u/AvocadoAlternative

All of those co-op dominated regions in Italy? Nice.
Revolutionary Catalonia? Good job.
Paris commune? Well done.
Pre-industrial tribes? Almost a meme at this point.

I don’t give much weight to these examples because scale, both geographical and temporal, are key challenges that an ideology must overcome if it is to have staying power. I have no doubt that some sort of small socialist enclave could survive or even thrive for a few years, but all of them seem to inevitably collapse. Why? We could use the Israeli kibbutzim as an example. These were small agrarian-based Zionist-utopian societies that practiced collective ownership, workplace democracy, and even community child rearing. Most of them eventually shuttered or liberalized over 100 years of existence. Because they were the topic of so much academic attention in the 60s through 90s as a “socialist laboratory”, we have many papers and detailed interviews on why they declined. The biggest reasons were:

• Freeloading: many people simply didn’t show up to work because they knew they would be taken care of. It’s not just a meme. This bred resentment and distrust, which led to….
• Brain drain: the most ambitious workers saw no incentive to stay and emigrated to work in the nearby cities.
• Loss of fervor: although the first generation of founders were devoted followers of the socialist philosophy, their children were not and desired more independence from the community.
• Loss of familiarity: for the smaller kibbutzim, it’s much easier to bind everyone together when you personally know each member. Once the large communities exceeded a couple of hundred members, distrust skyrocketed because you were no longer always working with or for someone you cared about.

Notice all of these issues have to do with scale, especially the third point. Your ideology cannot rely on fervor, lest the next generation disavow it. It must be self-sustaining and able to operate over billions of people. This is also why capitalists tend to talk much more about the Soviet Union, for example, because this is one instance where it actually did survive for multiple generations over millions of people. Even if you want to criticize capitalism, you cannot deny that it has not only survived but thrived among more than a hundred nation-states and for multiple centuries. Scale matters.

And if so, what makes you so sure that the proper material conditions exist today to enable socialism?

What I mean:

I support the idea that certain material conditions must exist first in order for different ways of organizing the economy to thrive. For example, capitalism as we know it cannot exist without industrialization. Mechanization, mass production, and advances in technology led to surplus food production, freeing billions of people who would have had to work in agriculture to work in manufacturing and services instead. This fundamental shift from subsistence farming to paid wage labor naturally led to the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism from the ground up.

In a counterfactual world, suppose there was a pro-capitalism movement in the 1100s in Europe, when 90% of the population were serfs. The material conditions were not there to enable capitalism — it would’ve failed miserably.

To really drive home the point: consider the fact that humans need to sleep 8 hours a day. One day, a movement starts that aims to abolish sleep. This is obviously going to fail because the material conditions to make this happen don’t exist. However, if someone invented a pill that allowed you to gain the benefits of sleep without actually sleeping, then the movement to abolish sleep suddenly makes sense. The material conditions (energy pill) enable the shift in society (no sleep).

The analogy here is that socialism on a large scale failed in the 20th century because the material conditions for socialism didn’t exist, and trying to impose it from the top down inevitably ended in disaster, just like trying to abolish sleep for a population who needs to sleep.

What are the material conditions for socialism to work? Do they even exist besides post-scarcity (where any system would work)?

If you’re a socialist, how can you be so sure that the material conditions exist today?

Seriously, being able to have every single soldier run at 150% speed to the objective is way more impactful than getting a 10% reduction in body hit damage.

Taxing negative externalities

Company A is a manufacturing company that emits many tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Dumping carbon doesn't "cost" company A anything, but it leads to negative externalities in the surrounding areas. Suppose that the cost to society is $X per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. A Pigouvian tax aims to tax Company A at the marginal cost to society, $X, per ton of carbon dioxide in order to disincentivize carbon emissions.

Subsidizing positive externalities

Company B is a major airliner that focuses on the routes that generate the highest profits. However, this leads to them completely ignoring regional flights between smaller towns. If they were to establish a route between Town A and Town B, they'd be incurring -$Y per flight due to undertrafficking. Yet, the positive externalities that such a route would provide would be $Z, due to economic connectivity, labor mobility, easier logistics, and social cohesion. Assume Z-Y > 0, so that the cost overall benefit to society is positive even if the airline itself eats the cost. A corporate subsidy in this case would mean that the government pays the airliner to fly between Town A and Town B at +$Y plus some extra so that it is more profitable than the least profitable flight they're currently servicing.

Would you be in favor of such subsidies?

In the early 20th century, Russia was a poor feudalist backwater with a GDP of around $1000 per capita. By the middle of the century, it had become an industrial powerhouse and one of the two superpowers on the planet. It had achieved nuclear capabilities, launched the first unmanned satellite into space, and had sextupled its GDP in just 80 years.

Socialists will often point to this as a success of the USSR. However, we're not interested in the question of whether the USSR industrialized quickly under socialism, we care about whether capitalism or socialism is the way we should be organizing our economies. To get us closer to that answering that question, we'd have to ask:

Would the USSR have done just as well under capitalism?

The problem, of course, is that a capitalist USSR delves into a counterfactual scenario that we're unable to observe. The best we can do is look at comparable countries during the same period. If we inspect the previous graph, we see that the US GDP per capita* went from $4000 to $18,000 in the same period. Germany and France both went from around $2,000 immediately post-war to $15,000 by 1990. So, it seems like 5x'ing your economic output via industrialization was par for the course whether you were socialist or not, which makes it highly plausible that the USSR would've done just as well under capitalism.

This is also insufficient, of course. The USSR is not Germany or France, which received billions in aid from the US. Nor is it the US itself, which is blessed by ample natural resources and an optimal strategic geographic location. In causal inference, this is known as confounding, which is when other variables muddle the causal effects of interest. To this end, we could look at natural experiments where similar entities are randomly assigned different treatments and then compare the outcomes. Two popular comparisons of this are East vs. West Germany, and North vs. South Korea, which both ended up with greater economic growth for the capitalist models. Another way is to compare two different time periods under different interventions. China is a good example of this. It liberalized its country as a market economy and opened it up to foreign investment in the 80's and 90's and saw almost a 100x in its GDP per capita. I'm greatly simplifying, of course. Countries interact with each other, they compete, the confounding due to geography may be intractable, but it's interesting to think about.

So, back to the original question: would the USSR have done just as well under capitalism? The answer is that we'll never know, but based on evidence from other countries in the same time period, I think we could at least allow for the possibility that it would have. This calls into question the notion of offering the USSR's industrialization as evidence of socialism's superiority to capitalism.

• Note: I understand there are issues with GDP as an absolute measure of economic prosperity, but as a benchmark to track economic performance between countries and within countries over time, I think it's serviceable.

Are there are any labor policies that you could point to (in any country) where you would say is too heavily biased in favor of workers and should ideally be rolled back somewhat? Or is it that the more protections, the better?

Note: I'm not religious, just using religion as an example.

1. Mutually disagreeing sects can still count as a single ideology

Let's take the example of Christianity. Two thousand years ago, Christianity looked very different from today, but I think we can all agree that a self-described Christian from 100 AD indeed qualifies as a true Christian. Fast forward to 2026. Christianity has splintered off into so many denominations that it's difficult to keep track. All of them will disagree with each other in one form or another, they may even call each other "unchristian" or not "true Christians". For example, Catholics believe in the authority of a pope, they believe the Eucharist contain the literal body and blood of Christ, they believe that holy men like priests are necessary to facilitate the relationship between the laity and the divine, etc. Protestants believe none of these things, and yet we would consider both Catholics and Protestants to be Christian.

The analogy I'm drawing here is that even if, say, a Marxist-Leninist disagrees with an anarcho-communist, we would consider both of them socialists. Similarly, a social democrat and anarcho-capitalist are both capitalists. So far so good.

2. We owe historical figures no special intellectual privileges, only their ideas for consideration

Now consider the Bible. This is meant to be the literal holy book of what to believe if you're a Christian. In it, we're told that women should cover their heads when praying (Corinthians 11:5), woman should remain silent when at church (Corinthians 14:34), that slaves should obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5, Peter 2:18), homosexuality is a sin (Romans 1:26–27), etc. Nowadays, most self-declared Christians would disagree with these things, and we would still consider them Christian. Beliefs change over time; ultimately, ideologies are defined by both contemporary and historical beliefs. Someone today who thinks slavery is wrong can be a Christian. Someone in 100 AD who thinks slavery is natural can also be a Christian. A strict adherence to all historical beliefs today however, would make you a fundamentalist (believing that slavery is natural in 2026 because the Bible says so). See Islam for some nice examples. Note that there are limits of course: you do need to believe in Christ to be a Christian.

The analogy here is that Capital or the Wealth of Nations is not the end-all be-all for socialist or capitalist beliefs. We are free to disagree completely with Marx or Smith on many points and still qualify as socialists or capitalists. For example, Smith believed that a laissez-faire approach to organizing the economy would lead to the greatest benefit because the invisible hand would guide people to better outcomes. We don't need to and shouldn't believe this anymore. Similarly, Marx believed that human labor was the source of all new value produced for exchange under capitalism. You can disbelieve this and still be socialist (although you may not be Marxist anymore). We owe Marx and Smith no special intellectual respect. To do otherwise would be called dogmatism. What we do owe them is to consider their ideas, that we are free to judge as useful or not.

3. Ideologies centered around a single person are almost always bad ideas

I put "almost" here but I can't think of a single counterexample. Any ideology centered around one single, unchanging person always seems to lead to poor outcomes one way or another. Marxism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Peronism, Trumpism, and of course the most important ones, the Abrahamic religions. The reason is because this implicitly privileges the static beliefs of a single (usually dead) person over the truthfulness of those beliefs. If you are a Marxist, can you really afford to disagree substantively with Marx? You can and should criticize Marx if you're a socialist and Smith (I choose Smith but there's no real "central" capitalist figure) if you're a capitalist. If you claim that you've done this exercise and yet coincidentally believe everything they believe, then you may just be fooling yourself.

How much of socialism is based on this core belief?

People deserve to be compensated proportional to the amount of time and effort they put in

I believe such a feeling is innate to human beings. Expending time and effort into a task is tiresome, as it requires calories and builds stress. People would rather be lazy, but effort is necessary to help the tribe. Therefore, the more time and effort one puts into a task, the more they deserve to be rewarded. Such a sentiment probably had evolutionary roots.

We’ve all felt this. There‘s a cosmic sense of justice when the person who works the hardest gets the biggest paycheck and inversely a sense of injustice when the person who does nothing gets paid nonetheless. In business, this is called equity theory, pioneered by J. Stacey Adams. The idea is that this ratio should be constant:

Pay (person A) / Effort (person A) = Pay (person B) / Effort (person B) = …

It turns out we’re very sensitive to imbalances in this ratio. If someone is getting paid more and doing less, it foments resentment. In a family we can tolerate that, which is why small tribes were able to live communally. However, in a system of 8 billion people, it doesn’t work so well.

The main issue is that effort is meaningless unless directed at the right tasks. Some of these tasks are easy to identify, especially for physical commodities like food production. However, as modern economies trend increasingly towards services and digital goods, what the “right tasks” are becomes much less obvious and being able to identify which tasks are the correct ones becomes a task in and of itself. Thus we begin to see the decoupling of effort and pay, which is deeply unsatisfying to us. I think this drives much of the resentment towards capitalism.

Discuss.