And I’m over “medicine” that pays no heed to biology nor the self organizing complexity of life and healing
Likewise over idiot idealism and childish political ideologies that pay no heed to anthropology and propose a utopia in violation of the laws of physics
Likely the most savage, take no prisoners but to exquisitely torture them to death tribal groups were high oxytocin. Something of a cycle between insider intimacy, dependency, matriarchy and hugs in a balancing act with aggression and horrendous violence. Just a phase in (arrested) development.
Communism is toddler tyranny pushing for a return to the teat and inevitably achieves universal simultaneity of insider/outsider violence and collapse of productivity.
Analogous to the heat death theory of the universe, when everything and everyone are finally made equal all transmission and exchange cease in absence of polarity
Meh. You can use the same sort of rhetoric against any sort of social or political organisation, really. Capitalist societies did very well on the genocidal, imperialist, colonial part thank you very much (and still do, just watch the news for a few minutes), and I didn't even mentioned environmental and climate collapse.
Simplistic, ultra-individualistic anthropology doesn't cut it. The fact is that there isn't one true social organisation that solves all problems for all societies under all material conditions. Who could have guessed? Also, you seem to believe the naive idea that our "free will" is what makes society what it is, when we are as much the products of our society.
It's pretty weird that you rely upon some sort of material determinations (atavism), while forgetting entirely some others. I think that your belief in the power of individual will and dislike of Communism is itself mostly socially determined, and very "local" (tightly coupled to your modern Anglo-Saxon capitalist society upbringing).
relativism and whataboutery doesn’t, under any guise, reduce the simplistic fact that every known attempt at ‘socialism’ in whatever form have one thing in common : tyranny, despotism, war-fixation, lawlessness, cronyism, death-cultism and implosion - all of which are structural features that are not, by design, replicated in most other systems. The current paradigm of corporatocracy is not much different and is leading us down the same path.
The government of human beings is about power. Communism/socialism is promising presents to obtain power. The Greeks were aware of such methods over two millennia ago and reasoned that the antidote to tyranny is democracy: the People must be able to regularly eject their governments. The Greek solution is still the only workable way forward.
Democracy and tyranny are not mutually exclusive either to capitalism or socialism. A people could democratically vote for socialism, organise buying out land and productive capital and set it all as common, shared property.
Notice that in most capitalist systems, the working environment is a tyranny, not a democracy, unless you're working in a coop.
I don't really understand what you mean with "socialism is promising presents" though.
I agree, "Democracy and tyranny are not mutually exclusive either to capitalism or socialism.". However, to link back to the Article, Democracy and communism are mutually exclusive.
Both socialists and communists promise presents such as extra benefits, pensions, guaranteed employment, social security etc. as a means of gaining support. In practice these are seldom delivered and of lower quality than, say, a (small 'c') conservative government might provide.
If folk call themselves ‘Communist’ they generally are. Same with folk calling themselves ‘socialists’. (Yes, including National Socialists.) The term ‘primitive communism’ comes from Marx.
Imperialism is as old as states, it has nothing inherently to do with commerce, except the wish to tax or seize it. ‘Capitalism’ is a term I am very wary of, as it used so profligately to conflate different phenomena together, notably including state activity of types we observe in societies not deemed to be ‘capitalist’. Meanwhile, strikingly new achievements get underplayed or misrepresented.
One of the truly remarkable things about openly Communist regimes is that they actively killed and starved their own citizens at scale, including in the millions, in peacetime. Their only rival in deliberate mass murder at scale—the Nazis—mass killed other people’s citizens outside their own territory during wartime.
Hum we're much too far away to start a constructive discussion here as I'm afraid we won't agree on anything, really, starting with "Nazis were socialists" (no they absolutely weren't at all).
Actually I agree with you that plundering doesn't explain Western wealth, though the true reasons are, of course, material; from geography (see Ian Morris' "Why the West rules for now"), anthropological structures (see Emmanuel Todd's "The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social Systems"), and most importantly, energy availability (see Vaclav Smil's works, etc).
Though Mussolini was a socialist, his key insight was that he didn’t have to expropriate the economy’s “commanding heights” to control them. Instead, he effectively expropriated their owners - gaining control of both their expertise and their property.
Marx conveniently left mercantilism - the link between feudalism and capitalism - out of his social hierarchy. By conflating the two, he was able to lay its sins - imperialism, colonialism, and government-backed monopoly - at capitalism’s doorstep.
Unfortunately, as Trump has so recently demonstrated, mercantilism has never been fully eradicated.
Indeed. Let's not forget which recent president is the one trying to acquire the means of production. That goes past Mussolinean fascism, where private enterprise is completely subordinated to the State, to outright socialism.
Ironic statement re Marx since communist and mercantilist understandings of economics share the exact same flaw: they treat it as a zero sum game, and the attempts to impose both systems created massive failures.
OK, I am now going to put in a sort of good word for mercantilism. If you wanted to gain the benefits of monetising your economy—something which greatly reduces transaction friction, especially for the taxing-and-spending ruler—in a time when silver was the main monetary metal, then you had to import silver, which meant running a persistent trade surplus.
As is so often the case, the theorising about it was bunk. But the underlying preference for silver inflows over silver outflows was far from silly. As both David Hume and Adam Smith noted.
On the other hand, if the Chinese and other folk are going to sell Americans all sorts of useful stuff in return for special paper with pictures of dead US Presidents, that sounds like a pretty good deal for Americans. (It is a little less of a good deal if it economically hollows out the US in a way that reduces social and economic resilience. Economic efficiency is not everything.)
That the critiques of mercantilist theorising of the Salamanca School came from within a silver-exporting Empire was not, I think, entirely coincidental.
But it was Hume who pointed out that it just didn’t work. As silver flowed into a country, prices rose. That made foreign goods more attractive than domestic ones, so silver flowed back out.
It depended on your economy. It worked fine for China for centuries. Also Muscovy. Once a certain density of trade relative to domestic production was reached, and your economy became highly monetised, it changed things. But if who produced what was fairly stable, and there was a lot of local demand for silver to “soak up” via monetisation proceeding, not so much.
Mercantilist policies - conquest, colonialism, government-granted monopolies, protectionist policies, heavy regulation of imports and exports - make well-connected individuals wealthy at the expense of the rest of a nation’s citizens.
This is quite a negative definition, listing a whole list of things that TDS-afflicted blame Trump for supposedly perpetuating. I see what is being implemented as a tremendous positive compared to the Biden/Harris administration and luckily we do not have Harris/Tampon administration.
Ending with "make well-connected individuals wealthy at the expense of the rest of a nation’s citizens." Here is the rub - progressives excel in graft that does exactly that, unproductively. And the mercantilism: if the productive are in power doing the opposite of what you claim - building productive businesses and benefiting both society and themselves, dismantling the Green New Scam, promoting nuclear fusion and fission power, realigning tariffs so as to reindustrialize the country - and yes, supporting the dollar including the petro-dollar as world exchange currency, valiantly trying to dismantle DEI - and the list goes on - I see it as a great positive. After all, if mercantilist self-interest aligns with the prosperity of their country - and is also tied to personal success - it is infinitely better than the alternative of the previous administration and of what is happening in the bureaucratically decadent EU.
I have a comment in the latest Lorenzo's post that may also expand on this point, if indirectly.
Coal had existed for millions of years. It does not explain the Great Enrichment, which was, at bottom, a commercialised discovery process. Neither do family structures that had existed for centuries, etc.
There are two longstanding stupid arguments about Hitler. One is “he was not a socialist”. He absolutely was. He said he was, he argued on socialist grounds, he did socialist things and intended to do more after victory. The idea that he was not a socialist rests on trying to make ‘socialism’ a hurrah word. Also ridiculous: Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Mengistu etc were all socialists. There is no moral kudos in being a socialist. Direction-of-history definitions of socialism are even sillier.
The second stupid argument is “Hitler was not right wing”. Of course he was, he invoked all sorts of right-wing ideas and tropes. That is why, for example, emigre White Russians and various folks traumatised by revolutionary violence were significant funding sources for the NSDAP. This silly argument requires socialism to be a purely left-wing phenomenon, which it is not.
There is now a new stupid argument. “Weimar problems require Weimar solutions”. How stupid does one have to be to see a response that left Germany flattened, millions of dead, occupied and divided among four Powers while losing 20% of its territory as “a solution”?
Actually socialism (and communism) are entirely distinct from "left" and "right". Historically in 19th century France socialists and the left were enemies until the Dreyfus affair. They were enemies in 1917 Russia, and in 1919 Germany, too.
If by "Hitler was a socialist" you mean that the state managed the economy, well, that was also the case in 1914 France, because planned war economy is a thing, and indeed Lenin explained that the war economy of WWI France was his main inspiration for a state-controlled economy. Does that mean that WWI France was socialist, or Nazi Germany, or fascist Italy? Of course not, because socialism implies a (generally forced) redistribution of the ownership of capital. What occurred with Nazis and fascists was a state intervention in the economy, with a general agreement between the state and the capitalists (see the famous meeting of Goering and Hitler and the main industrialists in 1933, corporate statism in Italy, etc).
On the other hand, a socialist country such as Yugoslavia economy was structured through cooperatives, and was not really a state-commanded economy. The generalised cooperative system created its own, distinct problems like the lack of investment, but still, my point holds : Socialism =/= state-controlled economy.
I won't comment on energy because I didn't read your article yet, and this comment is already getting too long to be easily manageable.
I've read your interesting article, thanks. It seems to me that we agree on energy though, you wrote "The key modern economic take-off was the Energy Take-off". And I notice that someone had already commented on family structures among the lesser-known forces playing a role in political and economic development :)
Primogeniture is only one parameter of a family system. To go rapidly through Todd's theory, there are three main systems with variants : nuclear family (with and without primogeniture variants), stem family, and communitarian (with and without cousin-first marriage) family. Religion also plays a role. The diffusion of communism is strongly correlated to communitarian family systems (Russia, China, Vietnam, southern India, etc). Various forms of other economic and political regimes are quite strongly correlated with different family systems, for instance central France being nuclear family without primogeniture makes equality a much more important value than in England (nuclear with primogeniture). Countries / regions with stem families tend to fell more often for authoritarianism, etc.
The author is a resentful marxist but he makes rather good points about current system also going to hell with thermodynamic dividend dwindling. It's full of cynical humour and confusing neologisms. Anyway... He set out to find the real socialism and came up with 10 features of that system. He went on to score a few systems and the highest score turned out to be national socialism. I laughed out loud.
Thermodynamic limits of growth is recurrent problem (the Seneca effect, etc). There are lots of resources in many languages (though the problem is generally ignored in USA and Australia, the two most "limitless" countries). Google doesn't want to translate from Polish for some reason, but Firefox did what it could, I'll see if I understand :)
edit : interesting, though difficult to read... Unfortunately the main table is a picture therefore not translated (I can get some words, but not enough).
Life is actively anti-entropic. Hence decay sets in so quickly after death. I presume he has the standard Marxist problem of not taking discovery seriously. “Thermodynamic divided dwindling” is one way of expressing Malthusian constraints, which operate at given levels of technology. Hence the importance of discovery.
As I said, socialism implies "socialisation of means of production" in Marxist parlance. Not mere state intervention in the economy. The Nazis may have paid some lip service to a supposed "nationalisation" of big industry at some point, but it never happened. Neither any "fair sharing" of profits with workers or whatever. OTOH trade unions were forbidden, etc.
There were historically two main ways to socialism/communism : nationalisation of companies (control and property go to the state) and cooperatives (control and property go to the people working in the company). USSR and its satellites went mostly the state control way, with some coops sprinkled over (kolkhoz); Yugoslavia went mostly the coop way, with some state control sprinkled over.
Socialism doesn't even imply a single party state. China wasn't a single-party state until 1957.
I agree with the idea of cooperatives where they work. I think that legislating for all industry to be cooperative would create a low functioning economy. It should be tried so we can test whether it ends in tyranny :)
I spent some time in the Balkans and was not impressed by anything commercial except the low cost of the Adriatic hotels.
It has been tried in Yugoslavia and it didn't work very well, but it didn't utterly fail either. Then it's always complicated sorting out what among all of Yugoslavia's problems (ethnic tensions, bad relationship with the rest of Europe but also USSR, etc) was playing a role in its economic woes. Branko Milanovic talked about the subject recently, apparently there was a large economic literature in the country which has been mostly ignored out of Yugoslavia but seems to be interesting, discussing this matter of a "market socialism" rooted in coops.
I have really happy memories of Yugoslavia in the 70s. As the country was the link between the two countries with the best ice cream in the world (Italy and Greece) we had great hope on this matter, unfortunately Yugoslav ice cream was awful :D -- probably due to lack of available products such as proper cocoa and vanilla.
Marx was wrong about almost everything and I don’t accept Marxist terminology. Hitler was a tactical opportunist but if you read (or listen) to Mein Kampf his reasoning is very socialist, in power they did some nationalisation (e.g. Herman Goring works) and he is quite clear in the Table Talk that he intends to do more after victory. I regard “not a real socialist” as an instance of “no true Scotsman”.
Socialism is an economic system. It has political implications depending on how much control you need to implement it—the faster and the more completely, the more control.
Technically, the PRC has never been a single-Party state in that there have always been other political Parties in its “Parliament”. But by every serious measure it is a Party-State and has been since 1949.
Communism has deep human appeal- And will as long as we have professional educators playing Socrates, Bin Laden, Marx, Nietzsche, Abimael Guzman etc with callow young minds.
Any school is a barracks waiting to march, from the very groves of Academe to now.
Primitive peoples still formed hierarchies. Its programmed into us. Hierarchies allow groups of us to be greater than the sum of our parts. Communism does not allow for this, except for a dictator at the top. Capitalism (ideally) creates a complex, flowing hierarchy. Its not really that way today because of crony capitalism and massive inequality, but thats another subject.
Excellent post. It is very important to understand the appeal of collectivist forms of government. Why, in the face of so much evidence of failure and harm are so many people drawn to collectivism? Moths to a flame. I think that there is a romanticized warmth in their imaginations of what centralized government controlled societies would be like. And there are other motivations: Envy. Vanity. Sloth.
Tax the rich. Income inequality. Why does someone need so much money? These Leftist chants have nothing to do with care or compassion for others. They are nothing but envy.
Look at how many people promote themselves for their supposed compassion and moral superiority through their attacks on Western values and free market capitalism. These are self-serving behaviors. Look at me. Vanity.
Free healthcare. Free housing. The government should take care of me. The government is responsible. Little to no personal responsibility. Sloth.
Collectivism is appealing because it taps our baser instincts.
We all just want to live happily ever after together. We know that this is how we were meant to live as originally created by God. But we abandoned God and His ways; we can't have heaven without God. Men are not angels, and angels do not rule.
This is one of the few times I disagree with Helen's or Lorenzo's analyses. Although I don't challenge the underlying anthropological reasoning. Human group psychology is indeed rooted in clan/tribe dynamics and that is precisely why loss of status is such a powerful driver. This is the core reason income inequality is so devastating to social cohesion.
The best way to preclude the public electing Mamdanis & Sanderses is to make sure capitalist/liberalism keeps delivering what these "democratic socialists" promise. The only reason they have accumulated a mandate is precisely because this stopped being the case.
The major (possibly only) benefit of Communism was the threat it posed to the established power elites. It was this threat that pushed them to make concessions and re-engineer the prior robber baron economic order into the social democracy that the masses got to enjoy for 3 decades and a bit. Analogous to a dilute vaccine you take to prevent the full disease. That vaccine is worth keeping inside the political toolkit notwithstanding the past plagues that the disease caused.
As I have noted in a couple of places, the collapse of the Soviet Union removed an existential threat, so Western elites became much less concerned with alienating their working classes.
I was interested in Communism’s enduring appeal. Fluctuations in its actual appeal have much more contingent causes. Such as, for instance, alienating a lot of young people.
Firstly and most significantly, Communism/variants appeal to sense of fairness buried inside our tribal brainstem. Our psychology is still clan/tribal/Dunbar-ish despite living in mass societies. Primitive psychology reacts with a sense of unfairness to seeing anyone who has "more" irrespective of whatever mechanisms created that disparity. Especially a peer/member of the same tribe.
Secondly it explains a complex system (economics) in an apparently simple way - that economic inequality is simply the result of an unjust distribution.
Thirdly, it applies an equally simple solution to it - re-distribution using state force.
Fourthly, is is counter-cultural. It attracts anyone who has a grievance or even just wants to be cool (eg Sartrians in the 50s, Baader-Meinhofites in the 70s). This is why marxisms are so good at coopting other movements like feminism.
I disagree with you, in that I believed Helen is spot in this instance (see my comment). That said, as a Libertarian/ Conservative, I also agree with you, re the left.
Communism and Socialism (and all forms of Collectivism, including Fascism) appeal to something in the lizard brain. This explains not only the persistence of these ideologies but why it is so hard to teach proper/correct economics to people - good economics is counterintuitive. Hence why libertarianism isn't that popular in the vast majority of electoral democracies.
Dostoyevsky, speaking through the Underground Man, discusses the human side of socialism by noting forcefully that men are violently opposed to becoming piano keys and will fight any tendency to instrumentalize them vigorously and will resist compliance with any plan, state or regime which attempts to make them into a machine for someone else to direct.
This is, simply, why socialism starts as a promised warm embrace and ends at the edge of a pit with a rifle in your back.
A lot of this is because it actually works; we run our families like this. Socialism also works at the larger family/church level. The problem is that it doesn't scale. The communal aspect of a close family cannot scale to a national level. But it DOES work, and it works at the most intimate level that appeals to us. That's why I push back against the false binaries in politics and claim to be an Anarchist, Socialist, Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian all at the same time, just at the right level. More thoughts on that here: https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/quantum-superposition-and-politics
wiresouth.com/s3qw0
I believe in civilization
And I’m over “medicine” that pays no heed to biology nor the self organizing complexity of life and healing
Likewise over idiot idealism and childish political ideologies that pay no heed to anthropology and propose a utopia in violation of the laws of physics
Likely the most savage, take no prisoners but to exquisitely torture them to death tribal groups were high oxytocin. Something of a cycle between insider intimacy, dependency, matriarchy and hugs in a balancing act with aggression and horrendous violence. Just a phase in (arrested) development.
Communism is toddler tyranny pushing for a return to the teat and inevitably achieves universal simultaneity of insider/outsider violence and collapse of productivity.
Analogous to the heat death theory of the universe, when everything and everyone are finally made equal all transmission and exchange cease in absence of polarity
The callous embrace of unaccountable collectivism tends to become cooler as the bodies stack up.
FEAR. Fear works. Fear is good.
Fear is just that special spice added to the commie dish.
Fear of death is all that checks predators including communists
And “Gun Control” is at the top of the To Do list.
Means but potential
Meh. You can use the same sort of rhetoric against any sort of social or political organisation, really. Capitalist societies did very well on the genocidal, imperialist, colonial part thank you very much (and still do, just watch the news for a few minutes), and I didn't even mentioned environmental and climate collapse.
Simplistic, ultra-individualistic anthropology doesn't cut it. The fact is that there isn't one true social organisation that solves all problems for all societies under all material conditions. Who could have guessed? Also, you seem to believe the naive idea that our "free will" is what makes society what it is, when we are as much the products of our society.
It's pretty weird that you rely upon some sort of material determinations (atavism), while forgetting entirely some others. I think that your belief in the power of individual will and dislike of Communism is itself mostly socially determined, and very "local" (tightly coupled to your modern Anglo-Saxon capitalist society upbringing).
relativism and whataboutery doesn’t, under any guise, reduce the simplistic fact that every known attempt at ‘socialism’ in whatever form have one thing in common : tyranny, despotism, war-fixation, lawlessness, cronyism, death-cultism and implosion - all of which are structural features that are not, by design, replicated in most other systems. The current paradigm of corporatocracy is not much different and is leading us down the same path.
Of course as long as you choose to label whatever system displeases you as "socialism", that's a pretty easy win :)
superficiality appears to be a speciality
The government of human beings is about power. Communism/socialism is promising presents to obtain power. The Greeks were aware of such methods over two millennia ago and reasoned that the antidote to tyranny is democracy: the People must be able to regularly eject their governments. The Greek solution is still the only workable way forward.
Democracy and tyranny are not mutually exclusive either to capitalism or socialism. A people could democratically vote for socialism, organise buying out land and productive capital and set it all as common, shared property.
Notice that in most capitalist systems, the working environment is a tyranny, not a democracy, unless you're working in a coop.
I don't really understand what you mean with "socialism is promising presents" though.
I agree, "Democracy and tyranny are not mutually exclusive either to capitalism or socialism.". However, to link back to the Article, Democracy and communism are mutually exclusive.
Both socialists and communists promise presents such as extra benefits, pensions, guaranteed employment, social security etc. as a means of gaining support. In practice these are seldom delivered and of lower quality than, say, a (small 'c') conservative government might provide.
Well, capitalism promises that everyone can become rich, which is obviously untrue, so that's not much of a difference :)
If folk call themselves ‘Communist’ they generally are. Same with folk calling themselves ‘socialists’. (Yes, including National Socialists.) The term ‘primitive communism’ comes from Marx.
Imperialism is as old as states, it has nothing inherently to do with commerce, except the wish to tax or seize it. ‘Capitalism’ is a term I am very wary of, as it used so profligately to conflate different phenomena together, notably including state activity of types we observe in societies not deemed to be ‘capitalist’. Meanwhile, strikingly new achievements get underplayed or misrepresented.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/the-plunder-lie-about-western-wealth
One of the truly remarkable things about openly Communist regimes is that they actively killed and starved their own citizens at scale, including in the millions, in peacetime. Their only rival in deliberate mass murder at scale—the Nazis—mass killed other people’s citizens outside their own territory during wartime.
Hum we're much too far away to start a constructive discussion here as I'm afraid we won't agree on anything, really, starting with "Nazis were socialists" (no they absolutely weren't at all).
Actually I agree with you that plundering doesn't explain Western wealth, though the true reasons are, of course, material; from geography (see Ian Morris' "Why the West rules for now"), anthropological structures (see Emmanuel Todd's "The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social Systems"), and most importantly, energy availability (see Vaclav Smil's works, etc).
Though Mussolini was a socialist, his key insight was that he didn’t have to expropriate the economy’s “commanding heights” to control them. Instead, he effectively expropriated their owners - gaining control of both their expertise and their property.
Marx conveniently left mercantilism - the link between feudalism and capitalism - out of his social hierarchy. By conflating the two, he was able to lay its sins - imperialism, colonialism, and government-backed monopoly - at capitalism’s doorstep.
Unfortunately, as Trump has so recently demonstrated, mercantilism has never been fully eradicated.
Indeed. Let's not forget which recent president is the one trying to acquire the means of production. That goes past Mussolinean fascism, where private enterprise is completely subordinated to the State, to outright socialism.
Ironic statement re Marx since communist and mercantilist understandings of economics share the exact same flaw: they treat it as a zero sum game, and the attempts to impose both systems created massive failures.
OK, I am now going to put in a sort of good word for mercantilism. If you wanted to gain the benefits of monetising your economy—something which greatly reduces transaction friction, especially for the taxing-and-spending ruler—in a time when silver was the main monetary metal, then you had to import silver, which meant running a persistent trade surplus.
As is so often the case, the theorising about it was bunk. But the underlying preference for silver inflows over silver outflows was far from silly. As both David Hume and Adam Smith noted.
On the other hand, if the Chinese and other folk are going to sell Americans all sorts of useful stuff in return for special paper with pictures of dead US Presidents, that sounds like a pretty good deal for Americans. (It is a little less of a good deal if it economically hollows out the US in a way that reduces social and economic resilience. Economic efficiency is not everything.)
That the critiques of mercantilist theorising of the Salamanca School came from within a silver-exporting Empire was not, I think, entirely coincidental.
But it was Hume who pointed out that it just didn’t work. As silver flowed into a country, prices rose. That made foreign goods more attractive than domestic ones, so silver flowed back out.
Indeed, that's what happened to Spain, who was hollowed out by the inflow of silver and gold in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It depended on your economy. It worked fine for China for centuries. Also Muscovy. Once a certain density of trade relative to domestic production was reached, and your economy became highly monetised, it changed things. But if who produced what was fairly stable, and there was a lot of local demand for silver to “soak up” via monetisation proceeding, not so much.
Why unfortunately? Fortunately.
Mercantilist policies - conquest, colonialism, government-granted monopolies, protectionist policies, heavy regulation of imports and exports - make well-connected individuals wealthy at the expense of the rest of a nation’s citizens.
This is quite a negative definition, listing a whole list of things that TDS-afflicted blame Trump for supposedly perpetuating. I see what is being implemented as a tremendous positive compared to the Biden/Harris administration and luckily we do not have Harris/Tampon administration.
Ending with "make well-connected individuals wealthy at the expense of the rest of a nation’s citizens." Here is the rub - progressives excel in graft that does exactly that, unproductively. And the mercantilism: if the productive are in power doing the opposite of what you claim - building productive businesses and benefiting both society and themselves, dismantling the Green New Scam, promoting nuclear fusion and fission power, realigning tariffs so as to reindustrialize the country - and yes, supporting the dollar including the petro-dollar as world exchange currency, valiantly trying to dismantle DEI - and the list goes on - I see it as a great positive. After all, if mercantilist self-interest aligns with the prosperity of their country - and is also tied to personal success - it is infinitely better than the alternative of the previous administration and of what is happening in the bureaucratically decadent EU.
I have a comment in the latest Lorenzo's post that may also expand on this point, if indirectly.
‘Mercantilism’ is also one of those terms that suffers from definitional problems.
Coal had existed for millions of years. It does not explain the Great Enrichment, which was, at bottom, a commercialised discovery process. Neither do family structures that had existed for centuries, etc.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/understanding-the-great-enrichment
There are two longstanding stupid arguments about Hitler. One is “he was not a socialist”. He absolutely was. He said he was, he argued on socialist grounds, he did socialist things and intended to do more after victory. The idea that he was not a socialist rests on trying to make ‘socialism’ a hurrah word. Also ridiculous: Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Mengistu etc were all socialists. There is no moral kudos in being a socialist. Direction-of-history definitions of socialism are even sillier.
The second stupid argument is “Hitler was not right wing”. Of course he was, he invoked all sorts of right-wing ideas and tropes. That is why, for example, emigre White Russians and various folks traumatised by revolutionary violence were significant funding sources for the NSDAP. This silly argument requires socialism to be a purely left-wing phenomenon, which it is not.
There is now a new stupid argument. “Weimar problems require Weimar solutions”. How stupid does one have to be to see a response that left Germany flattened, millions of dead, occupied and divided among four Powers while losing 20% of its territory as “a solution”?
Actually socialism (and communism) are entirely distinct from "left" and "right". Historically in 19th century France socialists and the left were enemies until the Dreyfus affair. They were enemies in 1917 Russia, and in 1919 Germany, too.
If by "Hitler was a socialist" you mean that the state managed the economy, well, that was also the case in 1914 France, because planned war economy is a thing, and indeed Lenin explained that the war economy of WWI France was his main inspiration for a state-controlled economy. Does that mean that WWI France was socialist, or Nazi Germany, or fascist Italy? Of course not, because socialism implies a (generally forced) redistribution of the ownership of capital. What occurred with Nazis and fascists was a state intervention in the economy, with a general agreement between the state and the capitalists (see the famous meeting of Goering and Hitler and the main industrialists in 1933, corporate statism in Italy, etc).
On the other hand, a socialist country such as Yugoslavia economy was structured through cooperatives, and was not really a state-commanded economy. The generalised cooperative system created its own, distinct problems like the lack of investment, but still, my point holds : Socialism =/= state-controlled economy.
I won't comment on energy because I didn't read your article yet, and this comment is already getting too long to be easily manageable.
I've read your interesting article, thanks. It seems to me that we agree on energy though, you wrote "The key modern economic take-off was the Energy Take-off". And I notice that someone had already commented on family structures among the lesser-known forces playing a role in political and economic development :)
Primogeniture had been around for centuries. Yes, I absolutely agree it had an effect, but a broad one.
Primogeniture is only one parameter of a family system. To go rapidly through Todd's theory, there are three main systems with variants : nuclear family (with and without primogeniture variants), stem family, and communitarian (with and without cousin-first marriage) family. Religion also plays a role. The diffusion of communism is strongly correlated to communitarian family systems (Russia, China, Vietnam, southern India, etc). Various forms of other economic and political regimes are quite strongly correlated with different family systems, for instance central France being nuclear family without primogeniture makes equality a much more important value than in England (nuclear with primogeniture). Countries / regions with stem families tend to fell more often for authoritarianism, etc.
I'm not sure if the translator will work well on this: https://pracowniaekonopatologii-wordpress-com.translate.goog/2019/08/26/kapitalizm-kontra-socjalizm-w-pigule/?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=es&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
The author is a resentful marxist but he makes rather good points about current system also going to hell with thermodynamic dividend dwindling. It's full of cynical humour and confusing neologisms. Anyway... He set out to find the real socialism and came up with 10 features of that system. He went on to score a few systems and the highest score turned out to be national socialism. I laughed out loud.
Thermodynamic limits of growth is recurrent problem (the Seneca effect, etc). There are lots of resources in many languages (though the problem is generally ignored in USA and Australia, the two most "limitless" countries). Google doesn't want to translate from Polish for some reason, but Firefox did what it could, I'll see if I understand :)
edit : interesting, though difficult to read... Unfortunately the main table is a picture therefore not translated (I can get some words, but not enough).
Life is actively anti-entropic. Hence decay sets in so quickly after death. I presume he has the standard Marxist problem of not taking discovery seriously. “Thermodynamic divided dwindling” is one way of expressing Malthusian constraints, which operate at given levels of technology. Hence the importance of discovery.
The German form of National Socialism - Nazism - was indeed a form of socialism.
See the manifesto of the NSADP or any other totalitarian, socialist manifesto: https://therenwhere.substack.com/p/national-socialism-on-the-march
As I said, socialism implies "socialisation of means of production" in Marxist parlance. Not mere state intervention in the economy. The Nazis may have paid some lip service to a supposed "nationalisation" of big industry at some point, but it never happened. Neither any "fair sharing" of profits with workers or whatever. OTOH trade unions were forbidden, etc.
There were historically two main ways to socialism/communism : nationalisation of companies (control and property go to the state) and cooperatives (control and property go to the people working in the company). USSR and its satellites went mostly the state control way, with some coops sprinkled over (kolkhoz); Yugoslavia went mostly the coop way, with some state control sprinkled over.
Socialism doesn't even imply a single party state. China wasn't a single-party state until 1957.
I agree with the idea of cooperatives where they work. I think that legislating for all industry to be cooperative would create a low functioning economy. It should be tried so we can test whether it ends in tyranny :)
I spent some time in the Balkans and was not impressed by anything commercial except the low cost of the Adriatic hotels.
It has been tried in Yugoslavia and it didn't work very well, but it didn't utterly fail either. Then it's always complicated sorting out what among all of Yugoslavia's problems (ethnic tensions, bad relationship with the rest of Europe but also USSR, etc) was playing a role in its economic woes. Branko Milanovic talked about the subject recently, apparently there was a large economic literature in the country which has been mostly ignored out of Yugoslavia but seems to be interesting, discussing this matter of a "market socialism" rooted in coops.
I have really happy memories of Yugoslavia in the 70s. As the country was the link between the two countries with the best ice cream in the world (Italy and Greece) we had great hope on this matter, unfortunately Yugoslav ice cream was awful :D -- probably due to lack of available products such as proper cocoa and vanilla.
Slovenian ice cream is superb too.
Marx was wrong about almost everything and I don’t accept Marxist terminology. Hitler was a tactical opportunist but if you read (or listen) to Mein Kampf his reasoning is very socialist, in power they did some nationalisation (e.g. Herman Goring works) and he is quite clear in the Table Talk that he intends to do more after victory. I regard “not a real socialist” as an instance of “no true Scotsman”.
Socialism is an economic system. It has political implications depending on how much control you need to implement it—the faster and the more completely, the more control.
Technically, the PRC has never been a single-Party state in that there have always been other political Parties in its “Parliament”. But by every serious measure it is a Party-State and has been since 1949.
Communism has deep human appeal- And will as long as we have professional educators playing Socrates, Bin Laden, Marx, Nietzsche, Abimael Guzman etc with callow young minds.
Any school is a barracks waiting to march, from the very groves of Academe to now.
The Appeals to;
(Power ) LUST, ENVY, SLOTH, GREED, VANITY (scientific Marxism) , WRATH (Bloodlust).
= Appeal of Communism.
Also Tyranny, also Rentier Capitalism, etc.
of course “communism” has deep human appeal.
It’s appealing to baseline human nature.
Primitive peoples still formed hierarchies. Its programmed into us. Hierarchies allow groups of us to be greater than the sum of our parts. Communism does not allow for this, except for a dictator at the top. Capitalism (ideally) creates a complex, flowing hierarchy. Its not really that way today because of crony capitalism and massive inequality, but thats another subject.
Let’s be honest, communism appeals to the callow and the resentful.
The young and undeveloped like it because it purports to supply instant status without accomplishment. The resentful like it for the same reason.
Excellent post. It is very important to understand the appeal of collectivist forms of government. Why, in the face of so much evidence of failure and harm are so many people drawn to collectivism? Moths to a flame. I think that there is a romanticized warmth in their imaginations of what centralized government controlled societies would be like. And there are other motivations: Envy. Vanity. Sloth.
Tax the rich. Income inequality. Why does someone need so much money? These Leftist chants have nothing to do with care or compassion for others. They are nothing but envy.
Look at how many people promote themselves for their supposed compassion and moral superiority through their attacks on Western values and free market capitalism. These are self-serving behaviors. Look at me. Vanity.
Free healthcare. Free housing. The government should take care of me. The government is responsible. Little to no personal responsibility. Sloth.
Collectivism is appealing because it taps our baser instincts.
We all just want to live happily ever after together. We know that this is how we were meant to live as originally created by God. But we abandoned God and His ways; we can't have heaven without God. Men are not angels, and angels do not rule.
What works for 100 people does not work for 100 million people.
“Systematic failure is the key that unlocks the door to thriving…”
https://substack.com/@demianentrekin/note/c-195192540?r=dw8le
Several things:
1) Communism is just one of a series of attempts to repeal the law against free lunches.
2) Communism is balm for overproduced elites that cannot find a place in society commensurate with their self-concept.
3) Socialism can and does work well at a micro, voluntary level. Exhibit A: co-ops. Problem is, it does not scale from that.
This is one of the few times I disagree with Helen's or Lorenzo's analyses. Although I don't challenge the underlying anthropological reasoning. Human group psychology is indeed rooted in clan/tribe dynamics and that is precisely why loss of status is such a powerful driver. This is the core reason income inequality is so devastating to social cohesion.
The best way to preclude the public electing Mamdanis & Sanderses is to make sure capitalist/liberalism keeps delivering what these "democratic socialists" promise. The only reason they have accumulated a mandate is precisely because this stopped being the case.
The major (possibly only) benefit of Communism was the threat it posed to the established power elites. It was this threat that pushed them to make concessions and re-engineer the prior robber baron economic order into the social democracy that the masses got to enjoy for 3 decades and a bit. Analogous to a dilute vaccine you take to prevent the full disease. That vaccine is worth keeping inside the political toolkit notwithstanding the past plagues that the disease caused.
As I have noted in a couple of places, the collapse of the Soviet Union removed an existential threat, so Western elites became much less concerned with alienating their working classes.
I was interested in Communism’s enduring appeal. Fluctuations in its actual appeal have much more contingent causes. Such as, for instance, alienating a lot of young people.
There are a handful of reasons...
Firstly and most significantly, Communism/variants appeal to sense of fairness buried inside our tribal brainstem. Our psychology is still clan/tribal/Dunbar-ish despite living in mass societies. Primitive psychology reacts with a sense of unfairness to seeing anyone who has "more" irrespective of whatever mechanisms created that disparity. Especially a peer/member of the same tribe.
Secondly it explains a complex system (economics) in an apparently simple way - that economic inequality is simply the result of an unjust distribution.
Thirdly, it applies an equally simple solution to it - re-distribution using state force.
Fourthly, is is counter-cultural. It attracts anyone who has a grievance or even just wants to be cool (eg Sartrians in the 50s, Baader-Meinhofites in the 70s). This is why marxisms are so good at coopting other movements like feminism.
I disagree with you, in that I believed Helen is spot in this instance (see my comment). That said, as a Libertarian/ Conservative, I also agree with you, re the left.
Agreed entirely.
Communism and Socialism (and all forms of Collectivism, including Fascism) appeal to something in the lizard brain. This explains not only the persistence of these ideologies but why it is so hard to teach proper/correct economics to people - good economics is counterintuitive. Hence why libertarianism isn't that popular in the vast majority of electoral democracies.
Dostoyevsky, speaking through the Underground Man, discusses the human side of socialism by noting forcefully that men are violently opposed to becoming piano keys and will fight any tendency to instrumentalize them vigorously and will resist compliance with any plan, state or regime which attempts to make them into a machine for someone else to direct.
This is, simply, why socialism starts as a promised warm embrace and ends at the edge of a pit with a rifle in your back.
I would encourage anyone with an interest in this topic to read at least the introduction to Ludwig von Mises's epic takedown of socialism: https://cdn.mises.org/Socialism%20An%20Economic%20and%20Sociological%20Analysis_3.pdf
A lot of this is because it actually works; we run our families like this. Socialism also works at the larger family/church level. The problem is that it doesn't scale. The communal aspect of a close family cannot scale to a national level. But it DOES work, and it works at the most intimate level that appeals to us. That's why I push back against the false binaries in politics and claim to be an Anarchist, Socialist, Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian all at the same time, just at the right level. More thoughts on that here: https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/quantum-superposition-and-politics