This is a pretty sanctimonious article, again attempting to push the agenda that all new technology is good technology, and all resistors are luddites.
Be cautious of this standpoint, technology suffers from a confirmation bias, we tend not to remember the technology that fails, the technology that lowers quality of life, or the technology that kills people.
Here are some counter-cases for you all:
1. 1920's era radiation craze. Water energizers, xray shoe fitting etc.
2. Communism
3. Airships
There's nothing wrong with scrutiny, and nothing wrong with taking your time exploring an idea, dealing with it's repercussions at a manageable rate. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.
For example, we're only just now starting to see countries start to bring the hammer down on companies that push their employees to be contactable 24/7 without paying them to be on call. Mobile phones have been around for how long? The legislative system has inertia, and sometimes it's worth giving it time to catch up.
> Here are some counter-cases for you all: 1. 1920's era radiation craze. Water energizers, xray shoe fitting etc. 2. Communism 3. Airships
Not sure what communism has in common with the other 2, considering it is:
1. Not a technology.
2. Has never actually been implemented with success due to flaws in human nature.
3. Failed precisely because of lack of technology to support it (a command economy could be viable, given a high enough technological level and sophisticated models to predict the necessary outputs in real-time)
If there ever was something that failed because it threatened the established way of doing things, communism was it.
A fundamental requirement of a command economy is that either everyone is voluntarily on board or you apply coercion as needed to get everyone to comply with your central planners.
It turns out that at scale it's very hard to get everyone on board, so you start having to apply coercion... and then any time your command economy is locally inefficient black markets spring up and you have to apply more coercion. Obviously this is a matter of degree; there's a good bit of coercion in economic matters that happens in today's "capitalist" economies too. But the point is that if you slip too far off what the vast majority of people agree to, you start running into sedition problems.
Now you also need a not-too-corrupt coercive apparatus (something that was sorely lacking in the places that have tried communism, I agree) _and_ you need quite saintly central planners.
The real litmus test here is whether you could combine a command economy with a political system that replaces the central planners when enough of the population loses faith in their general direction. _This_ is the thing no one has really managed to do yet, and I'm not sure how viable it is given that human nature you talk about.
But the the result is that most discussion of communism just ends up with the No True Scotsman fallacy, pretty much.... because every time attempts at it fail people say it wasn't really "communism". Including the people who claimed it was too "communism" at first.
That same coercion is required of a market economy. The primary difference is that both coercion and opposition tend to be distributed. E.g., bosses, management theory, police and sheriffs, courts, collections agencies, renter and homeowner evictions, military force, etc., etc.
Perhaps the success of the market system has to do with spreading the coercive element across more fronts (as it did some of the rewards).
One of the successes of the market system is that you get some amount of choice in who gets to coerce you (e.g. you can sometimes, not always, switch jobs to avoid a boss who is asking for things you don't want to do). So yes, spreading the coercive element is pretty key for that.
Importantly, "all" you need in the market system is to find _someone_ willing to pay you for doing whatever it is you would like to do for pay. I'm not going to claim that's easy (it's not), but it's a lot easier than convincing a small group of bureaucrats to pay you for that thing. This is what allows, for example, writers who cater to niche markets to exist... In theory, the central planners could be enlightened enough to fund (with food or services or whatever, if you want to assume a post-money society) that sort of thing, but in practice, why would they bother?
Rather than markets contra communism, I think we should think of it as property rights contra state ownership (of everything).
It is because people are allowed to own things that they can trade. In this system there's plurality whereas in a system where all is owned by the state, there's a monoculture.
This is why property rights are important to many things including intellectual freedom. However, the "market" can also create monoculture if one player gets too big.
I just saw that people seem to be downvoting your comment, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. :( It seems pretty spot on to me: the multipolarity of coercion (and the ability to set the coercive elements against each other) is the key difference between totalitarian and non-totalitarian systems!
No, the apparent success of market systems is just from allowing experimentation without permission from above. A non-market system that allowed that would work fine, and a market system that doesn't allow that (like, say, intellectual-property capitalism) won't work very well.
I think it doesn't fit, but for a different reason. Communism was considered scientifically superior by its proponents. Those who disagreed with it were often labeled luddites and anti-science. Communism absolutely was considered a scientifically provable method of managing societies.
But that's not the reason it shouldn't be grouped with the others. The fact that the others only resulted in a few hundred deaths while communism resulted in hundreds of millions. People still die today from the after effects of communism's heyday, killing more people than anything ever before it besides old age.
>killing more people than anything ever before it besides old age.
Wow talk about hyperbole. Well I guess that's true if you discount malaria, bubonic plague, typhus, AIDS, dozens other diseases, religion, nationalism, fascism, european colonialism...
To put communism in perspective, it killed as many people as were alive in 1 C.E. Or roughly 15% of the population at the time the cultural revolution ended. This is also roughly the number who died from Malaria in the 20th century.
Again, it's an irrelevant comparison from which you can draw no conclusions. If you want to be honest, at least compare with the number of people killed by European colonialism, or US foreign interference, etc.
Of course communism can probably never be implemented successfully, as long as humans are involved, and certainly not on a national scale.
For a small commune, or village scale, perhaps. Perhaps also once technology has advanced far enough for humans to cede leadership to a benevolent AI. Then the humans can be equal, deferring to the AI?
Some are virtually entirely based on trade: Singapore. Hong Kong (as an autonomous region of China), etc.
But the comparison was more one of size and scale of operations.
WalMart has an annual income of $482 billion.[1]
That's more than the annual GDP of Poland, as measured by the World Bank, the 25th largest economy in the world, and of Belgium, the Philippines, Thailand, Norway, Iran, Austria, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, South Africa, Hong Kong, Malaysia, ... and 153 other countries (163 total) in the world.[2]
It carries nearly a third of a million distinct products -- 291,000 unique SKUs across all channels, some 100k per store.
It employs 2.2 million people.[4] That's more than Macedonia (#143), but might better be considered as
It has 11,620 stores worldwide. Each is comparable to the business district of a small town, and in many cases is.[5] Wikipedia only lists cities in the US of 100,000 or more population in the United States, there are 304 such.[6] There are a total of 35,000 recognised place names of cities or towns in the US, most quite small.[7]
Of course, that's being a tad unfair to WalMart, perhaps, and the company has all the advantages of modern computers and such which earlier command economies did not have. Clearly, it would be impossible for an early 20th century or earlier command economy to have claimed a significant share of any national economy, let alone the global economy.
Except of course, for the fact that the East India Company which effectively was the corporate state of India, and comprised half the world's trade at the 18th and early 19th centuries.[8] A prime example some Prussian-born economic critic living in England in the 1840s might well have been aware of.
"... might better be considered as" should have been concluded as "the labour force of a nation, usually ~50-60% of the total population, so closer to 3.7 - 4.4 million total.
A firm's revenues are the monies paid it. A nation's GDP is measured largely as money flows, though Adam Smith (and Simon Kuznets, largely) defined it more specifically as "the annual labour and produce of the nation".
So yes, it's not clear to me that a company which is buying at $n and selling at $n+m should be rated on its revenues. But you'll see that number turning up in GDP as I understand it. See:
"Output can be measured in three (theoretically equivalent) ways: by adding up all the money spent each year, by adding up all the money earned each year, or by adding up all the value added each year. Some economies, including Britain, combine all three methods into a single GDP figure, whereas others, like America, produce different statistics for each. (American GDP is estimated via the spending approach; GDI, or gross domestic income, by the income approach.)"
You're asking why isn't it obvious to me that the two metrics can be meaningfully compared? If I could answer that, I would know whether or not they could be meaningfully compared.
Your post doesn't convince me. Whether that's because I don't know enough to follow the argument, or because the argument doesn't follow, I couldn't say.
I will say that, as I understand it, GDP depends a lot (mostly?) upon things being bought and sold within a country, while a firm's revenues mostly come from sources outside the firm.
No, I'm asking what your reasons for thinking corporate income and GDP aren't equivalent concepts, because I'd like to see and understand your thinking.
As I'd hoped my comment above made somewhat evident, my thinking can go either way on the concept. Your insights might give me a nudge one way or the other.
My quoting the accepted answer doesn't mean I agree with it.
The interrnal production vs. passthrough disttinction has merits. Though what of a mabufacturing company, say, of automobiles of computers?
> Has never actually been implemented with success due to flaws in human nature
The flaw is in Communism, not human nature.
The very system you claim could theoretically work - given enough technological development - is fully incapable of ever producing that technology to begin with. That's just another excuse in over a century of endless excuses for why command economies fail and fail so dramatically. That specific excuse regarding technology has existed at least since the 1960s. Fortunately, human nature will always thwart command economies.
They have a point, if you can remove the humans from the decision making loop, communism would actually probably work. But I don't think its possible to actually remove the humans.
The very system you claim could theoretically work - given enough technological development - is fully incapable of ever producing that technology to begin with."
If you look at how new technology develops, you'll see a lot of what goes into it is fundamental research carried out without an immediate profit motive. Science progresses through the open sharing of knowledge, take that away and the technologies we'd be left with would be far less advanced.
> "Fortunately, human nature will always thwart command economies."
It is a commonly held misconception that communist societies are dictatorships. A dictatorship is as far from a communist society as you can get. What about those countries under dictators that claim to be communist? I'll give you a hint, they're not.
If you want to know what a communist society looks like...
True communism has a lot more in common with anarchism than the societies that got given the communist label in the 20th century. There are different schools of anarchism, but if you'd like to read more about it, I'd recommend starting with Proudhon...
Last time Luddites mentioned here someone posted a link to read more about them. I can't find it right now but do yourself a favor and look it up. Luddites were a sorts of early workers movement, but we tend to hear mostly the prevailing side's caricature of them. In reality they didn't rebel against mechanization, they were skilled in it.
I suspect you are making the same point I alluded to. They read the situation correctly, further mechanization of textile production was going to destroy their livelihoods and families economic positions, by removing the leverage of the necessity of skilled labor. What use to them that it also generated economic growth they would not take part in, nor would their children?
> This is a pretty sanctimonious article, again attempting to push the agenda that all new technology is good technology, and all resistors are luddites.
Agreed. This is not the best way to argue for acceptance of new tech. I believe it would have the opposite effect.
Innovators should consider themselves teachers. The more unexpected the tech, the more the public will need to be taught. And, open discussion is part of teaching. Teachers can learn too.
>> Uber offers a prime case study. The ride-sharing service exploded in popularity and rapidly expanded to cities around the world, sparking an outcry from taxicab commissions the world over. In most cases, the government’s response was slow and reactionary. “That’s because they think about [innovation] in a slow and linear way. That’s how it’s been in the past; that’s not the case anymore,”
I disagree the government response was reactionary. Constituents are losing their livelihoods. They went to the government and complained. It is understandable that the government would react on their behalf and that the unrolling of some tech would be more gradual. It is the job of the government to represent the people. If they don't do that they are voted out.
To use the example in the article: fridges used to kill people when the refrigerant leaked out. There were fifteen deaths in Chicago in 1929[1,2], so it adds up over multiple years in multiple cities.
The article is (smugly) passing judgement on yesterday's acceptance of technology, forgetting that we are looking though the lens of 80 years of development and safety improvements.
> Here are some counter-cases for you all: 1. 1920's era radiation craze. Water energizers, xray shoe fitting etc. 2. Communism 3. Airships
#2 depends very much on what you mean by "Communism". If you mean "Marx's prediction of what would naturally evolve to replace capitalism [0], and what flaws in capitalism would produce the discontents that would provoke that change", then so far it hasn't been particularly wrong, though the developed world has only, so far, progressed in that direction so far as a system which implements a limited form of socialism over a property-rights system which follows that of capitalism in broad outlines, with key exceptions with major effects.
If you mean the program that Marx and various others advocated as the best means to facilitate and realize that transition, making it immediately real (or at least, transitioning fully to its socialist phase) in his time, well, while people advocated for that, the program was never adopted in any of the states where it was advocated, so it can hardly be called a "technology" (to the extent that it was a kind of social technology) that failed, so much as one that no one ever bothered to give a trial to.
If, instead of either of those, you mean the radical rejection of many of the key principles (including both in preconditions and mechanisms) of Marx's Communism represented by Leninist vanguardism and its various derivatives (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.), yeah, that failed rather spectacularly.
[0] the "capitalism" for which the term was coined, the economic system of much of the developed world in the 19th Century, which is very different from the system which exists now that sometimes is called "capitalism".
> Imagine a world where you could say "Communism is bad" with the same impunity as you can say "Naziism is bad"...
I can imagine a world where "Communism", like "Naziism", was a label for a single system of government implemented by a single group of people in one time and place in history, with no theoretical model (and prior practical advocacy) that shared the same name but had substantial differences.
OTOH, that world is very much different from the real world, so when one wants to criticize one of the things called Communism, one needs to be careful in identifying which it is, since there are multiple of them, and they have different traits.
What if you believe the tautological kernel at the core of Marxism is what causes communism ("as implemented") to always run off the rails, and become an oppressive authoritarian state?
What I see is the root of Communism; "No True Communist" is simple deflection.
No True Scotsman is a good point here; likewise the motte-and-bailey issue mentioned elsewhere in the thread. There might be some baby somewhere in the bathwater, but I'm not really very interested in sifting through 19th-century hermaneutics in order to figure out whether or not it exists.
Either Communism is an unusually badly-designed system, more than usually volatile and likely to implode by accident; or it was built to implode on purpose, using good intentions as cover for a world-historic power grab. There's no way to prove which of these theories is true -- but that says something pretty unflattering right there -- but either way, it's rather horrifying that there are still people out there who go to bat for it, some of whom aren't even on Vladimir Putin's payroll...
> What if you believe the tautological kernel at the core of Marxism is what causes communism ("as implemented") to always run off the rails, and become an oppressive authoritarian state?
What if I believe the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East?
If you mean to provide a reason that I should believe the thing you suggest, perhaps an argument and/or evidence supporting that proposition would be in order.
I marvel at how Lenin (allegedly?) failed to realize that he wasn't implementing Marx, given just how much he studied Marx and how routinely he referred to Marx to justify his policies...
> I marvel at how Lenin (allegedly?) failed to realize that he wasn't implementing Marx
What? Failed to realize? Leninist vanguardism was, viewed optimistically, a deliberate modification of key elements of Marxism to address the fact that Lenin wanted to avoid the mess of actually having to have a mature capitalist society with the features Marx saw the transition from capitalism to communism through socialism requiring, what with Russia not having gotten there yet.
Viewed cynically, it was a modification that allowed using the language of Marxism -- an idea that had quite a bit of appeal internationally at the time -- to implement a centralized authoritarian dictatorship governed by a narrow elite, as well as providing the cover of a superficial theory that provided a veneer of an excuse for how "Marxism" could be applied a country with what was largely, in Marxist economic terms (not traditional political terms), a feudal rather than capitalist system.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim that Lenin's divergences from Marx were unintentional.
I'd always heard that Lenin claimed to be implementing Marxism, but that actual Marxism wasn't what he was implementing; this is the first I've heard it said that he deliberately wasn't implementing Marxism.
Communism is an economic system with flaws and virtues you can discuss and argue about. Nazism is about race supremacy and totalitarianism. So yes, thankfully you can't say "Communism is bad" with the same impunity as you can say "Nazism is bad".
Communism as envisioned by Marx is an economic system, sort of.
Communism as anyone has ever tried to implement it, or has talked about implementing it in pratice, is a system of totalitarian social control masquerading as an economic system.
The only difference between Nazism and Communism in practice has been whether "right genes" are defined by race or by your ancestors' professions and social classes. The totalitarianism is pretty similar, really.
(As a side note, "communism" as practiced in the Soviet Union, the version I'm most familiar with, had quite its share of racism as well, both official and just people on the street.)
The terminological confusion is unfortunate on the one hand and great for motte-and-bailey arguments[1] on the other.
So much revisionism (and bad history) in this whole thread...
No, Stalinism does not represent communism as a whole and Stalin was very controversial even at that time.
"Communism did not work in practice" - by which metric ? The Soviet Union transformed itself into a world superpower from an backward agricultural undeveloped nation in just 40 years while fighting two world wars and losing almost all their male population. That in itself is a pretty amazing feat in itself. Not to take into account the countless inventions we owe to the Soviet Union today, it was a very productive place for scientists.
Ironically, it's the social policy of the Soviet Union which had the most issues since during most of its history, it was a brutal dictatorship sending opponents (and even random people) to Gulags.
Stalinism isn't Communism as a whole, to be sure; but it was Lenin's men who threw prisoners of war into blast furnaces (not on Wikipedia, but I think this was in _The Sword and the Shield_, from the Mitrokhin archive); Lenin who robbed the peasantry at the end of the NEP; and Mao who created the world's largest famine. You can't sacrifice Stalinism to save the rest of actually-existing Communism; Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism (probably, although Trotsky didn't rule for long), Kim Il Sung thought, Enver Hoxha-ism, and all the rest were just as vile. (Castro was less bad, but that hardly means no political prisoners at all, or no torture at all.)
Catch-up industrialization is easy; many societies have done it, dictatorships or not. Staying developed is harder; the USSR, like Argentina and North Korea, first developed and then regressed, which is not a particularly impressive feat. Meanwhile, China's development was stalled for 50 years because their implementation of Communism was more than usually destructive; it wasn't until Deng Xiaopang renounced Maoism and overthrew the Maoist die-hards that China finally began to industrialize.
Nor are impressive feats acceptable when they're built on bones; or was the opium trade justified because of all the money it made for the UK and US?
And the GULAG proper existed until 1961, with forced-labor camps for political prisoners (so, GULAG but on a smaller scale) existing until 1987; likewise, the VChK and its many renamings persisted for the whole history of the USSR, and I think the FSB is descended from them -- although they're evidently much less bad.
An amazing technology with a negative effect that wouldn't be seen till years later when the people buying (or selling) shoes show signs of cancer? Yeah, that scares me. The idea that "It's OK until shown that it's not" leads to hideous down-the-road effects that can't be undone.
The question aaron695 proposed was "Because an amazing technology was misused a little while changing the world it scares you?"
My answer is yes. That doesn't mean I'd have delayed x-rays used by medical professionals, or any of the myriad technologies that did harm when they first came out. I would, however, be worried about them myself, and would want to make it painfully clear to anyone looking into it that the tech's long term effects are unknown. We've been bitten on this repeatedly, and almost every time it's been a trivial use of an eventually useful tech.
Be cautious of this standpoint, technology suffers from a confirmation bias, we tend not to remember the technology that fails, the technology that lowers quality of life, or the technology that kills people.
Here are some counter-cases for you all: 1. 1920's era radiation craze. Water energizers, xray shoe fitting etc. 2. Communism 3. Airships
There's nothing wrong with scrutiny, and nothing wrong with taking your time exploring an idea, dealing with it's repercussions at a manageable rate. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.
For example, we're only just now starting to see countries start to bring the hammer down on companies that push their employees to be contactable 24/7 without paying them to be on call. Mobile phones have been around for how long? The legislative system has inertia, and sometimes it's worth giving it time to catch up.