« Some Marxian Musings | Main | Promises, Promises »
I Take It All Back!
In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have considered that if you seem to endorse a massive plan for the global redistribution of wealth and the creation of a zero-growth economy all in the context of a post defending Karl Marx against an attack from a liberal economist people are going to get the idea that you subscribe to some pretty far out views. But I was really just musing, as the post title says. There are some very good reasons for not doing as I suggest in the post. More on that, perhaps, tomorrow.
April 6, 2005 | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8345160fd69e200d8343f45a553ef
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference I Take It All Back!:
Comments
Now, you should already know from recent example that apology is futile... The psychoanalysts are going to point out that the policies you mused on clearly indicate your deepest unspoken desires. I guess you might as well defend them.
Posted by: Sammler | Apr 6, 2005 3:27:28 AM
Run away, run away!
Posted by: Dick Durata | Apr 6, 2005 3:30:10 AM
You can turn in your party card only after you tell us the names of the other members of your cell. Kicking a street-person would be a indication of a sincere recantation.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Apr 6, 2005 3:31:07 AM
Kicking a street-person would be a indication of a sincere recantation.
Actually, listing the countless millions murdered by Communists across the globe would be a sincere recantation.
Posted by: realist | Apr 6, 2005 6:53:38 AM
PS:
A link to the Communist Holocaust Memorial Museum would also do.
"Never again." The tyranny and atrocities of Nazi Germany have been justly condemned by world opinion for over 50 years. But it is only recently that Communist despotism has begun to receive remotely similar attention.
It would be a great tragedy if Communism disappeared from the earth without leaving behind an indelible memory of its horrors. Communism was not essentially about espionage, or power politics, or irreligion. Rather it was a grand theoretical synthesis of totalitarianism... a theory which millions of people experienced as the practice of murder and slavery. The roots of Communism lie squarely in the works of the philosopher Karl Marx.
That's for those of you who don't know exactly what happened the last time the state was given arbitrary power to seize everything you own and ship you off to a gulag in the process of collectivization...for your own good , of course, you selfish wingnut!
Posted by: realist | Apr 6, 2005 6:59:38 AM
Bad Marx, bad Marx. However, as a realist would you be able to consider a notion that the roots of Communism lie, in fact, squarely in the excesses of Capitalism?
Posted by: abb1 | Apr 6, 2005 7:26:06 AM
Bob beat me to the punch. I suppose we are still experiencing enough of a cold war hangover that any attempts to discuss Marxist or other left-wing economic ideas related to equality and the distribution of wealth, even for the purposes of refutation of logical errors and separating the good from the bad, must be followed by the usual apologies, recantations and presentation of capitalist bona fides.
Since much of left-wing political discourse would seem to consist in discussing economic ideas that are, well, left-wing, perhaps we have part of an explanation here for Brooks's observation that the left doesn't discuss enough philosophy: left-wing political and economic ideas are apparently still officially taboo in most of American society.
Thus Democrats are not supposed to defend Social Security on the basis of the fact that it transfers a lot of wealth from younger, wealthier wage-earners to older people, and was originally based on a view of things that is more social than individualistic. (That's why the right always wants to kill it, since their every man for himself view of humanity is radically individualistic and anti-social.) We're only supposed to point out that it is too much of a pain in the ass to change the system.
Don't worry Matt. Nobody who has read your stuff is going to think you're a pinko.
Posted by: Dan Kervick | Apr 6, 2005 8:02:55 AM
However, as a realist would you be able to consider a notion that the roots of Communism lie, in fact, squarely in the excesses of Capitalism?
Abb1, I have strong opinions about Communism because I have close family members who escaped the Soviet Union and friends who escaped the Cultural Revolution.
I think the roots of Communism lie in the fantasy of a madman. That fantasy was that a primitive, premodern commune was a better way to live than an industrial society. Marx was the ultimate reactionary. Marxists don't want to go back to 1950 AD, but to 1950 BC. A time before money was also a time before there was anything worth trading. In his desire for a premodern society, Marx was a unabomber before his time.
Thing is, if you want something someone else has, either you can trade with them (in kind or in cash) or you can club them over the head and kill them. Trade in kind breaks down pretty rapidly as an economy becomes more complex. You can't easily give someone 3.5 horses, for example. Societies that used money as a placeholder for value got around this inefficiency. Those societies that didn't develop money were either terribly inefficient traders or else rampaging hordes. This is why the idea of a "moneyless society" is so reactionary and irrational.
The tragedy is that so many followed the writings of this madman Marx. It's a human flaw, I think. For whatever reason, humans like to follow books written by madmen that advocate murder of the outgroup and altruism towards the in group - e.g. the Christian Bible, the Torah, the Koran, Mein Kampf, and Das Kapital. The window dressing is different, but the content is the same: kill/convert/enslave everyone who doesn't subscribe to your holy book and everyone will enter heaven (or the thousand year reich or the classless society).
Eventually that stuff gets moderated. Christian conservatives, Ann Coulter notwithstanding, don't convert people at the point of the sword anymore. Socialist Europe has lower growth rates and probably less individual freedom, but it's not killing people at high rates. Reform Jews are *way* less extreme than old-school Jews (who are the most extreme rightwingers in Israel, though that's another topic). Muslims haven't yet really reformed, but there are some hopeful signs nowadays. However, the birth pangs of these madmen-generated ideologies usually result in lots of dead people.
This is one of the reasons I am so opposed to the neocons - they have an essentially Marxist worldview and want to spread permanent revolution. Lots of people will die before that ideology gets moderated unless they are stopped in the bud.
I know there are problems with unregulated capitalism. That is why I'm a moderate Democrat. I voted for Kerry. But people in third world countries - or communist countries for that matter - would die to have a society with the "problems" of capitalism. I've seen videos of people shot at the Berlin Wall. I've seen the people drowning in an attempt to escape the Communist North Vietnamese. I've seen the North Korean refugees, the Cubans who were executed for trying to make it to the US, and the Chinese defectors mowed down in Tiananmen square.
The message is very clear: You don't have to go to year zero, give the state ultimate power, and start sending people to be slaves in the gulag to pass some environmental legislation.
If I am to jump ahead, what might be the biggest difference between you and I is that I don't see colonialism as "proto-capitalism". Capitalism is about trade and exchange, with money as an abstract representation of value. If you are conquering and enslaving a country you are not practicing capitalism. If you are coercing people into slave labor you are not practicing capitalism, even if you sell the results. Both communist systems and pre-capitalist systems sold the results of slave labor and used it to take over more territory. For example, Soviet gulags and Chinese laogai made the AK47s that exported revolution to North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba and Eastern Europe.
The rapid Soviet industrialization was based on slave labor, just as the American South's *non* industrialization was based on slave labor. It is worth noting that the non slave labor states grew far faster during both time periods, which shows that slavery is economically bad as well as morally abominable, and not confined to either communism or capitalism.
Anyway - sorry to ramble. Bottom line - I think that it disrespects the dead to mock them or to make light of what people did in the name of Marx. I'm not saying you did that, but some people in the other thread did. You don't have to defend Marx to be a liberal and you don't have to defend Hitler to be a conservative.
Posted by: realist | Apr 6, 2005 8:10:19 AM
I suppose we are still experiencing enough of a cold war hangover that any attempts to discuss Marxist or other left-wing economic ideas related to equality and the distribution of wealth, even for the purposes of refutation of logical errors and separating the good from the bad, must be followed by the usual apologies, recantations and presentation of capitalist bona fides.
I suppose we are still experiencing enough of a World War 2 hangover that any attempts to discuss the mass murder and/or internment of an entire ethnic group, even for the purposes of refutation of logical errors and separating the good from the bad, must be followed by the usual apologies, recantations, and presentation of non-genocidal bonafides.
...what exactly is the difference between the mass murder of a class and the mass murder of a race? They're dead, aren't they? Saying you're not a Marxist simply means that you've decided class war, violent revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat aren't a good way to solve normal problems.
Posted by: realist | Apr 6, 2005 8:16:27 AM
Well, in fairness to capitalism, a few years ago my mother became interested in her family's move to America from Cornwall. It turned out to be fairly simple to find out what happened to them- newspaper articles recounted the terrible accidents in the mines that, mercifully, resulted in their death in just a few hours. What shocked me was how common it was to read a sentence like "His crushed body was carried to the office but he expired an hour later".
Of course, this will not really be news to anyone who knows how lifespan, even today in the U.S., is related to wealth. You can't buy happiness, but you can buy a long life and the good opinion of the nattering clases, and for many rich people in America that's been a pretty good substitute.
Posted by: serial catowner | Apr 6, 2005 8:28:41 AM
I think the roots of Communism lie in the fantasy of a madman.
Well, if that's your POV, you may want to change your name from 'realist' to 'romanticist'. Just an observation, no offense intended. It takes all kinds.
Posted by: abb1 | Apr 6, 2005 8:30:39 AM
Let's take a deep breath and acknowledge two basic facts. 1) Realist is correct that communism in the 20th century was a horrendous disaster and a great evil.
2) Realist's reading of Marx is so wrong-headed and ass-backwards it defies comprehension. I saw this not to defend Marx but to defend plausible readings of major political theorists. There may be a few 19th century thinkers more intoxicated with modernity and progress than Karl Marx, but not many.
Posted by: djw | Apr 6, 2005 8:39:19 AM
I would not call Marx a "madman". The guy just had a simplistic and inaccurate view of how history, society and economies work. He resembles Aristole on physics, or Ptolemy on astronomy, wrong but not evil. (The evil lay in those trying to realize his ideas which, since they didn't work naturally, had to be forced at the point of a gun.)
Posted by: JonF | Apr 6, 2005 8:44:28 AM
Ah the ingenuousness of youth.
Matt Matt Matt surely you didn't imagine that people could understand that a hypothetical is hypothetical ? You couldn't really have imagined that people would take not of an explicit statement that you are not making a policy recomendation.
If you weren't wet behind the ears youw would have know that "if we could have perfect equality in exchange for no further growth we should choose perfect equality" would be interpreted as "we can have perfect equality in exchange for no further growth and no other costs as is showed by the case study of Khmer Rouge Cambodia" (by realist for example).
Oh and by the way realist. If you want to propose that someone list countless millions one by one, you might want to use another nickname.
Posted by: Robert Waldmann | Apr 6, 2005 8:56:41 AM
JonF writes: The evil lay in those trying to realize [Marx'] ideas which, since they didn't work naturally, had to be forced at the point of a gun.
That's exactly right.
Posted by: Daryl McCullough | Apr 6, 2005 9:06:33 AM
Well, I'll say that the excesses of Marxism lie rooted in the excesses of Hegelism. I hold Hegel personally accountable for every victim of the Gulag. Yup.
Posted by: Julian Elson | Apr 6, 2005 9:31:29 AM
What does Karl Marx have to do with Eastern 'communism' ?
When Christians claim to be the real Jews, that doesn't make it so.
Posted by: Sal | Apr 6, 2005 9:48:11 AM
Trade in kind breaks down pretty rapidly as an economy becomes more complex. ... Capitalism is about trade and exchange, with money as an abstract representation of value.
Whu? I know very little about these things, but didn't you every play Civilization? Currency comes wayyyy before Capitalism.
Posted by: tom | Apr 6, 2005 9:55:46 AM
Here's what I found most bizarre about the original posting:
it's not so wildly off the mark that he can't envision reaching a $12,000 per capital world product at some point in the not-so-distant future. Sometime around then, we're going to need to start asking the question: What price growth? Creating a property-rights system that encourages investment and growth by permitting large profits and inequalities seems like an excellent idea when boosting real wages is a major priority. It does seem, however, that a point comes when we can do more good by redistributing the pie we already have than by baking more pie.
"Redistributing the pie we already have" rather than "baking more pie". You're nuts--totally out of your mind.
What we're 'baking' these days is increasingly valuable but non-tangible--the product of human ingenuity: improved medical tests, drugs, and surgical procedures, more robust, more efficient crops, more efficient forms of transportation, new ways of generating energy, new styles of art & design, of movies & music, better ways to store data in more durable, more compact forms, ad infinitum.
Your idea of a utopia is that, sometime in the near future, that this all will just STOP--we'll fix all knowledge, arts and technology at, say, 2030 levels and nothing ever will ever change or improve ever after? Gack.
Growth means both more and better. Are you really arguing with better? And even 'more' doesn't have to mean more resource, more impact, more damage--it increasingly means more pleasure, more information, more entertainment--more books, more music, more films, more communication.
We all now have free, nearly instant access to virtually every notable book written before 1923 (including, of course, all of Marx). With an all-you-can-eat rental policy at the local video store, we're now wandering our way through the great (and not so great) films of the 20th century at about a dollar each. Not so many years ago, long-distance calls to distant friends and family members were expensive--now they're dirt cheap (even overseas). Want that pie to stop growing? Slow mail (requiring wood and chemicals and fuel and physical labor) has been replaced with electronic mail. Expensive photographic methods that depended on copious quantities of precious metals and noxious chemicals have now been replaced by cameras that require no consumables, no trips to the lab, and for which the incremental cost of an image is roughly zero. We have 10x as many family photos from the last 4 years as from the 4 years before.
I could go on, and on, and so could you. When, in time, the world's poor have achieved a decent physical living standard, that will not be the time to put on our gray Mao suits and adopt permanent stagnation as the greatest good--that will be a time when people will be even freer to devote themselves to ephemeral, non-tangible pursuits, like, oh, say...blogging.
Posted by: mw | Apr 6, 2005 9:57:52 AM
The evil lay in those trying to realize his ideas which, since they didn't work naturally, had to be forced at the point of a gun.
Well, if this comment is about Stalinism and Maoism, then this is also rather simplistic. Apart from Marxism, Russia and China underwent their industrial revolutions under Stalin and Mao - and those things are always bloody, with Marxism or without.
This is like blaming, say, Adam Smith's ideas for US civil war that, after all, killed over 600,000 people.
Posted by: abb1 | Apr 6, 2005 10:00:22 AM
mw, your idea of a utopia is a world where some people get richer and richer while others stay as poor as ever? I guess I know which side of the divide you believe you're safely on.
Posted by: neil | Apr 6, 2005 10:02:27 AM
> he guy just had a simplistic and inaccurate view of how
> history, society and economies work.
Perhaps my viewpoint is a bit different because I once lived in a 1880s-era industrial neighborhood where there were still people alive who had been in the workforce (or not) in the 1920s and 1930s. Was Marx wrong about a lot of things? Yes, but then again so was Isaac Newton. Was Marx wrong about everything? I suggest doing some intensive reading on what ordinary peoples' lives were really like during the Industrial Revolution, and why the ideas that became communism gained currency, before making a glib judgement based on theoretical analysis.
If WWII, a centrally-planned endeavour on both sides, hadn't happened, it is not at all clear to me that we would have the somewhat-spread-about wealth that the radical right likes to cite as the ultimate vindication of extreme capitalism.
Cranky
Posted by: Cranky Observer | Apr 6, 2005 10:02:57 AM
To blame Marx for the truly horrible excesses of Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China is ridiculous. If you even bother to read Marx, neither society was ready for a socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks were acutely aware of this, and argued amongst themselves about it incessently. I don't know enough about the Chinese Revolution to know if Mao even worried about such philosophical concerns.
Marx was not a madman, he was reacting to the truly horrible conditions of the practically unbridled capitalism of 19th century Western Europe. It was truly bleak. Death rates in the cities were so high that it was the beginning of the twentieth century before they could maintain their populations without emigration from the countryside. It is estimated that London had over 50,000 prostitutes, or 1 for every 12 males. His vision of a Utopian communist society is no more fanciful than Adam Smith's capitalist one.
Posted by: Freder Frederson | Apr 6, 2005 10:18:13 AM
mw, your idea of a utopia is a world where some people get richer and richer while others stay as poor as ever? I guess I know which side of the divide you believe you're safely on.
Not at all--quite the opposite, in fact. Everything I mentioned is already in the process of becoming broadly available to the world's poor--cell phones are the most obvious example, but also Internet access (and, with that, of course, free access to the 'virtual library of the world'). And certainly TVs, CDs, DVDs, etc. I recently read that cheap secondhand VCRs were being smuggled into North Korea as all the Chinese north of the border were abandoning the older technology in favor of DVD players.
But I don't actually have an idea of utopia, because that implies a static end-state, and I don't think stasis should be a goal at all.
Posted by: mw | Apr 6, 2005 10:22:00 AM
"I think the roots of Communism lie in the fantasy of a madman. That fantasy was that a primitive, premodern commune was a better way to live than an industrial society. Marx was the ultimate reactionary. Marxists don't want to go back to 1950 AD, but to 1950 BC. A time before money was also a time before there was anything worth trading. In his desire for a premodern society, Marx was a unabomber before his time."
You really don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. *Karl Marx* was opposed to *iundustrial society*? This is an error on a par with claiming that Hobbes was opposed to centralized political authority, that Mill thought conformity was the highest social value, or that Kant was a diehard consequentialist. You're right about Stalinism, and also right that Marx is in some measure implicated in its horrors, but you obviously have either never read a word of Marx or lack even the slightest understanding of what you read.
Posted by: Scott Lemieux | Apr 6, 2005 10:22:42 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.
