Or, how antipathy towards communism leads us in a zig zag path into... communism.

Communism is normally defined, in the short, as an economic model involving central planning by a government. It also tends to entail ensuring everyone has what they 'need', and that everyone should be giving their all to support the country/government/people. In real-world examples we see governments who take a hand in deciding what economic inputs will be spent to generate which economic outputs. We tend to see politburos or similar handling the translation from the command-control layer to the local layers of the economy. Everything is owned by the state, rather than the individual, so it is this political apparatus that determines who 'needs' what.

In contrast, capitalist economies posit that resources in the economy are owned by individuals, or by businesses which are, in turn, owned by individuals. It is organized around the notion that trade between these entities is (largely) unregulated by a political apparatus, and each business decides what inputs to buy, what outputs to make and try and sell. We tend to see that businesses which create profit grow, and often consumes or drives out similar businesses.

I will make a quick aside here: neither of these economic models strictly predicate a political model. Both can be democracies, both can be totalitarian. We have seen examples of each and more in the world. I'm setting these notions of political organization aside for the purposes of this post.

Within a nation, therefore, we see that communism typically involves one organization (the government) making choices about the economy, and we see in capitalism that there are numerous organizations (business) making choices about the economy. In the former, a global optimization is being sought, and in the latter a local optimization is being sought. The fascinating post, In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You, explores this idea in some depth, but for me the upshot was a realization that, outside of politics, outside of philosophy or rhetoric or military might, we have seen communist countries struggle for a simple reason: it's too hard to centrally plan an economy.

Not too hard like 'Oh, we need more educated people', but too hard as in 'mathematically impossible'. Consider: a communism has to take stock of all it's resources. Then, it must decide the needs of each of it's people - which in turn necessitates deciding what a 'need' is. Then it must decide how to prioritize those needs and what outputs it will create with the resources and workers it has. Then it must distribute those outputs to the people in an orderly fashion.

Alright, to be fair, a business must also do these things, with an important twist on that last point which echoes through the rest: to whom and whether to distribute an output. A business wants all of it's product to be bought, but it is the buying that determines both the need and the distribution of the product. A product that doesn't sell isn't needed, puts a downward pressure on creating more of that product. Compare to a communist economy, where someone has to decide that a product isn't needed and not prioritize it.

The former, communist, problem is an extremely hard one. Because the number of resources, the number of workers, the number of needed outputs, the computational complexity of the problem skyrockets in a non-linear fashion. When you're talking about millions of people, billions of resources, billions of possible products you could make - the combinations of these are simply astronomical. We see that reflected in the real world, where communist governments revert to making lots of very-similar one-size-fits-all things. Customization is a practical impossibility.

Capitalisms offload this problem on the consumer. (I'll leave aside the interesting dynamics of messing with a consumer's problem-solving via marketing.) Businesses make fairly narrow, local choices about what they make. They can play with the combinations of outputs more easily, find the right fit for the consumers they have. They use trade to reason about relative priorities without having total knowledge. They have relatively few (one to maybe some tens of thousands) workers to task in their industrial output. The problem is simply more tractable.

And yet, businesses grow. As they grow, so does the complexity.

This is the interesting thing, to me: that a sufficiently large business, making a sufficient number of products, taking up a sufficient footprint in the economy, starts to run up against the same problems as communism. You can imagine a multi-million worker count of some cyberpunk megacorp, the only gig in town and comprising the vast majority of the non-black-market economy, and that business is struggling along because it has to actually provide stuff for all it's workers, who are the consumers of what it makes. It has to juggle the gargantuan equation regarding how much to make of what. If the business grows enough, it's problems are the problems of communism.

To explore that a bit: a large company has a huge number of middle managers. They're tasked with figuring out how to deploy workers, and how much of which product to make. It's highly political. They are responsible for the morale and unity of the factory-line workers. They (somehow!) tend to allocate more of everything for themselves, from paychecks to office space, in proportion to their height on the ladder. It's essentially a politburo. Internal conditions for workers tend to be one-size-fits-all, and there is intense resistance to special accomodation - it must be enforced from the outside (regulation) or have great groundswell support. (Or, it must become cheap enough to supply - the subject of a different post.) All of these things have direct analogies in communist economies.

It is, of course, plenty possible to poke holes in this, to mention this detail or that about how capitalism works. Businesses, for instance, are not on the hook for the health and safety of workers. (Well, in the United States they're on the hook for their health. Sort of. And their safety, during working hours. YMMV.) They do tend to eventually get security forces and intelligence operations, if they get big enough, but the shapes of these are dictated by a different set of ground rules. Suffice to say, corporate governance is a thing, and in the broad strokes it's hard to distinguish between businesses and governments once they hit a sufficient scale. And, as governments, what are they but communisms?

One thing, though, that does distinguish them is how they scale. Typically communisms sort of start with everything. Businesses typically start with one thing and work up from there, starting new products, arms, divisions or merging with other companies. Economies of scale help offset loss of agility. This drive for growth seems inevitable - few talk about steady-state businesses, and the fact they can always not do something remains. Yet the impetus to choose to keep their problem constrained is limited, because of the growth drive.

That, I think, is a failure of business calculus. (This manifests in other ways, but externalized costs are what make this ground-up approach work, and carry a lot of issues for society at large, which must contend with them at a governmental level. Also a different post!) Perhaps it would be more precise to say this is a failure of lacking sophisticated business calculus - and while we know business calculus is plenty complicated, and even plenty powerful, it generally makes decisions based on profits rather than formally including the very real cost of your problem space's complexity. (It is sometimes a factor, but, again, not a formalized one.)

More than a failure of analysis, though, it's a cultural failure. Within capitalism, profit-seeking is what businesses do. We structure our economies and, yes, our economies, around this drive, and around the growth drive. We encourage businesses to get bigger, and eschew anything the government does that looks like communism, frightened that it might infect our capitalist economy.

Yet, this causes our businesses to evolve in exactly that direction. Individuals within the structure, within the business, are incentived to support this evolution. Individual workers don't want to account for the resources they use - the company should provide the desk, the monitor, the floor space. Departments, similarly, don't have easy tools for the costs and benefits they provide other departments. How many dollars worth of IT service did HR utilize today? This month? It's practically impossible to say, and the estimates are just that - estimates. The business must provide, to itself, to each according to their need. (And, I say with no small amount of irony, demand of each according to their ability - and then some.)

So we see there are some stark similarities between this central unit of capitalism, the business, and communism, which subjects the latter to the flaws of the former. Is the answer to given in and just make everything a communism? Should businesses be capped in size so that they keep acting more capitalist? Do we just require better tools and practices, making the problem more tractable for larger businesses?

I have ideas, of course, but I'm not sure they ring louder than the problem statement. What I am sure of is that taking, as an assumption, that capitalist enterprises are nothing like communism, are antithetical and opposite is not really all that true. Without thinking about why communism has the benefits and drawbacks it does - what actual mechanisms cause them - capitalism is liable to fall victim to a very similar problem. I think that requires stepping back and tinkering with what we fundamentally think of as capitalism - treating it more as a mechanism than an ideology, and one that is in our control to define.