Communism vs Capitalism

Today's Izvestia includes a story by Jeff Sommer detailing the incipient schism within The Party between the Capitalist business class Bosses and their Communist financial overlords in the Politburo.  While beginning with an account of the contents of the Party's official "Beige Book ", Mr. Sommer has apparently got his hands on a copy of the Party Executive Committee secret "Beige Book" made only available to full members of the Executive Committee.


While Sommer is careful to present the differences between the public position of the Party in the official report and those of the secret version as primarily one of tone, Samizdat readers will recognize key phrases as indicating the possibility of a more significant political breach within the Politburo.  The article begins with summaries from the official report derived from statistics provided by local Party Bosses in required "Three Month Plan" filings.  However the executive report includes an interpretation of these statistics by local Bosses diametrically at odds with the official Four Year Plan interpretation.



"Pithy statements made by Party Bosses during Three Month Plan conference calls", by beginning with the key phrase "pithy statements", indicates the reported comments are censurable under the current orthodoxy unless reported in an explicitly negative frame making clear the unacceptability of irresponsible opinions to the Executive and the breach of protocol in expressing them by local Bosses.  For the Executive Committee, this obviously "makes for disturbing reading" and it is clear in allowing publication the Executive is intent on pressing down their discomfort onto the dissident local Party Bosses.  

While the next paragraph makes clear that the combined effort of these local Bosses "continues to churn out impressive extraction", it also sets up a clear disjunction as to the causes of future uncertainty between the Local Bosses and the Executive Committee.  While it is in orthodoxy of the Official Four Year Plan that regulatory uncertainty and excessive expenses by the Party on public health and pensions are the factors crippling the future extraction growth of the local Bosses, the Boss's statements make clear that while they may agree with the doctrine of the Plan, they are experiencing real local affects the Plan does not anticipate or account for.  

Statements by Bosses like "while business levels remain strong, the uncertainty around 2012 G.D.P. growth rates has caused us to slow hiring for the rest of this year" and "economists say we’re officially out of the recession, but it hardly feels that way, proletarians everywhere continue to be cautious and hesitant to spend" are in direct opposition to the Four Year Plan's requirement that financial reflation is the key to extraction growth.  This points to the heart of the schism: Local Bosses have information based in real local conditions and while their rise to prominent positions within the Party is often a result of their enthusiastic embrace of doctrine, their operational bases are dependent in most cases on real production rather than the extraction that is the only form of income the Communists on the Committee are familiar with, and to which they see themselves entitled as the institutional head of the Dictatorship of Finance.  

So long as real production is growing, extraction can always be increased, but Local Bosses are seeing stagnating real production and are chafing at the increasingly difficult extraction targets future Three Month Plans will require.  And while Local Bosses agree that uncertainty is a key problem at present, they see its locus in the Satellite economies where doctrinaire extraction has overwhelmed some states administrative abilities, threatening state dissolution and anarchy while spreading systemically to their economically entangled neighbors.   The Four Year Plan position is that regulatory rigidity prevents the optimization of extraction efficiency and that if extraction were supported by the full power of the police and armed forces the irresponsible consumption by the proletariat of luxuries like housing, pensions and medical care could be suppressed with the same kinds of methods and success (as perceived by the Politburo) of the War on Drugs and The War on Terror. 


In a bright spot for Samizdat readers, BlackRock Boss and Politburo member Larry Fink said "politics and government are playing a major role in market performance and market volatility.” He added: “This is a confidence crisis, not a liquidity crisis. There’s trillions and trillions of dollars sitting on the sideline."  But because the Bosses are in fact Capitalist, they refuse to spend what money they have "on the sideline" until they can foresee profitable demand that would justify an investment.  That one of the Communist overlords recognizes that local Bosses can't mobilize their Capital, rendering it a useless hoard, without proletarian demand formation suggests that the schism is finally reaching into the Politburo itself.  

Certain Bosses in certain areas have been able to ramp up extraction despite Four Year Plan efforts to prevent accumulation of "disposable income" amongst the working class.  "I think the level of extraction we’re taking in the marketplace puts us in uncharted territory,” one said adding “we haven’t had this amount of extraction in a long time.” the  Bosses with the most direct contact with housing, pensions, medical care and food however are finding that even with application of police and judicial enforcement extractions can not be increased.  This leaves these bosses looking at states who's economies are not yet "integrated " to Party control as opportunities for extraction, an area the expansionist Executive Committee is always interested in engaging.  But the popular unrest in the Homeland, with reactionary roaders in the street, despite the armed cadres of the Politburo's efforts at suppression, leaves the Local Bosses with both information and interpretations that contradict orthodoxy and a schismatic stance with regard to the Politburo.

What Samizdat readers should watch for is evidence of dissent amongst Executive Committee staffs and infrastructure that could lead sympathetic senior staff, administrators or even Committee members themselves into open break with the psychopaths who dominate the power structure.  As the risk of economic shock from the satellites increases and the organizational depth of the resistance in the streets builds, the potential for a structural shift of rapid and deep character expands.  It is clear that there are individuals within the Executive Committee that are not committed to the extractive agenda of the Communist financial Politburo, but so long as Izvestia, Pravda and Radio Moscow continue to propagandize only for the Politburo itself these dissident views will come at great personal risk to powerful people who express them as they have to dissident demonstrators in the street.