I don't think so. Consider what happens to real resources. Consuming wealth is the equivalent of a rich person buying a yacht (i.e. having it built, paying all these people money) and then burning it down. How is society better off?
The scarce workers who would have been employed elsewhere, doing something productive, wasted their time building the yacht. The materials that went into it were wasted. The engineers, managers that oversaw its construction wasted their effort.
Consuming scarce resources, rather than investing them, by its very definition makes society poorer.
I think this is the right way of thinking (ie a materialist view, which looks at what an economic system means in real resources), but it's obviously more complicated than a binary choice between "rich people spending all their money on non-productive toys" and "rich people investing all their money into socially useful enterprises".
The invested (saved, not consumed) resources that rich people have won't necessarily go to socially useful enterprises. Instead, they'll probably be invested in things whose main purpose is to create more capital for the capitalist class to invest, not to decrease human suffering. The two things have historically been correlated, but there's no guarantee that this will last forever, and good reason to think that it won't.
At some point (and maybe we've already reached it) we will have enough capital for everyone in the world to live a maximally happy life. Arguably, any investment beyond that point (beyond what is necessary to maintain that capital sock, and perhaps grow it at the same rate as population growth) is malinvestment, since if our goal is to maximize human happiness, additional capital is useless beyond that point, so we should use those resources to do something else.
The obvious problem with this line of thought is determining when we've got "enough" capital, and therefore when we can stop playing capitalism and whack up the gains. Obviously 1918 Russia was the wrong time and place to do that, but hindsight is 20/20.
Another issue is that a lot of our capital stock is not in the form of physical stuff, but institutions, contracts, and relationships that a socialist revolution would actually destroy. The reason Amazon is worth so much money is not because of all the physical stuff it owns, but because of the structure, contracts, and relationships within the company itself allow that physical stuff to be more productive than other physical stuff employed by other firms, and indeed even by the laws that allow firms to exist at all. Any "revolution" will obviously severely disrupt a lot of these relationships, from employer-employee relationships, to government contracts, IP laws, etc. Indeed, that's the whole point of a socialist revolution, but similar things on a smaller scale are faced with almost any progressive policy proposal: changing the social contract to be more beneficial to workers and redistribute society's wealth can actually reduce the amount of wealth in the society. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, since less wealth distributed more evenly will probably be a net positive for the majority of people, but we can't pretend this problem doesn't exist. It's a conundrum that I rarely see the Left wrestle with, but I think we need to.
Regarding wealth redistribution reducing wealth in society. Would you say that that is a short term blip, that may or may not lead to increased wealth in the future? A company restructuring can reduce productivity before increasing it.
Also you presuppose revolution, that isn't necessarily required. Post war Europe went quite far along that road democratically and peacefully, and seemingly in the short term successfully (I suppose the inverse of the scenario in my prior paragraph)
I'm not sure a private-sector restructuring is exactly the right frame for left policy change, since the whole point of these changes is to refocus ourselves away from the tyranny of constantly optimizing for productivity instead of happiness. Also, even in a successful corporate restructuring, there is pain all around (layoffs and capital losses) before there is any gain to anyone. This is the hallmark of disastrously unsuccessful left policies like the Cultural Revolution, where tons of people suffered but there was no real gain to anyone except perhaps a small minority of Party members for decades. In my view, a successful left policy change should make a minority "suffer", while almost everyone else benefits or, even better, make everybody better off with outsized gains to the worst off.
I'm not advocating a revolution, and meant to bring it up as one limit of left policy change. This exact problem (radical changes to relationships during a revolution destroying lots of wealth) is why I think a Russian-style revolution is a bad idea, unless the revolutionaries are making the conscious choice to create a post-revolution society that is drastically poorer than the pre-revolution one. I don't think most people (except extreme radicals) would support this goal. Any socialist revolution would therefore have to downplay or ignore this fact in order to succeed, which is precisely what happened in places like Russia, China, and Cuba in the 20th century. (To be fair, the Russians were the first to try this, so they didn't have anyone else to look at and learn this lesson.)
That doesn't mean incrementalist left policies don't have to grapple with the problem though. Single-payer healthcare, for example, would probably reduce the amount of wealth in society, since most of the value in private healthcare firms comes from the current structure of the healthcare market. A leftist should be OK with this and support single-payer anyway because most people will gain.
> To be fair, the Russians were the first to try this, so they didn't have anyone else to look at and learn this lesson.
They were well aware of this [1]. That's part of the reason why most leading revolutionaries, including Lenin, saw the spread of the revolution to western European countries as a requirement for their (edit: I meant to write "its", but "their" is probably more accurate after all) long-term success. IIRC he remained deluded in the prospects for this until his death.
[1]:
There's probably a more direct source for this but here's one I remember. This is from "The Conquest of Bread" (1892), albeit an anarchist rather than a bolshevik, Peter Kropotkin was famous enough during that time to prove the point:
It is evident, as Proudhon has already pointed out, that the smallest attack upon property will bring in its train the complete disorganization of the system based upon private enterprise and wage labour. Society itself will be forced to take production in hand, in its entirety, and to reorganize it to meet the needs of the whole people. But this cannot be accomplished in a day or a month; it must take a certain time thus to reorganize the system of production, and during this time millions of men will be deprived of the means of subsistence.
Fascinating! I have always understood the desire to spread the revolution to the West was straight from Marx, where the struggle against capitalism, a global system, must of course be a global one.
Coldly understanding that "millions of men will be deprived of sustenance" while the new Socialist system takes place, and yet doing it anyway, is I guess just a reflection of how steely-eyed these radicals were. Still, my point stands that this was not how it was sold to the masses. Going out with a message of "Out with the bosses, we'll take all the riches ourselves!" is a much easier sell than "Listen, I know you are all desperately poor and suffering, but that will have to get even worse, and a lot of you are probably going to starve, before it gets better if we're going to build socialism."
> I guess just a reflection of how steely-eyed these radicals were.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of factors to take into account during that time ofc, most social upheavals will not come with an attached short-term economic benefit. I do not think that they necessarily thought that most would simply die either, but experience a generally hard time rebuilding. Tsarist Russia was a powder keg that were likely to blow up even without the brutal version served by the bolsheviks.
You're right, I didn't really mean to address your initial point about that, I'm just cherry-picking and adding some thoughts. Propaganda will always emphasize the positives and downplay the negatives as you wrote. In fact, and maybe I'm getting a bit side tracked, but Lenin and others of the more cynical revolutionaries of that time, and probably before and today, thought it might be necessary for things to get worse to reach the conditions needed for the revolution to succeed. Of course there's some amount truth to that, but it's nevertheless very much in line with the terror that followed in the means to an end fashion. On the other hand, Bertrand Russell, for example, while agreeing on the need for communism thought the price to pay through these bolshevik methods were just "too terrible" to justify it. So the spectrum of revolutionaries during that time was quite wide.
The scarce workers who would have been employed elsewhere, doing something productive, wasted their time building the yacht. The materials that went into it were wasted. The engineers, managers that oversaw its construction wasted their effort.
Consuming scarce resources, rather than investing them, by its very definition makes society poorer.