Against “Kinder, Gentler” Socialism

There have been some recent attempts to resuscitate and rejuvenate the dead ideas of socialism. Despite its having been thoroughly refuted by the experience of the 20th century, advocates are always appealing to some slight variation on the basic concept that's "never been tried." You can read some of my recent posts as pushing back against these attempts to redeem a fundamentally misguided idea. 

In this post on worker ownership of the firm, I'm arguing against a thread of socialism that downplays state control of production and endorses worker ownership of the firm. As I read it, this position is actually a substantial retreat from socialism as it was initially conceived, an attempt to "moderate." Or perhaps it's just and attempt by crypto-communists appear moderate to onlookers. It's as if they recognize socialism in actual practice (as in literal state control of the means of production) has a horrendous track record. "No, no, we're not endorsing that." Ben Burgis and Richard Wolff are attempting to achieve as much socialism as possible through voluntary arrangements, while still not shying away from using the machinery of the state to mold the world toward their imagined utopia. I think their vision of an economy dominated by worker co-ops is extremely unlikely. Apparently the workers agree; the vast majority of workers in free economies are wage and salary employees. Very few workers get a substantial share of their income from residual claims against their employer's revenue (like you would as a partial owner). Even this kinder, gentler, warmer, fuzzier variant on socialism is a terrible idea.

In this post I explore the experience of the Israeli Kibbutzim. This was an institution of private socialism that started strong at their initial founding and began to decline. The critiques of such a system that a basic econ 101 analysis would warn you about began to materialize and take a bite. If "kinder, gentler" socialism were a viable option, they would have grown rather than shrank. The obvious incentive problems and brain drain took their toll. Despite reforming themselves in a pro-market, pro-property direction (hiring outside firms to run their commissaries, giving members the right to own more private property and leave the Kibbutz with it, etc.), life outside the Kibbutzim was more attractive. 

I see people like Burgis and Wolff as misstating the historical record, or simply not dealing with it. They subscribe to a vision of the world that I don't recognize, where companies have "power" over employees and customers. (They don't have "power." They can only offer a thing for a price, which the customers and workers can freely take or leave.) They fail to recognize the massive improvements in living standards over the last two centuries, or at any rate they fail to attribute those improvements to private enterprise. So they end up inventing solutions in search of problems.

Mao and Stalin were mass murderers. I'm glad that today's defenders of socialism at least see a need to distance themselves from them and say their program is a different thing. This is a kind of progress. But the problem isn't just that these people were big meanies. State socialism failed to deliver the goods. If the problem were merely that corrupt, evil people took over the machinery of the state, we still should have observed superior economic growth (with the proceeds going to the corrupt rulers rather than the workers more generally). No, the problem with socialism is the incentive problem. People treat communal property like trash (compared to how they treat their private property). People don't work so hard when their salary doesn't depend on their productivity. Those problems don't go away when you retreat to a gentler, more voluntary form of socialism. I'm happy to see experiments in communal living arrangements, and I think some version of this can succeed in a tightly knit community of very dedicated individuals. (The Kibbutzim falls just shy of this realization, but comes close.) I don't want to over-analyze the motives of modern defenders of socialism, but I see them as not willing to let go of something when history has given us a clear verdict. I detect a desperate clutching to whatever variant of this idea remains "untried." They've retreated to a superficially defensible enclave of idea-space. But they're trying to defend something that's fundamentally indefensible. 

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I want to apply a "line in the sand" test to some of these people. As in: Is there a line they won't cross, where the economy becomes "too socialist" or the government exerts too much control over markets? Is there theoretically a point where they would say, "Nope, this is too much socialism. We need more economic freedom and private incentives." If not, they are crypto-communists masquerading as sensible moderates. They want whatever amount of socialism that they can get away with. If they got what they asked for, they would simply push it further in the same direction. I often sense that there is no limiting principle. (Not just w.r.t. socialists pushing socialism. The answers to questions like "How much should we tax cigarettes?" or "How much should we pay school teachers?" always seems to be "more", without reference to the current level or recent trendlines.) Maybe most of these gentlefolk have a limit in mind, and I'm being paranoid for entertaining this hypothetical at all.