> The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products. “Whalers knew that no matter what, the plan must be met!” Berzin wrote. The Sovetskaya Rossiya seemed to contain in microcosm everything Berzin believed to be wrong about the Soviet system: its irrationality, its brutality, its inclination toward crime.
>As a rule, the people who became commissars were the ones who couldn’t find another job. They were not very smart but were very conceited, self important individuals, especially after they had been given a taste of power, and especially over other people. Those who were thinking about a career in the party system, who could speak loudly and authoritatively from a podium, and who curried favor with the boss, these people could climb the party ladder quickly, and high up.
This describes a pervasive problem with large bureaucracies, including universities and large corporations. The only difference is that corporations have a bigger incentive to try to prevent this because those corporations that are able to get better middle management will outperform those that are unable to.
Well I've been employed by certain high tech multinationals whose obsession with certain MBA flavors of the decade metrics have reduced them to shadows of their former selves.
They were fulfilling the plan just as much as Soviet whalers.
It's not a common term but it is readily understandable to most people.
There have been numerous management trends, innovations, and fads over the years. Maybe now your company has OKRs. Maybe in the 2000s they had a balanced scorecard. Maybe in 1990s they did Management By Objectives (MBO). Maybe in the 1980s they did Total Quality Management (TQM).
Personally I think that lower-level employees cynically overestimate how much damage things like that cause. The real problem is that the business is floudering for market-based reasons. The management is trying to fix it. That they don't always pick exactly the right cure says more about the complexity of having billion dollar companies successfully navigate big changes than about the fads themselves.
Microsoft was hurt by the rise of the internet & google...not by stack ranking. GE was hurt by GE Capital, not stack ranking. Kodak was hurt by digital cameras, not by Management By Objectives. And so on.
I've heard from my friends who were part of the first iteration of Green Peace that they would use the I Ching to search for whalers, once all of their other options were exhausted. They swear up and down that it worked for them and they found a lot of ships that way.
This reminds me of FDR burning fields of grain and killing herds of cattle to drive prices up even while people were starving. The high level goals are to 'improve' things but some serious bugs got introduced into the process that resulted in practically the opposite of intentions.
It's a matter of history. The Agriciultural Adjustment Act of 1933 limited the amount of wheat production in an effort to prop up prices. It was challenged by farmers and went to the supreme court as Wickard v Filburn. This established that the inter-state commerce clause can be used to regulate intra-state commerce, and since all farming affects commerce, thereby farming. [1][2]
The feds generally paid farmers more than their crops were worth on the market to destroy them, so they were destroyed, and this was most definitely happening at a time when there were food shortages in the US.
There is nothing as malicious as a politician on a mission. The US also poisoned tens of thousands of people during prohibition with denatured alcohol. [3]
Perhaps it would be better to talk about the complete failure of planned economies[1] (centralized) VS the success of market economies[2](distributed). I guess you could do both systems under a totalitarian regime or a democratic regime.
Most pro-socialist talk in the US today is probably talking about a market economy with a better social safety nets for the regular population (at the cost of the wealthy), something like the Nordic model[3], not a re-imagined Soviet Union.
There's no way any discussion of Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Whateverism on the internet will bear any fruit today. No one even knows what they're talking about.
I tend to agree with you that we're past this point and market economies offer bountiful opportunities to perform minor tweaks with major outcomes and improved efficiency, if you're more left leaning that may mean systems like basic income. Even in many countries with socialized medicine, it's quite common to have hospitals operate as businesses, hiring doctors, performing research and marketing and just billing the government and insurance companies in some cases for the resulting healthcare provided in the end.
Then I go to reddit and find stuff like /r/latestagecapitalism on the frontpage where they... quite blatantly would rather have a soviet style system and wonder what went wrong.
> The actual answer has a lot to say about the impossibility of rational economic calculation under socialism (and also the lesser but still important problem under capitalism of mispricing in the presence of externalities and the difficulty of aligning private and social incentives.)
It's refreshing to hear such a frank statement of the problems with pure communism and pure capitalism in the same sentence.
Pure capitalism is an engine without a steering wheel. It's very efficient and powerful, but without guidance it will just drive you off a cliff. Socialism is a steering wheel without an engine. They both have important aspects; it's only when they're treated as absolutes that they fail catastrophically.
I don’t get why they call externalities a “lesser” problem or put it in parentheses except out of ideology. Sure you can point to horrific environmental crimes in communism, but what would you say the primary economic engine is that has led to widespread environmental destruction and the climate crisis?
If that's even the case, it's mostly because the most efficient economic system is, in the long term, going to be the economic system that generates the most economic activity and hence the most externalities.
Climate change in particular was only discovered in the second half of the 20th century, while the root cause (the burning of fossil fuel hydrocarbons) was done inside developed economies of all stripes since at least the 18th century. The other environmental problems caused by 18th, 19th, and early 20th century industrialization have largely been addressed over time as they've been discovered, particularly in capitalist economies. In fact, the most popular proposals for addressing climate change are market-based controls on carbon emissions (either cap-and-trade or carbon taxing), which in other contexts have proven very effective. One of the best qualities of capitalism is the way that it can be applied to such ends via simple policies that merely apply incentives and use the mechanisms of the market rather than directly dictating command-and-control over economic activity.
Incidentally, another environmental catastrophe of communism was the disappearance of the Aral Sea, which was once larger than all but one of the Great Lakes. The Soviets started to intentionally redirect the sources of the Aral Sea into irrigation megaprojects in the 1960's and ended up destroying the entire ecosystem, in exchange for growing cotton in Uzbekistan.
You can also count Chernobyl, the Darvaza gas crater and I'm sure there are other idiotic soviet mistakes. They did not care much about people let alone the environment. Just look at China, another communist country.
I think the "lesser" is because capitalism works but causes lots of destructive side-effects, while communism doesn't work at all (and according to the article, apparently can have some of the same kinds of side-effects, which was news to me).
In one sense this makes capitalism worse, because it can keep chugging along wreaking havoc instead of collapsing. But in another sense it's "less dysfunctional".
You don’t think the Soviet economy would have collapsed much earlier than it did had it taken no signals at all into account? There are signals other than price that give you a sense of demand
If you're American they seem to be understood as being synonymous, and US sites will often explain or discuss them incorrectly from that assumption they describe the same thing. In Europe they manage to remain mostly distinct.
Investopedia has the following to say. I don't know if it agrees with the distinction that you like to draw:
"Communism and socialism are economic and political structures that promote equality and seek to eliminate social classes. The two are interchangeable in some ways, but different in others.In a communist society, the working class owns everything, and everyone works toward the same communal goal. There are no wealthy or poor people -- all are equal, and the community distributes what it produces based only on need. Nothing is obtained by working more than what is required. Communism frequently results in low production, mass poverty and limited advancement. Poverty spread so widely in the Soviet Union in the 1980s that its citizens revolted. Like communism, socialism’s main focus is on equality. But workers earn wages they can spend as they choose, while the government, not citizens, owns and operates the means for production. Workers receive what they need to produce and survive, but there’s no incentive to achieve more, leaving little motivation. Some countries have adopted aspects of socialism. The United Kingdom provides basic needs like healthcare to everyone regardless of their time or effort at work. In the U.S., welfare and the public education system are a form of socialism. Both are the opposite of capitalism, where limitations don’t exist and reward comes to those who go beyond the minimum. In capitalist societies, owners are allowed to keep the excess production they earn. And competition occurs naturally, which fosters advancement. Capitalism tends to create a sharp divide between the wealthiest citizens and the poorest, however, with the wealthiest owning the majority of the nation's resources."
I saw something interesting the other day which pointed out that the meaning of "socialist" to America's political left, in 2019, is very different from its original meaning. Today people use it when talking about very basic social programs like public health care and regulated employment benefits. Because we're at a point now where even those fundamental protections are considered "extreme". Originally the word's meaning was much closer to that of "communist", which is probably the source of the miscommunication.
The author is an economist. They coarsely distinguish between command economies on one side, market economies on the other. Socialism and communism may mean different things to different people, but the terms are generally considered to oppose markets and the closely related concept of private property.
Basically, socialism is a transition to communism [0], and so they are viewed as gradations of the same ideology. The idea is that communism is workers controlling the means of production, but there must be an intermediary where the government owns the means of production (defined above as "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat", but marx was a cynic and believed revolution was an absolute, and dictatorship of the proletariat is basically direct democracy without regard to the constitution).
Perhaps many people think that socialism and communism are such toxic ideologies that any defense of them deserves to be downvoted into oblivion. I did not downvote, but being from a former communist country i agree with the sentiment as this ideologies are the ones responsible for the largest amount of deaths and misery in the last century.
Any form of government that involves central planning and large redistribution of income is going to create worse outcomes for society. This is partly the reason why things like SpaceX Amazon etc are created in US and not in Europe.
Of course some social programs as free education and free healthcare are necessary, since it is essentially a form of vc funding where it pays off to invest in many people as some of them would make enough money later in life to cover all the investment. But even here it is important to not take too large a chunk of societies resources and to keep the service itself capitalist with many competing actors.
I don't want to dismiss your experience... but space is a bad example here. The USSR was far ahead of the US on basically every "first" except landing people on the moon (which was important! It just wasn't everything.). I'm skeptical of SpaceX. While they make claims about Mars, they've mainly innovated in regaining access to space (which was lost through lack of investment) and making it cheaper (in an impressive way). These aren't wholly new capabilities.
The fact that USSR was happy to spend enormous resources on anything weapon related in a hungry country doesn't speak about communism being better for space. The main reason USSR had its "firsts" was that by shear luck Korolev didn't die in gulag (though was very close to) and that we were more willing to risk human lives. Perhaps one of the reasons soviet moon program has failed was that in 1966 Korolev have died just 59 years old because of his time at gulag. The other reason was that until mid fifties cybernetics was considered anti-communist science and USSR never managed to recover from that and develop good computers. (This is typical with communism where utility of things is determined not by people freely choosing where to invest their money, but by government). So i can't agree that USSR being first makes space a bad example.
That being said i was bringing SpaceX not as a comparison with USSR, but with the mild socialism of current day Europe which despite having more people doesn't produce the kind of innovation US does.
> The fact that USSR was happy to spend enormous resources on anything weapon related in a hungry country doesn't speak about communism being better for space.
They were terrified by the US. For good reason, arguably. I mean, I've read that the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in part as a warning shot for the Soviets. And there were discussions in the late 40s of nuking the Soviet Union, preemptively.
For both sides, I agree that space exploration was a side effect of the arms race. Putting stuff in orbit was a demonstration that you could put it anywhere.
Also, it was an issue of national pride. So in that sense, for the Soviets, not that different from gross whale harvest. Or wheat, nails, or whatever.
But in the end, it's arguable that the arms race played a large role in destroying the Soviet Union. Its military budget was so large, relative to its GNP, that everything else fell apart.
As someone who grew up in a former socialist state, I mostly understand the distinction. But you gotta admit that the only countries so far that have attempted outright socialism were/are all communist as well.
That's true. But I support socialist policies around things like education and healthcare. Heck, the public education system in the United States /is/ socialist. But good luck getting a politician to admit that.
Anyway, my point is that systems like single-payer healthcare is certainly a socialist policy, but I don't think calling it a communist policy would be accurate.
I could be wrong, but it seems like socialism is more about the application of tax dollars towards social security programs, whereas communism is a form of rules and organization imposed on the private market. I'm probably oversimplifying it, though.
Socialism is economic and need not distribute only according to need. Communism is political with some economics.
In Europe there's a lot of shades of grey. No one would consider the UK or Nordic countries communist, and no one the UK socialist. Yet with the NHS there is a socialised health service. Nordic model countries go much further with their social policies but are still capitalist democracies far removed from communism. Few would even call them socialist but social democratic or similar.
Europe has a lot of social democrat, and middle ground socialist parties that believe in some level of redistribution and other somewhat socialist ideas and healthy capitalism with profit, and freedom to become wealthy.
America uses them in a far more black and white manner.
There are many socialisms. The weakest form that many socialists (such as myself) don't consider socialism is social democracy, which accepts the market as legitimate and attempts to "fix it" or otherwise tame it with regulations and social spending. Obviously, this doesn't work because eventually, the ruling class decides it wants more money and undoes the regulations - the story of America since the last Gilded Age.
The socialisms to the left of social democracy focus on fundamentally changing the basis of the economic and therefore social system. These interventions focus on workers owning the means of production. In "market socialism" this means the market is left intact, but the old capitalist class is eliminated or otherwise largely disempowered in favor of worker ownership of private companies. If we go further left, we get state capitalism, where a democratic state owns the means of production and uses it to serve the people (with various levels of employee empowerment in the workplace). Communism is supposed to be a state where the state, no longer needing to suppress class struggle, fades away as being unnecessary. Many of these ideas are up for interpretation. I currently think that at least large parts of the security state would fade away, but am unsure about other public services and see the need for central authorities to coordinate on environmental issues now that we are facing catastrophe.
In the early part of the 20th century, "socialists" and "communists" distinguished themselves from each other. "Socialists" claimed the mantle of an electoral road to one of these outcomes, while "communists" focused on militant revolution, seeing the bourgeois state as hopelessly captured by the ruling classes / reactionaries / counter-revolutionaries.
Anywho, I hope that helps defines terms for y'all.
In the end the greedy who are also powerful end up corrupting any system; therefore the problem is clearly the humans. I hope if we manage to build an AI it turns out better.
Not aruging but just wanted to point out Yugoslavia as one of the only examples of pretty successful market socialism. According to Wikipedia at least Cuba is also working on such reforms.
Socialism was supposed to be a transitory period towards true communism, so e.g. in the Soviet Union you had the communist party ruling over a socialist nation. Using the two words interchangeably in this situation is reasonable.
The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics was communist. So was Albania, Yugoslavia, Romania, etc. even though officially they all had “socialist” in their official names while they were under soviet influence, so it’s no surprise people find the terms interchangeable.
That’s just their other usage of democratic where to them it is equivalent to folks’ or people’s (keeping with Greek etymology, if not spirit of the word). But we keep the traditional meaning of it.
