Communism or Capitalism?

[Liu Yuante]

I really wish there were an "other" or Socialist option. Pure Communism and pure Capitalism are equally extreme abstractions from reality that ignore basic elements of human experience.

Straight up, free market capitalism is basically a pipe dream wherein it is imagined that if you remove all government or other oversights and constraints from the noble class of capitalists, magically the market will run with perfection. Say's Law will come into play ("no gluts" or overproduction), the market will ensure that everyone is matched with the best job and is paid a wage that is 100% in accord with what is deserved, and, most importantly, involuntary unemployment will not exist such that anyone without a job and an income is basically a freeloading piece of garbage and will be left to rot in the street.

There are any number of issues with this, one of the primary ones being that no human endeavor works like this - people are, themselves, imperfect and irrational - the idea that simply removing restrictions would somehow magically allow the market to achieve perfection is naive at best and deliberately misleading at worst. I can't imagine why manufacturers and the like would want to cultivate the idea that letting them do whatever they want is the best plan for economic success...oh wait. There is a reason why things like exploitation of child labor and adulteration of food products with unsafe materials were practices that had to be banned by law - if you don't make it illegal for people to screw over other people for money then that is exactly what happens, especially in the U.S. where our culture has replaced the ancient (and also wrong) notion of superiority of blood with that of superiority of money.

There are also other problems with Capitalism - although I'm not a Marxist, Marx did make some rather perceptive criticisms of Capitalism and the one that I have always most agreed with is the way that Capitalist theories of value ignore the actual production of the good or service being discussed. They take raw materials/components and other preliminary expenses and then magically they become the end product, that the Capitalist is then able to sell for profit or loss according to how the end product compares in value to the initial costs of production. Nowhere is it ever discussed how exactly the "widget materials" become "widgets" nor is there any discussion of the value imparted to a product or service by the very workers who are creating the product. It would be like me denying that my employees create any value of their own when they are on the phones making sales and up-selling services to customers but rather only looking at the initial expenditures of our company and then the end profit without any consideration of how we got there. It's what Marx famously called the "Black Box" and it's utter lunacy.

Basically, pure, unadulterated Capitalism (that no country I know of actually utilizes) says, "All of the value created in production and distribution of goods and services comes from the capitalist/manufacturer - any contribution from the people actually making the products or performing the service is strictly minimal and there is no contribution, indirect or direct, from society as a whole in providing a safe, law-abiding and conducive environment for the practice of the capitalist's trade; accordingly, the lion's share of profits go to the capitalist, with little to the workers and little taxation. Additionally, poor people are evil - if they were more virtuous or enterprising then they wouldn't be poor but instead would be capitalists themselves - and those without jobs are even worse, lacking even the basic intelligence and morality required to be a cog in the corporate machine. As such, society as a whole, and the hard-working, self-sufficient Capitalist in particular, do not owe any kindness or sympathy to their workers or to the unemployed."

However, do not let this condemnation of free market Capitalism fool you into thinking I hate everything about Capitalism or that I love Communism - there are good things about Capitalism, such as the way it allowed people who were not of the appropriate social class, in terms of aristocratic bloodlines, a way out from under the heels of the upper crust. Unfortunately, they have now formed a new upper crust but at least career achievement is a somewhat more objective analysis of worth than who you were lucky or unlucky enough to be born to (although the latter undoubtedly can still be a big influence on the former). Plus, Capitalism does encourage innovation and new technologies/advances. Unfortunately, it also dilutes and modifies these things until they become tame and safe enough for mass consumption but the fact is that a great many of the things that we use today and that make like convenient for us are the result of the way in which Capitalism rewards those with new ideas.

There is also the matter of Communism - frankly, I find Communism, especially of the Soviet model, just as distasteful as pure Capitalism. Communism is very much the opposite of Capitalism - where Capitalism says that value is created by the Capitalist, Communism says it is created by the workers; where Capitalism says the profits legitimately belong to the Capitalist, Communism says that this and all things or "property" that exceed that owned by others is theft; where Capitalism says that the poor and destitute have arrived at that condition solely through their own uselessness, Communism says that they have reached that state solely due to the exploitation of others. It should begin to become apparent why I have a problem with both of these systems - both abstract from reality to a degree that begins to distort and twist how things really are. All economic models - all models, period - are abstractions to some degree because the universe, this planet even, is far too complicated for our brains to comprehend so we simplify things to the point that we can make some kind of conclusion without frying our brains like the wife of the man from one of Adams' Hitchhiker's novels, who is always nattering on about "having some perspective" and who winds up having her brain fried by a machine built by her husband that would simultaneously allow awareness and comprehension of everything in the universe at once.

There is such a thing as abstracting too much, though - we simplify so that we can understand something instead of being utterly lost, but should stop when we start ignoring things that clearly are real and important. Communism ignores the possibility of a person deserving to have extra "stuff" due to hard work and earning it. According to Communism, that is not possible unless you are knowingly or unknowingly exploiting other people and that's nonsense. People do work hard and do gather some of their money simply through doing a good job. If someone earns a bonus because he or she went above and beyond, that's not exploitation and that money has been earned. People like Bill Gates certainly weren't born to a crack-addicted mother in a slum somewhere, so that he had environmental advantages from the start, but you can't diminish the fact that his genius, intellect and hard work were driving factors behind the fact that he now has more money than God. Does exploitation occur? Absolutely. Do people tend to take for granted the direct and indirect benefits of living in a society of people rather than, oh say as a hermit in the middle of a swamp, when it comes to assessing whether they ought to pay taxes or "give back" to society? Definitely. But that doesn't mean that no one with "extra" or largesse deserves it - life is complicated and just as you can't say that the Capitalist creates all of the value and should get all the benefit, you also can't say that the workers create all of the value and the Capitalist deserves none of the benefit.

The production of economic value is a complicated process that both systems oversimplify - you have to look at it from both perspectives. Denying the value created by the workers is wrong, but so, too, is denying the value created by the economic expenditure of the capitalist who is investing large amounts of money and resources in his or her company. Additionally, although there are all kinds of factors - societal, cultural, economic - that affect people and that can cause them to be disadvantaged unfairly - and based on my economics work in college (my B.A. is in Econ) I would guess that the majority of people fall into this category - one cannot dismiss the fact that there are people out there that are not pulling their weight. Some people really aren't contributing as much as they could be and to assign them the same amount of value produced is equally invalid. You can't just take everything from everyone and give it to the government, as Soviet Communism does, and distribute it all equally to people. I strongly believe everyone deserves food, shelter, clothing and access to basic medical care, but the quality of those things is not something you can just assume should be the same for everyone. If I work my ass off and end up making $500,000 a year you had better believe I am going to be giving large amounts of that to charity and will pay taxes without complaint - but at the same time, if I want to use what's left to live in a huge house and drive a fancy, expensive car then I have the right to do that, too.

It is undeniable to me that the corporate elite in the U.S. has been misbehaving for a long time and in general they award themselves salaries that are completely out of line with the pay scales the rest of their companies have to follow. They freeze wage and salary increases for years at a time because of "economic issues" and yet they continue to make the same or more as they ever did. This IS clear exploitation and it is unjust and immoral and is not an example of working hard to get where you are but rather those on top taking another kick at those beneath them. But Communism says that property is theft, period - whether it is a Capitalist's or yours or mine, if we have more than someone else then we got it unfairly. It isn't just about whether big time corporate executives are to be trusted or how much actual work they really did and how much value did they really themselves create, it's about whether "regular people" like us get to have our hard work acknowledged and our ability to get extra things for ourselves legitimized, as well. It's also about innovation and choice - yeah, Capitalism often uses "choice" as a way to psychologically brainwash people into buying things - "buy our new Tundra XL 650 pickup truck and you will be a real man that doesn't back down and is super tough" - but the reality is that choice is important. We shouldn't all have to wear the same shoes and the same clothes etc etc - Capitalism innovates while Communism stagnates.

So....what is my final stance? Socialism. Although in the U.S. we see Socialism as being leftist because, in this country at least, Communism has been wiped off the map of public, economic discussion, leaving only Socialism and Capitalism, the reality is that Socialism is the moderate policy, in between the two poles on the right and left. It allows for private property and private ownership - and therefore the ability to work yourself up to higher levels of income - but also has a heavy public focus, with significant taxation and government programs because it recognizes that there are economic, social and cultural issues that derail the perfection of the market's operation that pure Capitalism wishes were achievable. Right now the U.S. is a blend of things and - were the government not so bloated and inorganically organized - I could see our arrangement as being pretty good. Unfortunately, the government grew not according to some plan but instead haphazardly and according to dozens of different plans - as a result there is redundancy, waste, red tape and unnecessary complexity everywhere. Were there an ability to simply streamline the organization of the government without necessarily cutting any funding, I think we would see enough money saved to make a legitimate merger of social and economic fairness possible.

But anyway, to summarize: some of the economic value created is due to the Capitalist and some to the workers; some of the profit belongs to the Capitalist, some to the workers and some to society; and lastly, though a great many people are disadvantaged not because of a lack of virtue but due to circumstance, there are also people who are where they are because of who they are and not because of the unfairness of the market and society. So, a no vote to both Capitalism and Communism and a yes vote for Socialism.

Adrian

[bodidley]

Straight up, free market capitalism is basically a pipe dream wherein it is imagined that if you remove all government or other oversights and constraints from the noble class of capitalists, magically the market will run with perfection. Say's Law will come into play ("no gluts" or overproduction), the market will ensure that everyone is matched with the best job and is paid a wage that is 100% in accord with what is deserved, and, most importantly, involuntary unemployment will not exist such that anyone without a job and an income is basically a freeloading piece of garbage and will be left to rot in the street.

Thanks for your thoughts, Adrian.

Many discussions of capitalism in the academic environment start from the position of Marxist or critical theory. When the socialist philosophy provides the definition of capitalism then it makes criticism infinitely easier. Obviously the idea that people who don't work hard enough are garbage is neither inherent to capitalism nor alien to communism and socialism. Stalin and Mao put people who were perceived as slacking (and therefore sabotaging the workers' paradise) into labor camps.

Could you really have capitalism without regulation, and is lack of any regulation more capitalist? I would say to both. Even the concept of laissez-faire is by no means anarchist. Expecting manufacturers or restauranteurs to have health and safety standards doesn't interfere with their private property rights or right to self determination. The most important regulations are those that prevent companies that have grown too large from manipulating the market and preventing competition. It's only when regulations are unreasonable, complicated and stifling that they become a problem. In fact some of the over-regulating that goes on is lobbied for by large companies because they prevent small businesses from having a fair chance at competing. One example is the alcohol distribution laws in the United States that split brewers, distributors, and retailers and basically prevent small brewers from distributing their product, and which companies like Anheuser-Busch have historically lobbied to keep.

There are any number of issues with this, one of the primary ones being that no human endeavor works like this - people are, themselves, imperfect and irrational - the idea that simply removing restrictions would somehow magically allow the market to achieve perfection is naive at best and deliberately misleading at worst.

Certainly people are imperfect and irrational, but irrational people don't usually become successful entrepreneurs, do they? They might, however, rise in the ranks as civil servants. Systems of human organization tend to be based on peoples' limitations. The reason a military or a company has a chain of command, for example, is not because of the individual's inability to function without constant supervision, but rather because of the leader's inability to effectively supervise more than a few people at a time. No one knows whats best for another person, and no individual is capable of managing other peoples' affairs better than they are at managing them on their own, so it follows that individuals are capable of handling their own affairs then some stranger, and private organizations are more capable of handling their own affairs than a bureaucrat who is unfamiliar with their day to day activities and organization.

Decentralizing control of the market and of business and lets competition naturally select performing companies helps the consumer receive better service, pay lower prices and gain access to better quality products.

So....what is my final stance? Socialism. Although in the U.S. we see Socialism as being leftist because, in this country at least, Communism has been wiped off the map of public, economic discussion, leaving only Socialism and Capitalism, the reality is that Socialism is the moderate policy, in between the two poles on the right and left. It allows for private property and private ownership - and therefore the ability to work yourself up to higher levels of income - but also has a heavy public focus, with significant taxation and government programs because it recognizes that there are economic, social and cultural issues that derail the perfection of the market's operation that pure Capitalism wishes were achievable.

Is socialism a middle ground between communism and capitalism, or is communism simply socialism taken to its logical moral conclusion? The moral basis for socialism and communism is the same, and communist theory is derived from socialism. Certainly the ideas behind socialism are much older, and go back in practice to ancient times.

Unfortunately, the government grew not according to some plan but instead haphazardly and according to dozens of different plans - as a result there is redundancy, waste, red tape and unnecessary complexity everywhere. Were there an ability to simply streamline the organization of the government without necessarily cutting any funding, I think we would see enough money saved to make a legitimate merger of social and economic fairness possible.

Of all governments in the world, I'd say the United States is actually one of the less haphazardly planned and organized in the world. Based on my own experience working for the government, I'd say that inefficiency is unfortunately an inherent quality in government that has to be actively combated. Just one small example is at the end of training exercises in the military, the soldiers must expend all the ammunition that hasn't been fired because A) the process of turning in unused ammunition is excruciating B) firing all the ammunition is the best way to guarantee that no ammunition has been misappropriated without making an investigation and C) you have to use all of it in order to get justify getting just as much ammo next time, when you might actually need it. Point C is a particular Achilles heel you see frequently in government funding. I've seen tens of thousands of dollars wasted at a time for that very reason, be it for ammo or office equipment.

Also, could you explain more about how you define economic fairness?

[WeiWenDi]

Is socialism a middle ground between communism and capitalism, or is communism simply socialism taken to its logical moral conclusion? The moral basis for socialism and communism is the same, and communist theory is derived from socialism. Certainly the ideas behind socialism are much older, and go back in practice to ancient times.

Could you really have capitalism without regulation, and is lack of any regulation more capitalist? I would say to both. Even the concept of laissez-faire is by no means anarchist. Expecting manufacturers or restauranteurs to have health and safety standards doesn't interfere with their private property rights or right to self determination. The most important regulations are those that prevent companies that have grown too large from manipulating the market and preventing competition. It's only when regulations are unreasonable, complicated and stifling that they become a problem. In fact some of the over-regulating that goes on is lobbied for by large companies because they prevent small businesses from having a fair chance at competing.

This being a double standard, of course. If the 'logical moral conclusion' of socialism is communism, then it must also be the case that the 'logical moral conclusion' of capitalism is anarchy, as it expressly provides no moral grounding for government action and reduces all value judgements to individual preference. As a system, in spite of capitalism's dependence on the state's enforcement of property rights through the courts, it still tends toward the demolition of traditional family and property arrangements and toward theft from those outside the legal structures which protect it. In short, while capital is willing to take advantage of the rules which govern it when those rules can make it anti-competitive (as with the 'unreasonable' regulations you listed above), it is not willing, when it has control over those regulative bodies, to give up any of its entrenched power for moral considerations unless it is forced to - whether by legal action or by sustained appeal to the better character of the public. When do you believe Apple is going to give greater legal rights to the workers at Foxconn, for instance, and how long will it take Apple to switch to another supplier in Vietnam or Bangladesh?

As to whether socialism is a middle ground between capitalism and communism, that depends entirely on the source.

Marxism will tend either to capitulate to its own excesses (as in Stalinism and Maoism), or it will capitulate to the reigning demands of capitalism, globalisation and the so-called 'Washington consensus' (as in the European 'social democratic' parties). However, the pre-Marxist labour advocacy traditions - though scorned by much of the left for their religious roots and (naturally) by the right for their insistence on a morally grounded political economy - have been successful where they have been tried. The Mondragon Corporation is only the most dramatic example, but also the more functional welfare states in Britain and Northern Europe were the results of sustained effort by Christian and guild socialists, High Tories and independent radicals - many of whom had more to do with John Wesley and Edward Pusey than with Marx or Engels.

Certainly people are imperfect and irrational, but irrational people don't usually become successful entrepreneurs, do they? They might, however, rise in the ranks as civil servants. Systems of human organization tend to be based on peoples' limitations. The reason a military or a company has a chain of command, for example, is not because of the individual's inability to function without constant supervision, but rather because of the leader's inability to effectively supervise more than a few people at a time.

You do realise that the military - even the career-driven sort - are a form of civil service, yes? Loyalty to the government is the first duty of any military man or woman, and militaries are generally ideal case studies in top-loaded bureaucratic forms of organisation. Hardly an example suitable to your purposes here - particularly when one considers that military veterans have access to taxpayer-funded public health care (not just mandatory health insurance like the rest of us now have).

Also, could you explain more about how you define economic fairness?

Daren't speak for Adrian, but my ideas on what constitutes economic fairness generally tend to come from Catholic social teaching - particularly from Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. Living wage suitable for (and proportional to the needs of) raising a family, guaranteed right of labour to organise, structures which guarantee economic democracy in a market economy, anti-trust legislation, that sort of thing.

From the US Conference of Catholic Bishops:

The economy must serve people, not the other way around. All workers have a right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, and to safe working conditions. They also have a fundamental right to organize and join unions. People have a right to economic initiative and private property, but these rights have limits. No one is allowed to amass excessive wealth when others lack the basic necessities of life.

Catholic teaching opposes collectivist and statist economic approaches. But it also rejects the notion that a free market automatically produces justice. Distributive justice, for example, cannot be achieved by relying entirely on free market forces. Competition and free markets are useful elements of economic systems. However, markets must be kept within limits, because there are many needs and goods that cannot be satisfied by the market system. It is the task of the state and of all society to intervene and ensure that these needs are met.

[Liu Yuante]

There are any number of issues with this, one of the primary ones being that no human endeavor works like this - people are, themselves, imperfect and irrational - the idea that simply removing restrictions would somehow magically allow the market to achieve perfection is naive at best and deliberately misleading at worst.

Certainly people are imperfect and irrational, but irrational people don't usually become successful entrepreneurs, do they?

bodidley - Thank you for your reply.

I don't have time for a full response right this minute, but I do have a few quick thoughts -

1st, the quote above is begging the question - you are essentially offering your conclusion itself as the proof of your conclusion.

I would argue that all people are irrational to a degree. I would also argue that since things like treating your employees like slaves - which isn't really very rational when you think about it, especially since behavior such as this ultimately led to the creation of things like unions, which have made life a pain for many a company in the years since - is extremely irrational and yet, as mentioned above, things like child labor laws, lunch breaks, paid breaks and the like had to be legislated into existence before many companies would implement them. Also, if entrepreneurs weren't capable of being irrational then I don't really see how things like racist or sexist hiring or wage practices could ever have existed considering it makes no sense to decline the work of a qualified applicant, or alienate a qualified employee through unfair pay, based on something as irrelevant as skin color or gender. And yet, these are more things that had to be made illegal in order to begin the process of improving the situations at hand.

I'll be back later with a more detailed response to the rest of what you had to say.

EDIT: I have a little more time so we'll do this in pieces I guess. Let me go ahead and clarify what I mean by economic fairness:

1. Everyone has equal opportunity - in other words, how far you go is based on merit as much as possible, with allowances made for luck, and with no prejudicial practices based on sex, race, ethnicity, handicap, sexual preference, religion or age.

2. The economic harvest that everyone reaps will be based on the value produced by that individual. In other words, it's not ok for a CEO to be paid 30 times what his rank-and-file employees make unless his contribution to the company is truly generating that level of value. Capitalist theories of value, which eschew examination of the labor process, must be thrown out or modified. If a company generates revenue of 5 million dollars, then each employee from the lowest to highest should be paid in accordance to the value created by that employee.

Well, that would be my stance, except that there is a small problem with this - if everyone is paid in accordance with value from the total generated revenue, then where is profit going to come from? If a business wants to expand or improve working conditions or adopt a new technology then extra money is going to be needed. Thus, it isn't possible to pay everyone exactly according to value produced - the question then is how is this going to be done fairly? Basically, you apply the same rule from top to bottom - if you're going to expect your employees to take a 10% hit in their income then you, the head of the company, are also going to take a 10% hit in your income, as well.

Except that this still isn't quite right. Firstly, these profits, moreover, must be reinvested in the company and not pocketed by corporate executives. Additionally, since in most situations the head of the company is going to end up making a larger amount of money, even in a "fair" situation, than his employees because there is one of him and potentially hundreds or even thousands of them, I would suggest that further analysis would need to be made to determine a better process than simply handing down the same 10% cut through the entire company. 10% of $250,000, while numerically higher than 10% of $25,000, is marginally less detrimental than the loss of money to the individual in the latter scenario - $2,500 "means more" to the person making $25,000 than $25,000 means to the person making $250,000. Additionally, if you have 50 employees then you have now gained $125,000 back from all of them in this 10% cut - smaller cuts can still reap a greater impact when spread out amongst many employees. So, in reality, we would expect the employer to cut his salary by 10% and each employee by 5% or whatever meets the improvement needs of the company's desired profit growth best - and by improvement needs I mean reinvesting in the company for the benefit of everyone.

Furthermore, the principal contribution that the heads of companies make in contributing value is in stewardship of the business and, most importantly, investment of their own capital. As such, it makes even more sense that the heads of companies - whether individuals or ownership boards or what have you - should have to kick back more of their potential income into the ongoing operations of the company than those further down the ladder who do more of the basic, day-to-day work that produces the goods or services of the company. I can certainly see situations where the higher-ups ought to be putting back far more into the company than the rank-and-file and far more than the 10% example used above.

3. Lastly, I believe everyone deserves food, shelter, clothing and access to basic medical care. The food doesn't have to be good, but it should be unadulterated and nutritious - canned vegetables as opposed to a Snickers bar. Shelter - again we're not talking about the Ritz, we're talking about Salvation Army shelters and the like. Clothing, again, hand-me-downs are what we're looking at here. Lastly, basic medical care plus emergency care for immediately life-threatening conditions. Ultimately the point of providing these things, though, is to have the proverbial safety net so that people capable of contributing to society don't get ground under its wheels but have the opportunity to rebound. I also think a lot of people fail to understand that for the working poor programs such as WIC and food stamps help to keep these people in jobs and out of homeless shelters.

Anyway - a lot of this is extremely oversimplified and given my rant about abstractions from earlier, not exactly appropriate, but I'm mostly just laying out the theory. There are issues with some of these things and a lot of questions to be asked and complicating factors, but this is the basic gist of what I would term economic fairness.

EDIT #2: The two paragraphs quoted by WeiWenDi from the USCCB also do a good job of summing up where I stand on this issue. Unlike WWD I have not arrived at these conclusions through any religious perspective, but unlike some on the left I have no natural animosity for religion, and indeed have always had a strong affinity for writers such as Victor Hugo, whose work both in literature and in the public eye embodies the best of the humanitarian religious tradition.

EDIT #3:

Could you really have capitalism without regulation, and is lack of any regulation more capitalist? I would say to both. Even the concept of laissez-faire is by no means anarchist. Expecting manufacturers or restauranteurs to have health and safety standards doesn't interfere with their private property rights or right to self determination. The most important regulations are those that prevent companies that have grown too large from manipulating the market and preventing competition. It's only when regulations are unreasonable, complicated and stifling that they become a problem. In fact some of the over-regulating that goes on is lobbied for by large companies because they prevent small businesses from having a fair chance at competing.

I think I mostly agree with what you're saying here in the sense that I don't believe safety standards are too much to ask or that regulations are often a good thing. I do disagree, however, with your classification of these beliefs as being consistent with pure Capitalism. Indeed, in the not-too-recent past in the U.S., during the late 19th and early-20th Centuries, the Supreme Court used the Due Process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to disallow labor laws and minimum wage standards as being violations of the freedom of individuals and companies to form contracts without government intrusion. Since this time the courts have largely reversed their position on the subject, but considering how important freedom of contract is to libertarian conceptions of government, as well as to laissez-faire economic theory, I think i would be right to say that advocating regulations such as those you mention above are, in fact, a push to the left from pure Capitalism and towards the direction of Socialism.

Adrian

[bodidley]

This being a double standard, of course. If the 'logical moral conclusion' of socialism is communism, then it must also be the case that the 'logical moral conclusion' of capitalism is anarchy, as it expressly provides no moral grounding for government action and reduces all value judgements to individual preference. As a system, in spite of capitalism's dependence on the state's enforcement of property rights through the courts, it still tends toward the demolition of traditional family and property arrangements and toward theft from those outside the legal structures which protect it.

I disagree that anarchism is the logical conclusion of capitalism or libertarianism. Anarchy is itself a form of tyranny because might makes right and it's difficult for people to have legal rights when there is no law. You can look at the customs of certain native American tribes like the Huron or even the vendetta ethos in Corsica and the badal portion of the Pashtunwali code as forms of judicial anarchy where individuals are responsible for enforcement, but especially in the case of Corsica it becomes obvious that in large societies it doesn't work out.

You simply couldn't have competitive capitalism without regulation. In the middle ages before much regulation existed trades tended to form guilds that controlled production and manipulated the market and access to employment. The manorial system, where a lord would manage the land on behalf of an overlord and organize the serfs who could not move from or be moved from their employment (no property ownership, employment by the government, sound familiar?) was largely deregulated in medieval England because serfs belonged to manorial law and not royal law. The centralized management of wealth in the middle ages was an impediment to growth and lack of regulation preventing monopolies is exactly the reason why medieval economies were socialist rather than capitalist.

Anarchism also isn't totally incompatible with socialism or communism either, as the most influential anarchists in history were anarchic-syndicalists or anarchic-communists.

I also disagree with your point that capitalism is destructive to family. I think that family is alive and well in the world and most of us still come from families. The destruction of family and its replacement by the state, however, is one of the tenets of the Communist Manifesto. To a certain extent there has been an attempt by governments in recent history to replace family as the source of values through instilling them in the education system, but that's not exactly an old idea since it was put forward by Socrates in Plato's Republic.

You do realise that the military - even the career-driven sort - are a form of civil service, yes? Loyalty to the government is the first duty of any military man or woman, and militaries are generally ideal case studies in top-loaded bureaucratic forms of organisation. Hardly an example suitable to your purposes here - particularly when one considers that military veterans have access to taxpayer-funded public health care (not just mandatory health insurance like the rest of us now have).

Oh bigtime WWD, the military would be a perfect model for the function of a socialist society, as the pay and organization is essentially communist. Everyone gets paid the same based on their rank and time in service, rather than their merit, their workload, the difficulty of their work or their individual contribution. The military is a great school for the pros and cons of an "egalitarian" system. I have to disagree with some of your facts, though.

While direction is driven top-down, execution of tasks is bottom-up and there is excellent small-unit NCO leadership in the U.S. military where most battlefield decisions are decentralized, although other militaries like the U.K. and especially Russia are behind the U.S.in this regard. Also, in the U.S. veterans do not get access to tax-payer funded healthcare unless they were disabled by their service. I lost my healthcare the day I left active duty (and coincidentally got shingles the same day). Retirees are have access to the taxpayer-subsidized military health care system but only if they live close enough to a military hospital and they must pay a premium, which under new rules being implemented by the Obama administration will become more expensive than getting health care on the individual market.

I'm not against many of the goals of socialism, but I think that if you want to achieve those goals private organization is a far more trustworthy path to achieving those goals. I think that it's somewhat naive to believe that any system of redistribution of wealth organized by the government will not fall victim to private political interest and profiteering. If you pay taxes to receive a service it's more likely your money is going to some boondoggle than the service the government is supposed to be providing. Governments are also inefficient by nature. Because they don't need efficiency to survive, they consistently take actions that comply with nonsensical rules rather than common sense (spend your entire budget on stuff you don't need so that you can justify spending next time when you'll need it) and their employment of individuals and contractors is frequently fraught with political corruption.

[Duncan]

Governments are also inefficient by nature. Because they don't need efficiency to survive, they consistently take actions that comply with nonsensical rules rather than common sense

I agree with this - I work for a government agency. Government isn't efficient, but then again it is usually run by politicians whose programmes and principles vaccilate on the winds of public opinion - ie you and me (amongst millions of others).

My sister-in-law has worked for a series of private companies as Director of Human Resources (she keeps being head-hunted to run "down-sizing" operations). She can affirm that they universally operate to sets of nonsensical rules made up on the whim of unaccountable individuals (people you might describe as Capitalists).

None of this is really about communism or capitalism, because in human society neither can really exist as a pure model. It is about what point you prefer in a continuum of different shades of grey. Who has economic power, who has political power, how much should power be centralised or in the hands of the individual, etc? These are all the real questions. Communist, capitalist, libertarian and socialist ideals are simply shorthands to express some of these ideas, and often people on the same side of the argument can't agree what they mean by these terms.