5 ms·

The constitution would be preserved and the press would not be censored. Civil liberties would be protected. The government began by increasing employment and w

The constitution would be preserved and the press would not be censored. Civil liberties would be protected. The government began by increasing employment and wages as well as implementing agrarian reforms. and immediately after Allende’s biggest challenge (and the challenge of all socialist revolutions generally) was to turn private business into public entities. Difficult to take it seriously after such cognitive dissonance. In any case, socialism was never a technological problem. I truly doubt the USSR didn't have the technological prowess to make it work. It's a fundamental economic one. You can't remove prices from the loop, as indicators of the human desire. It doesn't matter how many machines you throw at it. You can't replace human preferences.

yters 6y ago
Why is human preference essential? Everyone has certain needs in common: - food - housing - clothing And all those needs can be satisfied in a cookiecutter way for everyone. It's unclear to me why such a system cannot be centrally planned without reference to subjective human preference. IMHO, the 'human preference' counterargument to communism is a red herring to throw things into subjective, logic free land.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Yeah, sure, everyone needs food. We know that. But how many olives should they produce? Or are you going to just feed everyone the food that you've decided that they should eat? If they want olives, they're just going to have to make do with cucumbers instead? Do you see why actual human beings might have a problem with that?
  - yters 6y ago
    That seems orthogonal to the primary concern of communism, which is to make sure no one goes without something they need, i.e. from everyone according to ability, to everyone according to need. Lack of accounting for wants can make for an annoying, boring economic system, but that's a much lesser charge than the system is intrinsically genocidal. And if it's the difference between a boring system and a system where the rich oppress the poor, and many are forced to live miserable lives according to their less subjective needs like food, clothing, and shelter, then the former would be morally superior. Nor is it obvious why not accounting for wants would make an economic system less successful. I.e. if you have the best of the best bringing to bear the best technology and thought to improving the lives of everyone all at once, that seems superior to everyone trying to figure it out themselves. So, the 'subjective preference' objection does not seem very strong.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Looking at the historical track record, I'm not sure you really want to raise "genocide" as a talking point about why communism is superior...
      - yters 6y ago
        I mean historically communism is intrinsically genocidal. This is a much more serious charge than saying communism results in a bunch of products that people don't like very much. As to why it is genocidal, and whether this is intrinsic or just a factor of having the wrong people in charge, I think the computational complexity of the problem gets at why genocide is an intrinsic property of communism. Namely, it is just way too innefficient to supply the actual needs of a nation, and so millions starve, or must be killed to make the system work.
pram 6y ago
Maybe not a technological problem, but they certainly had a data problem. Most of the statistics the Gosplan (USSR economic planners) were basing production quotas on were fraudulent. It made price/cost discovery even more impossible.
- cbmuser 6y ago
  Socialism didn’t work in _any_ country ever tried. Even in East Germany, the country’s economists admitted in 1989 that the free market works far better and the centralized economy results in wrong allocations of resources and money. Google “Schürer-Papier” if you understand German.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Socialism didn’t work in _any_ country ever tried. Leninism didn't, but there's a reason why non-Leninist Marxists have been calling Leninism state capitalism since well before it's failure was obvious. Socialism, specifically a form of what Marx referred to as “bourgeois socialism”—though not so much by conscious design but as a compromise between Marxist and other proletarian socialists who were instrumental in labor, abolition, suffrage, and other social justice movements and more moderate forces within and outside of those movements—was completely successful in the environment (advanced democratic capitalist states) for which Marx prescribed his form of socialism, being so successful as to entirely displace the late-19th Century system for which Marx coined the term “capitalism” with a system in which the rent seeking power of capital was significantly more constrained in favor of broad (varying from country to country) guarantees for the basic necessities of the general population, which has been referred to by a variety of names (the “modern mixed economy”), though it's so completely displaced the original system called “capitalism” in the same states where that systemmwas once dominant that it is now most frequently just called “capitalism” despite being very different from it.
  - pietrovismara 6y ago
    Funny you say that, as the east/west Germany unification has been a disaster for the east side, and it still is today the poorer part of Germany. Before the unification, the east had a working economy, perhaps with problems, but every economy has problems.
wongarsu 6y ago
I don't see the cognitive dissonance? - You can have free press without private businesses just like we can have a Judicial branch that's paid for by the government but is independent of it. It comes with challenges, but it's not like privately run news are perfect either. - Civil liberties can be protected in any form of government and economy, even a dictator can decide to do that - increasing employment is a no-brainer, it's a prominent feature of socialist countries. - agrarian reforms are similarly commonly observed, it's probably one of the defining things of the USSR (and China, where it famously didn't go as smoothly) There's also no real reason why you can't have prices in socialism (and as far as I'm aware most socialist systems have prices). The loop looks a bit different since the supply side is typically centrally managed, but even that is technically an implementation detail and not a required feature of socialism.
- 1996 6y ago
  > There's also no real reason why you can't have prices in socialism There is: you can't estimate how much people will want something new. Imagine the new macbook air with Apple Silicon. What should the price be, in a socialist system? Set it too low and there will be shortage because you will not be able to produce enough as you wont get profits that would allow you to build extra factories and by extra components. Set it too high and there will be surpluses rotting in factories because nobody will want it. You need to guess right in advance. In a capitalist system, companies hold the responsibility: if they are wrong too often, they go bankrupt. In a socialist system, the responsibility is diluted, resulting in a cumulative overall inefficiency, with both shortage (ex: food in the USSR) and surpluses (ex: cotton in the USSR again). I used "new things" to simplify the reasoning, but the same logic apply to existing things: do you want more or less say phones compared to last year? You can't say "just as much", because the optimal amount will be impacted by a lot of things that change every year.
  - thesuitonym 6y ago
    > if they are wrong too often, they go bankrupt. Unless they're banks, or auto manufacturers, or any other huge corporation that would get bailed out by the government. Wonder why that bailing out is a problem for socialist governments, but not capitalist ones.

yters 6y ago

Why is human preference essential? Everyone has certain needs in common: - food - housing - clothing And all those needs can be satisfied in a cookiecutter way for everyone. It's unclear to me why such a system cannot be centrally planned without reference to subjective human preference. IMHO, the 'human preference' counterargument to communism is a red herring to throw things into subjective, logic free land.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Yeah, sure, everyone needs food. We know that. But how many olives should they produce? Or are you going to just feed everyone the food that you've decided that they should eat? If they want olives, they're just going to have to make do with cucumbers instead? Do you see why actual human beings might have a problem with that?
- yters 6y ago
  That seems orthogonal to the primary concern of communism, which is to make sure no one goes without something they need, i.e. from everyone according to ability, to everyone according to need. Lack of accounting for wants can make for an annoying, boring economic system, but that's a much lesser charge than the system is intrinsically genocidal. And if it's the difference between a boring system and a system where the rich oppress the poor, and many are forced to live miserable lives according to their less subjective needs like food, clothing, and shelter, then the former would be morally superior. Nor is it obvious why not accounting for wants would make an economic system less successful. I.e. if you have the best of the best bringing to bear the best technology and thought to improving the lives of everyone all at once, that seems superior to everyone trying to figure it out themselves. So, the 'subjective preference' objection does not seem very strong.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Looking at the historical track record, I'm not sure you really want to raise "genocide" as a talking point about why communism is superior...
    - yters 6y ago
      I mean historically communism is intrinsically genocidal. This is a much more serious charge than saying communism results in a bunch of products that people don't like very much. As to why it is genocidal, and whether this is intrinsic or just a factor of having the wrong people in charge, I think the computational complexity of the problem gets at why genocide is an intrinsic property of communism. Namely, it is just way too innefficient to supply the actual needs of a nation, and so millions starve, or must be killed to make the system work.

pram 6y ago

Maybe not a technological problem, but they certainly had a data problem. Most of the statistics the Gosplan (USSR economic planners) were basing production quotas on were fraudulent. It made price/cost discovery even more impossible.

cbmuser 6y ago
Socialism didn’t work in _any_ country ever tried. Even in East Germany, the country’s economists admitted in 1989 that the free market works far better and the centralized economy results in wrong allocations of resources and money. Google “Schürer-Papier” if you understand German.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Socialism didn’t work in _any_ country ever tried. Leninism didn't, but there's a reason why non-Leninist Marxists have been calling Leninism state capitalism since well before it's failure was obvious. Socialism, specifically a form of what Marx referred to as “bourgeois socialism”—though not so much by conscious design but as a compromise between Marxist and other proletarian socialists who were instrumental in labor, abolition, suffrage, and other social justice movements and more moderate forces within and outside of those movements—was completely successful in the environment (advanced democratic capitalist states) for which Marx prescribed his form of socialism, being so successful as to entirely displace the late-19th Century system for which Marx coined the term “capitalism” with a system in which the rent seeking power of capital was significantly more constrained in favor of broad (varying from country to country) guarantees for the basic necessities of the general population, which has been referred to by a variety of names (the “modern mixed economy”), though it's so completely displaced the original system called “capitalism” in the same states where that systemmwas once dominant that it is now most frequently just called “capitalism” despite being very different from it.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Funny you say that, as the east/west Germany unification has been a disaster for the east side, and it still is today the poorer part of Germany. Before the unification, the east had a working economy, perhaps with problems, but every economy has problems.

wongarsu 6y ago

I don't see the cognitive dissonance? - You can have free press without private businesses just like we can have a Judicial branch that's paid for by the government but is independent of it. It comes with challenges, but it's not like privately run news are perfect either. - Civil liberties can be protected in any form of government and economy, even a dictator can decide to do that - increasing employment is a no-brainer, it's a prominent feature of socialist countries. - agrarian reforms are similarly commonly observed, it's probably one of the defining things of the USSR (and China, where it famously didn't go as smoothly) There's also no real reason why you can't have prices in socialism (and as far as I'm aware most socialist systems have prices). The loop looks a bit different since the supply side is typically centrally managed, but even that is technically an implementation detail and not a required feature of socialism.

1996 6y ago
> There's also no real reason why you can't have prices in socialism There is: you can't estimate how much people will want something new. Imagine the new macbook air with Apple Silicon. What should the price be, in a socialist system? Set it too low and there will be shortage because you will not be able to produce enough as you wont get profits that would allow you to build extra factories and by extra components. Set it too high and there will be surpluses rotting in factories because nobody will want it. You need to guess right in advance. In a capitalist system, companies hold the responsibility: if they are wrong too often, they go bankrupt. In a socialist system, the responsibility is diluted, resulting in a cumulative overall inefficiency, with both shortage (ex: food in the USSR) and surpluses (ex: cotton in the USSR again). I used "new things" to simplify the reasoning, but the same logic apply to existing things: do you want more or less say phones compared to last year? You can't say "just as much", because the optimal amount will be impacted by a lot of things that change every year.
- thesuitonym 6y ago
  > if they are wrong too often, they go bankrupt. Unless they're banks, or auto manufacturers, or any other huge corporation that would get bailed out by the government. Wonder why that bailing out is a problem for socialist governments, but not capitalist ones.