Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[wsippel]

There is a curious lack of doctors, scientists, and engineers in this utopia.

Or farmers, miners, metalworkers, carpenters, mechanics, plumbers, electricians, builders, actual bakers (not, "I make cookies teehee 🤭), tailors, cobblers or any sort of trade.

This is the Austrian critique of socialism. That a modern, especially global, economy is beyond a single human's comprehension. Hence, central planning is impossible because no human can be omniscient. And it's all interdependent, making choices about capital means it can't be used for other things and the number of things that rely on these choices are staggering. Socialists believe this is not only possible, but simple. Marx used a single sentence to dismiss the idea it would be a challenge to allocate all of this.

Leninist strains of socialism admit there must be forced labor and see this as a positive thing, unlike capitalism everyone will work for the good. It's not "forced" because the collective is deciding it free of false consciousness and individuals happily agree because they are good patriots. This would never fly in the West, we were already too liberalism-pilled, so all the Western forms of communism developed an elaborate cope: that the capitalist distribution of labor would be recreated by people simply choosing what they wish to do. Even though their critique of capitalism is that it pays people differently to do different jobs and uses pay to entice people to do things they don't want to just choose to do. And also this wouldn't effect the central plan because it would somehow magically match the number of garbagemen to the number of people who want to be garbagemen. And this magical coincidence would cascade across the entire economy, something the dumb Austrians didn't think of.

Few socialists bother to try to ever understand capitalism so they almost universally think they personally could make a central plan. It almost always resembles something incredibly vague and based around a handful of people much like "take a carrot, leave a carrot" was.

Marx later proposed a similar solution to the Leninists: enslaving lesser races incapable of understanding communism to do the important jobs not enough enlightened comrades would want to do. Black Africans, specifically. It was in one of his letters to Engels if I remember correctly.