What ants carry out is no more communism than it is catholicism. Ants carry out ant-instinct, and it doesn’t matter what economic system it “looks” like to any human, because it’s not an economic system. Any similarities between what ants do and how human economies operate are only in the eye of the beholder: what if I said that ants seem to operate more along a feudalistic line, what with having a queen and all? It’s an analogy that sheds no light on what we’re discussing.
Let’s tackle this from another angle. The relationship between economics and human instinct is tenuous, at best. One may say that markets form naturally, but that is a simple minded statement that has little to do with the workings of capitalism today. To have a modern market system, you have to have currency, weights and measures, a code of laws, and a whole lot of other concepts that take time to design and build. Ants don’t need that stuff. Ants don’t have that stuff. They haven’t thought of it.
A Leninist or Stalinist or Maoist might argue that communism is more naturual than capitalism, but even those systems built up bureaucracies, commissars, communist dogma, as well as maintaining currency, weights and measures, codes of laws, etc. Ants don’t have dogma. Ants don’t have commissars. Ants don’t have gulags. Ants don’t have ant-Lenins or ant-Maos to design such things. Ants don’t have different philosophies that lead to different ant governments or ant economies. Ants don’t have communism. Ants don’t have economics.
Summary: there is nothing useful to be learned or understood by comparing ants to economics carried out by humans. The comparison does not prove anything, and it doesn’t explain anything. Ants shed no more light on economics than fishes do on bicycles.
An ant colony does have an economy in a certain sense: there is a system of gathering and distributing limited resources. That’s the basis for any economic system. The social institutions we use to implement our economy are not necessary components of an economy. Wherever limited resources must be distributed among a population, there will be an economy to distribute those resources.
Depending on the species, different ants have different specializations. Some gather food, some produce and care for young, some protect the colony, etc. There is a limited supply of labor, and there is a limited supply of food. The colony distributes these in a way that allows the colony to survive. The lack of inter-colony trade does not mean there is no internal economy. I do not the mechanisms the ants use to divide resources, but there must be one because the resources are distributed. That’s an economy.
An ant economy is very different from any human economy. But that doesn’t mean we can’t study the economics of an ant colony. And by understanding that economy, we may better understand the essentials of human economies.
Certain species show altruistic behavior towards non-relatives. Vampire bats will share meals with others (even strangers) when they roost together. They do this because bats who share freely are more likely to receive a free meal in the future (when they happen to have failed to find a meal). The vampire bat economy thus favors short-term altruism because of long-term individual advantages.
In my Economics class, they also mentioned unlimited wants in addition to limited resources. Ants don’t want anything other than enough food to get to the next day. People, OTOH, want stuff they don’t have. This is where human nature comes into the picture, one can argue that other intelligent societies may not be this way, but we are.
I’d also like to say that while we talk about the Invisible Hand we act like it just “appears” out of the ether. It doesn’t. It is the product of millions and millions of people thinking very seriously about their work, their product, their spending. People spend time deciding between brand names, store brands, car models, housing, food, entertainment. The number of decisions we make, and the number of things we think about well in advance is astounding. That effort is replicated millions of times, just on the demand side.
On the supply side, every single company, every single month, makes decisions about how much product/service they want to supply. Do they need to staff up, staff down, open for longer hours, make product X vs. Y. Nothing runs on automatic, even if changes aren’t made, the decision to keep things the same IS made. That’s a lot of work to replicate with a few high level officials deciding how much product to produce and what price to sell it at.
Every species has unlimited wants, even if it has limited means of satisfying them. Ants will gather as much food as they can store in their colony. And they will increase their numbers and expand the colony size to store more food, if it becomes available. And with more food, they will increase the frequency of the release of breeding ants to establish new colonies. All species will exploit as many resources as they can.
Ecology can be understood as economics, with energy and nutrients as the currency. The Invisible Hand of economics becomes Natural Selection in ecology. Those species that exploit their niche most efficiently (in terms of energy and nutrients) will be the ones that survive.
Do you actually disagree? I don’t see anyone else disagreeing. Others say that various economic details (pricing and so on) are more important, but I don’t see anyone else saying other than that motivating people to work hard in a communist system is difficult. Indeed my experience of market economists is that they regard all taxation (even small tax increases) as demotivating. Communisim is equivalent to 100% taxation.
Pleonast has answered the rest.
And by the way, if you’re looking for a massive and unjustified assumption cum strawman and want to see how blinkered one can be about the possibilities for alternative economic models, you could hardly do better than read Cheesesteak’s last post, particularly the last sentence.
I think we should ask the mods to move this to GD before we get scolded.
If you don’t mind, what part of my observation is unjustified? The idea that individual consumers carefully weigh out their options before spending their hard earned money, or that individual producers carefully manage their costs and production? Or was it that I consider it difficult to centralize those millions of decisions and keep your economy efficient?