Misunderstood communism

Nobody gets it

Just humor yourself and do a search on the title of this post: Misunderstood communism. What you will find are mostly defenders of the ideal, trying to explain away its failures; trying to champion the cause.
You can find several communist Substacks with thousands of subscribers who have no idea what they are talking about.

Communism, some say, has never failed because it has never REALLY been tried. I am not going to talk about that as there is no point in arguing with religious fanatics. I am not going to address the “yes, but…” and the “what about the free stuff…” arguments either.

After I left communist Hungary, my greatest frustration was with those who sympathized. With the slightly condescending “you poor victim of totalitarianism….” attitude. The anti-communist West pictured communism in black and white, the Gulags and the propaganda, neither of which had much to do with real life.
In that real life, I had many friends, the summers were beautiful, the sexual revolution was raging just like in the West. We did not have access to all the goods the West produced, but what we were able to get, was appreciated far more than in the West.

The problem with the Western perception of communism is that both sides are using a fundamentally moralizing approach to very pragmatic problems.

• The left sees its lofty goals and grandiose promises while the right looks at its most inhuman excesses.

• The left is pointing to its supposed and nominal social rights while the right bemoans the loss and suppression of individual rights.

• The left is smitten by its cheerful propaganda, the right is appalled by its blatant lies.

The real problems of communism were, of course, in the grey, depressing middle.
In the details that are hardly ever talked about. 

The problems

• In a system of strictly enforced centralized decision making, there can be no healthy economy.

• In a system without a healthy civil society, there can be no morality.

• In a system of compelled conformity, there can be no creativity.

It is important to understand, that these statements are not absolutes. In communist countries, there was (is) a more or less functioning economy, moral behaviour and creativity, but all of it existed DESPITE, not BECAUSE of the system that can only function on the remnants of attitudes, instincts and social conditioning that evolved over thousands of years of civilizational evolution. People living in communist countries are still humans.

Communism/socialism is a paradox that can only exist on the values it aims to replace.

There are two essential works to help you understand the economic aspects of the problem:  

• Mises’: Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth

• And Hayek's Nobel prize lecture on the pretense of knowledge

Mises explains how planning is impossible without market signals, while Hayek explores the pitfalls in the arrogance of the central planners.

In the first post of this series, I made the case for the value of distributed decision making.
The closer you are to the object of the decision, the more you can take into account the details that are needed to make the appropriate ones.
The further away you are from the details, the more of those details you will have to disregard in your decisions.
Communism is the ultimate example of centralized decision-making with a strictly enforced decision making hierarchy. Central planners are so far removed from the details, that it is not possible for them to even know what they are.
The pretense of knowledge is not driven by nefarious intent, but sheer necessity.
Marx called his economic delusions and political phantasies ‘science’.
The moment you buy into the ideology, you have to start treating Marx’s seriously confused ideas as gospel. Every communist had to treat them as such. Since the foundational questions – who will make decisions based on what information - could not be addressed, reality had to be shaped into matching the ideology-based projections. Of course it didn’t work. Ever.

In centrally planned economies there is constant waste on the one hand, shortages on the other;
black-markets and petty corruption, theft of public resources and bribes to get proper services or goods from the shadow economy.

Let me state it again, that all of this corruption was essential for some sort of economic functioning. The communist authorities were naturally blaming all problems on the people for not being in line with the ideology. If we were good communists, everything would be working fine – we were told.

The psychology of responsibility and focus

In the world of communism, you own everything and nothing at the same time. You own a tiny sliver of the conceptual whole, but nothing in particular. You are responsible for a tiny sliver of the conceptual whole, but nothing in particular.
With that paradox comes another: whenever you are interacting with another member of society in an official capacity, you are an actor of the state while in the reverse situation, when you are receiving something, you are charge of the state.

The state was responsible for everything. When you had broken plumbing in your state provided apartment, a state employee came to fix it. The state came to do something for YOU. Whether it was your fault or not, your problem was a nuisance. The plumber fixed it with the least effort necessary. If you offered a tip, or had something else to offer in exchange, he did a good job.

It was a typical situation that when you went into a store or office, you encountered two employees engaged in a conversation. You politely wait for them to notice you. If you interrupt, they will be rude. You are dependent on them and since they have no competition, there is nowhere else to go. You were expected to be happy with whatever you got.

The essence of the interaction is that they are not there for you, but you are there for them. Your presence justifies their existence. They work for the state, not for you. They represent the working class. They have rights. They do not care whether you are or will be satisfied with the work they do.
Not because they are bad people but because this is how the system is set up. This is the behaviour that the system incentivizes. Everything is about the state and its glorious vision of the future and the sacrifices we all have to make to realize it.

The one-dimensional immorality

It was funny to read Herbert Marcuse’s “One dimensional man” in a communist country, realizing that there can be no more serious alienation than what we experienced in communism. Not that I buy into the concept anyway. Communism atomizes individuals. By destroying civil society, it alienates and atomizes the individual. Individualism can only exist in its differences from the immediate social context. Atomization is the dissolution of the individual in a crowd, a class, or ideological group.

In the second volume of Law Legislation Liberty: The Mirage of Social justice Hayek has an excellent explanation of the evolution of morality and the way that leads to laws.

The point that matters for our discussion is that morality emerges in a social-evolutionary context.
The basis of morality is always individual judgement.  
Adherence to an ideology is NOT a form of morality. Obedience, compliance, group-identity do NOT represent morality.
Just as propaganda is NOT truth, virtue-signaling is NOT morality.   
Communism/socialism/fascism replaces individual morality with these collectivist values.

The last, but probably most important point I need to make is this:

Socialism/communism/fascism are not all-or nothing political system. They all exist to some degree around us. Canada has an outright communist health care system. The private-public partnership of the deep state and private enterprises in the US could put Hitler and Mussolini to shame. Censorship in the west is far more powerful today than it ever was in the Soviet Union. Critical theory is the new class struggle.
Education, retirement, healthcare, and welfare are all socialized, with all of the problems of socialized systems. All the manufactured conflicts around us about race, gender, the environment, whatever-denialism, fake news and propaganda are just the prelude to the great reset to the next communist international.

So, trust me, when Klaus says that you will own nothing and you will be happy, that is a half truth:
You may end up owning nothing, but at that point only he and his minions will be happy.

Further reading

A pinch of communism

Attawapiskat kulturni dom

Communism will never die

Why Marxism?

Respectable Marxism

The greatest achievement of Karl Marx

Worthwhile reading (more from Others)

• Friedrich August von Hayek – Prize Lecture - NobelPrize.org

• Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth

References

I Am Commie Scum: Why the Word "Communism" Is so Misunderstood

For Karl Marx, Alienation Was Central to Understanding Capitalism (jacobin.com)

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society: Marcuse, Herbert: 8601404923456: Books - Amazon.ca