7 ms·

> France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments, The only way any industrialized nation adopts a communist regime is with Red Army tanks. Ther

by rsj_hn 5y ago

> France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments, The only way any industrialized nation adopts a communist regime is with Red Army tanks. There is a reason why no communist government has succeeded in any industrialized nation -- and it's not for lack of trying. But you just can't convert a liberal advanced economy into an authoritarian command economy without massive repression. There are too many people who own property and land who won't agree to be dispossessed. There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it. But to make that initial mass confiscation of property you need true believers and mass democide as class enemies are liquidated.

Yoric 5y ago
> There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it. As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance. I don't think so. So what makes this work for, say, a Kibbutz, is that it's a voluntary association of people donating some wealth, and they can also leave the Kibbutz when they want and new people can come in whenever they want. Thus the individual Kibbutzniks are almost all capitalists, as they continue to have bank accounts, brokerage accounts, pension funds, land holdings, etc on areas outside the Kibbutz. Rather the Kibbutz is like a big coop. It's one business run cooperatively for the staff, and it's like a summer camp for the visitors. But each individual person still has their own bank account, and that bank account consists of private ownership claims on productive capital outside the Kibbutz. But in a communist economy, you would not be able to privately own capital. The "true" communist Kibbutz would have its own currency, its own bank, and you would need to sell all your assets and donate them to the Kibbutz, holding accounts only in the Kibbutz bank that were backed only by the business in the Kibbutz. Then you couldn't spend the day picking oranges but receive dividends from Walmart at the same time. BTW, in many countries there are coops of all sorts. Housing coops, business coops, agricultural coops. Capitalism, as a system, is not about banning corporate (e.g. group) ownership according to some agreed-upon bylaws. But communism is about banning private ownership. So capitalist societies have wide varieties of ownership structures.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    There are different flavors. You're broadly correct that communism (and, in general, actual socialism, as opposed to social democracy that is often mislabelled as socialism) is opposed to private ownership of the means of production - but it doesn't necessarily translate to banning them. Authoritarian varieties generally advocate for that. Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place. (Anarchists would also add that protecting property rights by violence is one of the primary functions of any state.)
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      > Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place. Right. That is basically how primitive societies (not meant as a value judgement) worked. You could own whatever you could physically defend, or convince your allies to help you defend. Unfortunately that means that political considerations will decide who owns what, at which point a hierarchical group will form, and it will be well organized, and it will conquer the decentralized society of individuals and small communities. So you are left with the eternal problems of decentralized societies, which is that they are just weaker than centralized societies. So then you say, we will have a strong hierarchy, but the sole purpose of the hierarchy is to guarantee our values, and now you are back in the authoritarian camp, and very quickly the party that runs the society will be more interested in domination than preserving whatever founding values they had before. There is just a big gap between what is intellectually appealing, and what is stable and defendable in a hostile world.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        Not quite. We're not talking about a free-for-all here, in a sense that if you can forcibly take it, it's yours. We're talking about what kinds of property are recognized (and enforced) above that by society at large. Abstract property rights, where "X owns Y" is true if there's a central registry that says so, are one thing. Property rights based on use and occupation are another - but they still have to be enforced by the society to be effective. And this all is actually orthogonal to whether the society has centralized governance or not - you could have a strong central government that still refuses to recognize & enforce some property rights. As for defense against organized authoritarians in general - the middle ground is a decentralized federation, where (relatively) small communities run their own day-to-day affairs, but band up together for defense. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is an example of that kind of framework, and Rojava is trying to build something like it. They seem to have fared quite well in combat against their more authoritarian opponents who are on a similar technological level (mostly ISIL and other Islamist groups, and very occasionally, Assad's forces). Not so much against Turkey, but the disparity in resources there is extreme.
_vbnz 5y ago
They had already been elected to the government in both Italy and France though, in a coalition with more centrist socialist parties. In both countries they already held ministerial positions, so this just isn't true. In practice they'd likely end up becoming more moderate, like happened in San Marino, and eventually France too.
- simonh 5y ago
  I think 'communist regime', looking at what the comment says about the practical problems such as confiscating property, is the institution of an actual communist economic system. It's one thing to have communists in government, but quite another to actually implement communist policies.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    What is a communist policy? When Lenin invited foreign investment and allowed private property to facilitate it as part of his plan to build a communist society, was that not a communist policy? Or perhaps Lenin didn't want to implement communist policies?
    - simonh 5y ago
      Communist economics is Marxist economics. Of course there have been multiple waves of revisions of Marxism, but fundamentally it's based on Marx's theory of value as it's core axiom. In practice communists sometimes play the cards they are dealt in terms of the economy they start with and what's achievable, depending on how patient they are. Lenin viewed foreign investment as a necessary evil, a temporary measure while the economy was in a transitional state. Do you think Lenin viewed allowing foreign investment and private property as being long term, essential aspects of a well functioning, mature communist economy? Of course not. Stalin was a lot less patient on this and instituted forced mass collectivism, with catastrophic consequences.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        What do you mean by private property? Do you mean that word in a Marxian sense? Or do you mean it in a classical/neoclassical sense and thus projecting non-Marxist economics on Marxist economics? No one believes that foreign investment is anything more than a necessary evil - being reliant on foreign investment means that you can't mobilize your own capital. The idea that markets are necessary for some industries is not at all incompatible with Marxist economics. Lenin's side of Marxist economics would be fine with markets as long as the property was owned cooperatively, until a post-scarcity society. Stalin's turn towards state planning was out of perceived necessity, not because he was less patient. He, and others in the party, decided that it was acceptable to sacrifice overall economic development in order to develop the heavy industries necessary for war with capitalist countries, that he thought was inevitable if they were too weak. That, and he thought agricultural development was too slow. While it was a failure for agricultural output, it was objectively a massive success in its primary goal, and development of heavy industries at the speed of the NEP would have probably led to the USSR losing WW2.
alehlopeh 5y ago
Cuba is going on 4 generations now, and so is North Korea. It depends how you define a generation, though, I guess.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  With Cuba, it's more about how you define communism. China has successfully transitioned into a mostly capitalist economy while keeping the one party control. Cuba has also liberalized their economy but is trying to keep one party in control. Cuba recognized private property in 2018, but even before that time there was a huge black market that was tolerated because it provided necessary goods and services.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    " China has successfully transitioned into a mostly capitalist economy while keeping the one party control." Well, so have we. I'm being 70% sarcastic.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      Can't really argue
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    The USSR liberalized their economy in 1919 and recognize private property exactly the same way as Cuba (and even China) does now.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  North Korea is a straightforward feudal monarchy decorated with communist trimmings. While the USSR was effectively a dictatorship it had no mechanism for inherited leadership. It was actually more like Imperial Rome, with the nominally elected leader acting as Emperor until death, in charge of a semi-loyal but fractious Senate (Politburo). Putin reinvented this recently, but without the friction. The omens strongly imply that Trump would have followed the same playbook if he'd won the last election.
blntechie 5y ago
Well, I have no sympathies to communism but the US also has not let any communist country alone without meddling in its affairs. So it’s hard to assess the true outcome, for better or worse. It’s like running a performance test while constantly unplugging some instances or knocking out power to the data center. The results are tainted.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  The Soviet bloc was sufficiently large that if communism was even moderately functional it would have succeeded even if the US had managed to stop it from trading from any country outside its bloc. The destruction wrought by any kind of communist policy is so devastating as to make its true effect obvious. This is unlike social democratic policies which are a weaker economic poison and thus can cause decades of stagnation/deindustrialization without total collapse.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    That's pretty ridiculous on its face. It was impossible for the communist bloc to outproduce the rest of the world by its size alone. Without being able to outproduce rivals, all it takes are a few arms races and your economy rots, no matter the system. The destruction wrought by "any kind of communist policy" still led to outcomes that were above the global average. Yes, they eventually lost, but they were very much in the same order of magnitude as the rest of the world, and were slowly catching up until political factors caused destruction, which was arguably the greatest weakness from a competitive point of view. Economic policies that are immediately devastating don't cause 60 years of frenetic existential anxiety. If communism was as obviously devastating economically, the USA wouldn't have spent so much time worrying about losing its economic dominance. As far as attributing deindustrialization to social democratic, all I can say is that this is laughable. Exporting your capital to countries where the wage share will be lower is the cause of deindustrialization, and it's simple economics. You need government policy in the form of direct or indirect capital controls to prevent that from happening.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago

by rsj_hn 5y ago

Yoric 5y ago

> There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it. As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance.

rsj_hn 5y ago
> As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance. I don't think so. So what makes this work for, say, a Kibbutz, is that it's a voluntary association of people donating some wealth, and they can also leave the Kibbutz when they want and new people can come in whenever they want. Thus the individual Kibbutzniks are almost all capitalists, as they continue to have bank accounts, brokerage accounts, pension funds, land holdings, etc on areas outside the Kibbutz. Rather the Kibbutz is like a big coop. It's one business run cooperatively for the staff, and it's like a summer camp for the visitors. But each individual person still has their own bank account, and that bank account consists of private ownership claims on productive capital outside the Kibbutz. But in a communist economy, you would not be able to privately own capital. The "true" communist Kibbutz would have its own currency, its own bank, and you would need to sell all your assets and donate them to the Kibbutz, holding accounts only in the Kibbutz bank that were backed only by the business in the Kibbutz. Then you couldn't spend the day picking oranges but receive dividends from Walmart at the same time. BTW, in many countries there are coops of all sorts. Housing coops, business coops, agricultural coops. Capitalism, as a system, is not about banning corporate (e.g. group) ownership according to some agreed-upon bylaws. But communism is about banning private ownership. So capitalist societies have wide varieties of ownership structures.
- int_19h 5y ago
  There are different flavors. You're broadly correct that communism (and, in general, actual socialism, as opposed to social democracy that is often mislabelled as socialism) is opposed to private ownership of the means of production - but it doesn't necessarily translate to banning them. Authoritarian varieties generally advocate for that. Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place. (Anarchists would also add that protecting property rights by violence is one of the primary functions of any state.)
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place. Right. That is basically how primitive societies (not meant as a value judgement) worked. You could own whatever you could physically defend, or convince your allies to help you defend. Unfortunately that means that political considerations will decide who owns what, at which point a hierarchical group will form, and it will be well organized, and it will conquer the decentralized society of individuals and small communities. So you are left with the eternal problems of decentralized societies, which is that they are just weaker than centralized societies. So then you say, we will have a strong hierarchy, but the sole purpose of the hierarchy is to guarantee our values, and now you are back in the authoritarian camp, and very quickly the party that runs the society will be more interested in domination than preserving whatever founding values they had before. There is just a big gap between what is intellectually appealing, and what is stable and defendable in a hostile world.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      Not quite. We're not talking about a free-for-all here, in a sense that if you can forcibly take it, it's yours. We're talking about what kinds of property are recognized (and enforced) above that by society at large. Abstract property rights, where "X owns Y" is true if there's a central registry that says so, are one thing. Property rights based on use and occupation are another - but they still have to be enforced by the society to be effective. And this all is actually orthogonal to whether the society has centralized governance or not - you could have a strong central government that still refuses to recognize & enforce some property rights. As for defense against organized authoritarians in general - the middle ground is a decentralized federation, where (relatively) small communities run their own day-to-day affairs, but band up together for defense. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is an example of that kind of framework, and Rojava is trying to build something like it. They seem to have fared quite well in combat against their more authoritarian opponents who are on a similar technological level (mostly ISIL and other Islamist groups, and very occasionally, Assad's forces). Not so much against Turkey, but the disparity in resources there is extreme.

_vbnz 5y ago

They had already been elected to the government in both Italy and France though, in a coalition with more centrist socialist parties. In both countries they already held ministerial positions, so this just isn't true. In practice they'd likely end up becoming more moderate, like happened in San Marino, and eventually France too.

simonh 5y ago
I think 'communist regime', looking at what the comment says about the practical problems such as confiscating property, is the institution of an actual communist economic system. It's one thing to have communists in government, but quite another to actually implement communist policies.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  What is a communist policy? When Lenin invited foreign investment and allowed private property to facilitate it as part of his plan to build a communist society, was that not a communist policy? Or perhaps Lenin didn't want to implement communist policies?
  - simonh 5y ago
    Communist economics is Marxist economics. Of course there have been multiple waves of revisions of Marxism, but fundamentally it's based on Marx's theory of value as it's core axiom. In practice communists sometimes play the cards they are dealt in terms of the economy they start with and what's achievable, depending on how patient they are. Lenin viewed foreign investment as a necessary evil, a temporary measure while the economy was in a transitional state. Do you think Lenin viewed allowing foreign investment and private property as being long term, essential aspects of a well functioning, mature communist economy? Of course not. Stalin was a lot less patient on this and instituted forced mass collectivism, with catastrophic consequences.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      What do you mean by private property? Do you mean that word in a Marxian sense? Or do you mean it in a classical/neoclassical sense and thus projecting non-Marxist economics on Marxist economics? No one believes that foreign investment is anything more than a necessary evil - being reliant on foreign investment means that you can't mobilize your own capital. The idea that markets are necessary for some industries is not at all incompatible with Marxist economics. Lenin's side of Marxist economics would be fine with markets as long as the property was owned cooperatively, until a post-scarcity society. Stalin's turn towards state planning was out of perceived necessity, not because he was less patient. He, and others in the party, decided that it was acceptable to sacrifice overall economic development in order to develop the heavy industries necessary for war with capitalist countries, that he thought was inevitable if they were too weak. That, and he thought agricultural development was too slow. While it was a failure for agricultural output, it was objectively a massive success in its primary goal, and development of heavy industries at the speed of the NEP would have probably led to the USSR losing WW2.

alehlopeh 5y ago

Cuba is going on 4 generations now, and so is North Korea. It depends how you define a generation, though, I guess.

rsj_hn 5y ago
With Cuba, it's more about how you define communism. China has successfully transitioned into a mostly capitalist economy while keeping the one party control. Cuba has also liberalized their economy but is trying to keep one party in control. Cuba recognized private property in 2018, but even before that time there was a huge black market that was tolerated because it provided necessary goods and services.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  " China has successfully transitioned into a mostly capitalist economy while keeping the one party control." Well, so have we. I'm being 70% sarcastic.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    Can't really argue
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The USSR liberalized their economy in 1919 and recognize private property exactly the same way as Cuba (and even China) does now.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
North Korea is a straightforward feudal monarchy decorated with communist trimmings. While the USSR was effectively a dictatorship it had no mechanism for inherited leadership. It was actually more like Imperial Rome, with the nominally elected leader acting as Emperor until death, in charge of a semi-loyal but fractious Senate (Politburo). Putin reinvented this recently, but without the friction. The omens strongly imply that Trump would have followed the same playbook if he'd won the last election.

blntechie 5y ago

Well, I have no sympathies to communism but the US also has not let any communist country alone without meddling in its affairs. So it’s hard to assess the true outcome, for better or worse. It’s like running a performance test while constantly unplugging some instances or knocking out power to the data center. The results are tainted.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
The Soviet bloc was sufficiently large that if communism was even moderately functional it would have succeeded even if the US had managed to stop it from trading from any country outside its bloc. The destruction wrought by any kind of communist policy is so devastating as to make its true effect obvious. This is unlike social democratic policies which are a weaker economic poison and thus can cause decades of stagnation/deindustrialization without total collapse.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  That's pretty ridiculous on its face. It was impossible for the communist bloc to outproduce the rest of the world by its size alone. Without being able to outproduce rivals, all it takes are a few arms races and your economy rots, no matter the system. The destruction wrought by "any kind of communist policy" still led to outcomes that were above the global average. Yes, they eventually lost, but they were very much in the same order of magnitude as the rest of the world, and were slowly catching up until political factors caused destruction, which was arguably the greatest weakness from a competitive point of view. Economic policies that are immediately devastating don't cause 60 years of frenetic existential anxiety. If communism was as obviously devastating economically, the USA wouldn't have spent so much time worrying about losing its economic dominance. As far as attributing deindustrialization to social democratic, all I can say is that this is laughable. Exporting your capital to countries where the wage share will be lower is the cause of deindustrialization, and it's simple economics. You need government policy in the form of direct or indirect capital controls to prevent that from happening.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago