this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2022
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Capitalism is a form of central planning. The State sets guidelines and regulations, and oligarchs set directions for their economic empires. So it's a multi-party centralized planning, but it's certainly not decentralized: the workers/users have no say in whatever happens.
Centralization is dangerous. It creates power structures and incentives to abuse them. Of coursing pooling together resources is a good thing, but in my opinion this must always be consented by every involved party, as in a federation. If a few communes that get along fine want to cooperate on some projects, fine... but if some people start imposing on a commune to behave in a certain manner (as the USSR did by replacing Soviet power with State power), then that's a situation of abuse/exploitation.
I don't know much about the pandemic in China, but i know in France the pandemic response was a centralized one, and a complete disaster. Not that it's wrong because it's a centralized response, but it certainly does not help that the State attacked decentralized initiatives such as fining/arresting people making free food distributions in popular neighborhoods.
Again, as I've already said, the problem with capitalism has nothing to do with central planning. The issue is that the goal of work is to produce capital for the business owners as opposed to social value for the society.
Decantralization is also dangerous because it makes it difficult to carry out large scale coordinated efforts. As I've already pointed out, problems like the pandemic or the global climate crisis require large scale planning and coordination that is difficult or impossible to achieve via federated efforts.
The pandemic response in China stopped the pandemic. The reason the response in France failed was due to the fact that the government of France represents the interests of capitalists, and France had the same response as every other capitalist nation. All the examples of centralized efforts producing positive outcomes are found in socialist countries which are China, Cuba and Vietnam.
To sum up, problems of capitalism are tangential to the problems of centralization and decentralization. Centralization can produce good outcomes only within a system that's meant to serve the interests of the majority. And, as I've stated in a prior comment, in practice you likely want a combination of centralized and decentralized efforts to leverage the strengths of both where appropriate.