Abstract
Communist’s collectivistic approach to social order is based upon the premise that private means of production should be abolished, and instead be managed by a centralized power representing the people as a whole. As such, it defies one of the most inherent characteristics of human condition, the innate, creative, subjective, and perennial search for a better condition in life expressed by the entrepreneurial function. Thispaper uses the Austrian School’s praxeology to show how entrepreneurs, as motors of the market system, end up being also the most relevant and widespread challengers to the socialist approach to economics. The real exercise of entrepreneurship defies the unreal socialist economic system in three basic ways: by exercising this latent entrepreneurial function in the most unfavorable conditions creating secondary markets in order to correct an official planned scarcity; by escaping the widespread statist mentality in socialist societies; and by actually exercising economic calculation in spite of the politburo calculus. The paper shows that as much as there are varieties of social order there is a on the kind of entrepreneurial function, which is impossible to eradicate from individuals. Therefore, even when totalitarian regimes take place, entrepreneurship finds ways to exist and emerges albeit of a different lacunar kind, in the shadows, supplying for consumer’s wellbeing under the limits of such societal disorder and, more importantly, bringing to light the intrinsic impossibility of the socialist economic arrangement.
Highlights
Communism1 was paramount amidst the totalitarianorders of the 20th century, both in breadth and length, which is why it was probably the most studied sociological phenomena of that particular time
Austro-libertarian authors confronted those ideas on different grounds: in philosophy and ethics one can refer to Hoppe (2010); from a sociological perspective, to Böhn-Bawerk (1890), Mises (1951) and Hayek (1949; 2001); in economics, Mises (1990) and Hayek (1935)2 contributed, while Rothbard (2004, p. 875) characterized socialism as the “violent abolition of the market”
Voegelin (2004) saw Communism as an expression of an ersatz religion. He identifies three varieties; the teleological; the axiological, which set out conditions for a perfect social order that are described and worked out in detail in order to deal with the antinomies of the human condition7; and telo-axiological where the two components are immanentized together, being present on both: a conception of the end goal, and the knowledge of the method by which this should be brought about
Summary
Communism was paramount amidst the totalitarian (dis)orders of the 20th century, both in breadth and length, which is why it was probably the most studied sociological phenomena of that particular time. 10), or “it is the aim of Socialism to transfer the means of production from private ownership to the ownership of organized society, to the state. If the State takes the power of disposal from the owner piecemeal, by extending its influence over production; if its power to determine what direction production shall take and what kind of production there shall be, is increased, the owner is left at last with nothing except the empty name of ownership, and property has passed into the hands of the State Following these insights, this paper aims at presenting some of the theoretical and practical oversights of socialism and the problems that it produces wherever it takes power. The paper closes with implications to societies in which the collectivistic logic is still prevalent
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