Why did socialism fail?

(This is a follow-on from thread HG Wells 1933 “The shape of things to come”. Before reading this book, I had no clue as to the vast difference between socialism and communism).

Reading further, Wells transition to utopia is a rehash of Leninist socialism. So why did this fail.

Timeline of book

• p. 47 Criticism of capitalism.
• pp 54-71 The Great War.
• pp 85-168 Between the wars.
• pp 168-211 The Last War. Predicts that Japan, Germany, Italy and Austria will be defeated by China, the US, Britain, France and Russia.
• pp 211-215 The pandemic.
• p. 250-258 De Windt fills in what Marx omitted – how to run a socialist control of production. Promotes socialist education as a total replacement for human nature.
• pp. 276-286 First Basra conference. Aviators start a transport workers union around which a world government will later form. Beginning of Lenin-like socialism.
• pp. 306-310, 352-362 Second Basra conference. Starts a World Government and imposes a Stalin-like tyranny.
• pp. 349, 371-374 Megève conference. Socialist propaganda has been completely successful, everyone is now an altruist. End of World Government in a laissez-faire utopia.

Where Wells went wrong in the worst possible way.

• The assumption that socialist education is a total replacement for human nature, ie. that nurture always trumps nature. In real life, biologists have found that nurture and nature have roughly equal influences on behaviour.
• The assumption that capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive opposites. They work together. Wells’s mantra “The primary task of world administration is to arrest this squeezing out of human beings from active economic life” is easily satisfied in a capitalist economy.
• The assumption that socialism works.
• The assumption that the 100% government control of socialism can transition to a 0% government control in utopia overnight.

Problems with Lenin-like socialism. What went wrong with socialism? Well, a lot of things.

• Captialism has problem of competition → efficiency → overproduction and unemployment. Socialism has the opposite intrinsic problem of low efficiency and underproduction.
• The US claims that it “won” by forcing more and more Soviet people into arms production away from goods production.
• Power hunger by minority ethnic groups led to the physical break-up.
• In socalism, everything new had to be approved by the government. Even with the best intentions, the country drowned in red tape that could only be cut by bribery. Without bribery, the country would have collapsed sooner.
• Hard physical work in a low-paid job leads to massive problems with alcoholism.
• Secret police enforcing the “no capitalism” and “no criticism” rules. The subsequent curtailment of transport and communications for the convicted people turns huge areas (eg. Siberia) into vast prisons.
• Secrecy in all levels of government attracts corruption.
• Jealousy of better standards of living elsewhere.
• Malicious compliance.
• Organised crime.

I want to discuss “Malicious compliance” in more detail. “Malicious compliance” is more than “work to rule” and less than “sabotage”, and unlike sabotage is entirely legal under a socialist scheme. It occurred everywhere throughout the USSR and can be blamed for the exceedingly high rate of failure of complex military equipment. Suppose as an example a producer is contracted to produce 10,000 shoes. Malicious compliance is:

• Producing 10,000 shoes, so satisfying the contract,
• all the same size,
• with different numbers of left and right feet,
• small,
• from the cheapest possible leather, stitching and glue,
• without any pretense of quality control.
• etc.

>The assumption that socialist education is a total replacement for human nature, ie. that nurture always trumps nature. In real life, biologists have found that nurture and nature have roughly equal influences on behaviour

technically the structure or ‘nature’ provides the variables and potentials of receptivity to nurture, or environment if you will, which can also involve (including intelligent and useful, often does) resistance to environment, or aspects of environment

transition said:

>The assumption that socialist education is a total replacement for human nature, ie. that nurture always trumps nature. In real life, biologists have found that nurture and nature have roughly equal influences on behaviour

technically the structure or ‘nature’ provides the variables and potentials of receptivity to nurture, or environment if you will, which can also involve (including intelligent and useful, often does) resistance to environment, or aspects of environment

Yes.

mollwollfumble said:

transition said:

>The assumption that socialist education is a total replacement for human nature, ie. that nurture always trumps nature. In real life, biologists have found that nurture and nature have roughly equal influences on behaviour

technically the structure or ‘nature’ provides the variables and potentials of receptivity to nurture, or environment if you will, which can also involve (including intelligent and useful, often does) resistance to environment, or aspects of environment

Yes.

and I guess if I can use ‘adequacy’ in a not too loaded or expectational way, it might be said an adequate example of the species is self-nurturing, possibly even everyone is in some way creative that way, necessarily so, self-aware consciousness sort of requires it, makes it unavoidable

Not much motivation to do a good job if you have to wait in line for days like everyone else just to get mouldy cabbage

Plus its usually forced onto the population by a military coup so has to act like a police state to work (or not work)

Cymek said:

Not much motivation to do a good job if you have to wait in line for days like everyone else just to get mouldy cabbage

Plus its usually forced onto the population by a military coup so has to act like a police state to work (or not work)

I had an example just yesterday here of two people cheating the government.
Light bulbs were replaced by LEDs, paid for by the government.
10 bulbs were replaced.
The electrician charged the government for 11. 10% mark-up.
The salesman charged the government for 15. 50% mark-up.

If that can happen in a relatively honest country li8ke Australia, I hate to think how high the government charge for work not done in the Soviet Union used to be.

mollwollfumble said:

a relatively honest country li8ke Australia, I hate to think

? lol what year do you think it is, 10000 BCE ¿