Tag: Karl Marx

Communism and Really Existing Socialism: A Reading List for Post-Millennials

Posted on by Brad DeLong
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What should someone coming of age in 2020 or so–someone post-millennial, who has no memories of all of any part of the twentieth century–learn about communism, and really existing socialism?

It is, I think, very clear by now to everyone except the most demented of the herbal teabaggers, and should be clear to all, that communism was not one of the brightest lights on humanity’s tree of ideas. Nobody convinced by the writings of Marx and his peers that a “communist” society was in some sense an ideal who then achieved enough political power to try to make that vision a reality has built a society that turned out well. All, measured by the yardsticks of their time and geographical situation, were either moderately bad, worse, disastrous, or candidates for the worst-régime-every prize. None attained the status of:

a prayse and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it like that of New England.” For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill…

Moreover, those who took Marx most seriously and fell under his intellectual spell either did first-class work only after they had liberated themselves and attached themselves to some other’s perspective (as Perry Anderson did to Weber via “modes of domination” and as Joan Robinson did to Keynes). Too close and uncritical a study of Marx is a mode of self-programming that introduces disastrous bugs into your wetware. The thinkers useful for the twenty-first century are much more likely to be along the lines of Tocqueville, Keynes, Polanyi, de Beauvoir, Lincoln, and (albeit in his intellectual rather than his political or personal practice) Jefferson than Marx. (And Foucault? Maybe Foucault–nah, that is too likely to introduce a different set of dangerous bugs to your wetware…)

Yet the ideas and the arguments for “communism” were (and are?) powerful. And they were very convincing to millions if not billions of people for fully a century and a half. How should post-millennials understand this? How much about this ought they to learn? And how best to present the subject so that they gain the fullest and most accurate understanding, in the short time that is all that they can afford to spend on it?

Here’s my first second take on readings, in the order in which I would put them a course:

More Scattered Things I Have Written: on and About the Subject:

Glosses on Jo Walton’s Plato Fanfic and Robots: A Brief Pickup Platonic Dialogue: Today’s Economic History

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Jo Walton (2015): The Just City (New York: Tor Books: 9780765332660) http://amzn.to/1WQi0cn

John Holbo: Walton’s Republic: What is Athene’s motive in dragging all those robots from the future to help build this thing?…

Brad DeLong: Re: ‘What is Athene’s motive in dragging all those robots from the future to help build this thing?’ Aristoteles son of Nikomakhos of Stagira:

Aristoteles: Let us first speak of master and slave, looking to the needs of practical life…. [Some] affirm that the rule of a master over slaves is contrary to nature…. Property is a part of the household… no man can live well, or indeed live at all, unless he be provided with necessaries…. [T]he workers must have their own proper instruments… of various sorts; some are living, others lifeless; in the rudder, the pilot of a ship has a lifeless, in the look-out man, a living instrument….

If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the [automated] statues of Daedalus, or the [self-propelled catering carts] of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, ‘of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods’; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves…

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right?… There is no difficulty in answering this question… that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule…

Neville Morley: @Brad De Long #1: yes, I was wondering about that passage, via Marx’s sarcastic gloss on it (someone else will surely remember the precise quote, but it’s words to the effect of:

Who’d have imagined that we’d get self-acting spindles not to shorten the working day but to lengthen it so that a few people can become most eminent shoe-black manufacturers’

but didn’t feel that it got developed in the novel as much as it might have been–and then by the second book most of the robots have simply gone.

Brad DeLong: Karl Marx (1867): Capital vol. I, ch 15, §3B ‘The Prolongation of the Working Day’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm:

Karl Marx: ’If,’ dreamed Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity:

If every tool, when summoned, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Daedalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephaestos went of their own accord to their sacred work, if the weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers, or of slaves for the lords.

And Antipatros, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, hailed the invention of the water-wheel for grinding corn, an invention that is the elementary form of all machinery, as the giver of freedom to female slaves, and the bringer back of the golden age.

Oh! those heathens! They understood, as the learned Bastiat, and before him the still wiser MacCulloch have discovered, nothing of Political Economy and Christianity. They did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working-day. They perhaps excused the slavery of one on the ground that it was a means to the full development of another. But to preach slavery of the masses, in order that a few crude and half-educated parvenus, might become ‘eminent spinners,’ ‘extensive sausage-makers,’ and ‘influential shoe-black dealers,’ to do this, they lacked the bump of Christianity.

Today’s economic history: Richard J. Evans reviews ‘Karl Marx’ by Jonathan Sperber

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Myself, I would translate ‘Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft’ as “All the established estates and orders of society are steamed away”…

Richard J. Evans (2013): Review of ‘Karl Marx’ by Jonathan Sperber: “Marx v. The Rest…. Previous accounts of Marx’s life have gone one of two ways…

…Either he is seen as a prophet… or… a misguided and misguiding ideologue…. This book aims to scrape away the patina of retrospective polemic to reveal Marx in the context of his own times…. Sperber provides a new translation of the much discussed sentence in the Manifesto, ‘Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft’: ‘All that is solid melts into air’ in the standard English version but rendered by Sperber as ‘Everything that firmly exists and all the elements of the society of orders evaporate.’ What Marx had in mind was not some mystical process of transformation, but the dissolution of hierarchical Prussian society by the steam-power of industry. Political revolution leading to a communist regime… would be achieved on the lines of the French Revolution’s… Jacobin phase, from 1792 to 1794….

The problem for Marx was that his anti-Prussian campaign required the co-operation of left-wing liberals and democrats, while his championing of the class struggle meant turning against them. While Marx vacillated, the workers lost interest in the former campaign and the democrats were alienated by the latter….

The exiles meanwhile accused each other of hypocrisy and embezzlement, taking each other to court and resorting to fisticuffs; two of them even fought a duel. Although this dire situation has often been blamed on Marx, he had previously been quite capable of working amicably with his associates, including the democrats of Cologne, and Sperber is more inclined to blame Engels, whose tactless and bullying personality he repeatedly criticises. The situation was made worse by scurrilous rumours spread by German and Austrian police spies, who swarmed around them like flies around a corpse….

Marx withdrew from politics and devoted himself to forging a new career as a journalist, writing articles for the New York Tribune, commissioned by an American working on the paper who had met him in Cologne. He published 487 articles in all, about a quarter of them ghostwritten by Engels when Marx was ill. They amounted to more, in sheer volume, than the sum total of everything else Marx published in his lifetime, and while many biographers pass over them silently, Sperber does a good job of analysing their content, particularly Marx’s extensive commentaries on the Crimean War. The fiasco of the British conduct of the war convinced him that the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, was a paid agent of the Russians, whom Marx had long loathed as ‘the gendarme of Europe’…. The money he got for his journalism, together with subsidies from the prosperous Engels, enabled his family to rent a house in Kentish Town, in North London, to buy their own furniture for it, and to afford modest luxuries like picnics on Hampstead Heath….

Marx’s Herr Vogt is usually ignored as a ‘non-canonical’ work, but Sperber shows that it was more influential and more widely read at the time than the subsequently canonical Eighteenth Brumaire. The charge that Vogt was a client of French imperialist designs on the Rhineland was vindicated when Napoleon III fell in 1870…. At the time, Vogt won the argument, but the dispute brought Marx new political allies, notably the revolutionary socialist Ferdinand Lassalle…. Marx and Engels did not entirely trust the flamboyant Lassalle, and they peppered their letters about him with anti-semitic invective, painting him as a vulgar, pushy parvenu, ‘Isidor Berlin Blue Dye’, ‘the little Yid Braun’. Lassalle invited Marx to Berlin, where he threw dinner parties for him and took him to the opera, cheekily finding him a seat next to the royal box. Marx visited old friends in Cologne and family in Trier, where his mother graciously cancelled his debts to her….

It was Marx’s ‘passionately irreconcilable, uncompromising and intransigent nature’ that had ‘the deepest and most resonant appeal, and has generated the sharpest rebukes and opposition, down to the present day’, Sperber writes, while downplaying the legacy of his ideas. He has given us a Marx for the post-Marxist age, a superb 21st-century biography that sets its subject firmly in his 19th-century context but also explains why his legacy continues to be fought over.