Overcoming economic flaws in Communism

[winston53660]

The U.S. produced vastly more raw materials, trucks, ships and planes. The only things that the USSR produced more of was tanks and artillery.

Well they also had human power and the siege of Stalingrad a turning point in the war.

 

[Hoplite]

The U.S. produced vastly more raw materials, trucks, ships and planes. The only things that the USSR produced more of was tanks and artillery.

Did you read the link or not?

 

[Harry Guerrilla]

I dont support the use of debt or financial promises as commodities. I freely admit I dont know much of the finer details about the financial industry beyond what I've seen in the last years, but to me, it seems to be an extremely volatile, high-risk high-gain industry that tends to land it's failures on the public sector.

Ehh it depends, on secured debt the rewards can be quite small.
They make their money doing volume from what I understand.

When it comes to under and/or unqualified debt, that's very risky but can be very profitable.

With the p2p market place I use, all of it is unsecured debt (credit card consolidations mostly) at lower interest rates than what credit card companies offer(less than 15% usually).

Right now I'm earning 11%+ which for this economy is really good but on average it isn't crazy profitable.

 

[invisiblgorilla]

What do you think are genuine ways (if any) that a communist society could overcome the problems of inefficient generation of resources due to factors such as abolition of profit motive and abolition of diverse economic variables, e.g corporations - and to which fair distribution becomes much more of a difficulty?

I'd say the real problems of communist governments as we've seen them is a lack of accountability. When states can simply starve their populations with innefficiency, they have no motive to improve.

I think there may be a way to institute competition for management of resources while still maintaining accountability to the workers. Worker owned cooperatives such as Gore (maker of gore-tex) are quite efficient and scalable.

Of course they function within capitalist economies, but if every company was worker owned then I suppose you could say the workers owned the means of production and that it might also eliminate class conflict.

 

[rathi]

Did you read the link or not?

Yes. It proves you wrong.

Direct comparisons from your source. The USSR produced 71.3 million tons of iron ore versus 396.9 in the United States. 157,261 aircraft versus 324,750. 197,100 trucks versus 2,382,311. In an example where the soviets produced more material, 105,251 armored fighting vehicles versus 88,410. If you take the aggregate of all the categories, the U.S. clearly managed to produce more war material.

 

[rathi]

Well they also had human power and the siege of Stalingrad a turning point in the war.

I wasn't speaking to anything other than total number of war materials produced. How the supplies and gear was used is a completely separate topic.

 

[winston53660]

I wasn't speaking to anything other than total number of war materials produced. How the supplies and gear was used is a completely separate topic.

One doesn't go with out the other IMHO.

 

[Gipper]

I think there is quite a bit of revisionist history done with regard to the output of USA vs. USSR during WWII and soon after. Besides, it matters naught. The USA knew that a military fight would be too risky and not an assured victory.

Communism can fight wars, but communism can't run domestics. That's how America won the Cold War - they donkey-punched them in the wallet. Communism is bred on stagnation, while capitalism has unlimited growth and expansion, at least on a relative basis.

 

[Potemkin]

Well, it seems the first mistake people have made here is coming to a mutual agreement to what Communism actually is. I see most have taken the assumption that Communism refers to the history of Marxist-Leninist states of the 20th century - which considered themselves to be "building socialism."

To put it in plain terms, Marxist-Leninist theory (assuming we're talking about the policies of Stalin and later Mao) attempted to explain why revolutions had taken place in the under-developed, largely agrarian countries rather than the industrialized, advanced capitalist countries of the Western world - this mainly rests on the idea of the "weakest link of the chain" concept that Lenin elaborated on in Imperialism, Highest Stage of Capitalism. With the failure of the German Revolution of 1918 and the failure of the European working class to rise in revolution - only instead the forces of reaction had defeated it. The Bolsheviks were taken aback by this - how could the Russian revolution survive without the industrial support of a Bolshevik Germany? What followed next was the reintroduction of limited market economies in Lenin's NEP, and later Stalin's economic planning. Of course, there's a lot of debate among Marxists whether Stalin's "Socialism in One Country" was really a continuation of Lenin's thought, but the majority opinion in the 20th century, is that it was. Marxist-Leninists believed that it was possible to "build socialism" via the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard in pre or not fully developed capitalist societies - and then transition into communism - the final stage of human development according to Marx.

Mao took Marxism-Leninism to a more radical level, believing that the peasantry of an imperialized country could be a revolutionary class (in direct contradiction to what Marx thought) and directly build socialism, bypassing capitalism entirely.

During and since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, there has been a lot criticism of the mainstream communist experience from within the left, mainly from the tenancies of Trotskyism and Left Communism - all the way back to the beginning years of the Bolshevik Revolution. Trotsky criticized the later stages of Bolshevik government and especially Stalin's reign as a "deformed worker's state," where a bureaucratic class had taken power from the organs of worker's power - the Soviets - as well as defeated many of the democratic and progressive reforms that the revolution achieved. Trotsky predicted that eventually this bureaucratic class would "sell out" to a market economy due to pressure and become capitalist oligarchs - as what happened since 1989. Left Communism takes this criticism to a higher extreme - that the communist states of the 20th century were "state capitalist," in which the state and Communist party has simply become the new owning, capitalist class - and the proletariat were in the same fundamental position as workers in the capitalist world. It can be said some of these communist states were resultants of the struggle of the national bourgeois against the imperialism of western capitalism.

No matter what tendency you subscribe to, you still must evaluate the merits of 20th century "Communism" under the light of the historical and material conditions that those states were founded in - backwards, largely agrarian societies that had marginal amounts of industrial capital to begin with. The progress that Marxist-Leninist parties in states like Russia, China, Vietnam are tremendous when you compare to their pre-revolutionary status in terms of healthcare, industry, and living conditions. There were obvious flaws in the history of Soviet central-planning, especially when it came to the information revolution (it is no contest to compare the development of personal computing in the free market compared to the Communist world), but whether that was a matter of historical/material reasons - rather than intrinsic economic flaws - is a matter of debate (would central planning be necessary?) I would suspect that a industrialized, "post-capitalist" socialist society would look radically different from those of past Communist states - especially due to the advent of the information economy, internet, more educated proletariat, and free flow of information.

But, that's really the debate and crisis among the left currently - the crisis of capitalism still exists (more than ever now), and there's plenty of revolutionary and class struggle opportunities abound, however the organized left has collapsed and it currently rebuilding itself - trying to find a new paradigm to fit the 21st century. Some cling on to the old paradigms within Marxism-Leninism, others have discussed radical alternatives to capitalism - and others not so radical. Eventually, I think we're going to find it.

My own opinion, I haven't really formulated one completely yet, and open to new ideas. I think there needs to be a shift from thinking of socialism as monolithic "state socialism" to more of a type of economic democracy of a kind - of course sometimes material and political situations don't allow us to achieve our fullest goals.

 

[Mensch]

The only method would be through smaller social units.

A version of communism works with Hutterite communities in Western Canada and US. The resources of the farming community are shared between the members (they sell there production to groups outside the colony).

The reason they work is that the people in the colony all know each other. Should a member not pull their own weight, it is known to all in the community. As such the social pressure to work hard and contribute to the colony is strong as those who dont are "shunned" and as the colony is the only social group most members have, such actions are rather devastating to the person.

When a colonies population gets to large, it splits and uses the common resources of the original one to form a new colony. Overall the Hutterites are one of the most successfull farmers/ranchers in western Canada.


Not sure on how this would work in more specialized technology industries , Consider that Fox Con a contract manufacturer has factories that employe 100 000 people in China for example

You may have hit on a very important point. Community of Goods is only effective on the local front, with very small groups. The Hutterites run their colony like a corporation and the self-worth of the individual is nil. I'm not sure, if you actually cared to take a look, that the Hutterite community would resemble something you could admire. Their exclusionary, hyper-religious, male-dominated society is not something many feminist liberals care to support.