Why did communism always turn into a kind of dictatorship?
Why did communism always turn into a kind of dictatorship?
Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
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Lots of reasons, but here's one:
Because one of, if not the main purpose of money is to provide a decentralized way of transferring information about economic needs and capabilities. Without that mechanism in place, the only way of determining where goods can be created and where they need to go (a massive problem that it is a daily miracle we don't generally have to deal with) is by an overbearing authoritarian state.
Spoken like someone that hasn't paid attention to the supply chains of places like Walmart.
We already have command economies. They exist and are functional. The owners are simply siphoning away the surplus value.
So you're saying you agree?
Walmart is absolutely a result of capitalism, those intricate supply chains are in place to make money. Maybe we could do it without a common way to track needs for a while, but would it adapt? Would the alternative resist corruption better? The invention of Money almost seems an inevitable consequence from one perspective.
I don't think this answers the original question, but it's an interesting side topic.
The invention of Money almost seems an inevitable consequence from one perspective.
That really depends on what you mean by money and how it’s used in the economy. David Graeber wrote a really great book covering this called “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” that I highly recommend.
As large as Walmart is, it is still absolute peanuts compared to the scale and (especially) dynamism of global production and consumption as a whole. Global supply chains have to change much faster and in arbitrary ways, compared to the centralized chains of something like Walmart, which in turn is also still subject to the external pressures of competition -- even just hypothetical competition based on some hypothetical course of action is a powerful constraint.