Board Thread:Townie of the Month/@comment-27398195-20180101062544/@comment-32942597-20180105140128

Communism does not work because it's a peculiar error in thinking (a series of peculiar errors to be more precise) fed by peculiar moral sentiments. It's hard to put in short space all the problems with marxist / communist thinking, so I'll limit it to the biggest problems:

1. "Socialization makes the man". Socialize the man to be a commune participant, train him in marxist thinking, and there you go, a communist pops out. A 100 years ago such a claim seemed reasonable. It took a century of scientific development for this claim to be progressively more weakened. For more evidence see S. Pinker's "The Blank Slate".

2. Peculiarly leftist belief that wealth is sort of like water: you transform it, move it, but essentially it doesn't disappear. All you have to do is create institution, allocate resources to it, command it / beg it / induce everyone into assuring everyone else that this is the mission and the plan and presto, the institution or the commune does the job as expected and the wealth pops out. All you have to do is proper distribution later.

3. Class thinking. Society consist of classes each with its own "consciousness" arising from production relations in society.

4. Labour theory of value. Wealth comes from labour, not from consumer demand. This was mistaking economic cost for economic value. (For more evidence see M. Blaug's chapter on marxism in his big book, "Economic Theory in Retrospect")

Economic failure of communism merely followed sociological, psychological and philosophical failures I outlined above.

Under communism (I was born in Soviet satellite country) we were often saying "Since the working class (as in 'class', not working individuals) does not exist, the Party tries to create it". Soviet industrial gigantomania did not arise only from the wish to show off: building huge new factories were supposed to be both more economically efficient and by keeping them in huge groups of workers socializing people into New Soviet Men (And Women. Why are you always on about women, Stan? Women have the right to participate in our movement..).

I wish a small book "Why Socialism Failed" were available in English. It was written by W. Wisniewski, an economist who were head of Labor Union of Communist Party Workers in Poland. Polish communists and people have this idealistic strain, so when the argument were presented "well, Communist Party has full-time workers and those workers deserve their own union too, no?" it was agreed to by the Party's verhuschka. The union was of course highly controlled but it had some degree of independence. The book does not present theory but reports day to day experience of running the labor union inside a Communist Party.

The failure of communism were apparent to me when I read about workers' behavior: all they were interested in were better lunches and vacations. In short, they behaved like perfect individualistic capitalist consumers, not New Soviet Men -- and that after a few generations of being submerged completely in reality created by socialist state and isolated away from outside world by Iron Curtain. So isolated we were that when I was a child, a foreigner on the street has evoked more interest than a space alien would. And yet, under complete control of socialist state, I remember that individually we behaved and thought in the deepest respects precisely like we do today. Nobody cared for socialism, people just wanted consumer goods. Trying to socialize people into communists has failed completely.

Life, experience and science have simply demonstrated forcefully that thinking behind communism, mostly sociological and psychological thinking, is so flawed as to be useless.

Wisniewski reports who were staffing and gravitating towards the power in Communist Party: "a type of exceptional social sensitivity, with tendency for peculiar mysticism". Reason is slave to passion, and Communist Party members were not rational like they were fooling themselves into thinking. Marx and Engels sensed the danger of basing socialism on moral sentiment, and were systematically trying to assure each other "we are materialists, not sentimentalists", a sentiment still echoed by brighter marxists, such as they are left today. It's of course not true: socialism image in public imagination is based precisely on moral sentiment (note popularity of "social justice", as in "justice" - not science, not facts, not politics, not truth, but "justice").

Marxism is not so much an idea as a peculiar, heavy and paranoidal mood that is always at work of self-distorting perception of real world phenomena. When statistical data on labor productivity and profits denied Marx's "law" of falling rate of profit by the time of third edition of The Capital, Marx simply removed the offending tables. Cognitive dissonance is present in most (all?) people I think, but in marxists and the left in general it is exceptionally strong: they always try to put a spell on reality by a stream of words and emotions, somehow always subconsciously hoping that changing perception of reality will change the reality, and always failing.

In short communism did not fail: an error cannot fail. Communism is simply an error in thinking, so it does not work like a car built according to flawed design doesn't work. Communism is not "beautiful on paper" like people often say: it's erroneous, flawed and wrong on paper. It just takes not having leftist/tribal moral sentiment overriding cold thinking about the ideas and the ugly facts with warm emotional noise of idealized community and safety (crimestop, warm and cuddly model), and few people are like this. Passions drive people, not reason, so the people try to put smth like socialism via redistribution, laws, etc. into practice and then when puzzled why it doesn't work -- "it should because it's just" -- conclude that we haven't tried hard enough or some baddie (bourgeoise, patriarchy, government, greedy people, paid agents, conspiracy) spoiled our wonderful plans. And so we move from error to error, wondering why it "does not work". It can't, but as T.S. Eliot put it, humankind cannot bear very much reality, and the reality that communist thinking is incorrect is too much of painful reality for most emotional people to handle.

For those interested in historical outlook and fascinating peek into marxist / communist mentality, I recommend Igor Shafarevich's "The Socialist Phenomenon", and Thomas Sowell's "Marxism" is well worth reading on background.