Mineshaft Gaps

One of the purer pleasures of the ongoing economic clusterfuck is the revivification of the old defense of Marxism (or Communism, or Socialism, or whatevers) against the abject failure of the Soviet Union to produce anything other than failure-prone nukes, gray concrete, and really cool graphic design: that Soviet Communism was not the real thing, that it was a debased and perverted form of whatever it was that Marx et al. imagined, and that Soviet failures proved nothing, nothing about the underlying validity of the system. In some respects I view this sort of apologia with sad sympathy. It is, after all, possible to imagine a planned economy that isn't so horribly, badly planned. I am in general wholly unsympathetic to the idea that economies are systems of such impossible mathematical complexity that the planned allocation of resources can never result in reasonable levels of general equality and prosperity, at least as compared to the pinnacles of Western capitalism. There are, to my mind, more compelling arguments against collectivist societies than the lousy state of the former Soviet auto industry. The defenders of so-called free markets are fond of noting greater productivity or more innovation in market societies, although both terms are notably ductile, and in any case this argument raises the uncomfortable specter of the correlation/causation fallacy, not to mention the even older question of the chicken and the egg. Also, despite the mumbojumbo of the hoodoo high priests of the Christian Science of scientific disciplines, economics, the means of exchange are not the most fundamental aspects of human societies, but are only one of a myriad features that collectively compose society and civilization.

Anyway, all across our grayscale spectrum, the defenders of capitalism now insist that what we are seeing isn't it. The Party cannot fail, it can only be failed.