Why Communism Failed

Goodie! Haven't had a chance to bag on communism in quite a while. :D

Planning was to be done by a central committee, insuring plenty for everyone. The state was to wither away.
Isn't there a contradiction here? When the state withers away and the People are making decisions with no central authority to manage them.....that's the system the whole planet already has, right now.

I like that "then a miracle occurs" step in the middle, by the way. Exactly how is a committee supposed to ensure there is plenty to go around?? There's no way to do it. Politicians have certainly been trying, for as long as there have been politicians, and any politician who actually succeeded would be dubbed President-for-life by a very happy electorate. The closest anybody anywhere has been able to get to this impossible ideal is by maximizing production at levels insufficient to give everybody everything they want.

And, of course, I counter that there are no real historical precedents for communism.
And you're correct.

The problem is, there needs to be a precedent before people will start embracing it wholesale. Proof of concept must come first. In order to get people to buy it, you have to prove that it works.
 
I'm not saying that the government should never use public money in infrastructure projects. I'm just saying that the free market is far superior to Communism.

That's a very simplistic view. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses.
 
That's a very simplistic view. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses.
I for one have never been particularly enamored of the lack of a corruption distance modifier

it's less useful than you'd think it is
 
I disagree. The USSR could sustain its defense spending.

I totally disagree. They could sustain their defense budget at the cost of the civilian consumer economy and because of plentiful cheap fuel. The costs of Empire and the massive military forces overwhelmed them immediately once the price of energy began to rise.

I may well be out of my depth here, I haven't studied the later days of the USSR very carefully. But in my opinion the war in Afghanistan and then the spectacle of a government that continually flogged itself with revelations of how nasty it had been in the past, which deliberately resurrected old conflicts. . that was what left the USSR vulnerable to collapse, by shattering people's willingness to fight for its continued existence. Even that would not have been enough

Yes, I agree that the revelations and acceptance of Soviet crimes discredited the State and its "infallible" philosophy, and combined with the bad economic times, it was a devastating mix. As Christopher Hitchens expressed, speaking of the pope, you can't admit to first massacring thousands, persecuting minorities, supporting sadists and genocidal policies, and then expect to go back being infallible. People won't take you seriously.

Also, the old Stalinists, and their victims, were dying like flies in the 80s, which meant that the next generation of Soviets could expect to avoid persecution in a non-communist Russia, because they never participated in the worst Soviet atrocities. I think this is the reason why North Korea still exists: the leadership of NK are responsible for so many crimes that they cannot surrender to the west or to their people because they know they'd be hung or imprisoned.

as (apart from the Baltic states) the people of the USSR were quite happy with continuing with the union. No, it also took Gorbachev the Idiot's total mismanagement of power politics to allow a coup which, with the USSR frail as it was, shattered it.

Its possible that the majority of Soviet peoples would have preferred for an intact Federal State to continue, but most likely in a completely reformed form.
 
The incentive problem and the calculation problem. The Russians could have spent zilch on their army and the system still would have failed.
 
Moderator Action: Please remember to abridge articles. I removed the OP article; edit back in something that complies with rule 6.
 
The incentive problem and the calculation problem. The Russians could have spent zilch on their army and the system still would have failed.

Its a good theory but can't be proven. If you actually look at the scale of Soviet Military expenditures, its wastefulness and the costs of keeping their Empire together, its very hard to come to the conclusion that the Soviets could not have created a more sustainable economy with greater consumer goods if they had tried to avoid the cold war altogether, withdrawn from Europe at end of WW2, and tried to make peace with the West. They wouldn't have needed to build 100.000 T 55 tanks, 6000 JS tanks, 20.000 T 62 tanks, 25.000 T 72 tanks and 4800 T-80 tanks and ungodly amounts of BMPs, BTRs and other AFVs. And they wouldn't have needed to subsidize their "fraternal allies" in the Eastern Europe: the Empire was never really profitable for the USSR.

But Stalin.
 
Not to mention that few railroads got built at all except with at least partially public money.

There´s this game called Sid Meier´s Railroads; in it, like in the US at some point, you compete to build railroads. Many US railroads were indeed privately owned.

Arguably, most economies today are centrally-planned, since their management is within the purview of modern-day governance.

It would be more accurate to say that there is central planning, and then there is the economy.

And, of course, I counter that there are no real historical precedents for communism.

There were no real historical precdents for capitalism - yet it´s still here.

Its possible that the majority of Soviet peoples would have preferred for an intact Federal State to continue, but most likely in a completely reformed form.

Possible, yes, probable, no. Given the choice, not just the Baltic states seceded, so did Byelorussia, Ukraine, the Caucasian states, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan - albeit not all for the same reasons.

They wouldn't have needed to build 100.000 T 55 tanks

I´d be interested to know in what scenario 100,000 tanks might be ´needed´...

Also, the Soviet economy wasn´t entirely centrally planned; the black market functioned quite fine on its own.
 
It would be more accurate to say that there is central planning, and then there is the economy.

Not true. It's not like contemporary markets exist outside of the legal and political frameworks that are integral to their operation.
 
I´d be interested to know in what scenario 100,000 tanks might be ´needed´...

3rd world war over Europe, as imagined by the Soviet military theorists.
 
Communism in the sense of a one-party state ruled by the Communist party isn't the same as Communism as an economic system or as a possible level of development. The first has been a failure (at least most of the time). The second hasn't ever been achieved and probably won't be in the forseeable future. In short Marx was a lot better at analysing capitalism. The title of his primary book was Capital and it was mostly about capitalism. Communism was a goal to be attained after a long time of socialism, like most people he was better at describing the past and the present than at predicting the future.
 
There´s this game called Sid Meier´s Railroads; in it, like in the US at some point, you compete to build railroads. Many US railroads were indeed privately owned.
Privately owned yes, but financed almost completely by the government, with many government provided benefits to entice investors to cover the remaining bits.

Looking specificaly at the Transcontinental Railroad (which was probably the largest government project until the Panama canal or the New Deal programs), the government gave land away free to the railroad company if it was within one mile of the surveyed trackage. Funding was provided for tools and supplies (which lead to the Credit Mobiler scandal, where the railroad owners created a shell company to buy the tools at a higher price, get reimbursed by the government, and pocket the difference) by the government, and government established land-grant universities to develop new engineering techniques.
This is also leaving aside the nationalization of the US railways under the USRA where the government poured several billion dollars into shoring up US railways.
 
It's always been interesting to me how the US government actually spent more money on railroad construction and lobbying than the Prussian-German government - notorious for ostensibly militaristic, dirigiste policy - ever did.
 
Perhaps the cultures Communism tried to take root in may be the reason. Communism took root in Tsarist Russia where there was heavy corruption between the wealthy aristocrats and the Tsarist government. Corruption is extremely difficult to stamp out and perhaps Lenin had a way to stamp it out before he died and Stalin seized control with his more heavy handed methods that most likely exasperated the corruption. I think one might find corruption the reason why communism, as well as other government types, difficult to run.

Maybe if we were to see a country that already had a decent amount of social and economic equality, we may get a better picture on what goes wrong with communist societies.
 
Possible, yes, probable, no. Given the choice, not just the Baltic states seceded, so did Byelorussia, Ukraine, the Caucasian states, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan - albeit not all for the same reasons.

So when were the people of those republics given the choice, and what were the results?
 
Perhaps the cultures Communism tried to take root in may be the reason. Communism took root in Tsarist Russia where there was heavy corruption between the wealthy aristocrats and the Tsarist government. Corruption is extremely difficult to stamp out and perhaps Lenin had a way to stamp it out before he died and Stalin seized control with his more heavy handed methods that most likely exasperated the corruption. I think one might find corruption the reason why communism, as well as other government types, difficult to run.

Maybe if we were to see a country that already had a decent amount of social and economic equality, we may get a better picture on what goes wrong with communist societies.
You say this as though corruption is a meaningful metric.
 
Can an argument not be made that without a Cold War to wage, the Soviets would have placed less of an emphasis on heavy industry, thus leaving more productivity available for the production of consumer goods? With more consumer goods you have a less angry populace, leaving more room for the reformers to operate, and possibly fix the system.

I don't really think it could have been saved without the Chinese style 'Markets in practice, communism in name' sort of reforms, but I think as a hypothetical its legitimate.
 
Can an argument not be made that without a Cold War to wage, the Soviets would have placed less of an emphasis on heavy industry, thus leaving more productivity available for the production of consumer goods?
Sure, but what goods, where do they go, how many do you produce, what do you price them, and so on? This doesn't apply to just consumer goods, but also capital goods and intermediate goods. How much lumber should Pencil Factory #12 get? None of that still answers the incentive problem or the problem of corruption.

The only way to fix that system is to smash it.
 
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