The paradox of communism

Great Debates
41

True. For a lot of people capitalism is mostly theory rather than practice.

Let’s say you work in a Walmart. You don’t own Walmart; you don’t have any stock in Walmart; you don’t have any say in the running of Walmart. Walmart is just the place where you work. You do your job the way a manager tells you to do it and you collect a paycheck.

Now suppose you live in a socialist economy where department stores are run by the government. And you work in a Govmart. You don’t own Govmart; you don’t have any stock in Govmart; you don’t have any say in the running of Govmart. Govmart is just the place where you work. You do your job the way a manager tells you to do it and you collect a paycheck.

As a practical matter, it really makes no difference in your day-to-day routine whether you’re living in a capitalist economy or a socialist economy.

42

Property is force. To recognize X as Y’s property is to recognize a social commitment to use force to ensure that no one can interact with X against the wishes of Y.

For example, the fact that Y owns a particular piece of land means that if I wish to go step on that piece of land and do so, and Y wishes for me not to go step on that piece of land and finds out, then Y can call the police and have them violently expel me from the land. Straight-up physical force will be applied to me on Y’s command against my personal wishes.

Now, you may say this is legitimate action, and therefore not “force”. But then you would be playing word games, trying to summon the moral intuitions associated with ordinary language “force” (as in violent physical force) and redirect it by sleight-of-hand to an ideological account of “force” (e.g., “Whatever libertarians don’t like!”). Besides, though you may consider expulsion of trespassers as legitimate action and therefore not “force”, the Communist (or some other anti-property fellow) may just as well feel this is illegitimate action, and therefore most certainly is “force”. The use of the word “force” buys you nothing to settle this ideological conflict (nothing by way of sound reasoning, that is, though it does often make for effective sophistry).

On another note, there certainly are ways, we must all admit empirically, to get people to do things other than by “force” or “markets” in any ordinary language sense. For example, Bob may invite Jane to a gathering at his house and Jane may not initially feel like going. Bob may then beg and cajole Jane, noting that Bob had been feeling particularly down lately and it would mean a lot to him if Jane could attend, and that Bob had been so kind as to attend Jane’s gathering last week, and Bob will take special effort to invite other friends whose company Jane enjoys, etc. And this may then change Jane’s mind just as Bob intends it to. Now, perhaps you will call this a “market” because Bob has incentivized Jane in various ways, or perhaps you will call it “force”, or god knows what, but that would again be doing violence to the ordinary language meaning of words.

43

eh, ignore this post

44

I have long wondered about the impact of this on the “communist” or proto-communist states. When part of the state’s struggle to establish a new system is being undermined by external pressure opposing the successful implementation of that system, how would one expect the officials of the state to respond?

45

That maybe it was a matter of the time and place and not the atrocity-prone nature of reds, no worse than that of whites.

46

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

47

It does when you’re the consumer and can choose stores and brands instead of having to buy GovBread, GovCheese and GovPants at GovMart.

The ‘little people’ participate in Capitalism as the consumer who is being wooed by the capitalist ‘fat cats’.

48

The flow of money is what coordinates economic activity, and the market process is what causes information about relative supply and demand to emerge.

You cannot replace this mechanism with a bureaucracy, because the bureaucrats don’t have the information required to make decisions. It’s simply not available to them absent some process that allows individuals to negotiate with others.

In the Soviet Union, the state planning agency, GOSPLAN, hired thousands of actuaries to try to track and calculate the factors of production. They failed miserably and the Soviet Union was constantly subject to gluts and shortages of materials because there was no way to intelligently determine supply and demand.

That works great when everyone knows everyone else. It falls apart completely when the workforce is mobile and people live anonymously in huge cities.

The ‘collective’ model has only ever worked in small groups, where information about needs can be transmitted to all members, where group decision-making is possible, etc. And even then, it usually breaks down unless all the members of the collective share the same goals (i.e. achieving the Kingdom of Heaven, which is why most successful communes are filled with fundamentalists).

Tell me: Let’s say you’re in charge of the bureau of cars. Not everyone can have a car. You want to distribute them to the people who need them the most. How are you going to do it?

Let’s further stipulate that everyone in the country is a good little Communist focused only on the good of the collective, so there’s no one greedily trying to take a car they don’t need or otherwise game the system. Everyone honestly wants the cars to go to the people who need them the most.

So, how does that work? Everyone’s life is improved with a new car. Anyone who needs a car for work will benefit from a new car. But not everyone can have one.

So here I am, a good Communist party member. I’m asking if I’m one of the ones who needs a new car. How the heck am I supposed to know? My car is 10 years old, so it could surely be replaced. But what if my neighbor’s car is older? Or it has broken parts? I have no idea, so I can’t tell between us who should get the car.

Or maybe we have the same cars, but my job gains more value if I have a new car, because I’ve figured out a way to do my route better. So the state would be better off giving me a car than someone who would use one less efficiently. How does anyone know?

The answer is that they can’t, because the information about relative need of cars doesn’t even exist until it emerges from a market process, where everyone is free to bid for a car at the expense of something else they could have instead. So each person in the market is forced to evaluate his own hierarchy of needs, and everyone else does too. Then during the bidding we figure out who really values them.

How does that process happen in a Communist country, and can you point to any examples where that has worked efficiently in the past?

49

Are you claiming that in capitalism has solved this issue and all products go to the customers who need them the most?

50

If you define the amount that someone “needs” a product as the amount they are willing and able to pay for it, sure! (Nevermind that, in a world of tremendous inequality, the wealthy can spend far more on their whims than the poor can on their deepest desires…). Problem solved!

51

If that were all there was to it, Sam, you could just flip a coin. The problem with communism is that people are NOT GOOD LITTLE COMMUNISTS. We aren’t. We steal, we lie, we cheat, take advantage of our fellow men. And many of us lust for power. That’s why we need institutional checks on those impulses for civilization to work.

And this goes for the other end of the spectrum, too-- Libertarianism. People DON’T always value freedom over all else. Most people want some level of security along with freedom.

Both systems fail because the both make incorrect assumptions about what we, as a species, are like.

52

That does not follow. The various needs, wants and desires of a given individual or household aren’t magically better expressed through negotiation over, I dunno, a monthly form of some kind to cover the special cases. Beyond that : a roof over one’s head, two hots a day, a bed, heating etc… those basic needs don’t have huge variance from one individual to the next.

And, again, communism and currency are not antithetical.

Well, yeah, but from what I’m given to understand this was less about GOSPLAN sucking at its job, and more about the process of central planning being fucked coming and going, with the central bureau demanding unreachable production quotas and the lower managers plain lying about their own capacities and productions out of fear of getting Stalin’d.
The miserable failings of the Soviet Union aside, and provided modern technology & infrastructure (e.g. internet & computers) I don’t think this is a mathematically unsolvable problem.

I tend to agree that communism/direct democracy doesn’t scale up, and that while organizing a nation or city in any number of semi-autonomous subdivisions at the monkeysphere population level would alleviate the problem to a large extent there still seems like there would be a need for a meta-authority to handle both inter-subdivision conflicts and those things that simply need to be handled with a long view from a high building - urban planning, infrastructure, defence…

Don’t look at me, I’m no communist. But what does that have to do with force ?

53

Ok, take a step back from the cartoon model of the economy that communists have, where the economy is made up of evil rich guys smoking cigars, plotting to stick it to the worker who is powerless in the face of massive wealth inequality.

The real economy is not driven by class conflict and rich people exploiting the poor. The real economy is made up of the billions of transactions that occur every day between people on a relatively even footing - suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, etc.

Where do you think economic growth comes from? How does society as a whole get richer? The glib answer from the right is ‘supply side’. The glib answer from the left is… I’m not sure. Spending? Equality? Some other fuzzy, nebulous concept? Or a few smart people in the government making better decisions than the great unwashed? Whatever, it’s wrong.

The real answer is… economic growth happens because little tiny optimizations happen all the time - optimizations made by people carrying out day to day tasks and trying to do them better so that they can make more money or make their work a little easier. Economic growth happens when millions of people are free to explore the unknown spaces of the future, to profit or lose as they try to build on their discoveries and sell them to the public. Economic growth happens when information is aligned with power, when the massive complex productive capacity of society is closely aligned with the demands of consumers. Millions of real people, making decisions every day under a rules system that allows them to personally benefit from the good ones - and pay the price for the bad ones.

Economies are ecosystems. They are complex adaptive systems, and as such require feedback and constant iteration to survive and grow. For such systems to work, the ‘actors’ in them must have agency - they must be allowed to discover, profit, fail. Innovation doesn’t come from a government bureau - it comes from millions of people learning little things and acting on them, from hundreds of thousands of people trying out ideas, testing theories, and then profiting from them if they hit the jackpot.

And innovation is not just the creation of new goods or advancing science. Innovation can be tweaking a supply chain to make it more efficient, or figuring out a way to align the machines on the factory floor to improve yield by a percentage point or two. Economic growth happens when a delivery driver uses local knowledge of traffic conditions to optimize his route a little bit, or when someone chooses to specialize in a task and become very, very good at it.

An economy is made up of millions of nodes (people) and billions of connections between them. It is unfathomably complex and utterly unpredictable in the long term. Innovation happens everywhere in that complex web when incentives are aligned with good decision-making.

Look at any large social system in nature. Ants, bees, flocks of birds, termites, slime molds… They all share a few things in common. Chief among them is that there is no leader - no central plans, no directed strategies, no central control of any sort.

What makes them work? How is an ant colony so efficient at finding food without a leader telling them what to do? Simple rules baked into the ant’s brains lead to complex group behavior. Plonk an anthill down in a new area, and you will see ants swarm out and begin milling round in what looks like aimless fashion. But it’s not. It’s an efficient, stochastic search. In other words, random searches spreading out from the anthill.

When an ant finds food, it carries it back to the anthill, leaving a pheromone trail behind. Other ants are attracted to it and follow it to the food source. The pheromones are information. New information about the environment that the ants can exploit. That’s economic growth, ant-style.

If the food source is large, each ant carrying food back will cause the pheromone trail to grow, which in turn attracts even more ants. Farther away, other hands keep exploring, and when they find food they create their own pheromone trails. Over time, what evolves is a highly efficient ‘economy’ consisting of many pheromone trails to food sources, with each one waxing and waning as the food supplies change.

The individual ants aren’t aware of any of this. They have no idea they are creating optimal paths between food sources and the ant hill. They are just following their own incentives - in their case, simple rules carried by instinct and a bit of programming. And yet, ants have been known to build bridges with their own bodies to help span chasms to food sources. They fight in armies along defined fronts. They capture rival ants and enslave them. They maintain temperatures in ant nurseries to very high precision by bringing in just the right amount of decomposing vegetation. If an alien came to earth and observed an anthill from a distance, he could easily come to believe that it was intelligent. But it all happens without thought, without any guidance or grand plan. These higher-level constructs are emergent properties. They are the ant equivalent of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’.

The analogy to a capitalist economy is that entrepreneurs are the ‘foragers’. Constantly trying out new ideas, new products, new ways of solving human problems. If they are successful, people spend their money on their products, create the human equivalent of a pheromone trail. The more useful the product or the more widely targeted its benefits, the more money moves in that direction.

This money trail attracts other entrepreneurs like ants to a pheromone trail. Money is information. It tells us who wants what, what people are willing to trade with each other for, where the value in the economy is, etc. And when that value no longer exists, either because the product became dated, or tastes changed, or other products provide better value, then that company goes out of business, and the entrepreneurs begin ‘foraging’ again.

This is a simplistic metaphor, but it gets across the point that in complex adaptive systems, growth has to happen organically from the bottom, and there has to be feedback and constant iteration to keep everything stable and growing. This is why central command and central planning will never, ever be as efficient. All the information goes in one direction - from top to the bottom. The people at the bottom who hold the vast amount of information needed to efficiently run an economy have no power to change things and no incentive to do so.

54

Of course people don’t behave like good little communists. First rule of economics is that people respond to incentives. When everyone is the same, when no one can profit from harder work, taking risks, or innovating, the problems get much worse because innovation dies. That’s why China with its billion people and a command economy has to steal most of its technology from other, much smaller countries.

But the point is that EVEN IF everyone was a good Communist, it still wouldn’t work. It can’t, because there is a gross misalignment of power and information. The people with the buik of the information required for an economy to make rational decisions do not have the power to act on it, and the people at the top who have all the power have almost no information that can guide their decisions.

And the other point is that even if the government created a massive bureau with hundreds of thousands of scientists studying the economy, backed by supercomputers, they STILL couldn’t do it, because the information about relative supply and demand simply doesn’t exist without a market.

Maybe you could try answering the question I posed: You’re the ‘car czar’, tasked with making sure the limited number of cars produced go to the people who will provide the most value back to society by having them. How are you going to know? How is anyone going to know? How do you know if you need a car more than another person a city over? How does a planner make an optimal decision?

There are many reasons Communism can’t work. Another one is that it’s impossible to plan production of an entire modern economy because it’s just far too complex, and because every economy becomes a complex adaptive system that will thwart your attempts to control it.

We seem to understand that we can’t ‘optimize’ an ecosystem by dicking around with it. Introducing six wolves into a park causes rivers to change direction through a feedback loop that was impossible to predict. Trying to manage forest fires leads to megafires. Unintended consequences abound when you try to control complex systems and direct them. An economy is a complex system subject to the same problems, but some people just don’t want to believe it so they pretend it’s manageable despite a history of constant failure when people try.

55

Yay, a thread about communism! Fear not, for I am here to enlighten all you proles beset with false consciousness. :cool:

I think it’s always easy for insurgents to appear heroic, and not just communist ones. Robespierre of revolutionary France, for example, looked heroic too before he finally took power and the Terror began. Appearing to fight the status quo, whether it be capitalism, monarchism or whatever else, just generally attractive to those whom said status quo oppresses, which is usually the majority of people. The reason why the régimes of Vietnam and China in particular became oppressive after the conquest of power by the Communists was, in my opinion, that the vanguard parties were structured incorrectly (too top-down), compromised by nationalistic strategy and forced to operate in backward, semi-feudal countries with tiny working classes. As well as the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and failure of the German and Spanish revolutions. Not because communism has some sort of inherent Jekyll and Hyde quality. Though that’s an interesting point you made, OP.

56

Why you’re wrong about communism: 7 huge misconceptions about it (and capitalism):

57

Salon turned into the Onion so gradually I hardly even noticed.
That is a recipe for poverty. Division of labor is what allows for prosperity. Someone who raises cattle once a week is likely to be much worse at raising cattle than someone who does it for a living. A society of dilettantes will obviously be much poorer than a society of professionals.

58

What Marx wrote in the Manifesto is no more relevant to the reality of communism than what Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged is relevant to the reality of capitalism.

The idea that communism “envisions a time beyond work” is cute and is about as real as the events depicted in “The Hobbit.” It didn’t happen, and it’s not going to.

59

Possibly, but **Cheesesteak **is still wrong. The notion that China, the USSR or any communist country ever had only one brand of anything, sold in one store chain is laughable on its face.

It’s even more amusing that the vaunted diversity of capitalist superstores is pretty much a sham. They’re selling you the illusion of choice. A dozen products sold in a hundred packagings, all made by a handful of massive conglomerates. And that’s ignoring the deliberately monopolistic fuckery (Comcast & Time Warner, anyone ?).

60

From the same article: