On Liberalism, Left Unity, Electoral Politics, and Other things

Some responses to what you've mentioned:

On Left Unity:

The Left Unity thing is not, as you suppose, a drive towards ideological compromise, it is an attempt to confront what has, at least in my country, been one of the greatest problems in socialism over the last century: The majority of socialist activity seems to take the form of socialists arguing with other socialists with very minor gradients in opinions, rather than spreading their message to the public about the necessity abolishing the capitalist MoP. Steinbeck had some interesting quotes on socialist in-fighting. More important that dividing our efforts, in-fighting robs socialists of revolutionary momentum by disheartening party members who grow quickly tired of such dramas. Party members often do not remain enthusiastic when they discover that the majority of their party's time is spent bickering among itself and with other similarly-affiliated parties, especially if they are not blind converts to the exact rigid dogma of their party, and, when it comes down to it, most people will not be.

If you look at countries which had successful socialist revolutions, they have typically had left unity in some form, either stemming from a the sole popularization of a single set of leftist ideals, or from the left unifying for the sake of the revolution. The Bolsheviks would never have taken power without the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, even if they did see the latter two groups exterminated.

On Markets/Central Planning:

Markets suck, but so do planned economies, luckily these are not the only two options, and it is possible for either of these options to suck considerably less than they typically do.

The easiest way to break down this problem is to remove humans from the equation: Bring it to pure math/computation and look at it as a resource allocation problem. Let us, for the moment, think of people as nodes in a vast network (society), and simplify things that fulfill the needs of humans as simple numerical values for which there is some minimum requirement.

Markets see the problem of resource allocation and tackle it with a distributed algorithm, where every node optimizes conditions for itself. This is a fairly common approach to problems with a good deal of information complexity, and allows for a lot more information to be processed. Every individual, in this case, knows their own needs better than anyone else does, and so is tasked with filling them, and through direct interaction between nodes, levels of resources spread themselves out so that most needs are generally met. There is some elegance in that solution, and some beauty, and that is what the enthusiasts of the "free market"/"invisible hand" are worshiping. It is important to understand your ideological opponents... But, of course, there are severe problems with this approach, and they're akin to what you might see in any other computation using a similar approach. Due to circumstances of initial state, differences in implementation, and most importantly the presence of malicious nodes, the greedy approach is going to lead to vast degrees of inequality between nodes, with many nodes being able to just barely achieve their minimum resource requirements... This is shit.

On the other hand, through this lens, central planning is also a sensible computational approach. You take your resources, put them in a common pool, and distribute them as needed. Because you have a very large common pool, you should always have enough to provide when necessary, and because you have a central authority rather than individual greed making decisions you can allocate resources evenly to all individuals. This sees the problem of current and future human needs, and comes up with the idea to have an optimal organization to fulfill them as best as is possible: quite the noble endeavor The problem with this (ignoring the fact that the central authority may not be impartial) is one of information-complexity. It is not possible for a central authority to have as much information about the current and future needs about all of the individual nodes as the nodes themselves do due to the communications bottleneck and the complexities of communicating various types of never-voiced needs that we still seek to fulfill (loneliness, for example, may contribute to one's requirements for goods/services in a way which we don't communicate or quantify well). But, more importantly, it is also not possible for a central authority to calculate how to fulfill the needs of the individual as well as the combined calculations of all of the individuals themselves. No matter how advanced their methodologies, 500 people will never be able to adequately calculate the needs of 1,000,000 people due to the sheer gap in processing ability.

Basically, markets necessarily lead to inequality, but central planning also necessarily leads to shortages.

There are, of course, other solutions here.

You can, for instance, say that each node is responsible not only for itself, but also for all of the surrounding nodes, ensuring that all of those nodes have their apparent needs met, but also that they do not exceed them too greatly. This has all of the advantages of markets, but also allows the inequality to be stripped away. This is the approach that anarchists take, but, of course, the obvious problem is getting all of the individual nodes to switch over. If the majority of the nodes do not obey this set of rules in every region of the network, then it can easily decay.

You can also take the fundamental idea behind central planning, but then remove the actual central planning from the equation. Have your central body, but distribute the planning stage of things to individuals and co-ops, which submit requests to this central authority. Because verifying that a plan is a good one is a much easier task than coming up with your own plan, this removes the majority of the issues from central planning. This is the direction in which Cuba seems to be moving. The main issues with this approach (again, overlooking the potential for a bureaucratic class) are that humans suck at formalizing our plans and communicating them accurately, and that we can mis-represent ourselves for personal gain.

Lastly, I will say that you can also conceivably have the trappings of a market, where there is greedy optimization among individual nodes, but where there is a central authority which watches over the degree of inequality and intervenes before any node starves, or before any node takes too much for itself... These are the socialist market economy people. The problem here is that you get information complexity issues again in determining how to spot injustices accurately, and that you're always going to get the smaller-scale inequalities.

And there are other arrangements I'm not mentioning, of course, but the overall point is that it isn't as simple as central planning = good, markets = bad. Markets do suck, but so does central planning. Just as every market has always had inequality, every central planned economy has had shortages.

  • Not all socialists are Marxists. There's nothing wrong with framing your views around Marxism, but you seem to be coming at things with the notion that socialists should inherently believe
/r/socialism Thread