Ask a communist economist

[vorlon13]

The Barefoot Bum - I know some answers but you probably know better than me - How would you reply to these capitalist arguments (numbered)?

1 - Capitalism is better because it promotes growth and wealth trough competition and gives people incentives and reasons to actually work

(I think pointing out the URSS put people into space is a good start to counter...)

2 - Capitalism is the only system that has proven to work correctly with human nature

3 - If you have quality products and services, you only need to think capitalism (technology, healthcare, et.c)

1. Does capitalism promote growth and wealth? Perhaps it did so in the 17th through the 19th century, but its record in the 20th and 21st is less than stellar. I argue in one paper that the economic growth of the middle of the 19th century was in spite of capitalism, and the result of the professional-managerial class taking state power from the capitalist class after the Great Depression. Email or PM me if you'd like a copy of the paper. The Global Financial Crisis and subsequent Lesser Depression is a substantial failure of capitalism, and all (or more than all) the gains of subsequent economic growth have gone to the capitalist class.

Furthermore, the economic growth of the 17th through the 19th century was due as much to colonialism, imperialism, and chattel slavery as to competition and incentives. Furthermore, capital "incentivizes" labor primarily through work and starve slowly or don't work and starve faster. Again, I would argue that the only exceptions are despite capitalism, rather than because of it.

The USSR's space program is nice, but I would rather highlight their pivotal role in defeat of the Nazis, and taking a broken agrarian Tsarist autocracy and European colony and making it into a world power. And, similarly, Mao's and the Chinese Communists' opposition to the Japanese occupation and again transforming China into another world power.

2. I don't know what "human nature" is, or even that there is such a thing, and I don't know how one determines that a society is or is not compatible with it. Humans have been around a long time, in a variety of economic and social arrangements, from hunter-gatherers in primitive communism to the agricultural state. Capitalism has been the dominant paradigm for only at most a few hundred years.

Marx argues (persuasively not only to communists but to sociologists and anthropologists) that what we sometimes label as "human nature" is socially constructed, not something "essential" to humanity, but a product of history and economics.

3. Briefly, thanks, capitalism. But what have you done for us lately? We have chattel slavery to thank for the United States' independence and early economic growth, but that is not an argument for preserving chattel slavery forever.

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I reiterate my fascination with the biblical form of communism.  God seems rather enamored of it too, offing Ananias and Sapphira when they didn't do it right.

The early Utopian Socialists (including Proudhon) were explicitly influenced by biblical communism.

The pilgrims (early colonist pilgrims in what would become Massachusetts kind of pilgrims) tried pretty hard to make the bible form of communism work but couldn't make a go of it.  I'd relish an analysis of their experience and would love to know what they did wrong.

That analysis would seem more in the history or anthropology department; it is definitely outside my area of expertise. I would venture to guess that trying to doing much of anything practical based on the bible seems like a Bad Idea.

The pilgrims didn't seem to lack the stomach for making martyrs in the attempt.  Perhaps if they had given it a just little more chance to flourish it might have worked.  Hard to imagine the US today had that prototype succeeded.

Even with the pilgrims abandonment of the practice, however, I still find it VERY, VERY, VERY odd current day US christers aren't more enamored with the idea.