• Vampire [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Sure.

    You’ve probably been told all your life “Centrally planned economies don’t work! They’ve always been a catastrophic failure!” which is simply untrue.

    • the USSR industrialised at record pace, went from a backwards joke that was jealous of its Western neighbours to the undisputed 2nd-most-powerful country in the world, launched mankind into space, defeated Hitler, electrified and industrialised the whole country

    • unplanned economies have been disasters: Russia under shock therapy in the 1990s. Thatcher closing down coalmines, GW Bush (and Greenspan) deregulating everything and causing the biggest financial crash in 80 years

    • Look at the history of Britain’s economy, did great under planning with people like Clement Attlee, worse when the free-market ideology took hold: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=iH6ur0X4wMI (you should watch the whole thing, but from 14:20 has a bit on Britain’s planned economy). War economies are often centrally planned and do in-kind accounting, and war economies stimulate growth.

    • look at how much better China and Vietnam perform at growth and poverty-alleviation than Friedmanite countries

    • The boring ‘Walmart’ argument: there are already massive country-sized planned economies with in-kind accounting. Called Amazon and Walmart. Amazon runs an economy the size of Australia (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-tech-giants-worth-compared-economies-countries/) and does it by databases that manage supply-chains, logistics, just-in-time ordering, modelling future demand, etc.

    Two caveats –

    • Marxists don’t “believe in” doing things a certain way, that’s Utopianism. Marxists believe in practice. Various things work at various times in various doses. That includes market mechanisms, like the Chinese economy today, or Vietnam with its Đổi Mới policy. Giving a template and demanding it be followed is anathema to “scientific socialism”

    • Marxism ≠ centrally planned economies. Marx mostly critiqued how capital was a means of exploitation, and said lets do ‘something else’ that doesn’t rip workers off so much. That leaves room for a lot of noncentrallyplanned methods. Which one is best? A stupid smallminded question. Like asking which food is the best food to eat, or which medicine is the best medicine to take. Depends on the context.

    You may say you don’t believe in centrally planned economies. Do you believe in a centrally planned economy to provide tap water? If it works for tap water, why not for other things? It works for public housing too. It works for transport infrastructure. It works for railways. Why is it such a stretch to think that what you probably already believe in for water, railways, roads, education, housing could also run some clothing and furniture factories?


    This was kinda written in a hurry, I can add references or answer questions if needed.