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I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside) about communism.
When I think how Marxism was gladly embraced by èlites in the West, and, after the fall of the URSS, the more anglocentric progressive one that took his side, it makes me think about the type of people that embrace it.
As Zagrebbi argue here https://salafisommelier.substack.com/p/a-robin-hanson-perspective-on-the Marxism is really the Platonic Realm of wordcellery!
All arguments, apart from being factually false, are reduced not on "policy" or "government", but on words, and how to define words, how to use words in a different manner, how words can be used in different ways, how different ideologies are different because "words" says so. A typical argument goes like this: "Communism is good because, unlike Fascism or whatever else, has a good objective. The objective is good because Communism say so. Different types of Communism are born from different interpretation of Communism, who are not all good (choose here if we are talking about Stalin, Social Democracy, Left Liberalism, Anarchism, Maoism etc) because they did not adhere to the ideal definition of Communism, and everyone who does not produce a good result has secretly bad objectives or it was a Fascist all along"
Obviously I am paraphrasing an hypotetical argument of an hypotetical communist, so I am really fighting against a non-entity here. But I saw enough debates that I could crystallise it in few phrases, and understand that the marxist galaxy today has been reduced to discussions about hypoteticals and fandoms, as if it was Fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own. Gone are the immense volumes of marxist economy or revolutionary action, in autistic dissertation on good end evil. Or maybe not, and I do not have enough knowledge of historical marxist politics, maybe they were like this all along, but I refuse to believe that communists won for decades using this kind of reasoning.
It is not surprising why Wokism had an evolutionary advantage on post-URSS marxism. All of this autism is pretty ick, it works on Reddit but not on real life, because every normal person can smell with a bullshit detector that this lines are actively trying to scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach. Wokism is better as an ideology because it refuses, partially, to play words. Patriarchy and Europeans are not evil because machiavellian people have tried to derail the progressive project, and our objective is to clean it arguing that, no, whoever did something bad was actively trying to sabotage the Real Meaning of Patriarchy. No, they are evil because of biology/social constructs and they deserve suffering. Autistic screeching and wordcelism do not play well with modern political coalition and the Schmittian Friend/Enemy distinction, and they also makes the women have the ick and the supporters smells like Redditors!
A lot of people love to criticize Marx without actually having read him. You and this sub-stacker included. Where does Marx ever support wokeness in his writings? Capital was a critique of capitalism and the social systems that it encourages that is largely correct. I have yet to hear an actually convincing critique of commodity fetishism or the labour theory of value that isn't a nitpick. Western leftists don't actually want to read Marx (because he is hard), nor do they seriously want to implement his ideas (also hard, and never successfully done, you can complain all you want about me pulling out the "not real communism" card, but the Soviet Union and China very clearly still engaged in capitalistic commodity production, which Marx would have criticized).
A communist factory is having its workers toil away for hours making widgets that nobody wants. The value of those widgets is zero irregardless of how much work went into making them.
That's not exactly a nitpick. How much people want something is incredibly important in determining its value.
More to the point, sometimes you can't even determine how much people will 'want' something until you take the risk of producing it and trying to sell it.
And sometimes you guess wrong, or you underestimate the ultimate demand and have to adjust.
That risk doesn't go away, its just a matter of who absorbs the risk of getting it wrong (or gets rewarded for getting it right!), and the existence of such a risk makes for one hell of an incentive to get it right.
Vs. the Soviet Commissary who is only punished if the widget factory doesn't produce enough widgets in a given month, even if those widgets are just being thrown out. So he'll happily keep the widgets flowing as long as he can.
That's not unique to communism, though: it's just the principal agent problem. Capitalist corporations regularly make decisions that are wildly insane due to non-economic factors and burn a lot of value in the process, and the decision maker can still walk away with their bag.
It's true that there is more of a signal to discourage this in capitalist economies, but that is a very coarse signal. And once a corporation becomes successful enough, it rapidly realizes that the best way to maintain its position is to do its best to eliminate the risks of being subject to that signal.
Well you're just getting at the point that skin in the game is the best way to align incentives.
If your company offers paying customers a ride to the Titanic on an experimental submersible, having your CEO along for each ride is a good way to align incentives.
And on that point, someone had to realize "hey, there might be a market for tours of the titanic wreck site," and actually spend money and develop a product that can deliver on that desire, while being uncertain if they'd find enough customers.
And if it fails, well that CEO is now removed from his position of influence.
I agree that there's been a drift where decision makers in a corporate environments are insulated from the consequences of their decisions (although I argue this is mostly due to political influence. Criminal prosecutions are underused).
I also agree with the point that dominant actors in a market will usually start attempting to reduce the influence of competition, to build their 'moat' so they can start to exploit their position rather than improve their practices.
I would not agree that they're successful in the majority of cases.
I'm just pointing out that in practice Communism is unadulterated diffusion of responsibility for any mistakes, and Capitalism at least HAS a signal, and there are ways to make the signal sharper.
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