g. natural gas, which the US has in abundance), an efficient and reliable legal system, a stable political system and the skillset of the workforce, can make a country the least costly place to site manufacturing, despite it having high labor costs.

The cause of the West's deindustrialization is broadly speaking, the capture of its economies by rent-seeking unions and regulatory agencies.

The first seeds of the economic destruction were planted in the 1930s, when laws like the NLRA granted totalitarian powers to unions, like the power to prevent companies from replacing them with workers outside the union.

The union movement completely captured US industry and extracted exorbitant benefits that crippled the golden geese of the US economy.

The labor laws passed in the 1930s and 50s guarantee that any industry that does start to become a significant contributor to national output, whether it's the Big Three Auto Makers and the big steel manufacturers in the 1950s, or Tesla, Amazon and Google today, becomes the target of rent-seeking unions who are impossible to effectively resist thanks to the free-market undermining labor laws in place.

The decline in productivity growth, particularly in globally competitive markets like manufacturing, is a predictable consequence of that.

Beyond labor regulations, is the growth of government social welfare spending, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield:

New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...

In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year.

California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.

Every dollar taxed for social welfare programs that end up as pension payments to public sector workers, is one less dollar spent on infrastructure, or private sector investments that expand the country's capital (e.g. factories, R&D, etc).

The Soviet intelligence apparatus spent a good deal of time and effort post-1945 ensuring that pretty much every state in Eastern and Central Europe would be dominated by the local communist party, parties which largely took direction from Moscow itself. In some places, like Poland, the process began even earlier when the war was still ongoing. The idea that they wouldn't have done so if Communist governments reigned in France and Italy is laughable.

Read Postwar, by Tony Judt. It's a pretty good roundup of what happened in Europe during the post-war era, including the start of the Cold War.

> France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments

As an Italian born in the 70's, thanks but no thanks?

Why? Has the “partitocrazia” first and the ‘80s cleptocracy, Berlusconi’s downward spiral, and the last attempts an installing neoliberal proxy governments done any good to the country?

I guess there’s no point discussing impossible alternative scenarios - especially given the extremely conservative attitude of Italian society - but an Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise would have been an interesting country to live in.

"Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise"

Not OP but as a Finnish (so not True Scandinavian but close enough)- Scandinavian wellfare state is as far from Communism as anything. Please don't confuse our social democratic parties with actual communists.

The Scandinavian liberal and egalitarian political outlook predates Marx (and Adam Smith in fact) - see for example Anders Chydenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius . While set in familiar enlightenment milieu Scandinavian concept of wellfare-state cannot be understood by labeling it as "socialism" which is a later construct.

Wellfare state itself of course was born after second world-war but the philosophical basis is more or less set in an earlier egalitarian view of man.

Yet strangely, if anyone suggests similar goals for the US they're invariably attacked as socialist or communist.

It's more accurate to say that socialism is a later expression of the same ideals - which actually date back to the late 18th century, when they appeared around Europe during a period of revolutions and enlightenment-inspired liberalism.

Socialism by that name predates Marx, but (unlike, I think, liberalism) you can find recognizable socialist thinking in the classics. The impulse toward egalitarianism is omnipresent throughout history, because equality is such an appealing Schelling point. Marx's genius was finding a justification for extremist Digger-style egalitarian ideology in the face of such dramatic manifestations of the positive-sum potential of voluntary exchange; in an earlier era where the gain of one feudal lord was inevitably the loss of another, the Digger approach is almost inevitable, but in the face of the explosive prosperity of the Industrial Revolution, Marx had to do quite a bit of work to explain how voluntary trade worsened the situation of the working class.

To a great extent he was correct in his analysis of existing conditions, but, as it turned out, not about their inevitability or about how to improve them.

This is not at all what Marx believed. I understand where the misconception comes from though.

Marx was quite particular amongst socialism because he did not believe humans were equal in ability.

Indeed, he argued with other socialists and believed that different people had superior and inferior abilities, and even that the more productive people logically deserved a higher wage, and so did the people with greater need.

This is why unlike other socialists of the era, Marx did not advocate for equal wages - he thought that people that were more productive should have a greater income (as well as people who needed it, ie, people with families, handicapped, etc...)

He also did not believe that conditions would not improve - he was a radical proponent of economic growth, and thought that things would improve for a significant amount of time until a plateau was hit, at which point a transition to communism would be the only alternative to decay.

Instead, Marx's argument was not that capitalism created inequality - he thought that inequality was inherent to the human condition - but that capitalism fundamentally engendered inequality on the basis not of personal ability, but on the basis of artificial social relations that rewarded the ownership of capital far more than the inherent inequality of humans ability and human need.

He also would vehemently disagree that voluntary trade worsened the situation of the working class - he wrote extensively about how capitalism was an immense improvement over feudalism, and how it would and was improving the situation of the working class materially. The issue he had is that the thought that this material improvement would eventually stop contributing to well-being, and that eventually the social harm caused by the capitalist social relations would lead to a plateau then decay of overall wellbeing.

If you look at his immediate suggestion in how to improve them, you would find them much more inline with modern welfare states than anything else, and indeed that was why Lenin basically instated a welfare state when he took power.

Here are the actual policies that Marx wanted to see implemented:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

These are certainly quite radical. But all of these are suggestions that are either already implemented today in capitalist countries, or that liberal capitalists have advocated for. Except for 1., 3. and 2., he was actually correct about how to improve the conditions of the working class - the abolition of private property of capital was his eventual goal, yes, but he was incredibly precient about the policies that would be used to improve capitalist society.

Thank you for sharing your point of view! I agree with most of what you said, and I was remiss in not quoting the Communist Manifesto myself.

Still, I don't think you can be a liberal capitalist and favor "confiscation of the property of all emigrants", "equal liability of all to work", or even "abolution of property in land", or even an exclusive monopoly on credit, and given that "the means of communication" here presumably means newspapers (as opposed to mails and telegraph companies) I don't see how a liberal could be in favor of that either, since it abolishes freedom of the press; and centralization of the means of transport in the hands of the state eliminates freedom of domestic travel. In countries that have abolished freedom of the press, property in land, freedom of domestic travel, and/or the freedom to emigrate without having all your property confiscated, it has not in fact improved the conditions of the working class; very much the contrary, it has been used to enslave and impoverish them. Even inheritance abolition and heavy income taxes are not clearly compatible with liberalism, but they aren't as central to liberalism as land tenure and the freedoms of the press, travel, and emigration. (Georgists want to abolish land ownership too, but George didn't claim to be a liberal.)

I didn't mean to say that Marx claimed that voluntary exchange worsened the condition of the working class more than feudalism, just that in its capitalist form it still tended to the immiseration of the working class.

As for "prescience," I'm not sure it was a question of prescience; I think that to a great degree the Russian Revolution and the Warsaw Pact simply moved the Overton Window a long way toward Marxist policies. I think capitalist societies adopted Marx's policies not, in many cases, because they would have anyway, but because (a) they were under pressure to do so when the policies were popular, so people wouldn't emigrate to Russia or replace their own governments with Communist ones, and (b) they were under less pressure not to do so when the policies were unpopular, because there were less and less places where you could escape from those policies.

Do you think that capitalist societies would not have eventually ended child labor, nationalized some key industries, and provided free education without the October revolution? I think that this would have happened anyways, these policies are just too helpful.

As far as the things you quoted - confiscating the property of all emigrants really means capital controls. Many liberal countries did in fact do this during periods of reform, such as Iceland in 2008.

But beyond that, capital controls were instituted under the Bretton Woods system. The idea of preventing people from leaving with their capital was indeed quite popular, and in that it allowed for example Iceland to reform their banking system, or a country from instituting public education and raising income taxes, many economists do think that they improve welfare.

Equal liability of all to work was also something that liberals implemented - here it basically just means public works projects open to all.

As far as "the means of communication", Marx does mean mails, telegraphs, and radio communication. He had argued otherwise for public newspapers, but argued against any kind of censorship of the press - making this actually yet another policy liberals would adopt :

In order to combat freedom of the press, the thesis of the permanent immaturity of the human race has to be defended. It is sheer tautology to assert that if absence of freedom is men's essence, freedom is contrary to his essence. Malicious sceptics could be daring enough not to take the speaker at his word.

https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/On_the_Assembly_of_the_Estate...

A historical document such as this one needs to be read in it's historical context. At the time, the income tax in England was of 3% - our modern income taxes of 20-30% are what Marx was referring to by saying heavy income taxes,

As far as abolishing property of land and renting it out, this is essentially just another way of saying "Land value tax". While it's not a liberal policy in essence, it is a policy that liberals advocate nowadays, and that many liberal capitalist countries such as Denmark, Singapore and Taiwan implement.

Completely abolishing inheritance of capital is something that no country has done in the capitalist world, yes, but it is again something that many liberals do advocate for, and nowadays inheritance tax rates of 50% do exist.

As far as saying that capitalism made the working class better off but that it will never completely stop immiseration of the working class, is that not what I said?

> Do you think that capitalist societies would not have eventually ended child labor, nationalized some key industries, and provided free education without the October revolution? I think that this would have happened anyways, these policies are just too helpful.

I don't know, but I don't think the answer depends on how socially beneficial these policies are; it depends on how much support they had among elites in different countries. It would be wonderful if elites favored all helpful policies (and only helpful policies), but surely nobody thinks that that is the case.

> The idea of preventing people from leaving with their capital was indeed quite popular, ... many economists do think that they improve welfare.

I was saying these aren't liberal policies. They certainly are popular, and it's unsurprising that many people disagree with me about whether they improve the welfare (generally or of the working class in particular.) However, I think "confiscating the property of emigrants" goes very significantly beyond what we normally understand as "capital controls"; an emigrant might return, after all, or rent out his house to tenants who pay the rent to his factor in the city, and these are not possible if you confiscate his property.

> Equal liability of all to work was also something that liberals implemented - here it basically just means public works projects open to all.

I read "liability of all to work" as a universal corvee system, which would be completely incompatible with liberalism, and which was in fact implemented (with some exceptions, for example for children and retirees) in officially Marxist societies. Clearly you know Marx's work much better than I do; can you point to something where he clarifies what he and Engels meant here?

> As far as "the means of communication", Marx does mean mails, telegraphs, and radio communication.

Since the Communist Manifesto was published in 01848, and Bose's first public demonstration of radio communication was in 01895, and Marconi's the following year, it seems unlikely that Marx meant radio communication. As for mails and telegraphs, do you know of anywhere that he or Engels went into more detail on this?

> He had argued otherwise for public newspapers, but argued against any kind of censorship of the press - making this actually yet another policy liberals would adopt:

Here by "freedom of the press" Marx seems to mean "freedom of information" in the FOIA sense; specifically the policy he is advocating is the "unabridged and daily publication" of the debates of the Provincial Assembly. Since such things are normally done by the State if they are done at all, this doesn't seem at all incompatible with the newspapers being all State-owned, much less the death penalty for posting broadsheets calling Stalin a wanker.

> At the time, the income tax in England was of 3% - our modern income taxes of 20-30% are what Marx was referring to by saying heavy income taxes,

I suppose you are right about this. Thank you.

> As far as saying that capitalism made the working class better off but that it will never completely stop immiseration of the working class, is that not what I said?

I think those two clauses are inconsistent with one another; it is impossible for them to be simultaneously true in any possible world. The immiseration of the working class would be the gradual decrease over time of its wages down to the bare minimum required for survival. An increase over time of the wages of the working class is precisely the opposite. Unless you mean that the working class had less income than previously but at least wasn't literally enslaved any more?

But, looking again at what I originally wrote, I see that my original point seems to have been that Marx was comparing the capitalist system of voluntary wage-labor, not with the feudal past, but rather with a hypothetical future Communist system, which also wasn't based on voluntary exchanges. Within a feudal system, where wealth is understood as land, it's easy to imagine how people would readily conclude that any voluntary trade had a winner (who received more value than they gave) and a loser (who gave more value than they received); this mentality is still common in many places.

But the ideologies of liberalism and capitalism were based on the widely shared presumption of positive-sum transactions, and in the face of conspicuous rapidly increasing general wealth, plus the gradual capitalist replacement of relations of involuntary servitude (including chattel slavery, indentured servitude, captured apprentices, impressed soldiers, the corvee labor later reinstated in places like the USSR, and manorial serf labor, as well as the much more recent prohibitions on debt bondage) with voluntary wage-labor, the zero-sum worldview would seem to be implausible, which you would think would give rise to the common-sense presumption that transactions would only occur when both parties believed they benefited by them, and that they would usually be right about it.

So, I was saying, Marx had to do a lot of work to construct an account of how such voluntary exchanges were still harmful to the workers. Nowadays we have much better conceptual tools for this, like the Nash equilibrium, the whole apparatus of game theory, Schelling's theory of negotiation, behavioral-economic experimental results on things like the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and so on.

> As far as abolishing property of land and renting it out, this is essentially just another way of saying "Land value tax". While it's not a liberal policy in essence, it is a policy that liberals advocate nowadays, and that many liberal capitalist countries such as Denmark, Singapore and Taiwan implement.

I don't think the people who are advocating a land value tax are liberals, and surely you would agree that Denmark, Singapore, and Taiwan have significant departures from liberalism; Singapore doesn't even have freedom of the press. I also don't think a land-value tax normally amounts to abolishing property in land.

(Not being a liberal policy doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. The liberals could be wrong. But I think it's important to be clear about the reasoning behind different policy proposals.)

> Completely abolishing inheritance of capital is something that no country has done in the capitalist world, yes, but it is again something that many liberals do advocate for, and nowadays inheritance tax rates of 50% do exist.

Again, I don't think the people who are advocating such policies are liberals.

Thank you again for taking the time to explain your understanding of the situation to me!

Scandinavia is in no way communist, not even "moderate' communist. For the nearest equivalent to that, Yugoslavia would be a better comparison.

If you look at the rapid industrialisation and growth of Italy through to the 60s starting from a similarly dire start, they leaped ahead of Yugoslavia. Yes Italy suffered recession through the 80s and 90s, but the Yugoslav economy completely collapsed. 150% inflation in Italy spread over a decade? Try 9,000% inflation in Yugoslavia over just 6 years in the same era. They were even a net importer agricultural produce despite 29% of their work force being in agriculture.

More recently since you brought him up yes Berlusconi was an idiot that hurt Italy, no question, but to really wipe out an economy right down to the roots there's no substitute for Marxism.

Italy also benefited from access to the European market, while Yugoslavia was stuck - and even there not quite well integrated either - with the flailing economies of the Eastern Block.

About your last statement, you seem to forget some of the attempts at Neoliberal Edens in South America of the '90s. They didn't go that well, haven't they?

I'm not sure if any liberal thinker would label policies such as fixed exchange rates, constant deficit funded by foreign borrowing, military dictatorships, as "liberal".

Yugoslavia did trade with Europe, it was independent and not a member of the Warsaw Pact. Only 25% of its trade was with the eastern block.

Hey, went to double check that claim and learned on Wikipedia that Yugoslavia did IMF backed austerity policies in the ‘80s.

Social Democracies are not Communist States. Communism requires certain extreme actions, not least of which is dissolving private property and seizing it for the state. Last I heard, Norway isn't taking everyone's land away and forcing everyone to live in communes.

Sure, but the OP said "moderate communism" and I wrote that a Scandinavian-like compromise would have been an interesting scenario for Italy.

I didn't quite say the two were the same thing, although some - n.b. some - ethical assumptions are cut from the same cloth.

I'm in agreement with another user's opinion that there is no such thing as moderate communism given that several of its core concepts are radically distinct from other forms of government/economic systems. Rejecting private property as a concept is a big threshold to cross. So is a full collectivization of labor. There is only one nation I know of that operated with a similar view but wasn't Marxist and that's the Inca.

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