Perhaps part of the problem is our desire to bundle solutions into grand theories, like supply-side economics or Marxism? I agree that we can beat a horse over and over again until there's nothing left to see, but small changes are how the world actually works. I can say "lowering taxes on producers of x can stimulate growth" or "increased public investment in industry y will resolve the problems it currently experiences" and those things occur all the time. But they also don't sell books.

EDIT: Perhaps a better way of stating this is our desire to package academically useful economic models into grand policy solutions.

Yes, I think it's a big part of the problem. Packaging things together and discussing them as ideologies, instead of stripping them to components and evaluating each component on its merits.

This is exactly it. It's also a good approach when constructively criticising technical solutions. But we tend to like silver bullets too much.

Those are almost always No True Scotsman fallacies. Supply-side failed because it wasn't supply-side enough. Etc.

It's not unlike abstinence-only birth control.

Practiced perfectly, yes, abstinence is 100% effective at preventing pregnancy. There is no question about that.

And yes, some small fraction of people do manage to practice complete abstinence, and reap the benefit of not getting pregnant.

But as a policy, abstinence only for broad swaths of the population is a total disaster.

Offtopic-ish:

> some small fraction of people do manage to practice complete abstinence

I actually think it's a pretty large fraction, but they do it out of inability to secure a mate. The people for whom supply and demand curves never cross.

It's much harder to reason why a person capable of having a life will choose to not to.

Communism's "discreditation" was the result of a decades long propaganda campaign and their descent into authoritarianism which isn't all that different to that which many capitalist countries went through (or some are currently going through).

You hear plenty of "well, capitalism would work fine too if it were just implemented correctly". That's exactly as stupid.

First point, yes on propaganda, but the failure of the Soviet Union had more to do with the inherent limitations of central planning than Marxist communism. That doesn't mean communism is a broken ideology, but rather that by attempting to refine the designs of failed communist states risks going back on the same path, instead of envisioning a new model for a community-focused ideology (in a way different from capitalist overthrow->authoritarianism->"communism").

Capitalism lends itself more towards authoritarianism, in my opinion, as the compound interest function of accumulated wealth works similarly with power. For example, wealthy Republicans support Republican politicians who lower their donors' taxes and entrench their party's power through gerrymandering and voter suppression (such as purged voter rolls, or deliberately understaffed polling places in areas with more opposition party voters).

There are various new approaches to central planning that may be of interest, such as those in Towards a New Socialism by W. Paul Cockshott. I don't think central planning is necessarily something bad, and there are certainly sufficient alternatives from both inside and outside Communism. Many Communists such as myself are not attached to one method or another.

The idea that some period of authoritarianism is required for Communism is quite a Leninist idea. Sometimes I feel as though Communism would work better as an ideal to strive toward, rather than necessarily something to be acheived. I don't know how others feel on this, though.

I agree on the second paragraph. In general, one cannot decree a better world. It must be a conscious decision for people to work towards their ideals. Authoritarianism cannot fix that and even a benevolent AI overlord would be limited in its ability to manage production and allocate resources as a means to make life better for all people.

In general I am dismal at the ability for overthrow to enact lasting change. It often descends into a brutal struggle to keep newfound power, which becomes more important than the ideals themselves. The American Revolution ("All men are created equal") failed to end slavery, among other shortcomings. The French Revolution was a bloody mess that was only pacified by dictatorship and monarchy. Haiti, most tragic of all, was the only successful slave rebellion and they've been paying for it ever since, both as a result of foreign meddling as well as by greed and power-lust from their own leaders.

If communism could just be boiled down to "laborers own the means of production" then what stops that from happening within capitalism?

What prevents people from banding together to create factories that they then work in, for example?

These factories must compete with others which value profit as the highest motive. So because there is still a profit motive, the co-op factory must optimise on two fronts: money in order to keep itself afloat and still purchase the required capital (and labour power), and further to operate by "ethical" principles toward the workers (whatever those may be).

Thus co-ops will have a tendency to fail within capitalism, because they usually cannot compete sufficiently. In addition, unless everyone worked in co-ops, there would still be worker exploitation, and thus still need for Communism (in the eyes of Socialists). This is especially true in developing countries.

Exploitation happens at a class level, not an individual level, nor the co-op level. It is pervasive.

Okay, but this competition is a benefit to the consumer, so you're arguing that the consumers should eschew this benefit in favor of "ethical" factories. From what you're saying you seem to believe consumers largely refuse to do this, so you would have to remove this choice from them completely.

The problem then(also identified by communists of old..) is that you can't compete with forces outside your control - so you either need a global communist revolution, or you need pretty strict isolationism.

Since you never convinced your consumers that ethical factories are worth supporting, how do you plan to deal with the resentment they feel when they see the wealth foreigners posses achieved through the harsher competition policies of capitalism? Will you be suppressing information and limiting access to the Internet? Maybe some propaganda pieces about how your ethical factories are better than slavery under capitalism?

Maybe the "horror stories" of communism were caused by its flawed leaders more than the ideology itself. But it seems that a lot of stuff that we wouldn't really be happy with needs to happen in order to implement "perfect communism".

You forget what profit is. Profit is (the monetary value of) the benefit to society of the product being produced.

Now when you say "must optimize on two fronts: money in order to keep itself afloat and" ... that first one is NOT optional. If that first one is not a prerequisite to having the factory than that factory (or company, or ...) is a net loss for the economy, society, for the world as a whole. You seem to imply it is tenable for a society to have most or all companies operate under such conditions, and of course it is not.

That is of course the alleged problem with communism. Profit in itself is not a necessity, but having profit >=0 over the long run IS a necessity (but obviously for company stability having a decent positive profit most years is very much not optional, and any exceptions must be made for investment purposes, not for any other reason). Otherwise, colloquially, you're "eating your seed grain".

That is the problem, right there. Communist economists see communism as a system that can work because people would still generate profit. People, even communist activists themselves, see communism as a system that can deny the real world. And under those circumstances, of course communism fails. Under a communist system as understood in economics departments, profit would still be an existential necessity for any company.

So if avoiding profit and "instead get X" is why you're a communist, stop right there. That's not communism, that's fantasy. No matter what X is. Stop defending anything remotely like that as an advantage of a communist system, because it is not. The real world need for more valuable output than input from any long-term process, applies just as much to communism as to capitalism, mercantilism, ...

>Profit is (the monetary value of) the benefit to society of the product being produced.

No. Monetary value is not perfect measure of utility, because market demand is weighted by wealth.

A luxury yacht for one individual clearly provides nowhere near as much utility to them as an equivalently priced quantity of food would provide to a bunch of homeless people, but the market prices it as such because the individual is richer. If we could magically swap the yacht for the food, everything else being the same, society would be better off as a result.

We allow this inequality of demand because it is what drives the supply side towards efficiency, and for the most part I think this is a reasonable compromise.

But we should not confuse profit with utility.

Again you're confusing some arbitrary ideological measure with utility. Social justice in this case.

Firstly profits of 5% of revenue are considered high, on average. That's what that yacht is paid out of, and that means that feeding many homeless with it wouldn't work in practice.

Second luxury articles provide firms with the rewards of motivation of their employees. Everyone in Silicon Valley keeps reminding us how that's the lifeblood of every company, and while I disagree with that, it's obviously useful, both to that firm and to society. So the yacht has more utility than you give it credit for.

> you're confusing some arbitrary ideological measure

Well I'm not using a well defined measure of utility here, but I thought it was fairly non-controversial to say that, at least in immediate terms, food for many people creates more utility than a yacht for one person.

That they're homeless isn't the point, and I should have left out that rehetoric. The point is just that they're less able to demand the food than the rich person is the yacht, despite it providing them more utility.

> luxury articles provide firms with the rewards of motivation

Yes, I said that. Inequality is what drives the supply side, and I agree that this may lead to better outcomes overall, but my point is that it complicates the process, and detaches money from being a raw measure of utility.

The possibility of a yacht may encourage someone to produce food more efficiently, but this is a lot harder to measure. Maybe the level of inequality doesn't matter that much as long as people perceive higher social status? Maybe the inequality reduces opportunities for many potential innovators, destroying more efficiency than it encourages? Or maybe the lack of security discourages people from taking risks even if they have opportunities?

I'm not asserting any of these ideas, just pointing out factors that confound measuring the utility created by inequality.

Cosma Shalizi deals very well with Cockshott's arguments on his blog: http://bactra.org/weblog/919.html

> inherent limitations of central planning

I wonder about those. I have this thought on the back of my head - now that we have ubiquitous light-speed communication and a big surplus of computing power, couldn't doing central planning via algorithms and automated systems offset some of the "inherent limitations" you mention?

(Honest question, I'm not advocating for communist revolution or anything; just looking for viable alternatives to organizing economy by recursive zero-sum games.)

Your line of thinking, though (as you noted) easily misconstrued by ideologists, seems quite reasonable and interesting.

I would guess that current AI tech is many orders of magnitude away, competency-wise, from being able to improve on the efficiency and agility of loosely connected networks of generally autonomous humans.

Even so, ignoring such technical limitations, the issues of control and individual agency are incredibly thorny. How are preferences aggregated? And how does a completely centralized system continually update itself to best serve all participants? Perhaps the competing AI systems can campaign every 4 years :)

Perhaps some sort of AI-human hybrid governmental system could offer a more modest path forwards. We are arguably already beginning to take first steps in that direction.

>the failure of the Soviet Union had more to do with the inherent limitations of central planning than Marxist communism

Between 1917 and 1950 they grew at a staggering pace. From agricultural backwater to first space power. That isn't an economic failure in any way.

After the 1950s they tried to re-gear the economy to producing things like fridges and, of course, for consumer items it wasn't nearly as effective.

In the end the thing that undid the Soviet project was the idealism of its president (Gorbachev) when faced with the results of his authoritarian predecessors. It wasn't really an economic failure.

>by attempting to refine the designs of failed communist states risks going back on the same path

If we attribute Stalin to a failure of communism surely we have to also attribute Hitler to a failure of capitalism?

Or we could accept that both analyses are stupid and shallow.

>Capitalism lends itself more towards authoritarianism

I think economic systems are orthogonal to political systems.

> Between 1917 and 1950 they grew at a staggering pace. From agricultural backwater to first space power. That isn't an economic failure in any way. > If we attribute Stalin to a failure of communism surely we have to also attribute Hitler to a failure of capitalism?

I agree with everything you said but this seems ironically contradictory...

> I think economic systems are orthogonal to political systems.

Not entirely orthogonal. But yeah, HN seems to think communism is inherently authoritarian.

Maybe that's because for many people, the belief that communism=authoritarianism was propaganda, spoon-fed at an early age and whipped up by the government at regular intervals to keep people afraid of the other and from questioning their present authority.

Same goes for terrorism these days. "If you're not with us you're against us," was the phrase I believe Bush the junior liked to tell us.

The engineers that drew up the Tsar's plans for industrialization implemented them under Communism. There is nothing surprising about that.

Likewise, it is predictable that a centrally planned economy would be able to develop industrial goods for industrial needs, but fail at producing consumer goods, which ultimately catalyzed far more economic growth in capitalist countries, both because of the market segmentation that a central plan could not predict or accommodate as well as a free market, and also because the incentives for the creator and access to the means of the production (primarily startup capital) were easier to come by in capitalist economies.

I think your comparison with Hitler is lacking in depth, unless it was meant to be a dig at my comment, which I believe I have rebutted.

I fundamentally disagree with your final statement. The accumulation of physical resources and political power is and will always be intertwined. If you can name one example in all of human history (from agriculturalization onwards), whereupon the political system did not depend on the economic system and the economic system did not depend on the political system, then I will concede my point. Until then, I find your argument lacking.