According to Wikipedia, in 1845
Michael Faraday discovered that an intense magnetic field can rotate the plane of polarized light - the Faraday effect.
Buys Ballot (nor me) confirmed the Doppler effect for sound waves
The German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff (nope) discovered that at a junction the current flowing out equals the current flowing in
So 1845 was an era of rapid scientific discovery and people dared to think that it was possible to make progress without using the Bible as the source of all knowledge. So it was only natural that people would try to design a fairer and better economic system.
Two of these people, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used to hang out at the Chethams Library on Deansgate in Manchester (free, warm and out of the rain) a couple of hundred yards from my penthouse. They probably had coffee in Starbucks just across the street.
So, I am sure Karl was a cool guy to hang out with. Mind you, Mrs Marx was heard to remark on more than one occasion that she wished Karl would spend less time talking about capital and more time making some.
Communism: "A theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs"
So instead of greedy people exploiting others in order to make obscene amounts of money for themselves, the state would do everything and people would get what was fair. Well, that sounds like a good idea, doesn't it? Who could argue with that? And what could possibly go wrong?
Well, it took 70 years but Lenin and Trotsky actually got this thing off the ground in Russia in about 1917. Subsequently Lenin and Trotsky fell out and Trotsky ended up being killed with an ice pick in Mexico under suspicious circumstances. In case you don't know what an ice pick looks like (I didn't) it looks like a stilletto.
The early days were a bit tough - you can't make omelets without breaking eggs. Stalin took over in about 1925 or so and set about seriously breaking eggs.
The problem was that the people who had stuff were reluctant to part with it. So Stalin liquidated them as enemies of the people. Not just a few but tens of millions. Entire provinces were deliberately starved to death - for example, the Ukraine - known as the bread basket of Europe because of the incredible fertitlity of its land. The Soviet army went right through this country almost three times the size of the UK and deliberately took or burned all of the grain and killed all the animals so that the entire population would starve to death - and they did.
Wikipedia: "During the Holodomor millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government"
But never mind the minor problems, did it work? Did state ownership and control of industry produce the goods. Unfortunately not. The problems were many. A factory producing shoes would be told that to fulfil its target it must produce 50 million shoes. It would do so, all size 5 and all for the left foot. Yes, seriously.
So, the central planners would revise the target to specify that the shoes must be for both feet and a specified range of sizes. Job done! Well, not quite. I mean, what use are cardboard shoes?
"The state tannery was unable to supply us with leather - so what were we supposed to do?"
The state tannery could not supply the leather because the state farms could not supply the cows because the state tractor factory could not supply the tractors because the workers had no shoes to wear to work and it was twenty degrees below zero. And we know why they had no shoes.
Maybe it would work in a hot country where you don't need shoes? 'Fraid not - see Cuba for details
An evil capitalist will work feverishly all night, drive hundreds of miles and do whatever it takes to make sure that his factory keeps producing. Otherwise he will go bust - never mind making a "vast profit". But if you are the clerk who allocates the leather you go home at 5pm - especially if there is no leather in the local warehouse. It is not your job to borrow a truck and drive 300 miles at night to collect it from a place that has so much leather they have nowhere to store it.
And so it went on - endless shortages and vast piles of stuff in the wrong place. Because it was nobody's job to run round like an idiot bribing and bartering to get the right stuff in the right place. Of course, some people did do that but most did not bother - why would they? Why work 70 hours for a pittance if you can just sit there for 50 hours and get the same pittance? "To each according to his needs", as Karl said. Not, "more to people who work hard and effectively to get the desired result - no matter what the problems may be".
So why bother to study and work hard - there is no point. And they didn't. The shops were empty and to get bread you had to queue in sub-zero temperatures from 5am until the shops opened - to find they were totally empty. If there was anything to buy, you had to queue to order the stuff, queue again to pay for it and then queue again to collect it.
In the West we take it for granted that every year stuff gets better - cars get more reliable every year. Your new iPad is better than the last one (usually). Not under communism. Why would it? There was a ten year waiting list to buy a car - a Trabant. Doing about 20 miles to the gallon and spewing out vast clouds of black smoke.
If you had a good idea you could not tinker in your garage, make a prototype and then sell in on Ebay. If you did that, you were an enemy of the people and would quite literally be sent to the Gulag in Siberia. If you took the good idea to your boss at work he would turn it down. Otherwise, if he managed to persuade his boss and his bosses boss it was a good idea, if it went wrong he would be sent to the Gulag. If it went right his bosses boss would claim the credit. So, nobody did anything - they just ossified out of fear.
Russian joke: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us
So, for a variety of reasons, communism failed to produce the goods - literally.
Well, hey, material stuff is not that important, so what about equality? They were all equal, right? No. The top brass had special shops selling desirable goods made by evil western capitalists, hospitals and leisure resorts that ordinary people were not allowed in. And there was a special lane in the middle of the road reserved for them. Ordinary people walked or went on the bus. So much for equality.
So, did people leave? No. If you tried that you would be shot. The communist state of East Germany, with typical German efficiency, had automatic guns surrounding the entire country. If you tried to cross, the sensors picked you up and your corpse was left there as a warning to other enemies of the people who might be tempted to leave this workers paradise.
Apart from Russia and all its satellite countries in Eastern Europe, the other major communist workers' paradise was China under Mao Tse-Tung. So how did that work out?
Wikipedia: "Mao was responsible for 40 to 70 million deaths through starvation, prison labour and executions, which would rank his tenure as the top incidence of excess mortality in human history".
"Excess mortality" - what a wonderful phrase! Up there with "terminate with extreme prejudice" as a euphemism for murder.
Mao was finally forced into retirement in the 1970's. He had decided that in order to catch up with America he would starve a third of the population to death - some 400 million people. Those around him thought this was a bit excessive and they confined him to a villa with a dozen or so young girls - so Mao died with a smile on his face - unlike the tens of millions he murdered.
The following countries (in alphabetic order) embraced communism:
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Cuba, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Laos, North Korea, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
In every single case they had men with guns stopping you leaving. Meanwhile, every capitalist country also had men with guns at the border - to stop you coming in.
Wikipedia: "On November 9, 1989, thousands of jubilant Germans brought down the most visible symbol of division at the heart of Europe—the Berlin Wall. By 1990, the former communist leaders were out of power, free elections were held, and Germany was whole again"
China turned to capitalism. The borders were opened and people could at last visit the rest of the world. Living standards have increased amazingly and wages are increasing by about 8%pa. Hundreds of millions of Chinese now have a higher standard of living that the everage person in the UK - thanks to unbridled capitalism.
Most of the these hideous regimes which starved and murdered their own citizens also fell apart soon afterwards and the people were free at last
Apart from North Korea and Cuba which remain as communist regimes - with the starvation and murder that is an intrinsic part of communism
Bob Cory
Modified on 11/08/2023 at 10:25:28 by ℗ Bob Cory