Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Inevitable Failure of Communism

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May 2, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

24:56

The Inevitable Failure of Communism

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	Communism will always fail, and I'll explain to you why.
	Communism is the name we give to a selection of far-left ideologies, a colloquial name, centered around the abolition of private property and the collective ownership of the means of production in order to create a stateless, classless society.
	Not all of these ideologies are derived from Marx, but finding a non-Marxist communist is like trying to find a southern man in a bar.
	Marx's proposed method of attaining communism goes something like this.
	From the Middle Ages, we inherited an aristocracy that maintained feudalism, a system of inherited privilege for the aristocracy alone.
	This was abolished after a revolution of the bourgeoisie and replaced with liberalism, a component of which is capitalism.
	The capitalists, the owners of capital, use their wealth to purchase the means of production, monopolizing them and essentially enslaving the proletariat, the working man who owns no property.
	From the downtrodden workers would clump a class revolution that would remove the source of the bourgeoisie's oppression, private property itself, so that everything would be collectively owned.
	This would be done via a worldwide revolution in which the dictatorship of the proletariat would democratize factories and farms, creating a system called socialism, in which all property would be held in the hands of the state, where it would be each according to their ability and to, sorry, from each according to their ability, and to each according to their deed.
	This would eventually morph into a classless, stateless society by gradual devolution of power to worker cooperatives until there was only one class left, the proletariat.
	And everyone would have an equal share in the produce of mankind from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
	Needless to say, this didn't happen anywhere.
	The dictatorship of the proletariat is an ideological construct that is represented in the person of the dictator.
	And we can see this in any socialist country, be it Castro and Cuba, Stalin, the USSR, Mugabe and Zimbabwe, Maduro and Venezuela.
	The list goes on and on and on.
	And unfortunately, it keeps going on.
	Lord Acton was doubtless correct when he said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
	Because when you create a system that requires totalitarian control over a country and then put this absolute power in the hands of one man, he's remarkably reluctant to give it up.
	Nowhere has socialism ever transitioned into communism, so let's take a look at some of the many reasons that socialism and communism always fail.
	Number one, communism is anachronistic.
	Take, for example, Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread, in which he proposes a series of independent communes governed by consensus.
	This is a poor solution to a problem that existed in czarist Russia.
	How can we guarantee a person's daily bread?
	Well, capitalism has solved the problem of hunger so successfully that we are actually struggling with the opposite problem.
	What do we do about our morbidly obese working classes?
	I'm not joking.
	It's a genuine problem.
	The working classes have an absolute obesity crisis.
	In Kropotkin's conception, communism's goal is a subsistence existence for mankind.
	You won't get luxury, but you will get bread, and you're working on a collectivized farmer in a collectivized factory to get it.
	And forget about bananas and grapes in supermarkets, because there will be no incentive to trade, and so no foreign goods, and this is by Kropotkin's own idea.
	To be able to start a new project, one will need to persuade the collective to grant resources necessary to accomplish it, which means that anything outlandish and hard to conceive from the start, as in the best inventions, will inevitably be voted against by naysayers out of a lack of imagination.
	Ultimately, the result of communism as he envisages it, this is what they would probably call now anarcho-communism, although all communism technically is anarcho-communism, or it's not real communism.
	But the result of this form of communism is to drag everyone in society down to the level of the lowest common denominator, the stupidest, most idle, and least likely to succeed, but at least you'll have bread.
	Probably.
	Part of this anachronistic view of communism is the obsession with factories and the industrial worker.
	Despite never setting foot in a factory, Marx had an obsession with the urban industrial worker.
	This was a narrow segment of society even in Marx's day and is virtually non-existent now.
	Britain is essentially a post-industrial society, and I haven't checked Ireland, but I haven't seen many factories around.
	And in the modern era, automation is making Marx's primary concern less and less relevant by the day.
	We are fast approaching a time where there will be no industrial workers of the world to unite.
	This is the essence of socialism and communism.
	The idea that the factory worker is suffering under the heel of the wealthy capitalist.
	Well, maybe somewhere they are, but it certainly isn't here, and it won't be sorry, it certainly isn't here, and it won't be in the state capitalist countries like China for very much longer.
	And while this might have been a relevant concern 150 years ago, again, these are problems that have been solved by communism's arch nemesis, perpetual boogeyman, and implacable competitor, capitalism.
	Which brings us on to point three.
	Communism is eternally out-competed by capitalism.
	There's a reason that people flee from Marxist states' deliberal ones.
	And it's because, in Marx's estimation, capitalism unleashed unparalleled productive forces.
	So why would we change this?
	This was done through a series of incentives that appealed to an individual's own needs.
	Capitalism needs no central command, no top-down instruction, because each person in a capitalist society is an individual economic unit capable of making sensible decisions about their own economic needs from the context in which they find themselves.
	It turns out that allowing people to be free makes them incredibly productive, in comparison to the sluggish and oppressive methods of production in socialist countries, where the individual is ordered to labor for the lofty and abstract phrase, the people.
	Harnessing self-interest allowed capitalism to radically out-compete communism, an occurrence not unobserved by socialists.
	In the Soviet Union, Stalin promoted the Starkonovite movement during the second five-year plan, named after one particularly industrious worker, in which workers who excelled above and beyond their quotas were given material rewards and privileges not available to their lesser performing comrades, which is rather the opposite of the communist ethos.
	It's in fact rather capitalist in outlook.
	And it just goes to show that people won't look people won't excel unless personally incentivized.
	This is the complete opposite of the communist imagination of what the average person's motivations are actually like, which is strange given that communism is a materialist philosophy.
	It turns out that people aren't really driven by noble ideals.
	It turns out they're driven by material gain, which, again, is strange that communists seem to have missed that incongruity in their own materialist ideology.
	So I'm going to take a break as and when I need it here.
	You will hear a cavalcade of excuses from Marxists about how evil capitalists are scuppering their utopia by merely existing because capitalism represents a better and more productive method of running an economy.
	Freedom pays dividends, and it is very difficult to manage people to the level of detail required so that they feel they are free.
	The example I would like to give of this is Cuba.
	Communism's failures in Cuba are usually attributed to the United States embargo.
	But the purpose of communism is to end the need to trade altogether, anyway, by preventing the existence of private property and a state to manage any kind of international trade.
	So what exactly were they planning on trading?
	Unless, of course, regimes like Cuba had no intention of ever actually achieving communism, and instead would be content to be an oppressive dictatorship in perpetuity for the benefit of the dictator and his party at the expense of the hoodwinked peasants, in which case the US is entirely justified in doing everything in its power to obstruct the existence of such a state.
	Ultimately, the purpose of communism is not to solve the problem of poverty.
	It is to erase inequality.
	There is a reason that socialist and communist countries end up dirt poor, and that's because class inequality is considered to be the source of all problems, and it becomes acceptable if there is just one big impoverished class of people, because at least they will all be equal.
	Point four.
	Communism breaks down because of the human element.
	Communism is an economic system for robots.
	It is conceivable that one could calculate value through labor if all labor was created equal and demand was entirely predictable.
	This is not the case in human beings.
	The needs and wants of human beings vary over time and often not in terribly predictable ways.
	Luxuries are difficult to predict because they are not necessities, but that does not mean they are less desired or that people should not have access to them.
	Markets are a more efficient way of assessing supply and demand because they require no central planning and they are self-correcting.
	If the state is not able to calculate precisely the required goods and services to perfectly satisfy the population, then segments of it are being ill-served and will rightly consider themselves mistreated.
	And unlike in a market system, they will know precisely who to blame.
	Communists like to persuade you that their system is scientific, but if it was, they would apply the scientific method to this repeatedly failed hypothesis and conclude that after dozens of large-scale failures, that communism doesn't work.
	It always begins with something along the following.
	If only everyone agreed that, if only everyone thought that.
	Well, if only anything is a line of reasoning that is doomed to fail because not everyone will think the way that you want them to.
	And because the communist is designing a system that will encompass the totality of economic activity of man, then anyone who is in disagreement becomes a threat to the integrity of the system itself.
	Naturally, these people will need to be dealt with.
	The way that Stalin dealt with the problem of the kulaks, a class of affluent peasants, and I say affluent by the standards of the time, who grew prosperous using a market economy to trade goods and services.
	Naturally, they had to go.
	And so Stalin decided that the kulaks, as a class, would be liquidated by an orchestrated famine through grain confiscation that killed approximately six million of them, according to Sokhonitsyn, and Soviet records show that a further two million were deported to gulags in Siberia and the Urals for daring to resist this appropriation.
	We don't know how many were murdered by Soviet forces during that process, but I think we can be sure that the number isn't going to be small.
	Number five, the moral dimension.
	Communism is opposed to the private ownership of the means of production.
	The communist conceives of this as the machinery in the factories, but the reality is that it's the people manning the factories that are the true means of production.
	And of course, this means they must not own themselves.
	People were producing goods and services long before industry existed with their bare hands.
	So the focus of communism on the factory and not on the person is entirely misplaced.
	This is contrasted with the core value of liberalism, self-ownership.
	You are your own private property.
	This is why communism looks like tyranny to a liberal.
	It has no concept of self-ownership.
	You are not free to do as you please.
	You and your labour are owned by the collective, be it the commune, the workers' syndicate, or the glorious leader.
	Either way, you are a slave.
	You will be told where to work, you will be told how much to work, and you will be penalized if you refuse.
	Communism is economic totalitarianism before all else.
	Where it is not outright destructive, communism becomes an enervating force, where the individual is to be policed by the group to ensure they remain in line with collective opinion, which will inevitably be the opinion of the person who claims to speak for the collective.
	This is the opposite of the freedom that Marx himself envisaged happening from communism.
	And just because a would-be central planner thinks that this time he can achieve real communism, why should you give up your freedom and personal self-ownership just to satisfy someone else's desire to attempt to create a perfect system?
	It's incredibly arrogant for communists to claim to know how to manage someone else's life better than they do themselves, which they don't.
	And all one needs to do is relinquish their own freedom and self-determination for an excessively convoluted system in which all economic and political power is entrusted to a small group of people who believe, above all else, that they can usher in a utopia.
	Can you think of a single person you would consider capable and honest enough to entrust with this kind of power?
	Revolutionaries rarely make it to the end of the revolution, because when you are in a revolution, there are no rules.
	The contest is one of strength alone.
	There is no justice, there is no fairness.
	There is only a great million dialogue in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
	This is why communist revolutions always produce wicked men at the head of them.
	The wicked man must be prepared to shoot as many people as possible as it takes to protect his position, and so this is why communism ends badly.
	As soon as you entrust ultimate power to a sovereign, it inevitably becomes corrupting, as they reach the limits of their own abilities, but not the limits of their own power.
	They are not capable of micromanaging millions of people, and dissenters will inevitably appear and inevitably disappear, as it becomes politically convenient to the dictator to ensure a counter-revolutionary presence does not threaten their status.
	You will not get freedom under communism, because there are no rights, there are only duties and entitlements.
	They have been preordained for you by a group of people who are not accountable to you.
	You can see this in modern socialist thought all the time.
	It seems like socialists like Jeremy Corbyn consider a right to be whatever is at the front of their mind when they're speaking to you.
	For example, you can hear a communist saying something like, you have the right to have breakfast.
	Do you?
	Rights are inherent and inalienable to the person.
	Take a man, place him alone on an island, and you will see very clearly what his rights are.
	He'll be free to create property.
	He'll be free to say what he likes and do as he pleases to satisfy himself because he won't be able to hurt another person.
	But he will not have breakfast provided for him.
	He will, in fact, have to provide his own breakfast and do the required work necessary to provide it.
	You don't have the right to have breakfast, but you do have the ability to procure breakfast and the freedom to follow that inclination and it is in your self-interest to do so.
	That is the difference.
	Number six, Marx's predictions were all wrong.
	Marx predicted that the internal competition among the classes would be a zero-sum game, which would eventually produce a small class of the super-rich and an enormous class of the destitute poor, with any middle class being ripped in half and subsumed into the previous two.
	The opposite of this has happened, with modern countries often having a poverty rate that is in single figures, and with most people belonging to the middle and upper classes.
	Marx's prediction, ironically, is actually what happens in communist and socialist countries, not capitalist ones.
	Cuba and Venezuela are fantastic examples of this.
	Castro died with $900 million worth of assets, while the average Cuban made $25 a month.
	And before Chavez, Venezuela had a poverty rate of around 40%, and now Maduro is growing fat while 82% of his country is in poverty, and the average person is losing weight to starvation.
	Marx predicted that as more and more people were forced to sell their labor after entering the proletariat, that their wages would decrease.
	This has not happened.
	Globally, real wages have remained on a steady increase of about 2% as of 2013.
	Marx predicted that the rate of profit under capitalism would fall over time.
	This is not true, as evidenced by the now staggering number of billionaires that exist in the world.
	Marx was wrong about the way societies change.
	Marx believed in the Hegelian model, in which the flaws of the status quo nurture their antithesis and will be synthesized through violence to create a new paradigm.
	This didn't happen under capitalism, which reflected a much more Darwinian model of social evolution as free societies gradually changed over time to become unrecognizable to previous eras without the streets running with blood.
	Marx believed in the labor theory of value.
	This theory is wrong.
	Value is based on demand and labor is a component of supply.
	A labor-intensive product might be scarce and if in high demand then the value of the product will rise, but if the product has no demand then no amount of labor can give it value.
	Marx predicted a proletarian revolution would start in the most wealthy and most capitalist countries, where in fact it happened in the most poor and most backwards.
	Marx believed that a society had to pass through feudalism into capitalism in order to initiate a communist revolution.
	This was not true.
	Communist revolutions happened in non-capitalist countries like Russia and China.
	So why was Marx consistently wrong?
	Well, it's hard to say.
	But many ex-Marxist economists believe that it's due to the internal inconsistencies in his economic theories.
	I'm not an expert on this, but there's something about producing a one-dimensional materialist analysis and applying it to people who have many different dimensions, not just economic but social, spiritual, and egotistical, that seems doomed to fail because of the deliberate exclusion of these other facets of what makes a person a person.
	And finally, point seven, why communism will not work on its own terms.
	The purpose of communism is to create a stateless, classless society without money, hierarchy, or restriction.
	And this will never happen through the methods that have been proposed.
	There is a reason that Marx called for a worldwide revolution of the proletariat in the Communist Manifesto.
	He said, workers of the world unite because to achieve communism requires a worldwide revolution.
	A stateless society cannot exist in a world full of nation-states.
	A nation-state is a phenomenally powerful entity, capable of marshalling vast amounts of force and expanding until it reaches the borders of another state.
	A stateless society will not be able to muster the military might necessary to resist because of a lack of hierarchy and institutional experience required to defeat a modern organized military force.
	A communist revolution that does not take place simultaneously around the world cannot possibly succeed on its own terms.
	If a country were to engage in a communist revolution, such as in Tsarist Russia, the revolutionary vanguard must protect the revolution from counter-revolutionary forces from within and without.
	This means it must take on all the necessary aspects of a state, a hierarchical command structure, a military, a police force, a bureaucracy to organize the collectivized property.
	And by doing this, we have already destroyed the goal of communism.
	To create the stateless, classless society.
	If communism cannot be achieved by a worldwide revolution of the proletariat, then it cannot be achieved.
	And even the most ardent Marxist-Leninist will tell you that there is very little revolutionary potential in the fat, X-Factor-watching lower classes of the West.
	And their numbers are rapidly dwindling.
	It's just not going to happen.
	There will be no revolution, and so there will be no communism.
	There will only be idealistic fools who engage in their local uprisings to install their dictatorship, their personal dictatorship of the proletariat, which will take the form of a tyrant who claims to speak for the people as his bureaucrats visit all Manner of depredations upon said people that they claim to represent, while reducing them to serfdom and poverty in the name of achieving a utopia.
	Even if, by some miracle, a worldwide revolution of the workers did manage to take place, overthrow the bourgeoisie and implement the dictators of the proletariat, all you will have accomplished is take one ruling class and replace it with another.
	Classes are created by mutual shared interests.
	To take one, the new rulers, no matter how democratically elected they would hypothetically be, as long as you consider democracy to exclude entire classes of people, form the new ruling class with their own interests separate to the people ruled over in order to maintain their own status in this new order.
	This is what Orwell was pointing out in Animal Farm.
	The pigs that take over end up walking like humans.
	Put simply, human beings are hierarchical creatures and classes are inevitable, which is why they are found everywhere.
	When communists say that communism has never existed, they are correct.
	It has never existed because it can never exist, at least in the world that we have at present.
	Communism is a brutal, ruthless, and tyrannical, brutal, ruthless, and tyrannical, and the inevitable result of any attempt to achieve the fictional and fantastical goal of creating a perfect society.
	Apologists will insist that this is not real communism, but what they mean is it is not hypothetical communism.
	What is real are the jackboots that will kick you to your knees and the bullet that is fired through your brain because your suffering has made you an enemy of the people.
	In conclusion, Marx was not only wrong in his theory, he was wrong in his predictions, and the political systems his theories produced were the most immoral, tyrannical, blood-soaked regimes in all of human history.
	Communism in any variant simply does not work, and we have ample evidence to demonstrate that fact.
	Capitalism is the only viable method for wealth creation in a free society.
	The social planners be damned, every single one of them.

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