Communism works

last edited 2024-11-05

Preface: I've always thought communism got too much hate in non-communist circles, especially since everyone but a pure libertarian supports nonconsensual redistribution of wealth in *some* situations. I embrace the *legitimacy* of private property, but the pragmatic comparison between communes and markets is a lot less clear than market advocates believe.

Incentives

A popular pro-market argument:

In a free market, the way to get rich is to provide something others want.

This is true, but there's a corollary: if you benefit from solving others' problems, then you also benefit from them having the problem in the first place. So markets incentivize causing the problem your business solves, providing only temporary solutions that make people dependent on your service, and discourages doing anything that would help them for free (like a positive externality) because that deprives you of the opportunity to profit from it. Communism eliminates all of these incentives.

Freeloading

As another way of looking at the incentive argument, market advocates will (rightly) argue that communism allows people to live on the work of others without producing any value themselves. But there are two factors being overlooked here that would greatly mitigate the problem.

First, reputation. Reputation is a powerful force that even market advocates often appeal to when talking about how bad business practices are discouraged; it also applies in communes. Even if you're entitled to food and other necessities without working, social ostracism is powerful, and even without outright ostracism, our emotional need for peer approval is powerful.

Second, producing value for others isn't always a sacrifice. I'm a programmer and have put many hours into contributing to free software projects for no payment. I do it for emotional reasons; I derive pride from contributing even outside of other people seeing it. These forces are very powerful, and they would mitigate freeloading in a commune. I'd actually do *more* of this if I didn't have to do write shitty software under the direction of a dipshit boss for a living!

Of course, the work-is-enjoyable argument doesn't apply equally to all occupations. I doubt someone who works in construction finds their work as enjoyable as I find mine. And this also doesn't help coordinate work where it's most needed. But it does mitigate the problem, and people who hate communism tend to overlook it and argue as if these factors only apply in market societies.

Concentration of power

Market advocates bend over backward trying to defend markets from the monopoly criticism. Many libertarians will go as far as to argue that monopolies *can't* happen in a free market. Although they're right that most monopolies and oligopolies are created by government licensing and favoritism (and that government itself is a monopoly), and there are lots of good arguments to make that monopoly abuse is not a *fatal* problem with markets, it seems obvious that markets do tend toward concentration of power *to some extent*, since economic power facilitates its own growth and things like vendor lock-in exist. Monopolies *can* form in a free society, and they *can* abuse their power, especially by acting in secrecy. Communes don't have this problem.

Property enforcement difficulty/cost

The severity of this issue depends on your beliefs about the nature of property rights. If you share mine, particularly the defense of royalties and the value-splitting stance on natural resources, well, there's a problem: as sound as those might be axiologically, they're basically impossible to enforce because they depend on quantifying subjective experience and intellectual property is trying to fight against the nature of physical reality. Note that having unenforceable property is worse than abolishing property in this way: unenforceable property allows your income to be lost; in a commune, your income is effectively fixed.

An attempt at a complete formulation of the ethics of ownership

Of course, this is a much lesser issue if you're a typical libertarian who accepts homesteading and rejects intellectual property altogether. But even then, if you look around you can see what I consider an absurd amount of resources being spent on protecting property rights.

For example, the checkouts at stores. I see a whole line of people whose *jobs* is just to make sure other people are paying for their food. From a "total/average wealth of society" perspective, those jobs provide no value. And of course it takes time out of everyone else's day, the resources to build the machines. The toll gates on public transportation (even though that's not private property, it would work the same way if it were), etc. These things are all *negative sum*: they're *spending resources* just to prevent it from changing hands in the wrong ways. Communism would eliminate this inefficiency!

Luck

Finally, market advocates are always on about how enterpreneurs are brilliant and *deserve* to be rewarded for their wise leadership; how the market rewards good decisions and punishes bad decisions. But this ignores how much *luck* is involved. Even if you assume there's a real difference between luck and good amoral decisions (I actually think that's a very dubious distinction), a lot of market success is luck. The environment you're born into is a huge factor. Even after that, you never have all the information relevant to your decision, so it's wrong to characterize markets as pure meritocracies.

Accordingly, in a market society you can lose everything and be plunged into debt without making any bad decisions. And things like mutual aid societies can mitigate this, but then those aren't really a market construct so much as a compromise with communism.

Disability

An especially important application of this is disabled people. There are many people that, through no fault of their own, have extremely limited or no ability to be productive in the way that market advocates imagine everyone should. Able people freeloading is a downside, but the ability to freeload is crucial for this reason.

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So to recap: markets are kinda cool, but it's not obvious that they're actually better than communism, and I for one want to try communism :)