DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT

Marx and the Death of the Author VI: Can we make a mountain out of a molehill?

It's been mentioned before in previous posts by me, and by other Marxists but if you had asked Marx himself which European country would be the backwards, ethno-nationalistic genocidal dictatorship and which would be the vanguard of the global socialist revolution, he would have likely guessed Russia (or France) and Germany, in that order. Instead, we got the opposite, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Why did Marx get it so wrong? How did Lenin kill Marx? And what does it tell us about the successes, failures, and lessons learnt from 'real life communism'?

In the never ending debates amongst neo-liberal and Marxist economists, a common refrain on both sides, one that gets parodied frequently is, 'well, of course pure, proper communism has never been tried', 'well, of course, pure, proper capitalism has never been tried'. In some ways, this is one of the very few instances I will say, 'both sides are right', a phrase that usually makes me angry, since recent history, especially in the UK, has seen 'both sides-ism' be used and abused by the right, as the centre assumes everyone is a good faith actor despite fascists being famously bad faith actors throughout history that abuse the 'good faith' of centrists. Here, for a change of pace, both sides are actually right, the 'pure proper' version of neither economic system has ever been tried, largely because 'pure, proper' systems are impossible. Humanity has too much agency for an academic at a desk to work out the perfect system. This is as true today as I sit writing things at my desk as it was in the 18th century when Adam Smith inadvertently began the academic discipline that I am currently a member of.

The difference, here at least, is the intent. People frequently say that capitalism is currently broken. I would argue that in many ways, this is the system working as designed, it just wasn't designed for you. As I have pointed out in previous posts, the first two modern corporations, the English and Dutch East India Companies, began the modern capitalist era with war crimes right out the gate. In Britain the Royal Africa Company provided a 'free market solution' for the lack of willing labour in the 'new world' by way of slavery. The plantation system in Ireland, the Highland Clearances in Scotland, and the forceful nature of Puritan Protestantism in Commonwealth England/Britain during the Civil Wars and the subsequent 'poor laws' were state violence to ensure exploitation of cheap labour for the benefit of the emerging bourgeois class in late 17th and early 18th century Britain, a process that would culminate with the violent suppression of the Luddites during the Napoleonic War in the early 19th century. All this violence and exploitation was designed to benefit only the top, the landlord class, the aristocracy, and the bourgeois class, which as established previously, is the extreme minority of the population. The 1 per cent, one might say, if they were quoting early 2010s political slogans, and of course, because of the way maths works, you're more likely than not in that one per cent. I'd make a terrible self help author. Thankfully, I don't respect them.

Communism, as the name implies, does try to work for the common good. The masses even. The proletariat. Of course, like most ideologies it can, and has, been hijacked by a few individuals trying to benefit themselves mostly, but there are also ways to prevent that. The Soviet Union, for example, had several flaws, but it also did more to raise Russia out of the middle ages than the Tsarist state it replaced, to the point where Russia went from running joke of Europe to 'big evil bogeyman' ulterior super power to rival the British and American Empires. Of course, the Soviets still frequently lagged behind Britain and America in terms of 'development' (itself a nebulous phrase). So why?

Well, it is related to why Marx would not have predicted Russia to be the global vanguard of Socialist Revolution, and instead predicted it to be Britain or Germany. In Marx's head, you couldn't go feudalism -> communism, rather you had to go feudalism -> capitalism -> communism. In Marx's rather linear view of history, namely one through the lens of British and German history, that the history of class struggle has to be aristocracy versus aristocracy, aristocracy versus bourgeois, and then proletariat versus bourgeois. Of course, I'm sure some historians are already readying their hands to type in that this is an oversimplified version of British/German history, let alone 'world' history. To these people, I point to this post, but I also plan to expand on this in the near future as an 'Africanist' and 'Asianist'. But to bring us back to Marx versus the Soviet Union, Marx would argue that the Soviets were damned before they started, as they had never gone through the primitive accumulation phase. It's hard to redistribute the wealth, when there's so little wealth to go around, and an insanely rich royal family's wealth might be massive relative to the rest of Russia, but the Romanov's wealth paled in comparison to their European counterparts, let alone the wealthy bourgeois classes of Britain, the Netherlands, and 'Germany'/Germany, who were often lending money to their respective royals, and the relatively small wealth of the Romanovs certainly wouldn't be enough to raise all of the Russian Empire out of poverty.

Of course, this is where Lenin becomes one of the earliest and loudest Marxists to 'kill the author', so to speak. First, Lenin figured, the Romanovs were relatively poor, what with Nicolas II frequently writing his British and German cousins for money and military help constantly. (The remarkably poorly run Russo-Japanese War that had led to the 1905 Revolution was mostly Kaiser Wilhelm II's idea, as he figured Germany might not have the resources to challenge the British in the Pacific, but Russia might, they didn't). But Romanov money would still be good enough to start Russia towards industrialisation, an industrialisation that could be done entirely through the state, rather than through the bourgeois class. This has led modern Marxists to debate whether the Soviets were actually Communists or if they had engaged in 'State Capitalism', and this debate we can return to later. At the very least, Lenin was following Marx's idea of primitive accumulation, he was just trying to do it in a way that didn't give the bourgeois power to steam-roll the proletariat, hence Lenin's embrace of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', since it has long been observed that Western Democracies are, more often then not, corrupted by the bourgeois. Maybe by buying out the Washington Press or running papers like The Daily Mail.

There are (in)famous scenes of Soviet soldiers in the Second World War running out of ammo or rifles. These scenes are particularly rife amongst American films, even after the Cold War. This is an over exaggeration at best, as the weapon shortages that did plague the Russian Armies historically occurred largely during the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War. That is to say, the Russian Army under the Tsarist regime. Of course, Western media has spent a lot of time trying to rehabilitate the image of the Tsars, because obviously an absolutist monarchy with an tendency towards pogroms and violent crack downs is preferable to Communism because... Because...

Anyway, there are many critiques of the Soviets, but they did in the course of mere decades build an industrial base that the Tsarists had spent over a century failing to build. Compared to their Tsarist counterparts at the beginning of the First World War, the Soviet Army was well equipped. Not well led, thanks to Stalin being insane, but well equipped, and contrary to popular belief, especially amongst the Nazis, much better prepared to fight off a German invasion, the largest land-based invasion in human history at that point at that, and able to rebuild quickly enough after the war that by the 1960s they beat the US in putting a human into space. The very same US that had fought no major battles on its own soil (Hawaii was seen mostly as a remote colony at that point, and arguably still today), and a US that had gone through primitive accumulation, but still wasn't sure if Black people are indeed fully people (for some Americans, that debate continues). Simultaneously, Khrushchev managed to pull off the largest housing project in human history. One might not be a fan of the architecture style, but the free market was also putting up horrendous Brutalist structures at the time. (Looking at you, London South Bank Centre and a decent chunk of Chicago).

What Lenin and his successors did struggle with, by Lenin's own admission, was the countryside. Marx, like most academics in the 19th, and frankly even the 20th and 21st centuries, was caught up in the 19th century's concept of modernity, which revolved around factories and cities. Little mind is given to the countryside and agriculture, which are seen as 'backwards', and part of the 'past'. The only people dwelling on those things are the romantics like Blake, who are convinced factories are the devil (metaphorically and perhaps literally, again I'm not the biggest Blake fan). The problem with this, you might have realised, factories can't produce food. Before writing this, I ate a delicious blackberry and apple muffin which the coffee shop I bought it from assures me is handmade here. The blackberry and apple were, allegedly, grown in the English countryside by a humble British farmer who has only recently been whipped up into right-wing fury by Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame, who amongst British right-wingers is relatively progressive as he apologised for physically abusing an Irishman and racially abusing East Asians, Black folk, Latin Americans, and South Asians. He was pro-Remain, but largely because he was worried for his holiday properties on the continent and his capacity to import German and Italian cars. Truly a man of the people.

Smith, a century before Marx, had also missed on developments in agriculture for a similar reason. Smith was the first academic to write about the economic advantages of the factory, but had missed the developments of the Second Agricultural Revolution, also happening in Britain at roughly the same time. Jethro Tull had patented the seed drill in 1713, and by the 1730s had championed modern iron ploughs and animal husbandry to improve farm outputs whilst also reducing the number of people necessary to run a 'modern' British stately farm. This was the 'other side' of Britain's 18th century population shift, these advancements in agricultural technology had resulted in considerable unemployment in rural areas, even as fields began to expand and displace people who had lived in previously unfarmable areas. Simultaneously, the factories opening in the cities provided both a new need for everyone to earn capital and opportunities to earn even a meagre amount of that capital. Resultantly, by the dawn of the 19th century, over 75 per cent of British people lived in cities, and British culture and history was forever entwined with this form of modernity. Smith was so focused on the pin factory that he had missed the fact that the pin factory could find labour because the modernised British farms had pushed the labourers there.

This lack of understanding of the modernising and capitalist forces on agricultural production, especially in the early 20th century, lead to a considerable amount of consternation, and even failure in socialist attempts at reforming land distribution. This, when coupled with a lot of the 'spiritual' pseudo science of the early 20th century led to outright disaster in both the Soviet Union and post-revolutionary China. In post-colonial Africa and India alike, questions of land ownership and hoarding by the local benefactors of colonial extraction have left the role of the state in land distribution an open question across much of the world to this day. Another legitimate, non-crazy, non-racist, non-xenophobic critique of the EU, for example, is a critique of the many ways that the Common Agricultural Programme (CAP) was created for the benefit of large land owners, especially in France, at the expense of smaller farmers across the bloc. Capitalism and Communism alike struggle with agriculture and agricultural development because most of the 'founding fathers' of both disciplines took it for granted as a part of the stoic past, not the evolving present or future. Hence why even 'free trade neo-liberal states' trend towards subsidy and protectionism around food. Neo-liberal capitalism struggles with keeping food affordable whilst also compensating the farmers or making food profitable. A quick glance at post-Brexit Britain's trade negotiations highlights how perilous trade negotiations around agricultural products really are, often remaining the sticking point that derails free-trade agreements, not only for Britain, but also for the EU, US, and China. Everyone wants to protect their farmers, and short of outright nationalising agricultural production, no one really knows how to. After all, when the price of bread gets too high, leaders tend to lose their heads.

So is it possible for a state to skip the capitalist phase? I personally think so, but only after the capitalist states leave their capitalist phase. In most of Europe, Africa, and Asia, the failure of the socialist states, no matter what kind of socialism, was capitalist interference from abroad or at home, and that interference was often violent, in the form of coups or assassinations. Neo-liberalism came to Latin America in the form of Augusto Pinochet, and it is no secret that his rise was largely choreographed by Dr Henry Kissinger in the US. Dr Kissinger, of course, also played a role in the rollout of neo-liberalism in Indonesia, Mozambique, Cambodia, and countless other places, all with extreme violence and often even outright genocide. After the fall of the Nixon and Ford White Houses, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organisation picked up the pieces and carried on Dr Kissinger's mission. Dr Kissinger wasn't even particularly dedicated to capitalism, to read his biography one is struck that he had a single-minded obsession with power, and seemed to believe that he should be in it. By accident of history he ended up in the US, and so he committed crimes on behalf of the US. Had he ended up in the USSR, he likely would have worked to expand their power.

Which brings us to another uncomfortable question that economists rarely struggle with, but really ought to. Can we do away with the kind of deeply human flaw that seeks to exploit whatever system is in power for personal benefit? If the communist project ever does succeed, will we still get Kissingers, Stalins, or Hitlers? Are they a product of their material conditions, or is there still something deeper, darker, and just as flawed in people that even in a utopian socialist future we will still have to be on guard against such people rising to positions of power? As a Star Trek fan, I know that's a common examination of the series, I'm thinking of the Home Front and Paradise Lost episodes of Deep Space 9 in particular. (Yes, DS9 is the best Trek, Captain Sisko, Dr Bashir, Lieutenant Dax, and CHIEF MILES EDWARD O'BRIEN for life).

But we're on a tangent now, so time to turn to the next page, next week, where we compare the various ways of interpreting the economic history of Europe and the World.