this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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The memes of the climate
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Not disagreeing with your central point, but it's worth noting that planned economy has been tried and it failed, not due to planning errors but fundamental systemic issues with the approach.
No place has a fully free economy - for good reason. Such a place would have no labour condition laws, no social security, no pensions, no free healthcare, etc.
Every economy to an extent already is planned. They do not fail per se.
There have been failures, yes. However, look at any company, especially the megacorporations like Walmart. They all have planned economies. Walmart IT isn't placing contract bids with the Walmart marketing department, they just help the marketing department when needed. The meat department isn't shopping around for cheaper suppliers, they get meat from the logistics network Walmart controls. The only example of a free market business I know of is Sears, which was already sinking. The free market idea from the CEO was catastrophic and sunk the company in under a year. The IT department needed to turn a profit, so their prices were high. When the marketing department needed IT and Sears IT placed a bid, it was higher than contracted IT so the marketing department didn't work internally and ended up costing the company massive amounts of money.
There are also successful planned economies in existence right now; Cuba is thriving in spite of the economic sactions by the US, and Vietnam didn't stop being communist after the war with the Khmer Rouge. This also excludes other realities, like what constitutes the failure of a country? Is it a failure of a planned economy, or is it a failure of government? If it's a failure of the economic system, then why aren't failing/failed capitalist nations attributed to capitalism?
Companies fail all the time and it is critical to ensure that bad systems are not allowed to continue. A government doesn't fail. It's issues are enabled to continue unabated.
The ultimate issue with a centrally planned economy is not environmental though. It is putting additional power into the hands of a majority which gives minorities no recourse. At least in a capitalist country minorities can form their own communities and local economies. If the majority wants to allocate food and resources to the majority in a centrally planned system, the minorities starve. Sure, there are still issues in capitalist systems with regulations targeting minorities and the stealing of resources like Tulsa but there's no recourse at all in a centrally planned one.
Vietnam transitioned from central planning before even the Soviet Union.
Are you really sure Cuba is the best example right now? Go look into how they are doing and get back to me. I won't claim that a centrally planned economy cannot be efficient when the leadership places great emphasis on it. Cuba has some very efficiently run state programs. They are also unfortunately not very nimble.
Central planning can make for some oppressive and robust environmentalism. We see that in Cuba. It also works the other way. What makes you think that after the revolution you will be the one making the decisions and the same grifters won't take part in that system for their own benefit?
What happens when the needs of the state outweigh the needs of the world? Does the majority in any country really care about the environment over jobs and prosperity? How likely is this central plan to place a focus inherently on resource efficiency and actually be successful without an incentive when lives are on the line? We know from the few large centrally planned economies that they've largely failed at that task rather dramatically.
All of this should not be weighed against hands-off capitalism but instead the modern liberal mixed system. Externalities are covered with regulations and government programs based on contracts and markets. That's reformed capitalism.
Reforms to socialist systems have not addressed the core issues of power imbalance but instead, allow corporations as long as they align with the efforts of the state and the majority. That's literally economic fascism and comes with all its own issues.
There's a lot more that can be covered here including numbers that support these narratives but there's a reason the Western left shifted from a revolution to a reform mindset in the 1960s and it largely follows the above logic.
It sounds like you're more interested in the few from the majority deciding everything on behalf of the minority. It feels like you understand the problem with our bourgeois democracy, but use it as a bludgeon to attack true democracy. We can decide to elevate the voices of minorities. We don't have to perfectly model our planned economy based on previous attempts, instead we can create our own system based on our culture and collective experiences. One of the huge failures of the USSR was not ensuring people that identify as kazakhs were part of the governing body of Kazakhstan. We don't have to repeat mistakes, we can choose to learn from them. I imagine elected reps from unionized ethnic groups to help make guiding principles for governing the commons by the commons. It may work, it may not. I don't know, but that doesn't mean we can't try.
There's literally nothing inherent to a socialist system that makes a society less racist. You are giving the majority more power over vulnerable groups though. You can say that sounds like I'm defending the rich but I never said that. Sure we can learn from it. We can eliminate majority power over capital control. The CCP argued that the USSR had strayed from the true intent of Lenin's Communism. It got them famine and they reverted. Yes, Lenin argued that it was more an approach than a set system. The issue with that is what the proposed approach is inherently oppressive. Lenin himself argued that dissent could not be allowed to exist because it would undermine the system.
Your argument that we can at least try ignores consequences that we've seen before. We also could try an ethnostate. That would provide the unity required. Those pesky minorities keep getting in the way of progress. How dare they want to keep the value of their labor. We could try shooting ourselves in the foot through radical change to try an experiment that could just as easily be formed internal to the system.
There's nothing stopping left systems for existing within western societies. The corporate structure actually allows for it depending on how you write the founding documents. Co-ops succeed all the time and they fail all the time. Nonprofits do a lot of the same. When these systems are not at a government level, when the trust fails and the system collapses it does not take everything down with it.
It's really difficult for a government system supporting capitalism to break down because it doesn't provide anything inherently required to live. In a command economy, when the trust is broken, the system breaks down. When the system breaks down, the people go to other systems for their needs. Then start the power struggles and the death. It's authoritarian and unstable by it's very nature and it has a tendency to become more authoritarian and consolidated as time goes on due to lessons learned.
Why would you knowingly choose this path when reform and regulations are an option? What is different about your approach from China or the USSR other than you'll just attempt it better or be more forceful in pushing your ideal code of ethics?
Bro, you're using way too many words to say that you benefit from the status quo and don't want to change things too much because you're afraid that it might impact your personal comfort. You want to move incrementally into a planned economy just in case, and I get that. I understand where that fear comes from. But the time for incremental change was 50 years ago, the current climate crisis demands we change now or face extinction.
I understand that socialism and planned economies don't fix issues of racial and ethnic hate. It's the responsibility of socialists and other leftists to have a healthy dose of intersectionality when talking about creating political systems, because discussing how to make sure minorities aren't negatively impacted is essential to the system succeeding.
I'm actually kinda offended by your suggestion that "we should try something else when creating a socialist society to ensure minorities are heard" is equivalent to an ethnostate. Actually what the fuck. That's a disgusting comparison and I don't understand at all how you decided they were equivalent.
There is stopping something from creating socialism in the status quo, and it's called capitalism. Capitalism has, does, and will continue to fight anything that challenges the status quo. The ideal for capitalists is to recreate a feudal society, child labor and all. You talk about instability within former socialist nations, but never draw the line towards the endless attacks placed on those countries by the imperial core. Most recent example? Zunzuneo, an astroturf social media site created by USAID as a CIA front to destablize Cuba. There's also the 1990 US Appropriations Act, which caused Yugoslavia to collapse into reactionary ethnic hate that resulted in the Bosnian genocide. You point to failures of socialism as if it's a fundamental flaw, but never examine the reasons for why those nations failed. If you did, you'd see attacks from the imperial core as well as mistakes from the local government being the point of failure, not socialism.
I am against it because people die. Full stop. Your insistence on radical change as a requirement to dramatic action is one of the main issues behind why we cannot actually move forward. You are not the only player at fault, but you are partially complicit.
You cannot eliminate prejudice. To knowingly give a system more centralized power is to enable it to be susceptible to it. It is negligent at best. This is why most theorists are anarchists. They are against centralized power structures. My issue with them is that so was every communist system so far. Every single one tries to decentralize power or promises to. When they do, the systems fail and they centralize again very quickly.
You should be offended. It is an offensive thing. The fact that you can recognize that should make a connection to you about suggesting we just try something. How do we know that fascism won't help society? Well, it is right there in the proposed structure. It is designed to be oppressive. It is the same when you take economic power away from minorities. It is designed to be oppressive by its structure. Capitalism would be perfect too if everyone acted in everyone else's best interests and weren't racist. As it stands we need multiple levels of power to account for externalities.
There is literally nothing stopping you from going and setting up a commune in the West. Just don't expect people to donate resources to you. Go ahead and try to set up a private company in a centrally planned economy. That is the difference and why it is oppressive by its design. It literally requires capitalism to not exist in order to force everyone into your perfect society. A liberal society is fundamentally incompatible with true socialism and it takes all of our other liberties with them.
Your examples are far from intellectually honest when put in context with what our adversaries do and have done to undermine free societies. I do find it actually pretty funny the lengths of which you twist events to pin the Bosnean genocide on the West though. Way to twist a conflict born out of minorities being oppressed by the majority in a socialist system into something useful to blame capitalism for. Is any of this connecting for you?
I'm not going to continue talking with anyone unironically comparing socialism to fascist ethnostates. Good bye.
Sucks to suck. Sorry your ideas are structurally racist. You should probably address that. It's broken up more socialist systems than you'll admit. (Almost all of them)