Debate from another site

[Technique3055]

A while back I was debating communism on another website (It's not even a politically related site, but it was in a general discussions topic) and the person I was debating with said the following things, which seem to add up to me, and which I have no response to. If someone could please help me out in understanding how to debate against this sort of mentality or what communism's real views are on such situations, that would be greatly appriciated:

"Which is why your comment about Mao and Stalin not being Communists really does nothing more than prove you understand nothing about communism. The motivations and goals behind communism? These are fine. Communists, like capitalists or anybody else, want a better life for more people. Unfortunately, the way it goes about trying to accomplish this is horribly, and fundamentally flawed. Stalin and Mao were who they were, in large part, because of communism and the way it organizes an economy.

Any centrally planned economy leads to a conglomeration of power in the hands of the planner. If you think Stalin and Mao were "bad communists" because they used their position in the economy to their advantage, you're missing the point. They abused power the way they did precisely because of the structure of communism - it incents that exact kind of abuse of power by placing all of the decisions of an economy into one pair of hands. The individual at the center of a planned economy has the power to decide everything about their country's economy and this leads, inevtiably, to the kind of abuses we've seen. Economic and personal freedom are one and the same and when you take away economic freedom and give it to a central planner, you take away personal liberties and political freedoms at the same time and just as effectively.

If communism was a viable and efficient economic model, we'd see a lot more of it. Communist economies would outperform free market economies (as they were advertised to do) and we would implement a lot more of their features everywhere. Dozens of countries experimented with planned economies in the last century and the degree to which they centralized their economies is the exact degree to which they failed. Countries that didn't go all the way, but kept large elements of socialism in place (many countries in Europe, for example), are saddled with minimal growth, massive unemployment, and falling standards of living. Planned economies are fundamentally flawed because they do not reward innovation and they do not incent risk-taking or hard work. They just don't work in the real world and it just doesn't matter how nice of an idea they are on paper.

Now you are of course free to study communism, and think about it, talk about, turn it over in your mind, and so on. We don't need a McCarthiest reaction to the words "communism" or "socialism" in this society. If thinking about communism helps someone to come up with a truly better model for economics, that's great. But in the free market of ideas, communism failed, and failed completely, a long time ago."

"Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, there is something in that form of government which causes the sorts of deviations from "purity" we see over, and over, and over again? I mean, if people set out to form communist states and they just keep turning into destructive totalitarian regimes, that perhaps some of it has something to do with the model? That perhaps the elegant "theory" you appreciate so much is built on principles that will cause its implementation to always fail if it is ever expanded beyond a very modest size?

My suspicion is that is the case. The most free societies in history have had the most "cynical" views of human nature. They recognize that people are motivated by self-interest and align those forces to balance against each other."

"What I am arguing is that communism, and really any economic system that is not based on free markets, incents men like that to seize power and provides a means for them to hold and abuse that power. Prices reflect realities about scarcity. Whenever that is subverted, the underlying reality is not changed. In order to enforce any sort of controlled economy, one is left with no choice but to try to control those realities and this has invariably lead to totalitarian control. You have to ask yourself if every time an economic model is implemented, it is subverted by evil men if there isn't something in the model that is incenting their behavior.

You have to ask yourself why it has never existed in its "purest" form, whatever it is that you mean by that. People have tried to implement it. They have done so in good faith and with good intentions, many of them. But they fail. The consequences for their failure are not light either. Millions die. Economies are ruined. Wars are fought. My point is that it doesn't matter what those people's intentions were. Theories that are well meaning in their rhetoric or look good on paper but do not incent constructive behavior will fail. Something happens, and happens with alarming consistency, when people try to implement communist ideas on any scale larger than at best a few million people. (And even on those scales it has enormous problems - economies badly underperform and standards of living tend to stagnate.) How many times do you need to see this happen before you stop trying to implement the system?

Communist systems incent leaders to further conglomerate their power. As the effective industrial leaders, they have no incentive to provide better service and every means by which to seize more of what their country produces. Are you really surprised greedy tyrants either move into those positions or are created by them? And can you honestly say it is worth the risk to try again? Say we were to implement a communist state in America. Past history suggests that on the road to implementation, somebody would seize power in the name of the state and the "common good." Our economy would stagnate. We could easily ruin our economic base, losing tens of trillions of dollars in real assets and millions could die. That is the history we have to look to for examples of how these models actually work in the real world. Do you really feel like you know enough about what you are talking about to reccomend taking a risk like that?

The intentions behind a policy don't matter; all that matters are the behaviors it incents. The reason I keep coming back to this is becuase communism is a well meaning model that incents terrible behaviors. By effectively removing the risk/reward mechanism of profits and losses it kills innovation and improvement of services. By taking the assignment of value away from individuals and putting it into the hand of a collective, it incents people to ignore the actual realities of scarcity. By centralizing economic decisions it loses efficiency and requires so much management that invariably strips away personal liberties. It doesn't matter that the theory wants good things for people. It incents behaviors that are destructive and oppressive. It incents behaviors that murder personal freedoms. At its best it incents behaviors that are grossly inefficient in their use of scarce resources - something that invariably degrades standards of living and stagnates growth."

"The right kind of leader will never "emerge" for this system though. The system is set up from its very base, no matter how well intending, to create a totalitarian state. Leaders who can rise to power in such a structure will invariably be leaders who want that kind of power. Not even you have disagreed with my analysis of the kind of incentives communism provides in economic decision-making. But if you want to convince anyone that the system is workable in the real world, you are going to have to address this. Communism is a system which naturally promotes to power men like Mao and Stalin.

How have things worked out for Cuba? The state owns everything. The state controls everything. Individuals count for nothing and rights do not exist. Somehow I don't think that is what people thought they were signing up for. Che might have meant very well - like I said, a lot of proponents of communism mean well. Those intentions are just completely irrelevant. All that matters are the policies communism incents and those policies involve stripping individual liberties and conglomeration of power. Economic and political freedom are entwined at the root and when you kill one, the other eventually dies."



Can someone care to explain a rebuttle against those arguements? I know it's a bit legnthy, but I really need some clearing up about it.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 26 2005, 11:53 AM
"Which is why your comment about Mao and Stalin not being Communists really does nothing more than prove you understand nothing about communism. The motivations and goals behind communism? These are fine. Communists, like capitalists or anybody else, want a better life for more people. Unfortunately, the way it goes about trying to accomplish this is horribly, and fundamentally flawed. Stalin and Mao were who they were, in large part, because of communism and the way it organizes an economy.

Any centrally planned economy leads to a conglomeration of power in the hands of the planner. If you think Stalin and Mao were "bad communists" because they used their position in the economy to their advantage, you're missing the point.
I would suggest that it's the poster who knows nothing about the communist movement, which is not primarily about central economic planning. We're for nationalizing capitalist property primarily because of the need to smash the economic power of the capitalist oligarchy; not because we're in love with central planning in and of itself, or irrevocably committed to any one system of organizing a postcapitalist economy. The market may well have a role for a time; then there are the various possibilities of more decentralized planning through workers' democracy and moral incentives.

But never mind that; probably the poster simply isn't interested in that kind of thing. Let's examine what can be learned from the experience of nationalized, postcapitalist economies.


They abused power the way they did precisely because of the structure of communism - it incents that exact kind of abuse of power by placing all of the decisions of an economy into one pair of hands. The individual at the center of a planned economy has the power to decide everything about their country's economy and this leads, inevtiably, to the kind of abuses we've seen. Economic and personal freedom are one and the same and when you take away economic freedom and give it to a central planner, you take away personal liberties and political freedoms at the same time and just as effectively.

"Economic and personal freedom are one and the same"? None of these countries had political freedoms to take away...they had "economic freedom" i.e. capitalism but not political freedom.

Nor does capitalism involve "economic freedom" for most people; your "personal freedom" is at the mercy of your employer but that type of coercion is invisible to many.

But anyway. Does one individual necessarily have the power to "decide everything" in a planned economy? Sorry, no, in fact it isn't physically possible for one individual to do so.

And for much of Soviet and PRC history, they were not in fact ruled by one individual with undivided power. Stalin and Mao served a certain political function for a privileged bureaucratic caste under concrete conditions....and it's that apparatchik caste which was the central problem of the PRC and USSR, and the reason they weren't socialist. "One-man rule" was a symptom, and not even the most important one.

The bureaucratic caste as a whole, or the Politburo or what have you, was not all-powerful either, nor did it have "every means by which to seize more of what their country produces." It certainly did use its power and administrative role to appropriate resources to itself; but there were always limits on its ability to do so.
Essentially, the fear of workers' revolt against their profoundly brittle system...brittle because the state was not supported by a broad propertied class.

For these reasons, all the postcapitalist economies had to spend considerable resources on social benefits and other things benefiting working people. These societies were not Orwell's 1984, nor is such a thing possible.

I'll return to the question of political freedom and postcapitalist economies later.


If communism was a viable and efficient economic model, we'd see a lot more of it. Communist economies would outperform free market economies (as they were advertised to do) and we would implement a lot more of their features everywhere. Dozens of countries experimented with planned economies in the last century and the degree to which they centralized their economies is the exact degree to which they failed.

That's not really true. The USSR, for example, was a much bigger failure (by communist standards) in other respects than in economic growth. For much of its history, the USSR experienced rapid economic growth and industrialization. The PRC and India are roughly equivalent in size and were at roughly the same level of development in the late 40s, when India became independent and the Chinese Revolution happened....which is more prosperous now? China's economy is still less capitalist than India's.

China also compares favorably to India in measures of social well-being...education, health care, and so forth. So you can't really say that economic growth has been achieved at the expense of the population....more than under capitalism, that is.

The USSR's economic problem was, at a certain point it ran into the limits of the bureaucracy's brute-force approach to economic growth....for political reasons the apparatchiks had to stifle all initiative of working people...it could increase quantity but not quality of production. After achieving a certain level of development, the Soviet economy began to stagnate.

It should be pointed out, incidentally, that attempts to restore capitalism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have not been a roaring success for capital; and have been disastrous for most of the populations. Life expectancy in Russia plummeted drastically.


Countries that didn't go all the way, but kept large elements of socialism in place (many countries in Europe, for example), are saddled with minimal growth, massive unemployment, and falling standards of living.

Not hugely relevant, since these are capitalist economies with large welfare states and some industries owned by a capitalist state, not "large elements of socialism." But in fact real wages are higher in most west European countries than in the U.S., vacation time is longer, and then there's the social benefits....of course this cuts into profits, so capital flows towards countries which allow more unbridled exploitation. German automakers build plants in the U.S. in part for the same reasons U.S. automakers build plants in Mexico.

So there's a certain argument for encouraging economic growth by laissez-faire policies and slashing the living standards for working people; but this race to the bottom cannot help to improve the situation of most of humanity. In any case, that's a debate over economic policy within the bounds of capitalism.


Planned economies are fundamentally flawed because they do not reward innovation and they do not incent risk-taking or hard work.

Capitalist economies don't reward hard work either; the hardest jobs I've ever had have also been the lowest paying.

But yes, there's an incentive problem in postcapitalist economies; there was very little fear of being fired, and most workers had little fear of being fired. Which kinda argues against the idea of the all-powerful bureaucracy, don't it?

One answer is to make more use of market-driven material incentives, piecerate, bonuses, etc...the Soviet Union tended to head more and more in this direction over time.

The other is moral incentives, which Cuba has made some effort with....

I gotta go now. I wanna come back and write some more, about Cuba and political freedom and the context all this happened in, among other things.

[Hachi-Go]

"Economic and personal freedom are one and the same"? None of these countries had political freedoms to take away...they had "economic freedom" i.e. capitalism but not political freedom.
In the 50 years before the Tsars fall only a few hundred people had been executed for political reasons, exponentially less then under Lenin.
As for capitalism, neither had it.
Russia had a feudel society. All property was nationalized.
Chiang-Kai Shek had a semi-corporativist, planned economy. As for China's freedoms, it varied from warlord to warlord, with Mao ranking next to Chiang for the worst. Mao opposed the only real revolutionary in China, Wang Jingwei.

[Severian]

Originally posted by Hachi-[email protected] 28 2005, 10:16 PM
Russia had a feudel society. All property was nationalized.
What planet are you from?

[Technique3055]

Thanks Severian, that really helped. But there's still one thing I'm not totally getting in the arguement against communism. I've got to go now, I'll post tomorrow with a few more details...

[Technique3055]

Alright, I've heard many claims of "Communism completely stopping progression." That "theory" of sorts comes up quite often, and I'm never really sure how to respond to something like that.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 30 2005, 04:37 PM
Alright, I've heard many claims of "Communism completely stopping progression." That "theory" of sorts comes up quite often, and I'm never really sure how to respond to something like that.
That it demonstrably hasn't. Even for the Stalinist regimes, economic growth continued, educational levels rose, etc....the former USSR, even the Central Asian republics, have levels of electrification comparable to the First World.

There was a limit to how much progress could be attained by the bureaucracy's methods...and when that limit was reached, the regimes fell.

To suggest that they could stop progress, was an overestimation of their power. To continue saying so today, is just ignoring facts.

The strength of this argument isn't so much history, certainly not a detailed knowledge of history, it's the raw impact of seeming victory of capitalism in the Cold War. "Nothing succeeds like success." 'Course as time goes on more and more people get kinda disillusioned with the way the whole attempt to restore capitalism turned out, including the more thoughtful representatives of the ruling class, but some people are kinda slow.

And of course if you look at Cuba this stuff just falls down on every level. Cuba's even done some impressive stuff recently in scientific research, which is one area of "progress" the Stalinist regimes always had trouble with. Dunno how it's done in quality of production, other than continuing to make the world's best cigars. It has more "political freedom" than much of Latin America...and never mind right-wing dictatorships, there's less repression than under parliamentary regimes like Colombia's or under the "multinational" occupation of Haiti. That's despite the difficult situation facing the Cuban revolution, where it's impressive, and to many inexplicable, that they've survived at all.

I'm not going to continue going through this guy's post line by line. At first it seemed more serious than it really is, 'cause there is a real problem of productivity in postcapitalist vs capitalist economies. We'll have to answer that with deeds not just words, showing in practice that working people can be more efficient than either the capitalist exploiters or the bureaucratic mismanagers.

But he ruins his point by trying to make a sweeping generalization that the more laissez-faire and the less planning, the more growth. Has he heard of Japan? Does he think it's developmental-state policies were "free market"? Has he noticed that it's been in a prolonged recession pretty much ever since 1990, roughly when the U.S. succeeded in pressuring Tokyo to open its markets more?

These super-free-market people are advocates of a reactionary utopia that never has existed, doesn't exist anywhere, and never can exist.

Anyway, the basic thing is that all anticapitalist revolutions so far have been in underdeveloped countries, under frequent attack by imperialism. The Russian Revolution was not a social experiment as some of its liberal "fellow-travellers" said, it was a besieged fortress.

Hardly ideal conditions for the construction of a profoundly different social order. Certainly not those Marxist theory always suggested were required.

To proclaim the death of communism at this moment, is like proclaiming the death of republicanism after the final defeat of the Emperor Napoleon....when the only remaining republics in the world were some bunch of isolated mountaineers in Switzerland, and some bunch of colonial slaveholding hicks across the Atlantic. Why couldn't everyone see republicanism was a failed dream, which can only lead to guillotine terror, tyrants like Napoleon, and devastating wars?

Ya gotta take the long view of history.