Comment by TFYS
2 days ago
> Why not just do market socialism?
Because markets are based on competition, and that causes a lot of issues on it's own, even in the absence of capitalism. It's because of competition that we consume too much resources, have wars between nations, etc. I don't think we can get rid of a lot of the problems we have unless we start actually planning long term and co-operating instead of competing. I agree with you that it'd be hard and risky to build a working planned economy, and that it'd be best to start with small scale tests. I just don't see how humanity will survive unless we start planning at a very large scale and stop competing with each other. A global planned economy is the only way to do that.
> But I believe most people, including myself, would only do the minimum if no personal gain was involved
I don't think all personal gain needs to be removed in a planned economy. There could be different rewards for different tasks, if achieving the plan requires it. What is not necessary is the ridiculously large differences between rewards. It's enough that the reward is somewhat motivating, there's no need to have some tasks be thousands or millions of times more rewarding than others. If there are tasks that wouldn't get done in the absence of rewards so large, surely they are rare and worth leaving undone for the other benefits of a planned economy.
> there are a number of social democracies (which are mixed economy, i.e. capitalist) in Europe that attest to that.
I live in one of the best managed ones, and still we're slowly but surely losing our government to the influence of capital. Media is concentrating, worker rights and unions are being attacked, etc. It takes a long time in a well designed system, but eventually capital will win. Even if we manage to get a government that tries to protect the rights of people over capital, the realities of a global economy based on competition don't allow that anymore. If we try, we lose to countries that don't and then we can no longer afford it.
I don't believe there's any connection between market competition and security competition, even though they both belong to the abstract category of "competition".
Conflict deaths were higher before modern capitalism, and were the highest per capita in hunter gatherer societies that don't have the social construction of private property. The 20th century communist states weren't more peaceful than capitalist states. The level of brutalization was often more extreme, like the Holodomor or the ethnic cleansing of Tartars from Crimea perpetrated by Stalin. China being no exception as the invasion of Vietnam shows. Or the agrarian communist Pol Pot and his genocide of his own people with a focus on ethnic Vietnamese. Or compare the brutality of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Conflict deaths were the lowest in all of human history in the most capitalist era of human history, the 1990s, during American unipolar hegemony.
The primary driver of conflict is the absence of a stable polar power, whether that power is capitalist or communist, and the resulting security competition that naturally emerges between actors with different interests when they're put inside this anarchic power vacuum with nobody to protect them but themselves, causing paranoia and preemption. The easiest path to return to a low conflict world would be just to return to American hegemony as it was in the 1990s before Russian imperial belligerence and Chinese revisionism around Taiwan were even possible due to American unipolar deterrence being unquestionable. It would be a capitalist world, but it would certainly also be the most peaceful world in human history, notwithstanding the relatively small number of conflicts that would still occur.
The liberal perspective on all this would be that the biological drive to compete with our fellow people is not something that can be suppressed, because it's an evolved trait that is part and parcel of existing as a primate. It's something to channel into less destructive activities like sports, games, or interests, and it's something to control and shape and unleash with regulations and systems. And no liberal would say that this is a perfect state of affairs, only that it's the least bad state of affairs that can be practically achieved given our biology and the real-world constraints that we need to work with.
Security competition is about securing resources. Markets are a mechanism for deciding who owns and how to use those resources. They are very closely related. If one country gets competitive advantage in the global market for owning a piece of land with some resource, that creates an incentive for conflict over that piece of land. If instead the two countries were a part of the same planned economic system that distributes resources in a fair way towards a plan that both countries have agreed upon, there would be no such incentive. There wouldn't even be a need for separate nations to exist, as the primary purpose of those is to secure resources in a competitive environment to your group of people.
You're right that conflict did exist before capitalism and even markets, but the systems before capitalism were also based on competition. Tribes competed for hunting grounds, kings competed for land, etc. They didn't come together and agree upon a plan that would best provide for all people equally. They had no means to do so. With modern technology we now do. Even the conflict within communist countries I would say was due to competition over positions of power and competition against countries trying to fight communism. A working planned economy would need to prevent such positions of power from existing to prevent that from happening. We'd need to design ways to make good decisions using direct democracy to avoid centralizing power and the competition over that power.
There might be a biological drive behind greed and competition, but I don't think that's a reason to use them as the base of our economic and political systems. We also have a biological drive to co-operate with each other, we should try create more systems based on that.
> If instead the two countries were a part of the same planned economic system
What you are proposing is a unipolar world order. That would create peace, but not due to its economic system. The shared security architecture is what causes peace. Any unipolar order is good enough for this task; see American capitalist hegemony in the 1990s. You can even have world peace with a mix of capitalist and communist states, as long as there is a unipolar security architecture that they're all part of.
Ask yourself, why is there no security competition between Texas and California? They are both capitalist entities, they could have been separate nation states had history run its course differently. The reason is the shared security architecture of the federal state that sits on top of them both. Their economic system is not relevant, but the power structure they exist in is. Why is there no security competition between the UK and France? It's because NATO sits on top of them both as the dominant polar security architecture. Why was there security competition between communist China and communist Russia during the Sino-Soviet split? It wasn't because of their economic system, it was the lack of a security architecture sitting on top of them both as China grew in power to the point it became a challenge to Russia.
> Security competition is about securing resources.
I would slightly deemphasize the role of resource competition. Competition over resources does happen, but it's often instrumental in nature. Hitler invaded the USSR to secure oil, but the oil wasn't the point, being able to continue the war economy on the Western front while having little access to indigenous oil was the point. Japan did a blitz through South East Asia in pursuit of oil in response to the US oil embargo, but again the oil wasn't the point, securing oil was instrumental to sustaining the imperial war machine. Even conflicts seemingly over land ownership often have a security component that is not well appreciated. You need land to ensure strategic depth, to preempt future belligerency, to ensure hydrosecurity, or to deny key staging points or radar locations. All of these zero-sum motivations for conflict disappear with a unipolar security architecture that subsumes all peoples.
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