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I would wholeheartedly advise anyone who has not read Marx to do so. As I see it, nbarclay is critiquing the Soviet system much more than he is critiquing Marxist philosophy. It takes only a little peek beneath elementary history lessons to get at the fact that the Soviet Union was anything but a natural outgrowth of Marxist teachings. In fairness, nbarclay acknowledges this possibility, so I gather there is at least a measure of awareness that Marxism and Stalinism are wildly different ideologies.
Marx not only understood the labor-saving value of automation -- he predicted correctly that it would put tremendous stress on workers while providing tremendous benefits to owners. Perhaps the most fundamental of all Marxist teachings is that socioeconomic tension will invariably result from situations where workers do not own the means of production, because technology drives a trend of fewer laborers being able to accomplish more productivity. This plays out in economics as a constant pressure to keep working class incomes low while hereditary industrialists cohere into an aristocracy with consumptive habits wildly out of proportion to anything they might contribute to society.
In other words, Marx predicted the modern United States, except that he then further predicted the majority being kept under poor economic conditions would rise up against a decadent minority that typically offers no greater contribution to society than being born to into a tycoon's dynasty. In point of fact, the median purchasing power of an American household has changed hardly at all in the past thirty years. Yet the continued enrichment of the rich plays out through the perversions of the American political system as if it were fundamentally righteous. It is as if every miner, construction worker, nurse, teacher, firefighter, trucker, et al. had squat all to do with American prosperity while individuals born into wealth rightfully deserve all the gains from decades of economic progress.
As far as I know (not having read everything Marx ever wrote,) the man is hardly guilty of any of the failings cited above. The question of whether workers should own the means of production is separate from the question of whether economic activity should be subject to central planning. It is true that communist thinkers may tend toward an emphasis on central planning over decentralization, but the greatest extremes (and greatest follies) of Soviet economic planning had more to do with the overbearing tendencies of dictatorship than the fact that centralized planning just can't be done effectively. Heck, in America nationwide oligopolies exist in many different economic sectors. What is the work of corporate headquarters but to plan the activities of corporate bureaucracies, some today as vast and convoluted as any Soviet agency?
The idea that "government most assuredly isn't so equipped" to plan economic activity seems to come from unthinking devotion to capitalist ideology. Take American agricultural policy as an example. If farmers were completely independent and driven by market forces, who knows how soon severe shortfalls would wreck these wonderful supply chains that make it possible to feed our multitudes so inexpensively. Because food is so fundamental, a security issue as much as an economic issue, every year the federal government spends billions upon billions of dollars to shape the American harvest. Incentives and other market manipulations are favored over raw edicts, but the effect is the same -- a national agricultural plan determines what seeds go in the ground each spring, and thus indirectly determines what goods stock supermarket shelves the year round. There is more too it than that, but anyone who believes the nation would be better off chucking the whole system and playing dice with our harvests might as well just put on the tinfoil hat and start spewing nonsense about the Earth being created in the last 7,000 years too.
To refocus though, the central question Marx asks is not "should the government be deciding how many of each type of shoe is manufactured in a given year?" or "should everyone be compensated equally for the same job without any regard for performance?" Instead he asks, "should an ownership class enjoy all the spoils from growing economies while increasingly expendable workers do the actual work without experiencing any actual gains?" The Soviet failure provides a convenient distraction, not to mention generations of our own propaganda to keep people fixated on hostility toward that distraction. This angry fixation prevents openness to the underlying ideas that moved men like Lenin and Trotsky to action.
It seems more like a religious belief than a function of anything real to argue that corporations are uniformly efficient or government is uniformly inefficient. Clearly there are many instances where market forces are tremendously useful. On the other hand, do we really want to go without an army for a few weeks because some screwball executive at National Defense Inc. pulled an Enron and bankrupted the organization? Do we really want our disaster relief efforts held up while guys with spreadsheets crunch numbers on the best way to profit from human misery?
There are some vital human endeavors that are far better accomplished with an organizational disregard for the profit motive. Then there are many more, like agriculture, where a coherent national plan imposed on a vast array of individual economic actors achieves a harmonious balance of control with chaos. Too much control can produce suboptimal outcomes, but so can too much chaos.
Allowing workers to own the means of production can still produce wonderful outcomes provided there is not so much corruption that there really are no incentives to do good work or disincentives to do poor work. As things stand today in America, it is much more the illusion of incentives like this than any actual incentives that make business churn along as it does. Sometimes a Soviet doctor received a promotion because he was a highly effective healer, and sometimes he received it because he schmoozed with the administrator. Is it any different in American hospitals, or factories, or office towers?
The myth that Soviet citizens could not advance for doing good in their jobs pastes over a much more important concern -- public morale sucks when your power-grabbing government lies constantly while ratcheting up privacy intrusions and the extent to which dissenting voices can be silenced or punished. It was just plain wrong to argue that advancement was impossible under the Soviet system, as it occurred through very much the same blend of merit and office politics as any other working environment naturally develops.
However, it was true that people deep down did not feel dedicated to helping either the state or their particular collectives (i.e. the factory, farm group, or other business unit they personally worked in) from accomplishing its goals. In areas where spirits still ran high, like the Soviet space program, human efforts squeezed great accomplishment out of modest resources. In areas where there was no such inspiration, like a backwater ranch or a humble shoe factory, apathy and alcoholism were rampant. Based on the realities of Soviet life, it seems unsound to chalk failures up to a lack of capitalism when there were so many much finer and more worthwhile institutions also absent.
If we are to be honest about all this, then we would also do well to be honest about nations like Holland or Switzerland. There a cutthroat "work or starve" paradigm would be regarded as barbaric (perhaps rightly so) by nearly all native citizens. Yet in spite of their relaxed ways and tolerance for economic freeloaders, those nations continue to experience growth and produce worthwhile innovations. Could it possibly be that something other than fear of homelessness and hunger generates satisfaction for a productive worker, or are we not permitted to look at intersections of liberty and socialist economics when trying to get a grip on how much of the capitalist manifesto (e.g. competition for profit is always the best way to motivate productivity) is just dogmatic hype?
Of course Marx is not flawless, and communism is imperfect too. Yet to get at what is really wrong with those ways of thinking, one must first dewoolify one's eyes of Red Scare trickery. Managers of worker-owned co-operatives are not prevented from orchestrating better outcomes, and managers of privately owned corporations are certainly not prevented from orchestrating inferior outcomes. This leaves Marx in a neutral position when it comes to managerial quality (speaking of the consequences of his ideas . . . presumably he was for it in a more abstract sense.) Performance-based pay incentives, merit-based promotions, institutional profit sharing, etc. -- all of these are ideas that fit just as well with Marxist distribution of ownership as they fit with capitalist consolidation of ownership.
Regards,
Adam Weishaupt
Marx not only understood the labor-saving value of automation -- he predicted correctly that it would put tremendous stress on workers while providing tremendous benefits to owners. Perhaps the most fundamental of all Marxist teachings is that socioeconomic tension will invariably result from situations where workers do not own the means of production, because technology drives a trend of fewer laborers being able to accomplish more productivity. This plays out in economics as a constant pressure to keep working class incomes low while hereditary industrialists cohere into an aristocracy with consumptive habits wildly out of proportion to anything they might contribute to society.
In other words, Marx predicted the modern United States, except that he then further predicted the majority being kept under poor economic conditions would rise up against a decadent minority that typically offers no greater contribution to society than being born to into a tycoon's dynasty. In point of fact, the median purchasing power of an American household has changed hardly at all in the past thirty years. Yet the continued enrichment of the rich plays out through the perversions of the American political system as if it were fundamentally righteous. It is as if every miner, construction worker, nurse, teacher, firefighter, trucker, et al. had squat all to do with American prosperity while individuals born into wealth rightfully deserve all the gains from decades of economic progress.
As far as I know (not having read everything Marx ever wrote,) the man is hardly guilty of any of the failings cited above. The question of whether workers should own the means of production is separate from the question of whether economic activity should be subject to central planning. It is true that communist thinkers may tend toward an emphasis on central planning over decentralization, but the greatest extremes (and greatest follies) of Soviet economic planning had more to do with the overbearing tendencies of dictatorship than the fact that centralized planning just can't be done effectively. Heck, in America nationwide oligopolies exist in many different economic sectors. What is the work of corporate headquarters but to plan the activities of corporate bureaucracies, some today as vast and convoluted as any Soviet agency?
The idea that "government most assuredly isn't so equipped" to plan economic activity seems to come from unthinking devotion to capitalist ideology. Take American agricultural policy as an example. If farmers were completely independent and driven by market forces, who knows how soon severe shortfalls would wreck these wonderful supply chains that make it possible to feed our multitudes so inexpensively. Because food is so fundamental, a security issue as much as an economic issue, every year the federal government spends billions upon billions of dollars to shape the American harvest. Incentives and other market manipulations are favored over raw edicts, but the effect is the same -- a national agricultural plan determines what seeds go in the ground each spring, and thus indirectly determines what goods stock supermarket shelves the year round. There is more too it than that, but anyone who believes the nation would be better off chucking the whole system and playing dice with our harvests might as well just put on the tinfoil hat and start spewing nonsense about the Earth being created in the last 7,000 years too.
To refocus though, the central question Marx asks is not "should the government be deciding how many of each type of shoe is manufactured in a given year?" or "should everyone be compensated equally for the same job without any regard for performance?" Instead he asks, "should an ownership class enjoy all the spoils from growing economies while increasingly expendable workers do the actual work without experiencing any actual gains?" The Soviet failure provides a convenient distraction, not to mention generations of our own propaganda to keep people fixated on hostility toward that distraction. This angry fixation prevents openness to the underlying ideas that moved men like Lenin and Trotsky to action.
It seems more like a religious belief than a function of anything real to argue that corporations are uniformly efficient or government is uniformly inefficient. Clearly there are many instances where market forces are tremendously useful. On the other hand, do we really want to go without an army for a few weeks because some screwball executive at National Defense Inc. pulled an Enron and bankrupted the organization? Do we really want our disaster relief efforts held up while guys with spreadsheets crunch numbers on the best way to profit from human misery?
There are some vital human endeavors that are far better accomplished with an organizational disregard for the profit motive. Then there are many more, like agriculture, where a coherent national plan imposed on a vast array of individual economic actors achieves a harmonious balance of control with chaos. Too much control can produce suboptimal outcomes, but so can too much chaos.
Allowing workers to own the means of production can still produce wonderful outcomes provided there is not so much corruption that there really are no incentives to do good work or disincentives to do poor work. As things stand today in America, it is much more the illusion of incentives like this than any actual incentives that make business churn along as it does. Sometimes a Soviet doctor received a promotion because he was a highly effective healer, and sometimes he received it because he schmoozed with the administrator. Is it any different in American hospitals, or factories, or office towers?
The myth that Soviet citizens could not advance for doing good in their jobs pastes over a much more important concern -- public morale sucks when your power-grabbing government lies constantly while ratcheting up privacy intrusions and the extent to which dissenting voices can be silenced or punished. It was just plain wrong to argue that advancement was impossible under the Soviet system, as it occurred through very much the same blend of merit and office politics as any other working environment naturally develops.
However, it was true that people deep down did not feel dedicated to helping either the state or their particular collectives (i.e. the factory, farm group, or other business unit they personally worked in) from accomplishing its goals. In areas where spirits still ran high, like the Soviet space program, human efforts squeezed great accomplishment out of modest resources. In areas where there was no such inspiration, like a backwater ranch or a humble shoe factory, apathy and alcoholism were rampant. Based on the realities of Soviet life, it seems unsound to chalk failures up to a lack of capitalism when there were so many much finer and more worthwhile institutions also absent.
If we are to be honest about all this, then we would also do well to be honest about nations like Holland or Switzerland. There a cutthroat "work or starve" paradigm would be regarded as barbaric (perhaps rightly so) by nearly all native citizens. Yet in spite of their relaxed ways and tolerance for economic freeloaders, those nations continue to experience growth and produce worthwhile innovations. Could it possibly be that something other than fear of homelessness and hunger generates satisfaction for a productive worker, or are we not permitted to look at intersections of liberty and socialist economics when trying to get a grip on how much of the capitalist manifesto (e.g. competition for profit is always the best way to motivate productivity) is just dogmatic hype?
Of course Marx is not flawless, and communism is imperfect too. Yet to get at what is really wrong with those ways of thinking, one must first dewoolify one's eyes of Red Scare trickery. Managers of worker-owned co-operatives are not prevented from orchestrating better outcomes, and managers of privately owned corporations are certainly not prevented from orchestrating inferior outcomes. This leaves Marx in a neutral position when it comes to managerial quality (speaking of the consequences of his ideas . . . presumably he was for it in a more abstract sense.) Performance-based pay incentives, merit-based promotions, institutional profit sharing, etc. -- all of these are ideas that fit just as well with Marxist distribution of ownership as they fit with capitalist consolidation of ownership.
Regards,
Adam Weishaupt
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