4 ms·

Communism is well suited to giving people a better horse instead of a car - when the whole system is collectively planned and owned - there is no incentive at a

• onion2k 10y ago
  There is an incentive for creative destruction - failure. If you can't continue innovating (eg you can't make a better horse) you have to take a different approach.
• zkms 10y ago
  Collective planning is not inherent to communism and communism doesn't inherently restrict the sort of market forces that enable "creative destruction".
  • mseebach 10y ago
    It's important to remember in these kinds of debates that there are two kinds of communism: The practical communism, the one actually tried dozens and dozens of times, despite implementing a pretty fair range of possible combinations of parameters, yet returning a the same pretty narrow range of failures pretty invariably -- and then the theoretical communism, as read and understood by contemporary western intellectuals for whom practical communism (or, as it's often known, "not real communism") is mostly irrelevant. With that, your observation is entirely correct, but it pertains to theoretical communism. The GP was likely referring to practical communism, and in that context, yes, practical communism most definitely inherently restricts market-driven creative destruction. (Cool side-anecdote: Karl Popper invented the scientific method partly in response to Marxist "science".)
• mseebach 10y ago
  What you're describing is an instance of the knowledge problem or the economic calculation problem. Centralism (to which communism belongs) is good at many things -- including huge endeavours such as space travel or going to all-out war. The immense power unleashed during the two world wars was a major inspiration for centralism in the following decades, in the shape of trying to apply this power towards societal good, rather than destruction. It even worked, in some form, for a bit. Millions of people were homeless or living in very poor conditions, they were relatively quickly re-housed in housing estates build on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented speed. But it didn't work at scale. While certainly better than not having anywhere to live at all, many of the housing estates were awful places, they simply weren't built to live in, they were almost militaristic "machines for living in" rather than "homes". Which brings us back to the knowledge problem: All-out war has the ability to align almost everybody's interest in the same direction - crush the germans. Individual happiness, even liberty, is basically optional, because if you don't win the war, you will have neither happiness or liberty. With this knowledge, it's reasonably easy to organise the economy both on both the micro and macro levels: I need to mine ore for steel for tanks. I need to grow cabbage because we can't import food and cabbage has the highest calories-output per input (taste is not a factor). At every level, you can get a very reasonable approximation of the right course of action by consulting a very small set of shared objectives. But in peace-time, things start falling apart. You no longer as a society have a short list of shared objectives, the best you can do is something vague like 'maximising happiness' (and even that is debatable). Even if you could identify a big, shared goal, and you might achieve it by suspending liberty, loosing their liberty will make people unhappy and so the means ends up mattering more than the ends (see: war on drugs). How do you figure out whether growing cabbage or wheat or carrots or raising beef-cattle in such conditions? Different people prefers different kinds of houses, so do you farm trees for wood, mine coal and dig clay for bricks or whatever it is you do to make concrete? In both cases, you need some combination of all, depending on an extremely complex, inherently unknowable, continuously shifting combination of desires in the population -- and the formation of prices in a free market is perhaps not the best (for some value of 'best'), but it's the only known actually functional mechanism to communicate these desires. Anyway, bottom line: I don't agree that centralised economic systems can even give people better horses, or better cars. If the need is clear and broad enough, it can give people a horse or a car, but it doesn't implement the feedback mechanisms required to continuously incrementally improve it outputs (cutely captured in this meme: http://9gag.com/gag/4298226 http://9gag.com/gag/4298226).
  • snrplfth 10y ago
    Agreed. One of the big problems in perception, I think, is the fact that, since a market economy can support a fairly substantial non-market fraction (socialized housing, roads, etc.) people imagine that you can just indefinitely extend the non-market system to encompass the whole economy. But you can't - and if you try, you end up not having enough of anything that you want. But it seems so simple, so people keep trying to do it.
  • cardiffspaceman 10y ago
    Le Courbusier did say, Une maison est une machine-à-habiter. A house is a machine for living in. Too bad people, perhaps those in charge of those housing estates, seem not to read further in the same work: You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: "This is beautiful." That is Architecture. Art enters in.
• mtrn 10y ago
  > when the whole system is collectively planned and owned It's funny. It is not that capitalism does not tend towards central planning. When companies fuse and get bigger, they want to reap the profits of centralization and unified control. To exaggerate a bit: the ultimate way to deal with the competition is to absorb or to kill it.
  • digi_owl 10y ago
    Or form a cartel where the prices and features from each member is decided as a group. That said, i don't think even Marx considered central planning as more than a transitional stopgap. Thing is that he expected socialism to rise from industrialized nations like England or Germany, not near-agrarian Russia. Also, his primary motivation was for workers to have more say in the factories they worked in. But then few people even know volume one, where as in volume two and three he rails against the rentier capitalists. And lament how in the long run it would be better for industrial capitalist to side with the workers against the rentiers, but that they rarely do so until it is effectively too late.
• willyt 10y ago
  Sputnik
  • dashoffset 10y ago
    Innovation during the Space Race was driven by the competition between USSR and USA.