The typical rightwing argument which everyone, including most liberals and even many Leftists, subscribe to nowadays is that centrally planned socialism doesn’t work due to some flaw inherent in its very anti-capitalist nature. In other words, only capitalism could ever work because only capitalism works according to the psychological laws that motivate human behavior necessary to produce a working economy. Socialism does not work, it is said, because it goes against human nature.
But the capitalist argument is that it is human nature to be a selfish shit and against human nature to be a decent person who shares with other humans. This seems dubious because there are many examples of more primitive or traditional preindustrial or often hunter-gatherer societies that were run very well for thousands of years on a socialist or primitive Communist basis. For instance, all Amerindian societies were generally run on a primitive Communist basis and it worked out just fine for millennia and obviously it did not go against human nature.
It is true that socialism works against some basic human instincts and that this causes a lot of problems. Under socialism, many workers just do not work very hard. Why this is is uncertain. Perhaps the fact that they cannot get fired has something to do with it. Chronic pilfering is a serious problem in all socialist societies. There are many complaints that the Cuban military is now running much of the Cuban economy but the sad fact is that the Cuban military is the only group of people in the country that could be relied on to run the state economy without stealing everything in sight.
Why do people steal state property in socialism? One problem is the Black Market. There is always a Black Market and the state stuff you steal can always be sold for higher prices on the Black Market. Another problem is that state property is really the people’s property and it belongs to everyone. If it belongs to everyone then it belongs to me, so goes the reasoning. If it belongs to me then I can steal it logically follows from that. Chronic shortages also cause a lot of pilferage and sadly create even more shortages. But one of the biggest problems was this:
This is just one way in which you can be too clever. Another is to choose a complicated solution over a simpler one, because the complex one all fits together in your head, where it also leads to a better outcome. Central state-planning is one such historically disastrous example.
Not exactly true. The amount of decisions needed for Central state-planning is beyond the capacity for any computer or person to issue them. In the USSR toward the end it would take the combined computer power of every computer on the Earth to run of over ten years to produce one year worth of orders. We are not even talking about intelligent decisions only ones that produce lawful orders for every possible action for a year.
At the end of the day, the collapse of the USSR was a technological failure, a failure of science and man’s industrial development to keep up with the needs of a socialist country. While everyone seems to agree that the USSR was a failed system, it is a good question to ask whether the radical capitalism that followed is a better system, is working better than Soviet socialism or is not a failed system itself.