Regarding communism’s inability to handle human nature, I don’t know if the following is true, but I heard a delightful story about the Moscow bus system in the 1980s. Apparently the buses, apart from being very cheap to ride, employed an honesty system whereby you’d just drop coins into a metal box by the door, and nobody really policed it. Eventually, the Soviets decided to audit the system, and they found that there wasn’t as much money in the boxes as there should be based on passenger levels. And they were surprised!
The idea that all modern property ownership (by “property” Proudhon means something like fixed assests and capital) derives from previous actions against other people or the Commons. No new property is created, only taken from others or isolated from the Commons. This excludes notions of intellectual property, but definitely includes land, mineral wealth and other environmental riches such as water rights. In his view, the chief current agents of such sequestering (“theft”) are the State and capitalists.
It didn’t strike me as such a radical statement.
Proudhon did specifically exlude the kind of personal property he called “posessions” to distinguish them from “property”.
I don’t understand what this means, or how it relates to the quote?
That’s true, but you’ve got to remember that plantations using slaves also weren’t run by guys spending every day killing kittens. Slaves were given free housing and food. They could receive favor by doing “favors” for their owners (for instance, sleeping with them.) And they were given honest work to do, which theoretically could have satisfied them for the daily life until they die.
Communism as it has always ended up being is just that plantation extended to a state level. And just as the plantation owner could get his crops picked every day, the “owners” in a communist society can make sure various tasks get done to keep income coming into the system.
The problems being that tending crops is just one task, while as running a nation involves thousands of products and hundreds of industries that have to be run–meaning that in general the owners can’t oversee that everything is getting done so they had to always act reactively. That is, if they found out that food was short, they would send out looking for any “food” available anywhere, and invest all energy into getting that one thing done–so for instance you’ll enter Moscow and find banana peels* scattered everywhere because Moscow had just gotten a shipment of bananas rushed in. And of course while they were focussed on getting in the one shipment of bananas, everything else stops, and suddenly they will lose power and the owners have to divert all their influence into getting power back up again.
The other problem with Communism versus a slave plantation is that in a plantation there are the white owners, and the black slaves, and that’s not going to change. Under Communism though, the people who become the owners are the ones who were the slaves that were best at doing favors, and getting favors done for their masters. Thus you see it that when Communism collapses, all the former leaders show back up as mafioso. The method by which one gets jobs under Communism is the same skillset that makes one a good mafioso. If the boss needs bananas, you get it by whatever means. If the boss wants women, you pimp your sister. If someone annoys the boss, that person disappears.
So, true, Communism isn’t necessarily the peak of evil, but it is still at least more evil than black slavery was, if only because it is less efficient, and rewards dishonesty and immorality more.
Woops, forgot my footnote.
- “Banana peels everywhere” is something that I witnessed when I visitted Russia. Can’t recall whether it was Moscow or St. Petersberg, but yep, banana peels in every corner on the street because the city had gotten a shipment, and niceties was too low a priority for anyone to not litter them on the sidewalks.
Wait, no. I’m an American who lives in Bulgaria. (My Bulgarian national ID says that I’m a “FOREIGNER RESIDING LONG TIME IN BULGARIA”.)
To be honest, whether or not a job was really guaranteed isn’t even really the point, it’s the perception now that back then everyone worked, everyone had a job, and life was more stable and comfortable.
From my AP Government textbook:
Since 1965, federal employees have held steady at 2.5-3 million. State and local employees have gone from 10.5-22 million in those same 38 years (my book only has data for this until 2003). State governments are far worse in this respect than the federal government; while technically you could call 2,500,000-3,000,000 “millions,” it’s a little bit misleading. There are barely multiple millions of federal workers.
The Department of Education has fewer employees than any other executive department (4,500).
As for salaries, the top 3 grades of the General Schedule have about 9,000 employees, and while the specific number is not listed, the highest one that is listed is GS-15, at $110,065. GS 11-13 have the largest number of employees each, and the average salary ranges from $53,485 to $77,004. The majority of GS employees are at pay grade GS-11 or below, and the weighted average salary (excluding the top 9000) is $54,329. This doesn’t exactly support your argument.
It does, however acknowledge the difficulty in firing workers: “In a recent year, the government managed to fire only 500 employees for poor performance, a tiny fraction of civilian federal workers.”
I am unable to find data regarding the second half of your second-to-last statement, and the first seems very poorly defined (it also implies a certain level of efficiency to the federal government that many would argue is simply not present).
Source: Government in America: People, Politics, and Policy (12th edition; pp. 470-473); G. Edwards III, M. Wattenberg, R. Lineberry. Copyright 2006, Pearson Education, Inc.
I can’t find the publisher or home city, but I assume what I’ve given is sufficient.