Socialism v capitalism

[heliocentric]

And

Can any member here point to a country that they consider truly 'communist' and which has survived?

... why is that seemingly such an important question? I can imagine a Roman Empire era scottycelt saying the same thing about democracy (the Greeks tried it for a while, didn't catch on) or, for that matter, a government not headed by a hereditary monarch (yes, we Romans had a go at that but the backstabbing got too much).

Oh yes, Kerala - isn't that a state which democratically elected a communist government and has the lowest levels of rural poverty in India? Thought so. And we might mention Venezuela too, where unaccountably a president advocating "socialism for the 21st century" has recently been elected for a fourth time despite having most of that country's media and wealthy classes and the USA implacably opposed to him; if you lived in South America (which almost four hundred million people do of course) you might have a somewhat different view of the possible future directions politics could take.

[heliocentric]

some on the Left tend to be bit selective when pointing to the 'failures' of capitalism. Greece is often cited but rich little Switzerland, say, is completely ignored.

Another mistake, scottycelt. Those "on the left" cite the systemic failure of capitalism. The relative economic strength of Germany, for example, is directly related to the weakness of Greece. It's not that some countries make it work and others don't - it's that the entire global system is subject to periodic crises, in the course of which an upward distribution of wealth generally occurs, and which do not take place evenly across different countries.

[scottycelt]

... why is that seemingly such an important question?

Well, I suggest it is an obvious one to ask, however awkward it may prove to be to those to whom it is directed.

I'm grateful to Amateur for his advocacy of Kerala which seems a truly delightful place. However one paragraph from the link provided is rather telling amidst the otherwise glowing report:

<Kerala has witnessed significant emigration of its people, especially to the Persian Gulf countries during the Kerala Gulf boom, and its economy depends significantly on remittances from a large Malayali expatriate community.>

Hardly a ringing endorsement that such Nirvana-states can exist withoud the aid of 'signlficant' filthy capitalist lucre ?

[heliocentric]

Well, I suggest it is an obvious one to ask, however awkward it may prove to be to those to whom it is directed.

Not awkward at all, for the reasons I gave. And not obvious either, unless you subscribe to the view that something can only ever be a "success" if it's already been one somewhere else for a certain period of time. I imagine you can see the difficulty there. Powered flight, for example, would according to that logic have been abandoned long before the Wright brothers got it right, but oh no, that was no use either, their first flight lasted only a few seconds, they weren't in the air long enough to pass the scottycelt test so let's call off the whole project.

[teamsaint]

no,maybe not, but try telling the big capitalist economies they can live without the arms trade (frequently sold to developing world countries), let alone without foreign sweat shop labour or cheaply mined foreign minerals etc.....

[scottycelt]

Another mistake, scottycelt. Those "on the left" cite the systemic failure of capitalism. The relative economic strength of Germany, for example, is directly related to the weakness of Greece. It's not that some countries make it work and others don't - it's that the entire global system is subject to periodic crises, in the course of which an upward distribution of wealth generally occurs, and which do not take place evenly across different countries.

Where's the big 'mistake'?

Of course economic success varies from country to country whatever the system! I don't see any connection between German strength and Greek weakness, apart from the obvious fact that in comparing the two countries one is obviously better at running things.

The Germans have long proved that capital and labour can cooperate and work successfully within the world capitalist system if the will to succeed and the proper organisation is present. Nationalisation, when appropriate, is sometimes adopted as a preferred option, not as a dogmatic tenet.

It is sometimes called Centrism!

[ahinton]

no,maybe not, but try telling the big capitalist economies they can live without the arms trade (frequently sold to developing world countries), let alone without foreign sweat shop labour or cheaply mined foreign minerals etc.....

I'd be the first to try to do just that if I thought that there might be the remotest chance of them taking any notice and doing something about it! Those very kinds of activity are among the most significant examples of insensitively anti-human short-termism that give capitalism the kind of bad name that it will almost certainly never shake off until and unless they are universally and permanently outlawed and ceased in the majority of - nay, all - capitalist régimes.

[eighthobstruction]

Of course the most used weapon is a AK47 made in Russia....

[aeolium]

You are of course entirely correct that the USSR was concerned with expansionism for similar reasons to the colonial powers and later the USA, but that's because in many ways it functioned as a "state capitalist" system, which by that time (as has been pointed out here numerous times) had very little to do with communism.

I don't think that's true. It had a lot to do with communism and not much with "state capitalism", certainly in the form that the latter takes in China for instance. The Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin was largely isolated from the global capitalist world by a mutual hostility. As to the communist qualities of the regime, there was indeed "centralization of credit in the hands of the State" (point 5 in the list of recommended actions for securing the proletarian victory in "The Communist Manifesto"); centralization of transport in the hands of the State (point 6); extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State (point 7); equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. (point 8 - as evidenced in Gosplan and the agriculture collectivization plan in the 1930s) and of course the expropriation of property in land (point 1 - large-scale expropriation in 1918 and subsequently the forced collectivization programme in the 1930s). It's hard to see how those programmes can be considered equivalent to state capitalism rather than communism, and indeed historians including the communist Eric Hobsbawm have tended to describe the Soviet Union as having a communist system.

I think it's essential to study historical examples of planned economies (and especially the failures and horrors of some of those systems) to get an idea of what the pitfalls may be. Typically they have been advocated and implemented as part of an authoritarian ideology - and not just on the "left". For instance, the National Socialist German Workers' Party programme of 1920, part-authored by Hitler, advocated the nationalisation of trusts and large companies, the abolition of unearned income, the expropriation of land required for national purposes, abolition of ground rents and prohibition of land speculation inter al. Oswald Mosley in his earlier socialist period advocated widespread nationalisation. It is the past association of the idea of planned economies with authoritarian ideologies, with severe restrictions on individual liberty (including intellectual freedom) that is a real concern. For a planned economy to work, surely it requires a significant consensus in support of it, in the way that there is a current (albeit shaky) consensus among most political parties in the West in favour of the market economy - an economic plan which is ditched on a change of government is not likely to be very effective.

There is also the major question of accountability and corruption where so much power is concentrated in state hands, as well as the effectiveness of state planning in being able to deliver goods and services people need. There are plenty of examples of planned economies where states have been poor at delivering anything beyond a subsistence level of existence for much of the population (and at time not even this). I recognise this is equally true of many unplanned, free market economies.

[ahinton]

There is also the major question of accountability and corruption where so much power is concentrated in state hands, as well as the effectiveness of state planning in being able to deliver goods and services people need. There are plenty of examples of planned economies where states have been poor at delivering anything beyond a subsistence level of existence for much of the population (and at time not even this). I recognise this is equally true of many unplanned, free market economies.

Lots of good sense in the whole of your post, not just the part that I quote here - but I cannot help but note that this phenomenon of undue levels of power being placed in the hands of the state seems painfully close to the gripes about too much of it being vested in the wealth so-called "ruling classes" that are so often and vociferously deplored by those of fundamental socialist persuasion; they're not wrong, either! Too much power concentrated in too few hands, be they state or private, wealthy or poor, is surely almost always a potential if not actual recipe for danger if not actual disaster.

[heliocentric]

I don't think that's true.

The points from the Manifesto that you mention, however, are only the first stage in the transformation of society according to Marx and Engels. Immediately after them the text runs:

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

The USSR obviously did not reach this point, which is what Marx and Engels regarded as communism, since the concentration of power in the State was succeeded not by the aforementioned "association" but by the further concentration of power in the hands of Stalin. The workers did not control the means of production but instead the state, run by the Stalinist bureaucrats, behaved within the world market like a single giant corporation. This is surely one reason why the transition of the former USSR after 1989 into a full-blown capitalist state (or cluster of states) was a relatively smooth one, rather than involving large-scale revolutionary upheaval as you'd expect if its mode of organisation was so very different from that of capitalist Western countries. The same people are in charge, in many cases. Since you mention Hobsbawm: in 1990 he stated in an interview: "It wasn't a workers' state, nobody in the Soviet Union ever believed it was a workers' state, and the workers knew it wasn't a workers' state." It took him a while but he got there in the end.

[scottycelt]

"It wasn't a workers' state, nobody in the Soviet Union ever believed it was a workers' state, and the workers knew it wasn't a workers' state." It took him a while but he got there in the end.

Yes, it took a lot of people to get there in the end and sadly some still haven't ...

Even in a 'workers' state' you need boss workers to control and organise the worker workers.

There will always be a 'class' difference in any society however much some pretend otherwise.

The alternative is anarchy.

[aeolium]

Yes, I'm aware of that passage from the Manifesto. It strikes me as by far the least convincing passage in all of Marx that I have read, not based as so much of his theoretical work was on historical and economic analysis. Is it really likely that in any country following a revolution "the public power will lose its political character"? The whole of history appears to weigh against such a possibility. In advanced (and many non-advanced) societies at least the story seems to me to have been one of a constant intensification and centralisation of state power. It's hard to conceive that the outcome of any revolution could be the voluntary dissolution of political power.

This is surely one reason why the transition of the former USSR after 1989 into a full-blown capitalist state (or cluster of states) was a relatively smooth one, rather than involving large-scale revolutionary upheaval as you'd expect if its mode of organisation was so very different from that of capitalist Western countries.

I thought the transition of the former USSR after 1989 was so horrendous precisely because the Western consultants and economists had blithely assumed that the move from a command economy to an open-market one could be seamlessly and relatively painlessly achieved, whereas in reality the structure was so radically different from a market-orientated system that drastic and wholesale restructuring was applied over a very short period: the precipitous collapse in GDP between 1990 and 1997, a fall in average life expectancy of over 5 years in the first few years after independence, the steep rise in crime, the collapse of the rouble and default in 1998, the 'gangster capitalism' of the tycoons. All of that suggests the transition was far from "relatively smooth".

Since you mention Hobsbawm: in 1990 he stated in an interview: "It wasn't a workers' state, nobody in the Soviet Union ever believed it was a workers' state, and the workers knew it wasn't a workers' state." It took him a while but he got there in the end.

But it was a state whose policies had been inspired by the model of revolutionary transition set out in the Communist Manifesto, as I suggested - following the individual prescriptions of that manifesto remarkably closely, though without proceeding to the following post-revolutionary stage as outlined in the passage you quoted. I have already said why I think that was never going to happen, and is unlikely to happen in any such revolution.

[teamsaint]

Yes, it took a lot of people to get there in the end and sadly some still haven't ...

Even in a 'workers' state' you need boss workers to control and organise the worker workers.

There will always be a 'class' difference in any society however much some pretend otherwise.

The alternative is anarchy.

so that's it then? two choices? blimey.

Why do you "need " boss workers? No chance that this is a fallacy perpetrated by the top people to justify their own position then?
Cooperation can work. Other models are available. we are SO often told that things are impossible, when in fact they are just undesirable from a certain perspective.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

What a marvellous idea

"Anarchy" = "without rulers" NOT "without rules".


(Measuring devices excepted.)