An individual in a comment on Kevin Drums’ blog stated the conservative belief that the only nations in the twentieth century which killed millions of their own people were Socialist states, in which group he includes Nazism. At a rather simple level that is not a bad association, but it ignores the real underlying reason why the twentieth century is now known as the Century of War.
Let me start with describing how social activities have been controlled in human societies. There are only three major ones, and they developed one after the other historically.
The first form of social control was tradition and routine. It was how hunter-gatherers organized their society.
The second came in with the agriculture revolution and its associated cities. It was the command method. Tradition did not go away, but command control was necessary to deal with associations with people who you were not related to. Jared Diamond provides a good brief description of this social development in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel." He also describes the development of taxation to support the aristocracies in Agricultural societies.
The third is market control which became central to society when the mercantile revolution was transformed into the industrial revolution by the development of the factory system. For factories to work there had to be free markets for the outpu8t, and the land, labor and capital all had to be provided by markets. This is still brand new, and society has not yet gotten over the social effects of turning people and land into marketable commodities called labor, land and capital.
A clear characteristic of market based societies is that there are two types of organization. One is market based and the other is government which is command based. (Keep always in mind that organizations which are market-based externally are command-based internally. That is where the bureaucracy comes from in large organizations, and it is required in any organization that is so large that one person cannot know everyone in it. Roughly that is 200 people.)
Nor, according to Hernando de Soto, ("The Mystery of Capital") have the non-first-world nations learned how to turn property into marketable capital. This is a social problem that has to be solved to permit industrial capitalism to work in the old Communist and third world nations.
Note that there is still a great deal that is done because of tradition and command systems. Note also that Society is not the same as government. Government is merely a system of command bureaucracy that can control some elements of society and the economy. It is the only system that allows men to plan and work to change macro-economic and large social changes.
The economy is also not society. In its factory-system form it is very destructive of existing social traditions and human social status systems. The classic book on this is Karl Polanyi's "The Great Transformation." Just one example, the economy has no place for families and children except as consumers and labor. We no longer permit child labor because it is so destructive of people. But we enforce that restriction by the only system possible, government and the command system.
Socialism was a reaction of society that began in the late 18th century to the very destructive actions of the factory system. Yes, it does depend on the command system rather than markets, a weakness now admitted by socialists the world over. But when the new and experimental market and factory based economy destroys a lot of social systems and lives, it is rational to retreat to the tried and true command system.
The many large wars of the twentieth century have been primarily reactions to the attempts to advance the free market system into traditional societies. Globalism is the current incarnation of that expansion, and the reaction against Globalism is perfectly rational. Globalism today is a direct descendent of the efforts of the British and Americans to expand trade throughout the world. The sale of British cloth in India was an early example, and Commodore Matthew Perry’s fleet to “open up” Japan in 1853 is another. The 19th century carving up of China and the resulting Boxer Rebellion was another.
Violence and rejection have been the first reaction to the expansion of industrial society all over the world. Socialism is one form of reaction to that advance. So is fundamentalist religion, both here in the U.S. and in the Islamic and Buddhist worlds.
After WW I the European world and Japan all retreated largely into command societies as a reaction to the disaster caused by Capitalism and Laissez Faire economic theories which we call the Depression. Spain, Japan, Italy, and Germany went to command societies with a corporate theme, while the USSR went to a command society with a Communist theme. The only place that got it right was in the U.S., where the system of checks and balances and the tradition of avoiding a military command government led FDR to modify capitalism rather than establish a form of command society. WW II was fought to destroy the German, Italian and Japanese forms of command corporatism, and the Cold War was conducted to allow the USSR to collapse from its internal contradictions.
The association of socialist governments with killing mass numbers of people is a good one at a rather simple level, but the actual association is to the expansion of the factory system and laissez faire economics it requires into more traditional societies.
The adoption of socialism without markets has been shown to be a failed form of economics. That is why the Chinese have abandoned it and are moving to a market based society. But Socialism as a theory is not the cause of wars and killing. It is a reaction to the massive social changes that have been occurring world wide because of Industrialism. But Islamo-Fascism and the American Fundamentalist so-called Christianity are also reactions to the same set of social changes.
Europe may have done a better job of adapting society to the demands of the factory system, but it requires government regulations. We avoid the regulation here and have a possibly better economy but a worse society and control by litigation rather than government fiat. Litigation is inherently a lot more expensive than government fiat.
This is an essay on world history, with all the limitations of attempting something on such a broad scale. But I think there is a real core idea here that needs discussion. I am working out these ideas and I would appreciate any comments and especially criticisms by anyone who thinks I have gotten it wrong.
The description of Traditional, Command and Market based social control is found in Robert L. Heilbroner's book "The Worldly Philosophers" updated seventh Edition (1999).
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