As technology, transportation, trade, and market reforms deepen the ongoing globalization of the world's economies, anti-globalization elements often rail against trade liberalization and even market economics itself. Intense scrutiny is devoted to such "failures" as periodic busts and income inequality. At the same time, booms, poverty reduction, and improved living standards made possible from functioning market economies are shrouded by the dense anti-globalization and anti-market rhetoric.

Yet, if one looks back to the closing years of the Cold War, for all of a market economy's imperfections—particularly the business cycle, income inequalities, transitional challenges, and externalities—the market economy trumped its single rival, the Marxist economy. The proverbial contest was a rout.

Even if one sets aside differences based on culture, tradition, and history in terms of making an assessment, the market economy proved vastly superior to its Communist counterpart. South Korea outperformed North Korea. West Germany outperformed East Germany. The Overseas Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore outperformed the People's Republic of China.

Indeed, being a leader of rare foresight, China's Deng Xiaoping dramatically cast aside China's Marxist economy and turned to a market-based one. Today, on account of that example of historic and prescient leadership, China is one of the world's foremost rising economic powers.

Perhaps the best place to examine at how badly the Marxist economic model performed in real life is to take a closer look at the Soviet Union where Communism first became the national governing ideology. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Communist economic sclerosis had transformed the Soviet Union into an economic wasteland. Its enormous potential on account of a talented and well-educated population had given way to a desert bereft of productivity. An enormous nomenklatura (Party officials and bureaucrats) some 18 million persons strong sapped what economic activity took place. Its peoples were worn down by searing burdens of debt and scarcity. In short, the Soviet sunset revealed that economies do not function, much less flourish, on dogma alone.

At first blush, it might appear that such an account was manufactured in a triumphant West solely on accidental account of the West's having persisted through the Cold War to the emergence of a new world in which the Soviet Union vanished into the pages of history books. Far from it. Those are the conditions, the last Soviet President and General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev encountered as he rose through the ranks of leadership to the helm at the top.

As early as 1978, he observed:

...the situation was taking a turn for the absurd: while the leaders proclaimed achievements, the real state of affairs was worsening. The centre expected positive reports from the filed and rapid spectacular results. Well, whenever there is demand, there will be supply. At the beginning of each year the oblast Party committees would make unrealistic commitments, which were promptly forgotten. Manipulators were the heroes of the day. Those who worked diligently were looked upon with pity...

Should you come up with your own ideas—be prepared for trouble. You could even land in jail. It was actually impossible to do something sensible while complying with all the regulations and instructions. A popular adage hit the mark: ‘All initiative is punishable’.

President Gorbachev's memoirs paint a vivid portrait of the economic gloom he inherited upon becoming head of state. Some excerpts (in italicized text) are categorized and provided to offer a glimpse of the Marxist twilight that was darkening the Soviet Union's economic future.

Economic Performance:
Economic growth had virtually stopped by the beginning of the 1980s and with it the improvement of the rather low living standards. The real per-capita income of the USSR was among the lowest of the socialist countries, not to speak of the developed Western nations.

We were faced with the prospect of social and economic decline. Finances were in disarray, and the economy was out of balance and in deficit. There was a shortage not only of foodstuffs and industrial goods, but also of metals, fuel and building materials, i.e. everything that was produced in enormous quantities. Latent, suppressed inflation began to make itself known through the black market. Speculation flourished. Economic ties were entangled in a dense network of ‘unofficial relations’ (extortions and gifts, bribery, exaggeration of results, embezzlement). State property began to be used for personal gain on a massive scale.

Production discipline was breaking down everywhere. There were mountains of uninstalled equipment, including imported goods. Cars and especially agricultural machines were being carelessly assembled and shipped with parts missing. There was pilferage en route, and on arrival they practically had to be assembled from the bottom up. Laxity had seized even the transport industry. Dozens of abandoned railway trucks loaded with goods stood in sidings and at line ends, subject to spoilage and pilferage...

To engage in individual labour and to earn a good living was considered shameful, but to while away the time in a large enterprise or in an institution was the normal order of things.

Whoever determined targets and allotted resources was seen as tsar and god, potentate and benefactor. The system needed the shortages to be maintained, otherwise the monopoly, along with its fellow-travelers—bribes, graft, mutual favours and so forth—would simply collapse.

Productivity Dearth:
The economy continued to put more in and get less out. The costs of labour, fuel and raw material per unit of production were two to two and a half times higher than in the developed countries, while in agriculture they were ten times higher. We produced more coal, oil, metals, cement and other materials (except for synthetics) than the United States, but our end-product was at best half that of the USA.

Environmental Degradation:
Glasnost dramatically opened up to the public the subject of the environment, although it had not been completely banned before… Nonetheless, there was a strict boundary that absolutely could not be crossed. Only scraps of information reached the public. No-one even imagined the extent of our ecological disaster, how far we were behind the developed nations as a result of our barbaric attitude towards nature...

Glasnost revealed what an extravagant mindset we had: deluding ourselves that our natural resources would last for eternity. How unskillfully we extracted, or more precisely did not extract, oil! We trampled over the delicate plant cover of the tundra. We destroyed invaluable fish species when we built strings of electric power plants on the Volga River. In ninety cities—almost all of the major industrial cities of the Soviet Union—harmful substances in the atmosphere were found to be much higher than permissible norms.

In the end, while it might be tempting for anti-globalization elements to yearn for an alternative to the market economies they find so imperfect, memories of the wreckage from the Marxist model should give all those who might be seduced by the quest for an alternative non-market economic model pause. Even when all the shortcomings of market economies are fully considered, the only real rival to emerge in the fairly recent historic experience wound up a catastrophic failure. Today, even as much of Eastern Europe has experienced an economic rebirth from the fruits of economies founded on the workings of the markets, it is important that the lessons of the Communist economic experience not be forgotten. The Soviet sunset provides a window into the dismal Marxist economic experiment that once vied for supremacy with market-based economics. Finally, if that example is not enough, contemporary North Korea and Cuba continue to provide the world with real-life examples of Communism's economic failings.

Originally Posted by donsutherland1 Perhaps the best place to examine at how badly the Marxist economic model performed in real life is to take a closer look at the Soviet Union where Communism first became the national governing ideology.

Originally Posted by donsutherland1 [left]...The proverbial contest was a rout....

Originally Posted by Scucca Actually, no! Of the Marxists I know, I can't think of one that would refer to the Soviet Union as a “Marxist economic model”.

Originally Posted by Scucca Further, your reference to economic performance and productivity actually introduces the similarities between Marx and Schumpeter,

Originally Posted by aegyptos When a Marxist like Scucca insists that real marxism hasn't been tried and that its unfair to hold the failures of communism against them all they are doing is defending their brand. Of course Marxism has been tried many times and has a 100% failure rate.

Originally Posted by Goldenboy219 Competition, yeah its something socialists avoid and i wonder why.