What's with Communists and Gold?

Great Debates
1

Okay, hopefully that was a nice, attention-getting OP.

Lately, there have been a number of threads debating the merits of Communism vs capitalism. My major criticism of these threads is that they are always short on specifics.

So, I thought it would be productive if we took a single case that encompasses most of the principles of resource allocation: Gold.

It’s scarce, and in high demand. It’s useful for a wide variety of industries.

So, you Communists you… Here’s the scenario. You’ve just discovered a rich vein of gold in Siberia. The vein is such that you’ll have to surface mine a large area, which is already covered by dwellings and light industry. Your job - extract the gold, and make it available in an efficient way to your society.

Anyone care to step up to the plate and describe how to do it?

And please, let’s not get into a ‘capitalism/communism’ debate, other than how the two systems would compare in allocating gold. There are plenty of other threads for general discussions.

2

Hi Sam,
I kind of get the feeling that this thread was more or less meant for me since gold came up in our discussion on the other thread. Judging from the underwhelming response, I must be right. Of course if anyone else feels the urge to hop in, I will stand corrected.
So politeness begs that I respond somehow. Unfortunately, I don’t feel qualified to debate this particular subject. If I felt that there was a need for a Ministry of Mining and Resource Extraction in my ideal communist government/economy I wouldn’t apoint myself as the head (it’s interesting to me how coming up with an entire government/economic system by yourself gives one the feeling of being an imaginary “benevolent despot”).

So, given my ignorance of mining, urban planning, the uses of gold, and Siberia: I have to bow out of this one.

I think I understand your need for specifics, and I admire your apparent willingness to provide your own. However, even if you limited the debate to capitalists based strategies, I think you would still see a lot of different opinions of how to handle this complex situation.

So, if indeed you are knowlegable on these issues, present your own specifics of the best capitalist strategy for this. Maybe since there seem to be more people willing to defend capitalism here, it will spark more of a debate.

3

See, the thing is that capitalists don’t have to provide a ‘capitalist strategy’. The whole point to how capitalism works is that there are a small number of rules which set up the legal parameters within which people work, and then order arises spontaneously from that. There IS no central ‘plan’. My whole point all along is that large, over-reaching ‘plans’ for an economy are doomed to failure for all sorts of reasons.

I didn’t open this thread just for you, though. I was hoping to move the endless ‘communism/capitalism’ debates away from generalities and platitudes into hard, concrete action items that we can debate. If you want to pick something you are more familiar with and have a go at it, feel free.

Perhaps this thread should have been titled, “Communism - let’s get specific”. I thought Gold might make an interesting test case, but I’ll be happy to debate any other industry you have in mind, as long as we limit this debate to specific policy proposals and not just, “Why can’t we all just work together?”

4

But there are capitalists strategies to this. Imagine yourself as a president of a mining company. How do you approach an entire community of seperate land owners and make purchases of their land? Suddenly you have to answer for these people what will happen to their lives and community when you’ve displaced them all and made the area a strip mine. Will you face resistance from the town council? Will they try to bargain collectively with you? Can you isolate them one by one, or will this create resentment? Will other companies come in and make lower bids and lower the attractiveness of the opportunity?
Or imagine yourself as a mayor with a respective poplulace. Do you court the industry and try to make it rich, or do you try to preserve your community?

Now I know why you wanted specifics, you had no intention of providing your own. Perhap a better title would have been “You commies get specific, while I nitpick”. It’s easy to argue when you don’t have a burden of proof.

Well how about you provide your capitalist plan for integrating China into the world economy as a free market system?

5

Sam, I’m sorry but your assumptions here seem rather arbitrary.

Capitalists don’t provide a strategy? Since when. Try raising money without a business plan. If you can’t demonstrate–in great detail–how you will make profit from the new mining enterprise you won’t get any backing. End of gold mine.

Conversely, there is nothing built-into socialist philosophy that mandates over-planning. In a socialist economy the gold-mining operation would be nationalized, and those who ran it could conceivably be identical to their capitalist counterparts: engineers, accountants, engineers and, presumably, miners.

Now as far as efficient distribution goes, that depends on a lot more than whether the economy is privatized or socialized. In either case supply and demand are going to determine what is efficient, and you haven’t provided any information about that.

6

Sam Are the Russians still considered “Communists.” I’m truly not pulling your chain. I don’t know.

And how does using gold address a topic such as “resource allocation?”

I would think that the Russians would mine the gold and sell it on the open market for what it’s worth. What they did with the proceeds might make for an interesting discussion.

They would have no domestic market that would absorb the gold.

I truly apologize if this doesn’t address your OP.

7

I’m trying to address how a pure communist society, without the large bureaucracy, with everyone acting in everyone else’s interest, would accomplish resource allocation like this.

8

Fine, Sam, but how can anyone answer a question like that without any knowledge of world supply and demand?

9

While I’m at it, I’m curious what you mean by a “pure communist society”? Would this be as in the second (post-socialist) stage as theorized by Marx? Or does it derive from some other discussion (I’ve only taken part in a couple of this red threads :wink: ).

10

In another thread, someone repeated the old saying, “Communism would work in a perfect world, but unfortunately people are greedy bastards”. Or something to that effect. I just want to know how a society in which everyone believed in Communism and did their best for the country would be structured according to Communist principles.

11

Sam, there is no world as you describe. All real life examples of socialist/totaliterian states have/had large bureaucracies.

Although I would point out one major difference. In a communist/socialist/paternalistic society, the rights of the individual are beneath that of the society. In a capitalistic society, that may not be the case. For the government, or the bureau of mining to make a case for imminent domain would probably be easier under a socialist society. That said, if you don’t have the money for lawyers/justice in a capitalistic society, then it’s likely you could be forced off the land just as quickly.

If you really want a debate, you’re going to have to define your capitalistic world as there are so many variables.

12

I’m not trying to define anything - I want the believers in Communism to define it for me. But not in platitudes or generalities. I want to see how it would work in practice, in mundane cases. I’d like someone to sketch it out so we can debate actual proposals instead of nebulous generalities that never go anywhere.

13

I think in a Communist society, if the people who needed the gold (or at least could convince the Ministry of Plenty that they did) outnumbered the people who lived in the area, then the people who lived in the area are just shit outta luck.

14

AFAIK we don’t have a lot of examples of people living in a free, democratic, communist society. Perhaps some communes would count, but I don’t think that they’re large enough for you. Without hard evidence, nebulous generalities will only become nebulous particulars.

Switching from one economic system to another is a complicated, chaotic process. That’s why I brought up the China example, to demonstrate the scale of what you’re expecting. We can lay all kinds of plans, but it’s not going to matter when everything hits the fan.

If I was a revolutionary I would feel obligated to present a plan on that scale. But I’m not proposing a revolution. I’m a gradualist and feel that historical realities will take precedence over theoretical postulations. A really practical plan for communism would take into account the culture that it is being implemented into, their technological advancement, natural resources, intellectual history, and previous economic system. Quite frankly I don’t see any societies ready to make that change right now.

What I’ve said is more substantial than we’ll “work together”. I’ve suggested gathering knowledge slowly and concretely through experimentation from small scale economic operations, to networks of larger cooperations, to communities, and then to networks of communities. If you want to know the results of the experiments before they’re performed, I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.

You know, back before the bolsheviks came into power, communism was actually associated with anarchism, and (gasp) libertarians. Previously the burden of proof on the necessity of bureacracy in communism would have been reversed. There’s a diverse range of communist thought and plenty of argument over what could/should happen.

15

This is easy. You get everyone to move off the land where the mining needs to take place. You build them new homes in nearby areas of low quality so that they can be built quickly. If the factory is of particular value you can move that brick by brick to another location. The displacement of so many homes and businesses will probably leave you with plenty of workers with nothing to work on. Perfect, you can now put them to work in the people’s mine so that they can mine the people’s gold.

If any of the workers behave in a selfish manner you can send them to work at the business end of the bayonet, send them to the gulags, take them away in the middle of the night, or starve them to death.

Marc

16

Bryan: :I think in a Communist society, if the people who needed the gold (or at least could convince the Ministry of Plenty that they did) outnumbered the people who lived in the area, then the people who lived in the area are just shit outta luck."

I agree that no nation-size communist economy would award the profits of the goldmine directly to those “who lived in the area” but then neither would capitalism.

Sam, let me repeat that the givens of your OP don’t provide enough information for anyone to sketch out how a socialist or, if you prefer, communist distribution might work out. Factors such as the world’s market for gold, the dynamics of the national economy in question, and the current uses for gold (technological and otherwise) are as significant to any socialist decision-making process as they are to any capitalist counterpart.

More broadly.

Readers of Marx debate as to Marx’s beliefs about the conditions of possibility for communism. Some believe that Marx thought that technology would soon make it possible by eliminating scarcity of goods and services. Some believe that, in addition to technology’s increase of productive power, Marx believed that collective ownership under socialism would produce a fundamental change in human behavior, making individuals more public spirited and, as a result, more free. As you may remember from previous threads, I think there are many good reasons to read Marx’s thought: but what you won’t find there is a roadmap of the kind you are looking for.

There is, however, another socialist (but not communist) tradition and one that, in the long run, impacted European socio-economic development more directly than Marx’s thought did. That is the Fabian idea of a state economy–eventually of a world economy–run by experts. If you’d like to read an interesting example of how this was seen to work, check out H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1906, I think), which you can get free on the web. Wells was both a socialist and a believer that human individuality was the highest good; like Marx, in other words, (but without being directly influenced by Marx’s thought), Wells believed that socialism was necessary to freeing human individuality. Under the influence of the Fabian Society (basically a middle-class professional movement rather than a working-class group and one that operated as a kind of “think tank”) Wells became interested in the idea of a world state. In MU the state in question is run by a volunteer elite class of “Samurai” who, in exchange for administrative power, agree to live by a strongly civic code of conduct. The interesting thing about the book is how clearly ambivalent Wells was about aspects of the bureaucracy: he could see how bureaucratic intervention was often going to conflict with the primary goal of liberating human individuality. Wells eventually parted with the Fabians (although there were personal reasons for the split as well as ideological ones.)

For a different view of the socialism of that period look at Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” For Wilde socialism basically is anarchism. He specifically rejects any kind of bureaucracy that would interfere with the highest level of individual expression. OTOH, he’s much less forthcoming than Wells about how the economy would be run after the eliimination of private property. You can also check out William Morris’s New from Nowhere where a non-bureaucratic socialist utopia is envisioned in the form of a society that rejects most machine technology and values craftsmanship at a very artistic level.

As to the real world, for the foreseeable future, the highest level of social democracy that seems possible is the kind that, say, Scandanavian and German people have enjoyed for decades. You may rush to say that the provisions of these social democracies (the so-called welfare state) is being dismantled because it can’t compete with countries that have no such provision. But that in itself would have been obvious to any of the thinkers just mentioned. It is not, in itself, an argument against the viability of social democracies which have delivered a very high level of freedom and socio-economic stability for quite some time.

What’s clear now more than ever is that any socialism, much less communism, has to be implemented on a global level. You can’t have German industrial workers being paid on average $20/hour and enjoying the benefits of advanced social welfare while, in the US, industries are using Chinese labor for 50 cents/hour, while former well-paid US industrial workers devolve into minimum wage Walmart employees.

To go any further with this line of discussion would change this from a thread on communism to a thread on globalization: its impact on existing social democracies, and its import for a socialist politics of the future.
I’m not sure you want to go there–but that’s the only way that you can get particulars of the kind you want. Anything less would involve positing a kind of autarkic communist society and I don’t think that anyone particular wants or expects a world of autarkic nation-states in the 21st century.

17

State mines Gold. State sells gold. State spends money.

Its not a very good example for crticizing communsim.

18

Marc: " If any of the workers behave in a selfish manner you can send them to work at the business end of the bayonet, send them to the gulags, take them away in the middle of the night, or starve them to death."

We in advanced capitalist societies must also be vigilant against abuse of the powerless; and to recognize the importance of government regulation to counterbalance the private incentive to exploit (or as in Enron, to cheat and defraud).

Take a look at this story:

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13364

19

Lenin once wrote that, after the victory of communism over capitalism, they’d build public lavatories out of gold.

A communist probably wouldn’t see any value in gold even remotely comparable to its price on the capitalist market because it’s not too useful a metal.

20

In an ideal communist society, the discovery of gold would first be very widely publicized. (A direct opposite of the likely case in a capitalistic society.) The subject of gold, its value, its importance to our society at this time, the needs for hard currency revenue of our society, and the displacement that would be caused by its removal, both environmental, and social. Everyone would be given as much information as could be reasonably assimilated, and the population at large would take some time to decide the needs of the many.

When that was done, a consensus would emerge. To mine, or not to mine. Since some would be more strongly hurt by the mining, the benefits to them would need to be made stronger as well. When the proper balance was achieved to gain the concurrence of a strong majority of the affected population, an agreement of the people, a law, would be enacted. It is inevitable that a small percentage would not agree however generous the compensation for their losses might be. Eminent Domain can exist in a communist society, but the process in a society dedicated to the principles of the society’s duty to the needs of the people will consider the range of those needs far more than that of a capitalist society.

I would willingly point out that by this time, a Capitalist society would have already allowed ten or so wealthy men to purchase the mineral rights to most of the land, with a minimum public fanfare, and the resulting low prices, borrowed the money, and begun mining gold. Some would consider this to be an advantage. Most of the people who sold out their rights unknowingly, and the people downstream of the mines would disagree. In an ideal communist society, it is quite possible that trillions in extractable gold lying under a lightly populated area might be considered not worth the cost of mining. In that case, the survey information would be archived, and a periodic reassessment of the needs of society would be carried out, to assure that the needs of the society as a whole were served by its use of resources.

Once the decision is made, the free communist approach is to allocate funds from central authority for additional compensation to the portion of the populace that has the skills and materials to bring to bear on the problem at hand. Once mining has begun, the deficit incurred from the central authority is repaid first and the compensation to the most strongly affected next. Additional funds are then allocated from the proceeds to provide training to replace the skills now in short supply for the rest of society, and the balance of the revenue is added to the general funds which provide benefits to our society. If the richness of the entire society was greatly improved, many other projects, perhaps considered to expensive before this, could be planned.

Specifics in matters of environmental impact, unique habitats involved, historic importance of the region, and other such matters would be part of the initial informational effort, not things brought up after the fact. The cost to the whole society is the balance to the benefit of the increase in wealth, of the whole society. In a capitalist society, the possibility of the very few being able to benefit at a great cost of the many is not important at all. Bottom lines in a capitalist system always have dollar signs on them. In this case, if the gold, or the coal lies under the most beautiful parkland in the nation, it might not be worth a trillion dollars to the people to give up the park.

Totalitarian communist societies would not follow this model, of course. The great flaw in communism, in my opinion, is not in the system itself, but in the fact that is cannot arise without imposition by either a small number, voluntarily, upon themselves, or by an act of despotism, upon a larger number. That makes it an unworkable system for nations, or even city states.

Tris

“As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.” ~ Josh Billings ~