“The State” as a Cop-Out for Communist
I can point to the beginning of the business cycle and the federal reserve expanding the money supply, and say “look at the state, the state did that.”.
I can point to the war profiteers and say, “the state led the war, and war is unprofitable otherwise”. I can point to obscene profits in the banking and oil industries and say, “banks and oil have a special relationship with the state, which is why they can get things at the expense of everyone else”.
The anarcho-communist looks at me and goes, “oh great, so now I’m sure, for the sake of consistency, you will grant me the same mulligans. The USSR, after all, was a state that didn’t follow my ideal plan!”
And so the anarcho-communist (I know the final point of communism is “anarchy” but anarcho-communists don’t want an intermediary step) will claim his ideology faced the same type of problems as that of the free marketeers.
Now the vanilla communists do support a state as an intermediary step, so part of their ideology is that this state would work. So a failure of state can be reasonably construed a failure of ideology. Of course there is the nazi invasion and cold war, but the USSR had “grown economically” by various measures after 1948 during what we call “the cold war” and was closing the income gap with the US. There was a period of gain for the USSR and it occurred during the cold war, it wasn’t a downhill slide from 1948 to 1991, so we can’t blame the later collapse on the cold war per se - something must have happened between 1948 and 1991.
The difference between the US and the USSR is that the USSR failed to the extent that it pursued communism, while the US has succeeded to the extent that there have been free markets. The obvious story is of agriculture, the private plots never consisted of more than 4% of the land but produced roughly “25% of the food”, how this was determined had to be subjective. For example does 1 egg = 4 oz. of grain? Because the disparity is so large, I am not concerned with the exact details.
What about the rest of the Soviet Economy? Well we’ve all heard stories about shortages and surpluses of products in haphazard and chaotic ways, and this is to be expected by people who understand that prices, profits and losses perform a calculation function.
When something becomes scarce - everyone wants roofing nails - the hardware stores realize their supply of roofing nails is falling precipitously, and raise prices. This allows the stores to conserve their supply of roofing nails, and only the people willing to pay the most will get the roofing nails. The hardware stores, wanting more profit, decide to buy more roofing nails, and the roofing nail producers then realize the hardware stores are buying the roofing nails. The roofing nail producers then shift production from other nails to roofing nails.
The roofing nail producers compete with each other to sell their nails, and as they produce more, each producer has to lower prices (sans cartels), and so each supplier gets more nails at lower prices. But then the hardware stores, to compete with each other for customers, have to further lower their prices (again sans cartels). Thus production of roofing nails is raised in response to demand without any central plan.
But by not having prices, in the USSR roofing nails would be produced, and then there wouldn’t be enough roofing nails for all of the houses that were ordered to be built. But to keep up with production the house producers would use other types of nails. And so Soviet Architecture later on had to be rather plain and simple, something simple and uniform for the central planners to calculate.
Whenever there were shortages, that is whenever the central plan did not perfectly mimick what would have occurred on a free market, there would be an attempt to spring up markets to fill the gap. Black-market roofing nail producers to produce nails in exchange for other things people had, for example. Unfortunately, these markets were limited because people had to work at their tasks and fill their quotas assigned by the state, so any market activity was extra-cirricular.
So how was anything done? Well Soviet Central planners could look at how things were being done in the US and the UK. They could see how much of various items was being produced, in various places, and then attempt to mimick that in the USSR making allowances for the different geography and demographics of the USSR. Of course they could never get it completely correct, but they could always look off of other places to see what needed to be produced.
For example:
“Oh, so in the US they produce 10 tons of roofing nails per day, so given our population differences and how many more buildings we need to make, we need to produce 18 tons of roofing nails. But do we have enough steel? No, then more steel. Not enough iron ore? Well more mines…” et cetera.
All of that headache would be bypassed if they just allowed prices to function. No individual actor needs to understand the entire structure of production. Each person knows what actions will earn him money from other people in the structure of production.
This also explains how the early USSR did so much better than the late USSR. One thing I noticed when looking at images of buildings built in the USSR in the 1920s and buildings built in the 1970s is how much more ornate they are, not like the simple stock buildings in the later USSR.
While the population was tied to the land in Czarist Russia, there were prices and so the structure of production was what I would say, for lack of a better term, “calibrated”. That is things were being produced to satisfy real demand in response to the prices of things… just within the framework of Russian legal restrictions.
But as a result, in say 1919, the state could call upon architects and construction workers to build something, and there would be no shortage of roofing nails in relation to all of the other building materials - because the structure of production was calibrated because prices worked in Czarist Russia existed in 1916, and some of that calibration still existed in 1919, though there is no clear cut-off date.
I’m not saying Czarist Russia was good, but it was better than the USSR in this regard.
In 1919, the central planners in the USSR could rapidly build an industrial infrastructure in a discalibrated manner. That is, all of the components of an industrial plan would be out of whack - there could be plenty of concrete but not enough glass, plenty of cables but not enough cable spindles, et cetera, and the Soviet Industry was riddled with these problems.
That said though, because Czarist Russia was so restrictive, the central planners in the USSR, looking to the US, UK and Germany for a general blueprint, bumbled their way into a higher standard of living.
But there was no way the USSR could ever have reached the US. The USSR was dependent on the US for information - that’s why there were so many industrial spies.
As the USSR became more and more industrialized and the per-capita industrialization gap between them and “the west” shrank, the massive improvements stopped. All the USSR could ever be was a Frankenstein version of the US - the same general plan of a real market economy, but riddled with shortages and absurd surpluses that wouldn’t go away causing the production processes to be inefficient.
The failure of the USSR was caused by the state’s opposition to markets. The failure in the US will be caused by the state’s opposition to markets. The advocate of a total free market can consistently blame the state on both the problems in the US and the USSR.
The difference between the free marketer blaming the state for the failure of the supposed “Free Market United States” and the anarchist blaming the state for the failure of the “Communist USSR” is that the USSR failed to the extent it attempted non-market modes of production, while the US has succeeded to the extent the market was let free. The failure of the USSR is egg on the anarchists’ face, but the failure of the US is NOT egg on the face of free-marketers. And this is not a double standard.
I can point to the war profiteers and say, “the state led the war, and war is unprofitable otherwise”. I can point to obscene profits in the banking and oil industries and say, “banks and oil have a special relationship with the state, which is why they can get things at the expense of everyone else”.
The anarcho-communist looks at me and goes, “oh great, so now I’m sure, for the sake of consistency, you will grant me the same mulligans. The USSR, after all, was a state that didn’t follow my ideal plan!”
And so the anarcho-communist (I know the final point of communism is “anarchy” but anarcho-communists don’t want an intermediary step) will claim his ideology faced the same type of problems as that of the free marketeers.
Now the vanilla communists do support a state as an intermediary step, so part of their ideology is that this state would work. So a failure of state can be reasonably construed a failure of ideology. Of course there is the nazi invasion and cold war, but the USSR had “grown economically” by various measures after 1948 during what we call “the cold war” and was closing the income gap with the US. There was a period of gain for the USSR and it occurred during the cold war, it wasn’t a downhill slide from 1948 to 1991, so we can’t blame the later collapse on the cold war per se - something must have happened between 1948 and 1991.
The difference between the US and the USSR is that the USSR failed to the extent that it pursued communism, while the US has succeeded to the extent that there have been free markets. The obvious story is of agriculture, the private plots never consisted of more than 4% of the land but produced roughly “25% of the food”, how this was determined had to be subjective. For example does 1 egg = 4 oz. of grain? Because the disparity is so large, I am not concerned with the exact details.
What about the rest of the Soviet Economy? Well we’ve all heard stories about shortages and surpluses of products in haphazard and chaotic ways, and this is to be expected by people who understand that prices, profits and losses perform a calculation function.
When something becomes scarce - everyone wants roofing nails - the hardware stores realize their supply of roofing nails is falling precipitously, and raise prices. This allows the stores to conserve their supply of roofing nails, and only the people willing to pay the most will get the roofing nails. The hardware stores, wanting more profit, decide to buy more roofing nails, and the roofing nail producers then realize the hardware stores are buying the roofing nails. The roofing nail producers then shift production from other nails to roofing nails.
The roofing nail producers compete with each other to sell their nails, and as they produce more, each producer has to lower prices (sans cartels), and so each supplier gets more nails at lower prices. But then the hardware stores, to compete with each other for customers, have to further lower their prices (again sans cartels). Thus production of roofing nails is raised in response to demand without any central plan.
But by not having prices, in the USSR roofing nails would be produced, and then there wouldn’t be enough roofing nails for all of the houses that were ordered to be built. But to keep up with production the house producers would use other types of nails. And so Soviet Architecture later on had to be rather plain and simple, something simple and uniform for the central planners to calculate.
Whenever there were shortages, that is whenever the central plan did not perfectly mimick what would have occurred on a free market, there would be an attempt to spring up markets to fill the gap. Black-market roofing nail producers to produce nails in exchange for other things people had, for example. Unfortunately, these markets were limited because people had to work at their tasks and fill their quotas assigned by the state, so any market activity was extra-cirricular.
So how was anything done? Well Soviet Central planners could look at how things were being done in the US and the UK. They could see how much of various items was being produced, in various places, and then attempt to mimick that in the USSR making allowances for the different geography and demographics of the USSR. Of course they could never get it completely correct, but they could always look off of other places to see what needed to be produced.
For example:
“Oh, so in the US they produce 10 tons of roofing nails per day, so given our population differences and how many more buildings we need to make, we need to produce 18 tons of roofing nails. But do we have enough steel? No, then more steel. Not enough iron ore? Well more mines…” et cetera.
All of that headache would be bypassed if they just allowed prices to function. No individual actor needs to understand the entire structure of production. Each person knows what actions will earn him money from other people in the structure of production.
This also explains how the early USSR did so much better than the late USSR. One thing I noticed when looking at images of buildings built in the USSR in the 1920s and buildings built in the 1970s is how much more ornate they are, not like the simple stock buildings in the later USSR.
While the population was tied to the land in Czarist Russia, there were prices and so the structure of production was what I would say, for lack of a better term, “calibrated”. That is things were being produced to satisfy real demand in response to the prices of things… just within the framework of Russian legal restrictions.
But as a result, in say 1919, the state could call upon architects and construction workers to build something, and there would be no shortage of roofing nails in relation to all of the other building materials - because the structure of production was calibrated because prices worked in Czarist Russia existed in 1916, and some of that calibration still existed in 1919, though there is no clear cut-off date.
I’m not saying Czarist Russia was good, but it was better than the USSR in this regard.
In 1919, the central planners in the USSR could rapidly build an industrial infrastructure in a discalibrated manner. That is, all of the components of an industrial plan would be out of whack - there could be plenty of concrete but not enough glass, plenty of cables but not enough cable spindles, et cetera, and the Soviet Industry was riddled with these problems.
That said though, because Czarist Russia was so restrictive, the central planners in the USSR, looking to the US, UK and Germany for a general blueprint, bumbled their way into a higher standard of living.
But there was no way the USSR could ever have reached the US. The USSR was dependent on the US for information - that’s why there were so many industrial spies.
As the USSR became more and more industrialized and the per-capita industrialization gap between them and “the west” shrank, the massive improvements stopped. All the USSR could ever be was a Frankenstein version of the US - the same general plan of a real market economy, but riddled with shortages and absurd surpluses that wouldn’t go away causing the production processes to be inefficient.
The failure of the USSR was caused by the state’s opposition to markets. The failure in the US will be caused by the state’s opposition to markets. The advocate of a total free market can consistently blame the state on both the problems in the US and the USSR.
The difference between the free marketer blaming the state for the failure of the supposed “Free Market United States” and the anarchist blaming the state for the failure of the “Communist USSR” is that the USSR failed to the extent it attempted non-market modes of production, while the US has succeeded to the extent the market was let free. The failure of the USSR is egg on the anarchists’ face, but the failure of the US is NOT egg on the face of free-marketers. And this is not a double standard.
15年前
