Wednesday, November 2, 2022
Why communism doesnt work
Why communism doesnt work
My father was a high-ranking student radical poobah and still thinks Castro was the bees' knees. Although I'm technically a red diaper baby, I've rejected all that baloney. I write off-the-wall fiction , and Righteous Seduction concerns next-generation game. My blog concerns "deplorable" politics, game, and my writing projects. An economy is a method of distribution of scarce resources. I should make it clear that an economic system is basically a Platonic ideal form existing in the realm of pure theory; real-world results will differ.
Theories grounded in reality get fairly good results; others will be disastrous. Further, corruption happens in any sort of system and drags it down. If tolerated and extensive, corruption eventually reaches the government and alters the system.
Although no system is perfect, we should strive to improve what we have and reduce corruption. With socialism, the means of production—factories, farms, and other workplaces—are partially or fully publicly owned.
At the most extreme, everyone works for the government. In some cases, no private property exists; everyone owns everything. Communism is a hardline variety with the goal of worldwide revolution. Then, everyone would share everything, and whatever you need would be available as easy as breathing.
Eventually, the apparatus of the state would wither away, leaving basically a global utopia without a government. A few problems appear already.
Having your material needs fulfilled effortlessly seems like something from a South Pacific cargo cult. It seems rather odd that dozens of Communist regimes across the globe, many lasting decades, never made it work. All of them sucked; it was simply a matter of how much they sucked.
Polish citizens standing in line for toilet paper rations. In a capitalist economy, scarcity is moderated by price. In a socialist economy, scarcity is moderated by rationing. That might sound attractive in theory to some. If you want more than what your ration allows, tough luck. Industries had quotas to fulfill, or else. Shoddy Soviet manufacturing standards were legendary, from workers rushing to meet monthly goals. When failure was admitted, sabotage and careless low-level management was blamed, but never the system itself.
In societies with market economies, we pursue our jobs diligently so that we might one day be rich. Guess what will be a better motivator? Pay was low, and finding goods was often difficult from frequent shortages.
All told, the command economy was a big mess. Central planning was cumbersome and worked badly, even for small countries. They emphasized full employment for the public, but labor was allocated inefficiently, often make-work situations such as several people assigned to a job easily handled by one.
Even despite some flaws , self-regulation works better than micromanagement. Science was sluggish in many areas. Capitalism incentivizes technological development, as companies want consumers to keep buying new products. In Communism, central planning manages research too, coming down to a matter of priorities.
The USSR pushed military development and had a top-notch space program. Finally, Communist Party members made themselves a privileged class, with better employment and better access to rationed goods. Hedrick Smith estimated that only ten percent of Soviet Communist Party members really believed in it; the rest were in it for the perks.
Bloated bureaucracy was one drain on the system, and inventory shrinkage was another. If Communism means that everyone owns everything, why not steal? Here, pilfering office supplies makes for a good Dilbert cartoon, but in the USSR, that sort of thing was normal despite being strictly forbidden.
For example, sides of beef from Siberia destined for Moscow would get whittled down at each train station. Even Brezhnev acknowledged that petty corruption was how people got by. Their emphasis on hyper-preparedness and exporting revolution turned out to be detrimental. They could have done better without all that. A large chunk of American national debt has been due to wasteful spending on behalf of the military-industrial complex for the arms race and fighting spit-in-your-eye wars.
Still, the Soviet economy got it far worse, with a much higher ratio of defense to gross domestic production. Grandiose projects became huge boondoggles.
Later, Khrushchev and Chairman Mao had to admit they were wrong. Shoddy cement work made the building unsafe, becoming an uninhabited, half-finished eyesore towering over Pyongyang. The concept was half-baked anyway; they expected foreigners to book huge business conferences there, but who the hell would do that in North Korea?
Silly Norks! In practice, compromises sometimes were necessary, such as allowing limited private enterprise. It worked better than complete Communism which caused dreadful food shortages but was plagued with corruption, considerably worse than what the Communists were complaining about before the Russian Revolution. Dissent must be suppressed to prevent a counterrevolution. Thus, Communist countries have a rather lousy human rights record.
The usual double standard applies: leftists even moderates are notorious for overlooking Communist repression, while magnifying atrocities of rightist regimes. Heavy-handed propaganda milieu control keeps the citizens in line, giving them a skewed view of the rest of the world. It was very difficult to emigrate or just travel abroad. In the USSR, even travel between the regions was controlled, leaving many to believe that lousy conditions were only a local problem. They say Americans are starving and survive on snow and pheasants, quite unaware of our obesity problem.
Communism metes out draconian penalties for dissent, even for getting caught telling a political joke. Quite remarkably, in East Germany, a third of the population participated in this. The only time that communal ownership of property proved workable is in religious orders and low-tech tribes. Also, neither monasteries nor primitive tribes had much use for slackers. Note that all these were small, very tightly-knit societies. If your job was chipping flint into spearheads, you gladly did so because this contributed to your survival as well as that of your tribe; your extended family.
In fact, Americans tried it before. There were a couple of experiments in early colonial times, but the hard-working farmers were resentful that they got the same reward as the lazy ones, and so the project was abandoned. The United Order by early Mormon pioneers fizzled out. Hippie communes tended not to last long. Gorbachev introduced restructuring and openness, attempting to reform the system. The legislature was no longer a rubber stamp for the Politburo, and the expansive rights guaranteed by the Soviet constitution were finally granted for real.
As soon as the citizens could speak their minds and vote themselves out of Communism, they did so. Just as the USSR was collapsing, cultural Marxism was taking over elsewhere. Political correctness seemed merely petty language policing and silly hypersensitivity. Today, people are ostracized or harassed for expressing politically incorrect opinions. Huge corporations enthusiastically participate in the spying, along with online censorship.
It may well end up worse. The KGB stopped pushing ideological subversion , but a group of powerful, ultra-wealthy champagne Socialists co-opted the leftist narrative. They live like sultans, intending the rest of us to be their docile peasants. They want capitalism for themselves with the utmost results , and want socialism for the rest of us and not the fairy tale version. The moral of the story is, never believe the economic theories of some pseudo-intellectual drunken bum who never worked a day in his life.
Communism is for the broadly overlapping categories of rabbit people , those who are ignorant of history, and rebels without a clue. Home About Archives Culture Masculinity. Politics Comments. Beau Albrecht. Would you buy a used car from this bozo? Send this to a friend Your email Recipient email Send Cancel.
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