My next question (regarding the efficiency of communist managed non-market economy).
Such a saying was popular in European communist countries before 1989:
"If communists took over the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand in two years."
What do you think about this saying, how much truth is there in it?
Obviously the joke uses the absurd, but I know it was meant to complain about supply shortages in those countries.
By way of answer I would like to point out that it is is easy to have fully stocked shelves in stores if the prices are high enough to exclude part of the population. Market economy manages supply be restricting demand. It does work. Even in poor countries there are no "market shortages", price sees to it. Doesn't mean their population is better off.
I've also always had the impression that one cause of the overall comparatively poorer productivity of the eastern block in consumer goods when compared to the developed western one was the issue of availability of resources. The USA were particularly blessed with
easily exploitable natural resources, not so for its big rival in the Cold War (which had also harsher climates to deal with). Between higher resource needs and misguided autarky the USSR got itself into its 1980s economic problems. The Chinese learned the lesson and accepted the necessity of engaging strongly in international trade.
Do all socialists/communists agree with Marx's quote "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need?"
Marx was intending to describe the sort of logic on which a communist society would out of necessity be organised. It wasn't an ethical claim in and of itself.
It wasn't
only an ethical claim in Marx's work, true. It would be the natural outcome of the end of class warfare which Marx saw as inevitable at some point in the future. For when such class warfare becomes just history there will be no reason for people not to use their abilities, and no reason for people not to have what they need. No more artificial scarcity for the sake of establishing relationships of domination.
But in the meanwhile it was, and has been, a strong ethical influence among communists. Belief that some future social organization will come to pass is not a mobilizing force: you may as well do nothing and wait for it.
Belief that a future form social organization is
desirable is what makes people put some effort into bringing it about. And Marx most definitely agreed that people had to put their effort into it. In fact that desire predates Marx, has been the big thing in common among socialists of all kinds ever since socialism came to be. Socialism has always been about finding some way to end the hobbesian view of society as a "war of all against all" and that desire is first and foremost an
ethical thing.
Don't make me laugh.
