Communism an an experimental group

Love it or hate it, from the scientific point of view communism was the biggest social experiment in history. Methodologically, it was also rather correct, because it was replicated in different societies, with different traditions and stage of development. It also had control as well as experimental groups, like East Germany and West Germany, South Korea and North. We never had such an experiment before or since. The conclusions from the experiment were also rather obvious, if you compare the standard of living in the control and experimental groups.

But it was probably a necessary experiment. Before communism what people knew was capitalism, with its cycles of booms and crises, every ten years. What a waste – said Marxists. Let’s organise the economy in a scientific, or at least rational way, without market anarchy, so that we do not have overproduction, oversupply and unemployment. We will not have those, because we will plan our raw materials and other resources, as well as jobs to avoid mismatch with our needs. In a rational economy there will also be no place for exploitation, war and poverty, because all the conflicts will be rationally regulated and resources rationally allocated.

Now, we know that this cannot be done. Certain things just cannot be planned. Planning and regulation stifle progress. But we needed experience to tell us that. Or did we?

But there is a snag. The cost of the social experiment. It has been argued that too many people died in the process. Too many hopes were thwarted and too many opportunities wasted. So let us better learn from the old experiment, because it is not going to be repeated any soon. Or is it?

Chicken or egg

I have always been fascinated by the so-called interdefinability sets which you find in dictionaries

(1) (a) „Green is the colour of grass”
(b) „Grass is a green plant”

(2) (a) „Red is the colour of blood”
(b) „Blood is a red liquid”

These are vicious circles found in real-life dictionaries. Teachers, especially logicians hate vicious circles, although many of them seem to think that everything must be defined, which leads to vicious circles, because you cannot define everything ad infinitum.
It looks as if vicious circles are quite ordinary. This may be an insult to those philosophers and linguists who think that all meaning should be derived from a final set of primitive concepts (lingua mentalis – Leibniz, Wierzbicka).
But it never occured to me until now that an intedefinability set can encapsulate a big part of the history of philosophy, namely the dispute between empiricists like Hume and Platonists.
Hume believed that all ideas came from experience. So he would think that we first see a green object like grass (impression) and then derive the concept of green from it (idea).
Plato might think that the concept of green is innate. When we see some object in the world we compare it with our set of innate features (like greenness) and define GRASS.
Make sense? There is no escaping from philosophy, even when compiling a dictionary.