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WillowOne's Positions

Communism

My Positions

  1. Communism is primarily a critique of capitalism, not a comprehensive programme for the development of a society.
  2. As a programme, it is not implementable. The historical attempts to implement it have failed to produce just, free, or sustainable societies, and have in several cases produced some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century.
  3. The critique retains some value. Karl Marx was right that capitalism concentrates wealth, that it is prone to crisis, and that it shapes culture and politics in its own interests. He was wrong about the remedy, and his economic foundations (see The Labour Theory of Value) do not hold.
  4. I favour regulated capitalism with ethical oversight, social protections, and progressive taxation. This is not a compromise between capitalism and communism; it is what every successful society has in fact converged upon.

Notes

  1. Why it is a critique rather than a programme. The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867) are overwhelmingly diagnostic. Marx says a great deal about what is wrong with capitalism and almost nothing about how a communist society would allocate resources, set prices, make decisions, or resolve disputes. The famous description of communist life (hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, criticising after dinner) is from The German Ideology and runs to a single sentence. The "withering away of the state" is asserted, not explained. Those who attempted to build the programme had to invent it, and what they invented was Leninism.
  2. Why it is not implementable.
  • The economic calculation problem (Ludwig von Mises, 1920; Friedrich Hayek, 1945): without market prices, a central planner has no way to know what things are worth relative to one another, and so cannot allocate resources rationally. Prices are not merely a mechanism of distribution; they are a mechanism of information. Every planned economy has either reintroduced markets by the back door or suffered chronic shortage and surplus.
  • The incentive problem: where reward is detached from contribution, contribution falls. This is not a claim about human wickedness; it is a claim about what any population does on average.
  • The power problem: abolishing private property does not abolish power over resources; it transfers it to whoever controls the state. "Common ownership" in practice means ownership by the party. A system that concentrates economic and political power in the same hands, with no independent institutions to check it, produces tyranny by its structure regardless of the intentions of its founders.
    3. The historical record. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea, and others. The death toll from famine, purge, and forced labour runs to tens of millions. The response that "real communism has never been tried" is the No True Scotsman fallacy. If every attempt to implement a theory produces the same result, the result is a property of the theory.
    4. What survives. Several things Marx argued for were adopted by capitalist democracies and are now uncontroversial: progressive income tax, free universal education, limits on child labour, and the regulation of working hours. The successful parts of the programme were the ones that could be implemented within a market economy. This is evidence for regulated capitalism, not for communism.

Also see