It would be nice if guaranteeing equality of outcomes could lead to a happier society, but it’s never going to happen.
Communism is generally considered to be a political and economic system which is characterised by common ownership of the means of production and free access to the articles of consumption. It purports to be classless, stateless, and without money.
Common ownership implies a planned economy, for it must exclude private trading and market determination of prices. Without private ownership, there cannot be any private trading, and without private trading there is little role for money. Yet someone must decide what will be produced and how much of it and how it will be distributed.
We should recognise that removal of property ownership from individuals does not abolish property ownership. Ownership of property is the set of legally enforceable rights to use and dispose of the asset. Where the decision making power over the creation and use of an asset is reserved to a central committee then it is proper to say that the central committee now own the asset. If that committee delegate decision-making power over the asset to a regional or local authority, then it is proper to assert that the delegated authority now own the asset.
I take it as a given, that people can and do naturally want different things to each other. Some prefer wine, others prefer water. Some would like to live in a rural area, others prefer the city. Some want a more affluent life and will work hard to achieve it; others prefer to work less and are content to have less as a consequence. Some find pleasure and fulfillment in serving the needs of others, or their family or their comrades, while some seek their own pleasures first.
In a free society, each individual can choose which objectives to prefer, and their individual happiness will be enhanced by their success at achieving their chosen objectives. In this present writing, I make no case about which objectives people ought to prefer, but merely note that their preferred objectives vary enormously.
An inevitable feature of a planned economy is that a central decision making body determines which products will be produced and thus which lifestyles will be consumed. If your personal desires happen to align with the vision of the central planners, then well and good, you can be happy. But for the vast majority of people, the central plan will not align with their personal desires. Not because their desires are intrinsically bad, but just because one size cannot fit all tastes.
The minimalists cannot work less and be content with less. The maximalists cannot work more and receive more. The jobs will be where the planners have decided they ought to be and not where people want to live.
A society in which people cannot choose which objectives to pursue, but which forces people down particular paths will be less happy, as many people are unable to pursue or achieve their preferred objectives. It does not matter whether the motivations of the central planners are for a purported greater good, or merely to preserve the power of the present ruling elite; many of their citizens will be permanently unhappy.
Sadly, the response of historical planned economies to the unhappiness of their citizens has usually been imprisonment, internal exile or deaths in the millions. Those who preferences diverge from the choices of the planners must be labelled reactionary or bourgeois, and be culled, lest the credibility of the planners be tarnished. Rather than meet the desires of their citizens, the aim of the planned economy is to force their citizens to only desire what the planners have chosen.
It is no accident that communist centrally planned economies are always one party states, without meaningful democratic elections. The people cannot be permitted to choose and vote for an alternative to the planned economy, because it is an inescapable feature of the planned economy that the choices of individuals must be suppressed.
Even the mere discussion of possible alternatives to the central plan, or constructive criticism of its successes and failures must also be prohibited and sanctioned. The centrally planned state cannot allow any meeting of minds between those whose ideas might call into the question the decisions of the leadership. No caucus of opposition can be allowed to form, lest the unhappy majority find a position to rally around in defiance of the state leadership. Instead, the populace are are only permitted to repeat the self-serving narratives of the leadership, even as those narratives diverge further and further from observable reality. It no longer matters whether what you say is true; all that matters is whether you support the party line.
Perhaps this lack of choice, that coercion towards the state-sanctioned behaviour will be tolerated if the system produces plenty for the citizens and removes historical imbalances of wealth and power. But does it?
A centrally planned economy, by its very nature, will mask the true value of the resources and products within it. Without a free market to determine value and prices, nobody really knows what anything should cost. Indeed, the planners would prefer money to not exist, so that no one can express a differing valuation for any product. While this may not matter so much within the confines of the planned economy, it becomes problematic as soon as the question of imports and exports arises.
Clearly a communist system cannot be stateless, unless it is already global. The geographical and human scope and authority of the planned economy defines the borders of the communist state, regardless of what the communist planners assert about the existence or non-existence of their state. While such a state may abolish money within its confines, it will need to grapple with the exchange value of goods if it wants to import or export outside the central planning zone.
If the communist state generously subsidises bread for its citizens below the international price of grain, but does not produce enough grain itself, then the communist state has a problem when it wants to import grain to cover the difference. Foreign grain producers, living within a market economy, will not be willing to sell grain below its market value, just to sweeten the position of the communist central planners. Their citizens will just have to put up with less bread.
The export side of the economy will have a similar problem. If the communist state has already determined the price of a product, and what the workers will receive for producing it, there is little incentive for anyone to improve their productivity or innovate for a better product. Elsewhere market economy nations will produce better and/or cheaper versions of the product, and the products of the planned economy will find no buyers in the international markets.
The old Soviet Union and present day North Korea both suffered/suffer from these constraints, and found/find themselves cut off from imports/exports. Concurrently, the market economies continue to innovate and produce goods that other countries want, and can use the revenue from their exports to fund their imports.
The consequence of a planned economy is stagnation. Innovation dies. New technologies cannot be imported (only stolen or copied). The standard of living falls behind that of market economies. In order to avoid envy and discontent among their citizens, the planned economy will therefore find it expedient to forbid foreign news and media, and prevent emigration.
It is exceedingly difficult to present the planned economy as providing “plenty” for the citizens, when everyone can see that non-planned economies have far more “plenty” than they do.
Even the communist claim to remove imbalances of wealth and power becomes tenuous, when the decision making and asset allocation power of the party nomenklatura far outstrips the capabilities of any humble citizen. The President of a communist state is at least as powerful and unassailable as any Tsar or Emperor who went before them.
It is no surprise that both Russia and China retreated from a fully planned economy once it became clear that a planned economy failed to deliver compared to the market economies. North Korea remains as an object lesson.
Russia no longer claims to be a communist country, but curiously China still does. However, this appears to be little more than window dressing now. Private property is permitted and money is in use. Consumer products get purchased rather than allocated. China behaves like a state. So China does not meet any of the criteria for a communist political or economic system. It’s clearly not a democracy or republic either, as all votable alternatives remain suppressed as in Hong Kong (2020). In my view, China is more like an Empire now, where the ruler personally owns all assets, delegating partial control of them to his supporters in return for their unswerving loyalty. As in the latter days of the Roman Empire, the Emperor of the New China continues to rule until he loses the confidence of his highest lieutenants, whereupon he is replaced in a palace coup.
RJ7: Dec 2024