Progress to Progress

Stalinism in the USSR

Many of us, upon seeing a system like this, immediately think Soviet, and rightfully so. The word "Soviet" itself means worker's council, which was a type of representative voice given to the lower class during the period leading up to and including the USSR. The fundamental difference, however, is the illusion of Soviet democracy versus the history of Soviet oligarchy. Political parties as an embodiment of the market of ideas don't directly affect human rights (though they certainly affect them indirectly), with an end-equilibrium-state of plurality over monopoly. In the USSR, however, the control of the CPSU could only be described as total and hegemonic. Those who didn't toe the party line in any real or imagined sense were killed, sent to work camps, or fled the country.

This total control of political debate, combined with the devastation of Russian industry and population through the Russian civil war and subsequent world conflicts plunged the region into poverty. These Bolshevik practices of intimidation, forced relocation, and genocide weren't lifted in any meaningful way until after the fall of their effective dictator, Stalin. Russia, under the guidance of its various post-Stalinist leaders, is escaping the shadow of this loss in a meaningful way. This is to say that the Soviet Union didn't fall because of socialism or communism, it fell in spite of them. The downfall of the USSR can be traced to two main causes: the bolshevik use of terrorism as a means of social control under the Stalin and pre-Stalin regimes, and the economic disparity caused by industrial and agricultural devastation in the periods following the Russian civil war:

The industrial production value descended to one seventh of the value of 1913, and agriculture to one third. According to Pravda, "The workers of the towns and some of the villages choke in the throes of hunger. The railways barely crawl. The houses are crumbling. The towns are full of refuse. Epidemics spread and death strikes -- industry is ruined."

--Wikipedia,
"Russian Civil War"

During post-Stalinist USSR and Russian periods, however, the nation rebuilt itself to a player on the world stage, achieving a number of milestones in the space race, and moving gradually towards democratization through Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika programs (meaning "openness" and "reconstruction," respectively.) It wasn't until after the collapse of the USSR that the democratization efforts went into full play under Yeltsin. Still, however, through the vision of Gorbachev and practice of Yeltsin and Putin, efforts to democratize the socialist states continued, and have met industrial and agricultural successes, but with a tradeoff of human rights through capitalization of fundamentally social markets (those in which human life or livelihood is the currency.)

Social Democratic Progress

So, how does progress exist without profit? Progress, understood to be effective social construction, mental representation, and linguistic communication is maximized in free markets through the universal conversion of human social liberty into human economic liberty. This system must be met with balance, however. As previously described, pure markets can't account for human rights or the protection of any common good (such as safety, public property, traffic control, fire and police, etc,) and this conversion between economic and social freedoms needs to be met with socialized institutions to guarantee that humanity isn't enslaved either fully to themselves or to their society. Under pure capitalism, progress is maximized. Under pure socialism, progress is typically at a stand-still. Under such a combination of the two, however, progress is optimized towards the amelioration of human need, without sacrificing the part entirely for the whole, or the whole entirely for the parts.

With free markets come inherent instability. Trade naturally incurs profits and losses due to the relationship between risk-seeking and risk-aversive behaviors (recall, this is the same structure that creates social class). When the means of production are democratized and the monopolies state-sanctioned and guided without central planning, however, profits and losses still belong to those who control the means of production: the industrial constituency. This is the ultimate form of the dictatorship of the proletariat as described by Marx, but without the necessary evolution to a Communist state. As previously described, classless societies aren't a natural equilibrium-state, due to this same relationship between risk behaviors. Given that social hierarchy is an anthropological universal, and thus should be guaranteed as a human right, the state has no business imposing classlessness on a people.

Likewise, entrepreneurial force through trade is no different than unionized labor force through negotiations over the control of means of production, or political force through the democratic vote. These are all initiations of force, in libertarian terms, which must be checked and balanced by a market-external force, again, to prevent annihilation of self for state or state for self.

Why does the baker bake?

The question of impetus to produce (which leads to, if not embodies progress) in a socialized state is a pressing one. In the USSR, what reason did the baker have to make bread? In the USA, what's the analog? In the case of the former, the only impetus was social-service, and in the case of the latter, self-service. No capitalist state would encourage a private company to be philanthropic without tax breaks (economic impetus) to do so. In this description of market socialism, however, impetus to produce comes as a combination of the two drives - the concentration on self-service without social harm.

Simply, when control of wages in a corporation is democratized, those entities who need bakers will vote to set the pay rate offered for the services of baking. This implies that all pay rates are transparent to all members of the corporation. This keeps the voter in control of the market (again, the dictatorship of the proletariat), and maintains supply-side economic policies. The world can't run on bakers alone, however - there are jobs that need to be done which pay very little, and jobs which don't need to be done which currently pay vast sums. In this construction, the wage and workload of all workers will be set by the vote of those workers. Again, this form of class consciousness lessens the gap between the upper and lower classes within baseline standards of living for both while still providing supply-and-demand impetus for self-betterment and industry progress.

When left unchecked, the pattern of pure capitalist enterprise in a profitable industry tends to the sigmoidal. In the beginning phases of the industry, growth appears to be exponential, until it grows to consume all resources, finally leveling off commensurate with resource scarcity, then falling again if tied exclusively to that resource. We see this in currency fluctuations, oil use, the housing market, and any other resource which must be commoditized, capitalized, and traded. When these markets are socialized, however, the growth is necessarily more moderate and sustainable, long-term.

Progress to progress

Well-functining democracies don't need revolutionary violence; they need revolutionary thought. The cold war was never a battle between capitalism and socialism - it was a battle between democracy and despotism. The path of dictatorship in the USSR led itself to a top-down democracy, but those are inherently unstable. It failed under Gorbachev in the USSR, and it's failing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Democacy has to come from people, through education and understanding. The fundamental driving forces of capitalism and socialism, selfishness and altruism, respectively, are one and the same. They are a pair of mutually creative and destructive concepts, along the same lines as property and theft or freedom and slavery. To progress to this form of sustainable progress, we'll need the education reform described in my post-industrial economics article, the industrial and political reforms also previously laid out. This path centrally guides humanity to a balance between social, industrial, political, and technological progress without threatening the aspects that build the societies building these advancements in the first place.