[ExI] communism/authoritarianism

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 3:22 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> Today a column by Walter Williams, a conservative economist I follow, features the total deaths of people under communism.  Truly horrible.
>
> However, I got to looking at the countries involved and wondered if you also factored in the deaths under authoritarian but not communist governments, like the Nazis, if communism would not come up with communism as the main culprit, but authoritarian governments.
>
> I do not have the inclination nor probably the ability to gather these data and run some sort of multiple regression formula on them, but I think it is worth doing and should not be that difficult.
>
> The right wing authoritarians also messed with the economy, no?

Were those governments really communist though? I mean I would state
socialist and from an economics perspective it's centralized planning
that's their key feature. I feel it's a misnomer to call them
communist, though at this point it's kind of like trying to rescue the
term 'liberal.' (I'm not trying to defend communism as such here, but
is there a difference between, say, the regime that took power in
Russia in late 1917 and communism? And I don't think it's merely a
matter of in theory communism is X but in practice it's Y.)

'Right wing authoritarians' -- by which I take it you mean the Nazis,
the Italian Fascists, and similar regimes in Hungary and tributary
states of the Nazis (e.g., Croatia) as well as many a regime in Latin
America during the 20th century -- don't have any problem of meddling
in the economy. Typically, such regimes are critical of liberalism in
the broad sense and of free markets. Italian Fascists, for instance,
embraced economic planning in various ways, including organizing
industries and autarky (an extreme anti-trade position). Nazis did
much the same, though both regimes maintained broad private ownership
in capital -- even if industry was managed for state goals, as in the
Four Year plans implemented started in 1936. (The Soviets started
their five year plans in 1928.) The basic idea is the state should
direct the economy overall -- even if some aspects of markets were
left in place. This can be called corporatism or state capitalism.
(Note that most regimes today which wouldn't be described as fascist
still have this aspect. In a sense, you could say fascism as an
economic system won. It's no accident that many New Deal policies were
influenced by fascism.)

Of course, any authoritarian regime (and I would use that more broadly
to cover so called communist ones) is likely to not cleave too
strongly to any particular ideology -- or to not embrace all aspects
of it. Such regimes are products of their times and they still have
factions and realities they have to deal with. Thus, for instance, the
Soviets experimented under the NEP with some market freedoms before
clamping down afterward. (Some take the NEP as the Soviet admission
that central planning didn't work.) Latin American authoritarians were
usually client states of the US, so they ran their economies mainly to
plunder the politically disenfranchised for their external (US
corporations mostly) and internal supporters (people and groups who
might switch allegiance if they didn't get some payout) rather than
implement some utopian scheme.

Regards,

Dan
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