This graph is important
It’s based on the writings of professor Cheng Enfu, President of the Academy of Marxism at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and Director of the Academic Division of Marxist Studies of CASS.
Socialism and communism are not one and done processes. They are gradual changes, both Marx and Lenin have addressed this extensively. We can’t just instantly press the big communism button unfortunately.
Here’s a paper that goes way more in depth on the professor’s definitions: https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdf/10.1521/siso.2022.86.2.159
Communism doesn’t mean a state-planned economy. There is no state under true communism.
Single ownership is centralized communism. Decentralized and multi-centralized communism exists. Correct me if this is a misunderstanding.
also if you look at the chart the last two stages of communism are pretty horrible with ‘completely planned economies’ those simply dont work and are unstable systems they’re essentially equiv to late stage capitalism were oligarchs are making the market decisions.
I feel like the big question is who is doing the planning? Because if it’s the central government, not workers themselves, we’re fucked. Communism is bottom-up, not top down. There can be organizers and public servants but there cannot be executives.
communism ends up top down in every implementation we’ve seen in the wild. but maybe you should think of the question not as ‘who is doing the planning?’ and instead as ‘what do we actually need to plan centrally’. i think you’d be surprised about how little you actually need to plan centrally. I ended up settling on worker protections.
classical communism’s take is its the economy and the state. both which means its ripe to collapse into corruption/authoritarianism and its very hard to protect. particularly once the system has established itself and is relatively stable. gives time for bad actors to start needling into the processes and abusing them.
You’ll never be able to control ‘who is doing the planning’ in a reliable manner over a long term in a centralized system. just take a look at every tech company that gets majority market share. soon as it happens they begin abusing their control as people within the company shift. can also use political parties in democracies as an example, even with voters deciding on the final candidates there isnt really a choice. this is why communism in the wild has never had the bottom up result you’re claiming it has, and no i don’t care about the purist written version of communism I care how it plays out in practice.
and the distinction between public servant vs executive is fairly immaterial if they’re both functioning as ‘making the final decision for the group’ what matters isnt who the decision maker is but how that decision maker was chosen to speak for the group.
The “boom-bust cycle” instability is inherent to capitalism, not to a socialist economy, planned or otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cyclePeriodic crises in capitalism formed the basis of the theory of Karl Marx, who further claimed that these crises were increasing in severity and, on the basis of which, he predicted a communist revolution.
Marxian view, profit is the major engine of the market economy, but business (capital) profitability has a tendency to fall that recurrently creates crises in which mass unemployment occurs, businesses fail, remaining capital is centralized and concentrated and profitability is recovered. In the long run, these crises tend to be more severe and the system will eventually fail.
In contrast, profit is not the engine of a socialist economy: meeting people’s needs is.
its inherent in any system with a monoculture / top down approach to planning. its not a problem that’s unique to capitalism.
think of it in terms of decision making: who is making the decisions? are there methods for unique approaches to be tried without consent from said leadership? if not then you’ll have boom/bust cycles due to errors in decision making by the leadership group because there isnt a way to allow alternate approaches that would amortize out the errors.
any system with ‘centrally planned’ is no different ‘ceo runs company’ and will have the same behavioral outcomes for the system.
it has nothing to do with profit motives. its about the motives of the individual making the decisions. just ‘removing profit’ from the list of motives (which profit is never the motivation, its power/ability to do whatever you wish) doesnt in any way impact the behavior of the individuals it just changes the justification used. but the system will still see the same behaviors / outcomes because you havent fundamentally changed the system
A democratic centralist government is fundamentally different from ‘ceo runs company/state’. And a CEO can’t just do whatever they want: they have to make a profit, or else their investors will have them removed or the company will be liquidated from insolvency.
Disagree. On all counts. Ceos dont have to make a profit. A business needs to make a profit (otherwise it isnt a business.) you fundamentally misunderstand the role of a ceo.
You’re too focused on the monetary policy you dont understand the power dynamics at play. If you have a centralized authority over the economy then you’ll have a monoculture. Just tossing ‘democratic’ in the name doesnt change this fact. Having elected officials doesn’t change this fact. Claiming not profit oriented doesnt change this fact.
The fact is you do not need a centrally planned anything and having one actually prevents improvements.
Ceos dont have to make a profit. A business needs to make a profit
This is just wordplay. If the business doesn’t make a profit, the CEO gets the boot, so the CEO makes decisions with an eye on profitability.
you fundamentally misunderstand the role of a ceo.
Why don’t you tell us what the role of the CEO is then?
If you have a centralized authority over the economy then you’ll have a monoculture.
By some meanings of “monoculture,” that is definitionally true. But that doesn’t mean the entire country is necessarily run as a monolith, because that centralized “monoculture” may set up any of a variety of power decentralization/federation/power sharing schemes.
The fact is you do not need a centrally planned anything and having one actually prevents improvements.
That’s a very strong assertion of a “fact” without evidence, and frankly sounds like something von Mises or Hayek or Rothbart or Greenspan would say.
Its not just wordplay. A business requires profit or it crumbles because it cant pay labor. A CEO is just a final arbiter of decisions for the business at the end of the day.
You dont need a central authority to setup that infrastructure you described.
And centrally planned economies are the rarity rather than the norm most economies are not centrally managed. The fact you think my statement about them existing without central planning requires evidence implies you have a lack of understanding about the basics of these systems.
As for your name drops who cares? I Hardly give a shit about Liberal economic policies nor am i advocating for them. Fun fact the US is a centrally planned economy for the most part.
You have yet to demonstrate why you need your centrally planned economy/government or why its something we should ever be looking to do. But honestly i dont particularly care to hear more lenin/marx regurgitated without critical thought on why its even relevant in this day and age when we know we can do the same things without the centralized government they advocated for.
Honestly itd be wonderful if communists moved on to the more modern approaches to socialism and stopped wallowing in the past.
