What does a socialist/communist economy look like?

Day 1,799, 04:46 • Published in Australia Australia • by Chris Carnage

Most people, when they think of a socialist/communist economy think of monstrous state-owned enterprises labouring under the mostly inept and often corrupt leadership of a vast bureaucracy led by megalomaniac dictators.

To be sure, that is a model that has been tried in RL under the brand of communism, and whether it is worse to its workers than a sharp-edged impersonal capitalist system trained to funnel the productive capacity of entire populations to the ever-increasing personal wealth of an ever-decreasing number of capitalists is a matter for debate, but not in this article.


Why do we think this way of the socialist/communist economy? I guess for those of us in the traditionally liberal-democratic societies a few generations of propaganda and some RL exemplars of extraordinarily bad practice don't hurt. Never mind the mass poverty and exploitation of the third world inflicted by global corporations that would amount to genocide if committed by a leader unfriendly to the first world, but I digress...

There are other economic models that fall into the broad socialist/communist framework. Allow me to expound on one such model, the syndicalist commune.

One might find, in the failure of the capitalist system (predicted by crazy people), that some workers will become disaffected with the degree to which their productive capacity is captured by capital (ignorant nincompoops that they are). It is entirely possible that in such circumstances one may find that communes form spontaneously around groups of such disaffected workers who find that bypassing the capitalist market economy and forming communes that effect the rightful distribution of the product of their labour all are not only better off in a material sense but also form a sense of community that the individualism required for successful capitalist domination frowns upon as inefficient and counter-productive.


In e-life this may take the shape of military communes, where workers do not work for a meagre wage but take a rightful share of the fruit of their labour. In time one might expect that the military commune may become the dominant form of production across the world. Crazy I know, but let me dream a little further.

Imagine that the military commune takes such a dominant hold that the entire market system collapses. Would-be capitalists sell their goods for less than the cost of production (unimaginable). The market system, so revered by the capitalist establishment, becomes a laughing stock. The price signals that are intended to render perfect efficiency instead promote perverse incentives and irrational behaviour. Government revenues shrink to miniscule proportions and government expenditure turns to unsustainable draw-downs of shrinking reserves to fund the social goods that capitalism refuses to supply on account of their unprofitability. The role of government withers and weakens daily.


Such a state is unimaginable, no? Yet here we are, with military communes the dominant form of production and prices of manufactures lower than the cost of the raw materials to produce them in most markets. Tax revenue has shrunk to such a level that the government draws upon ever-decreasing reserves while the fundamental function of government, the security of the people, is increasingly delivered by non-governmental organisations.

Welcome to the socialist economy my friends. I wish I could say I had done something to precipitate its realisation but I have not. It has arisen from good sense and pragmatism.

Long live the revolution!