31 ms·

Whether a centrally planned economy can work or not may be an interesting question, but it is irrelevant to whether Socialism works or not (or even whether it i

Whether a centrally planned economy can work or not may be an interesting question, but it is irrelevant to whether Socialism works or not (or even whether it is right or moral or not). Socialism does not require a centrally planned economy. It doesn't even require a centralised state. Socialism is about how workers organise their workplace (owning, managing and sharing the produce and profit of their labour). Having said that several avowed socialist states have attempted to centrally plan the economy, and their success or failure is a matter of highly disputed opinion - depending on what their aims, achievements, and outside opposition (and possible sabotage) were. Some Socialists say it is possible: See "Towards a New Socialism" (1993). Some say that Capitalist corporation like Amazon or Walmart are already effectively achieving this ("The People's Republic of Walmart" (2019) Others suggest models such as "negotiated coordination", "participatory economics", or "market socialism" will be able to accurately account for need, volume, value etc. But there are incredibly powerful interests that oppose any alternatives, and most of us are stuck playing their game by their rules.

hospitalJail 3y ago
>(owning, managing and sharing the produce and profit of their labour). The issue is that leaders and factions always emerge. Even if everyone could 'keep their excess labor', you get groups of people that position themselves to get higher value jobs or easier jobs. As much as people claim this is not inevitable, I've yet to see this happen IRL or in history.
- yourmatenate 3y ago
  This is veering into a different topic, but I'd encourage you to read "The Dawn Of Everything" (2021) & "The Art of Not Being Governed" (2009) for long term examples of non-hierarchal societies. It may be inevitable that people may rise up to seek power over others, but the question is what is the best way to respond to this? Do we leave them to rule over others without restrictions, or do we limit the damage they can do? Do we reward this impulse of control of the few over the many to their general detriment, or do we treat it as a mental health issue (like sociopathy or hoarding)?
  - hospitalJail 3y ago
    >for long term examples of non-hierarchal societies. Just mention them. There is no need for citing a book that will take me a few months to read before I respond. I have a feeling I know about the ones you are about to mention. They had leaders or factions that controlled the resources(not classless) or they only lasted for a few months or years before getting conquered.
    - yourmatenate 3y ago
      The first of these books is fascinating and worth a read (I enjoyed the second one too, but it is a little more scholarly in its language). The first primarily deals with hunter/gatherer peoples and early city-based civilisations. The second is focused on Zomia - an area covering large parts of China and India that was non-hierarchal and contained a large and diverse population. As for scarcity: It seems to me from my research that it is most often the leaders and factions that create artificial scarcity in order to enforce their power, rather than there being a lack of resources in the first place.
- int_19h 3y ago
  Leaders and factions are not a problem in a system that does not allow them to easily hoard power. Which authoritarian socialism isn't, of course, but that's not the only kind. If you're wondering why we don't see the other kind much - well, the socialist movements that won back in early 20th century were generally the most ruthless ones, whereas the more democratically minded movements (e.g. Luxembourgism or various anarchist groups) were crushed. So you had a kind of artificial selection for brutality to begin with - but then countries controlled by those winners would also subsidize similar movements elsewhere, and of course they demanded ideological conformance in return. This is largely why stuff like Marxism-Leninism and Maoism is still so pervasive on the left.
greenie_beans 3y ago
this needs to be at the top. the typical american conflates socialism with a centrally planned economy, thanks to the red scare of the 20th century and capitalism's grip on the public's imagination.
- chmod600 3y ago
  Promises of "socialism" always seem to require granting huge amounts of power to the government, which leads to inefficiency, abuse, and worse. In theory, perhaps socialism doesn't require huge amounts of government power; or perhaps huge amounts of government power doesn't always lead to horrible outcomes. But that's just a theory and has little evidence to back it up at the scale of millions of people. Bernie Sanders said "These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?"[1] in 2011, less than a decade before collapse. If he can't tell the difference between a socialist utopia and a recipe for disaster, how is a layperson supposed to know? Just like a tech startup: don't call your users stupid and keep pushing your theoretically-good product. Listen and try to understand why it's not working for them. [1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/sanders-distances-himself-from-2011-editorial-on-his-senate-website-praising-the-american-dream-in-venezuela https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/sanders-di...
  - gilmore606 3y ago
    > where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger If incomes were equal, how could a Horatio Alger story possibly happen at all? Do people even think about what they say?
- stereolambda 3y ago
  Well, wait till we try to square what Americans commonly mean by 'liberalism' and 'conservatism' with continental political theory and classic theorists connected to these words. In these cases America is, interestingly, removed to the left. The man who "hijacked" the word socialism would probably be Marx himself, as he declared his theory to be the (scientific) socialism, as opposed to various (he said) "utopian" and "naive" thinkers who hadn't subscribed to views like historical inevitability of communism, or dictatorship of the proletariat. Then in the Eastern Bloc the local political systems were called "real socialism", i.e. the one put into actual functioning, on the road to future communism. So association of socialism with command economy is well established and not really one-sided ideologically, I think. The terms to use if you want to distance yourself from that heritage would be 'social democracy' (if you mean the ideas that were partly implemented in capitalist Europe) or 'worker democracy', if you want something more akin to what the GP described. These ideas are easy to sympathize with on many levels, and what passes for "socialism" in the US is often just the not-really-disputed social contract on the other side of the pond. Ultimately these ideologies advocate for reducing economics, to varying extents, to just democratic politics. Which is kind of boring: not necessarily meaning this as a bad thing. The calculation problem and related issues of organizing true command economy are more interesting as an abstract problems of engineering, organization etc., regardless of actually wanting this politically to happen. (Being formed in part by the Eastern experience, I am very much wary myself.)
chmod600 3y ago
"Socialism is about how workers organise their workplace (owning, managing and sharing the produce and profit of their labour)." That is a nice simplification, but it makes it sound like something that can just emerge gracefully within a market economy. There are employee-owned companies, for instance, and if that's all that's needed for socialism to work, then it would spread and show us all the benefits of socialism. But the benefits are either not there or not amazing enough to spread. I'm left feeling like you left out the controversial parts, and I suspect that when you get into the details, there's lots of room for complicated power dynamics and ownership rules, perhaps much worse than non-socialist alternatives.
- greenie_beans 3y ago
  this ignores the systemic and cultural reasons why employee-owned companies haven't spread.
  - hbrn 3y ago
    What are those "systemic and cultural reasons" that exist in every single country and culture on the planet?
    - Tiktaalik 3y ago
      Like in Canada employee owned companies aren't even a legal possibility and it's something the government is only now investigating enabling. https://mcmillan.ca/insights/publications/budget-2023-employee-ownership-trust-measures-unveiled/ https://mcmillan.ca/insights/publications/budget-2023-employ... I would expect there are similar barriers in many countries.
revelio 3y ago
This is conflating cause and effect. Socialism is just a word, you can define it however you like. In theory it can be some sort of vague co-op of co-ops. In practice it always leads to a centrally planned economy. There's a good reason for that. The ultimate root cause that generates socialist ideals is not the plight of the workers or anything so surface-level, it's the intuition that intellectuals should run society. Thomas Sowell has done a lot of excellent work elucidating this and explaining why it happens. To try and summarize, socialism appeals to people who like the sound of the abstract ideas of intellectuals. If an intellectual posits a clever-sounding reorganization of society justified by high minded ideals, then this feels right to the socialist mind. The sort of people who most aggressively promote socialism are the sort of people who think society is ultimately pretty simple - after all, the way to cure all social ills is so simple it can be summed up in a single book or set of pamphlets. It can be understood and reorganized by a single mind. Marx was famously averse to detail about how communist societies would actually work in practice, as were all other socialists, but this didn't bother them because it didn't seem like you needed a lot of detail. Hence the "calculation debate" the article discusses, which kicked off only after communists gained power. If you intuit that society is simple and the best minds can understand and reorganize it for the greater good, then a planned economy is the obvious next step. Why would you not plan it? The only possible justification would be if the planning process was too hard, but that would imply that society was too complex for any one mind or even a committee of minds to fully understand, and if you believed that, you wouldn't be a communist to begin with. So socialism or communism invariably always leads to top-down authoritarianism in practice. Revealed preferences > stated preferences.
- csb6 3y ago
  > The ultimate root cause that generates socialist ideals is not the plight of the workers or anything so surface-level, it's the intuition that intellectuals should run society. This is not the case. Marx and other writers repeatedly emphasize that the working class itself must take power and begin the process of getting rid of social classes altogether. They definitely did not advocate for a society run by highly educated intellectuals from the top-down. See “The Civil War in France”, where Marx discusses the Paris Commune - a working class uprising that was not lead by intellectuals. > socialism appeals to people who like the sound of the abstract ideas of intellectuals. If an intellectual posits a clever-sounding reorganization of society justified by high minded ideals, then this feels right to the socialist mind. This is just a description of zealotry and overoptimism in general - attitudes than can be found among proponents of any framework. Marx himself criticized earlier utopian socialist thinkers for trying to plan out an idealized society from their armchairs, rather than actively organizing with workers to create a better one. He saw theory and practice as deeply connected, and he definitely was not a utopian thinker. > the way to cure all social ills is so simple it can be summed up in a single book or set of pamphlets. It can be understood and reorganized by a single mind. Marx didn’t believe this. He was a prolific author and corresponded with many other contemporary socialist writers. He published a whole series of books just focused on analyzing capitalism, and he died before completing them. There is a wealth of Marxist writing and many conflicting strands - there is no “one mind” or “one committee” with the final say. > Why would you not plan it? The only possible justification would be if the planning process was too hard, but that would imply that society was too complex for any one mind or even a committee of minds to fully understand, and if you believed that, you wouldn't be a communist to begin with. There is a whole area of thought known as market socialism that rejects both capitalism and central planning. Central planning is not fundamental to socialism; it is simply one kind of economic strategy that could be used by a socialist society. I would encourage you read accounts of socialist thought besides those written by a deeply conservative economist. Marx himself can be challenging to read, but David Harvey has a book called “A Companion to Marx's Capital” that helps explain some of the context.
hbrn 3y ago
> Socialism is about how workers organise their workplace (owning, managing and sharing the produce and profit of their labour) That's a sugarcoated way of saying "imposing restrictions". You're not allowed to have private ownership of means of production. You're not allowed to just sell your labor without taking on risks. You can practice socialism in a capitalistic society. You are forbidden to practice capitalism in a socialistic one.
- yourmatenate 3y ago
  To me this is like saying: You don't have the freedom to be a slave, therefore your system isn't really free.
  - hbrn 3y ago
    You're using mental gymnastics to attack the alternative framework so that you could avoid thinking about hard problems. No sane person believes that having option to sell your labor without taking risks is slavery. If anything, slavery is being forced to be paid in the proceeds of a futile endeavor instead of just being paid how much you think you're worth. People have different life circumstances and preferences, so naturally they want different risk options. Having better control over your risks is an indisputable benefit of capitalism. Apparently, socialism ignores this benefit by assuming that people are robots that don't actually have different circumstances and preferences.
    - yourmatenate 3y ago
      No sane person thinks that the current system is exploitative? No sane person thinks that it takes advantage about a power differential due to who has the capital (land, factory etc.)? I guess I know a lot of insane people. How many people really get paid how much they think they are worth under the current system? Not many I know. How much does the person with the capital risk compared to the employee who might lose their home with the loss of their livelihood? Do most employees really believe that they have a rational and fair choice of the risks they enter into? (including the risk of surviving on a low income) I guess I'm not meeting these swathes of workers completely satisfied with their wages, risks, and the system they live in. I know plenty of Socialists who believe in different benefits for different levels of effort or danger, especially as in Capitalism most of those people are the most poorly paid at present.

hospitalJail 3y ago

>(owning, managing and sharing the produce and profit of their labour). The issue is that leaders and factions always emerge. Even if everyone could 'keep their excess labor', you get groups of people that position themselves to get higher value jobs or easier jobs. As much as people claim this is not inevitable, I've yet to see this happen IRL or in history.

yourmatenate 3y ago
This is veering into a different topic, but I'd encourage you to read "The Dawn Of Everything" (2021) & "The Art of Not Being Governed" (2009) for long term examples of non-hierarchal societies. It may be inevitable that people may rise up to seek power over others, but the question is what is the best way to respond to this? Do we leave them to rule over others without restrictions, or do we limit the damage they can do? Do we reward this impulse of control of the few over the many to their general detriment, or do we treat it as a mental health issue (like sociopathy or hoarding)?
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  >for long term examples of non-hierarchal societies. Just mention them. There is no need for citing a book that will take me a few months to read before I respond. I have a feeling I know about the ones you are about to mention. They had leaders or factions that controlled the resources(not classless) or they only lasted for a few months or years before getting conquered.
  - yourmatenate 3y ago
    The first of these books is fascinating and worth a read (I enjoyed the second one too, but it is a little more scholarly in its language). The first primarily deals with hunter/gatherer peoples and early city-based civilisations. The second is focused on Zomia - an area covering large parts of China and India that was non-hierarchal and contained a large and diverse population. As for scarcity: It seems to me from my research that it is most often the leaders and factions that create artificial scarcity in order to enforce their power, rather than there being a lack of resources in the first place.
int_19h 3y ago
Leaders and factions are not a problem in a system that does not allow them to easily hoard power. Which authoritarian socialism isn't, of course, but that's not the only kind. If you're wondering why we don't see the other kind much - well, the socialist movements that won back in early 20th century were generally the most ruthless ones, whereas the more democratically minded movements (e.g. Luxembourgism or various anarchist groups) were crushed. So you had a kind of artificial selection for brutality to begin with - but then countries controlled by those winners would also subsidize similar movements elsewhere, and of course they demanded ideological conformance in return. This is largely why stuff like Marxism-Leninism and Maoism is still so pervasive on the left.

greenie_beans 3y ago

this needs to be at the top. the typical american conflates socialism with a centrally planned economy, thanks to the red scare of the 20th century and capitalism's grip on the public's imagination.

chmod600 3y ago
Promises of "socialism" always seem to require granting huge amounts of power to the government, which leads to inefficiency, abuse, and worse. In theory, perhaps socialism doesn't require huge amounts of government power; or perhaps huge amounts of government power doesn't always lead to horrible outcomes. But that's just a theory and has little evidence to back it up at the scale of millions of people. Bernie Sanders said "These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?"[1] in 2011, less than a decade before collapse. If he can't tell the difference between a socialist utopia and a recipe for disaster, how is a layperson supposed to know? Just like a tech startup: don't call your users stupid and keep pushing your theoretically-good product. Listen and try to understand why it's not working for them. [1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/sanders-distances-himself-from-2011-editorial-on-his-senate-website-praising-the-american-dream-in-venezuela https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/sanders-di...
- gilmore606 3y ago
  > where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger If incomes were equal, how could a Horatio Alger story possibly happen at all? Do people even think about what they say?
stereolambda 3y ago
Well, wait till we try to square what Americans commonly mean by 'liberalism' and 'conservatism' with continental political theory and classic theorists connected to these words. In these cases America is, interestingly, removed to the left. The man who "hijacked" the word socialism would probably be Marx himself, as he declared his theory to be the (scientific) socialism, as opposed to various (he said) "utopian" and "naive" thinkers who hadn't subscribed to views like historical inevitability of communism, or dictatorship of the proletariat. Then in the Eastern Bloc the local political systems were called "real socialism", i.e. the one put into actual functioning, on the road to future communism. So association of socialism with command economy is well established and not really one-sided ideologically, I think. The terms to use if you want to distance yourself from that heritage would be 'social democracy' (if you mean the ideas that were partly implemented in capitalist Europe) or 'worker democracy', if you want something more akin to what the GP described. These ideas are easy to sympathize with on many levels, and what passes for "socialism" in the US is often just the not-really-disputed social contract on the other side of the pond. Ultimately these ideologies advocate for reducing economics, to varying extents, to just democratic politics. Which is kind of boring: not necessarily meaning this as a bad thing. The calculation problem and related issues of organizing true command economy are more interesting as an abstract problems of engineering, organization etc., regardless of actually wanting this politically to happen. (Being formed in part by the Eastern experience, I am very much wary myself.)

chmod600 3y ago

"Socialism is about how workers organise their workplace (owning, managing and sharing the produce and profit of their labour)." That is a nice simplification, but it makes it sound like something that can just emerge gracefully within a market economy. There are employee-owned companies, for instance, and if that's all that's needed for socialism to work, then it would spread and show us all the benefits of socialism. But the benefits are either not there or not amazing enough to spread. I'm left feeling like you left out the controversial parts, and I suspect that when you get into the details, there's lots of room for complicated power dynamics and ownership rules, perhaps much worse than non-socialist alternatives.

greenie_beans 3y ago
this ignores the systemic and cultural reasons why employee-owned companies haven't spread.
- hbrn 3y ago
  What are those "systemic and cultural reasons" that exist in every single country and culture on the planet?
  - Tiktaalik 3y ago
    Like in Canada employee owned companies aren't even a legal possibility and it's something the government is only now investigating enabling. https://mcmillan.ca/insights/publications/budget-2023-employee-ownership-trust-measures-unveiled/ https://mcmillan.ca/insights/publications/budget-2023-employ... I would expect there are similar barriers in many countries.

revelio 3y ago

This is conflating cause and effect. Socialism is just a word, you can define it however you like. In theory it can be some sort of vague co-op of co-ops. In practice it always leads to a centrally planned economy. There's a good reason for that. The ultimate root cause that generates socialist ideals is not the plight of the workers or anything so surface-level, it's the intuition that intellectuals should run society. Thomas Sowell has done a lot of excellent work elucidating this and explaining why it happens. To try and summarize, socialism appeals to people who like the sound of the abstract ideas of intellectuals. If an intellectual posits a clever-sounding reorganization of society justified by high minded ideals, then this feels right to the socialist mind. The sort of people who most aggressively promote socialism are the sort of people who think society is ultimately pretty simple - after all, the way to cure all social ills is so simple it can be summed up in a single book or set of pamphlets. It can be understood and reorganized by a single mind. Marx was famously averse to detail about how communist societies would actually work in practice, as were all other socialists, but this didn't bother them because it didn't seem like you needed a lot of detail. Hence the "calculation debate" the article discusses, which kicked off only after communists gained power. If you intuit that society is simple and the best minds can understand and reorganize it for the greater good, then a planned economy is the obvious next step. Why would you not plan it? The only possible justification would be if the planning process was too hard, but that would imply that society was too complex for any one mind or even a committee of minds to fully understand, and if you believed that, you wouldn't be a communist to begin with. So socialism or communism invariably always leads to top-down authoritarianism in practice. Revealed preferences > stated preferences.

csb6 3y ago
> The ultimate root cause that generates socialist ideals is not the plight of the workers or anything so surface-level, it's the intuition that intellectuals should run society. This is not the case. Marx and other writers repeatedly emphasize that the working class itself must take power and begin the process of getting rid of social classes altogether. They definitely did not advocate for a society run by highly educated intellectuals from the top-down. See “The Civil War in France”, where Marx discusses the Paris Commune - a working class uprising that was not lead by intellectuals. > socialism appeals to people who like the sound of the abstract ideas of intellectuals. If an intellectual posits a clever-sounding reorganization of society justified by high minded ideals, then this feels right to the socialist mind. This is just a description of zealotry and overoptimism in general - attitudes than can be found among proponents of any framework. Marx himself criticized earlier utopian socialist thinkers for trying to plan out an idealized society from their armchairs, rather than actively organizing with workers to create a better one. He saw theory and practice as deeply connected, and he definitely was not a utopian thinker. > the way to cure all social ills is so simple it can be summed up in a single book or set of pamphlets. It can be understood and reorganized by a single mind. Marx didn’t believe this. He was a prolific author and corresponded with many other contemporary socialist writers. He published a whole series of books just focused on analyzing capitalism, and he died before completing them. There is a wealth of Marxist writing and many conflicting strands - there is no “one mind” or “one committee” with the final say. > Why would you not plan it? The only possible justification would be if the planning process was too hard, but that would imply that society was too complex for any one mind or even a committee of minds to fully understand, and if you believed that, you wouldn't be a communist to begin with. There is a whole area of thought known as market socialism that rejects both capitalism and central planning. Central planning is not fundamental to socialism; it is simply one kind of economic strategy that could be used by a socialist society. I would encourage you read accounts of socialist thought besides those written by a deeply conservative economist. Marx himself can be challenging to read, but David Harvey has a book called “A Companion to Marx's Capital” that helps explain some of the context.

hbrn 3y ago

> Socialism is about how workers organise their workplace (owning, managing and sharing the produce and profit of their labour) That's a sugarcoated way of saying "imposing restrictions". You're not allowed to have private ownership of means of production. You're not allowed to just sell your labor without taking on risks. You can practice socialism in a capitalistic society. You are forbidden to practice capitalism in a socialistic one.

yourmatenate 3y ago
To me this is like saying: You don't have the freedom to be a slave, therefore your system isn't really free.
- hbrn 3y ago
  You're using mental gymnastics to attack the alternative framework so that you could avoid thinking about hard problems. No sane person believes that having option to sell your labor without taking risks is slavery. If anything, slavery is being forced to be paid in the proceeds of a futile endeavor instead of just being paid how much you think you're worth. People have different life circumstances and preferences, so naturally they want different risk options. Having better control over your risks is an indisputable benefit of capitalism. Apparently, socialism ignores this benefit by assuming that people are robots that don't actually have different circumstances and preferences.
  - yourmatenate 3y ago
    No sane person thinks that the current system is exploitative? No sane person thinks that it takes advantage about a power differential due to who has the capital (land, factory etc.)? I guess I know a lot of insane people. How many people really get paid how much they think they are worth under the current system? Not many I know. How much does the person with the capital risk compared to the employee who might lose their home with the loss of their livelihood? Do most employees really believe that they have a rational and fair choice of the risks they enter into? (including the risk of surviving on a low income) I guess I'm not meeting these swathes of workers completely satisfied with their wages, risks, and the system they live in. I know plenty of Socialists who believe in different benefits for different levels of effort or danger, especially as in Capitalism most of those people are the most poorly paid at present.