By KindlePublisher
Assigned to
Address by Henry Flynt.
The Emily Harvey Foundation, December 2011
Note: Upon further study, I do not want to assert categorically that Stalin intended the Ivanov experiments to produce soldiers. The sources are inconclusive. It is indisputable that there were Ivanov experiments. HF 1/5/12
AUTOPSY OF THE LEFT
Expanded memo for an address, 18 December 2011
© Henry A. Flynt, Jr.
last changes 12 March 2012
° refers to glosses; I decided they did not need to be in the
core text.
Introduction
What I have to say would make a two-year course, and I’m
not going to pour anywhere near that amount of info into this
hour. °1
In talking to Left adherents, I have found deep denial about
even the most obvious observations about the path of the
Left in the 20th century. It is not easy to get true believers
to admit that the Soviet Union is gone—and that none other
than Putin was the highest insider Communist in the Soviet
Union when Russia was Communist. True believers will
never admit the mass murder of 45 million Chinese at the
end of the 1950s—even though all professional historians
and “crimes against humanity” campaigners are aware of it
(give or take the variation in death estimates).
True believers will not face up to the many wars between
Communist countries. They make a point of not even
knowing the list of wars.
True believers will never admit that the Soviet Union funded
animal biologist Ilya Ivanov and his son to go to West Africa
in 1926 to create a human-ape hybrid, a subman. They
will never admit that Chinese scientists created a human-
rabbit chimera in 2003. Why was institutional Communism
fascinated with the creation of submen?
And what about the way Stalin caused the two canals to be
built, the Volga and the Baltic? The prison population was
deliberately swelled via arrest quotas. Then the prisoners
were deliberately worked to death like Iditarod dogs. Stalin
being Stalin, he followed up by having the corrections
officials shot for having done what he had ordered them to
do.
History is also ironic—and that has everything to do with
the vapidity of conventional moral judgments. For example,
the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany fought a proxy war in
Spain. Then, immediately afterward, they allied to conquer
and divide Poland. Then, immediately afterward, the Soviet
Union allied with the democracies against Nazi Germany.
If Nazi Germany had come before the Soviet Union, instead
of after it, we would have to say: the Soviet Union took Nazi
Germany as the model for key policies.
All I can hope to do in this short space is to stress a few of
the most obvious points.
I am shocked to find that I am so isolated in calling for a
stock-taking of the Left, a stock-taking that has to be called
an autopsy not to be mealy-mouthed.
The entire Left is far more like a religious cult—is far more
devoted to wishful thinking—than I ever wanted to believe.
Marx said that socialism was scientific. That it would change
the world in certain ways based on scientific knowledge of
how entire societies transform over centuries and what the
dynamics of social reproduction are.
But as we will see, Leftists proceed in a way opposite to that.
Once upon a time, admittedly, Leftists were responsible for
great events. But the evidence became overwhelming that
those events did not mean what they had been promised
to. Marx had already been elevated to a new man-god
and his writings had already been elevated to the status
of Revelation. But now the Left could persist only via
psychotic denial and repetition-compulsion. Actually, their
best defense was to assail the evils of the West. They used
those denunciations as a wall to hide embarrassments in
nations such as Cuba or North Korea to which they had
pledged their loyalty. °2
People don’t want to register the obvious and assemble it
into an analysis. They want to sweep the largest and most
obvious events under the rug so as to protect some crackpot
combination of moral superiority and millenarianism.
In other words, the Left does not want to achieve any of the
extraordinary things they promised. They are satisfied if the
Left’s “successes” are indescribably grisly and oh so this-
worldly.
•
I. The lacerating chronology
The history of the Left included great and amazing events
as instructive as anything in human history. The Left
has cooperated with the bourgeoisie in sweeping those
events under the rug, the Left’s motive being that the actual
occurrences dislocate Marxist dogma. I am going to devote
the end of this talk to a chronology—also consolidated as a
separate document. But let me start by mentioning some
of the biggest occurrences that have to be covered in an
explanatory analysis.
For now, I skip the nineteenth century entirely. The earliest
occurrence that concerns us is the Bolshevik victory.
A.
First, Lenin substitutes the party for the proletariat. My
point is not that that is “bad.” Nowhere here do I rebuke
these large changes of direction. I’m not interested in
second-guessing large-scale trends. I’m concerned with the
departure from the tenets of Marx.
In Russia, the revolution comes first in a backward and
largely peasant country. Two major revisions of Marx make
their appearance.
i. The purpose of socialism is to enable the modernization
of a backward country. [[OK, this is something we know
in hindsight. But there was an intimation in Trotsky’s
misnamed theory of the permanent revolution.]] In that
connection, the substitution of the party for the class is
consummated as terroristic regimentation.
ii. there is the opening to the East. Bolshevism, unlike social
democracy, begins to listen to color-line ideology and anti-
colonial ideology. Sultan-Galiev. M. N. Roy in 1920.
iii. The Comintern is formed. A literal world conspiracy.
However, it is not really an association of fraternal parties.
The national parties are steered by roving comintern
operatives from Moscow in coordination with the NKVD.
iv. Urban insurrection as the model of the seizure of power.
(Paris Commune, but with the democratic centralist Party.)
Trotsky’s 1924 commentary on Germany 1923, Problems of
Civil War. Will subsequently be eclipsed by peasant guerilla
war.
v. At the end of the 1920s, the Soviet regime embraces
central planning—irrespective of whether it is authentically
scientific or not.
vi. Bukharin speaks at a conference in London in 1931 and
tells them that the Soviet Union is a higher civilization. That
is simply not a claim that can be swept under the rug. [It will
come back implicitly in Trotsky’s The USSR in War (1940).]
If true, it is the supreme turning point in human history.
vii. As Soviet officials, Bukharin and Rakovsky write papers
questioning that the proletariat can be a ruling class. Why
have these papers never been translated and showcased?
viii. Also c. 1931, Stalin commences killing 25 million people
for political reasons. At the very time that Bukharin made his
higher civilization speech, Bukharin was already sliding into
deep personal trouble with Stalin.
ix. Something I will have to come back to. At the beginning
of the 1930s, Trotsky, in his attack on Stalin, declared totally
for market socialism. No matter the mystique of Trotsky as
the eternal revolutionary, when it came to what he wanted
socialism to do in economics, Trotsky advocated something
very like social democracy (with nationalization managed by
a Labor Party). There would be a perpetual class struggle in
which the proletariat would keep the capitalists from taking
over society by arm-twisting.
x. The role of the Soviet Union in republican Spain. We now
know that republican Spain was a colony of the Soviet union.
The USSR ran republican Spain via the NKVD, for example.
(Walter Krivitsky.) The USSR simply abstracted two-thirds of
the massive Spanish gold holdings. Immensely important in
lighting up the nature of the Soviet Union.
xi. The question what was the Soviet regime had already
been asked when NEP was proclaimed. But with the Stalin-
Hitler pact of 1939, the question became far more insistent.
Here is when Trotsky defined a socialist country as a country
in which a labor union had seized power. Here is where
he said that the “bureaucracy” could not survive the war.
Because it did survive the war, I concluded falsely that it was
an authentic exploiting class.
B.
Enter the Chinese. The model of insurrection is now peasant
guerilla war, for which Marx provided in no way. In Mao’s
victory of 1949, the revolutionary protagonist is the alliance
of four classes. Socialism comes first in colonies in which
peasants are the prevailing producing class. In 1957, Mao
announces in Moscow that the East Wind prevails over
the West Wind. As the situation develops, Mao conceives
an alliance of Asian communism with the newly important
campaigns against colonial rule. Sukarno played a crucial
role with his call for an anti-imperialist UN. The redefinition
of socialism is deepened: as a modernization strategy for
backward countries in which primitive accumulation is driven
by the Party.
Beginning at the end of the 1950s, the Chinese carry out
what the human rights exponents will call the largest mass
murder in history. 45 million starve because of Mao’s
crackpot policy. There is cannibalism; sources disagree on
whether it is marginal or systematic.
As a side note, Simone de Beauvoir visited China in
1955. Her account, The Long March (French, 1957), was a
rapturous endorsement of the regime. It was published just
before the regime commenced the numerically largest mass
murder of all time. I read the English translation and it
influenced me just as the Mills and Sartre books on Cuba
did. Unlike me, de Beauvoir was in the elite of punditry with
access to the French leadership. Sartre had split with
Camus over the Hungarian uprising. Sartre was to make his
trip to Cuba and publish his rapturous endorsement of the
Cuban regime in 1961.
The question here is whether de Beauvoir learned of
the Chinese famine in a timely way, and, if so, whether she
understood that it jarred her endorsement of the regime.
In 1970, Sartre was the nominal editor of the Maoist La
Cause de Peuple. He sold it on the streets after it was
banned.
So, what did Beauvoir and Sartre know and when did
they know it? Did they really not know of the Chinese
famine by 1970? Did they conceal it?
Human rights exponents and Chinese historians are fully
aware of this episode, but the Left and the mass media do
not admit that it happened. In an early 2012 edition of the
RCP newspaper Revolution, RCP “theoretician” Raymond
Lotta denied it outright. That brings me back to the theme
that the Left is a cult. The Left is selling a millennial illusion.
The Left is like Jim Jones without the Koolaid. They deliver
you to the perfect happiness by lying. [[It is not insignificant
that the Workers World lawyer Mark Lane was also the Jim
Jones lawyer.]]
In sum, typical figures for mass murder are 25 million in the
Soviet Union and 45 million in China. The Left doesn’t care.
It solves the problem by concealment.
C.
Then communism comes to Cuba and we get a Communist
revolution without the Party. That is an immense divergence
from Leninism’s What Is To Be Done. So: bourgeois
reformers can come to power and then embrace official
communism, after the fact, for geopolitical reasons.
D.
By now, communism has been realigned so that it is about
non-white independence from European colonial masters.
Now more than ever, communism is terroristic regimentation
in aid of modernization.
But Communism as a formula for rapid modernization goes
sour, terribly sour. There is the Cambodian genocide.
There is the Ethiopian famine, which, as we now know, is
the second Communist famine, not the first. The Communist
formula — you can kill your way to modernity — proves to
fail more often than it succeeds.
E.
We now have to bring in the three wars between Communist
countries, and the proxy war between the Soviet Union and
China in Angola. These wars are immensely important in
lighting up the nature of the regimes.
F.
But we have hardly even begun in terms of the history that
has to be accounted for. Around 1990, the Soviet Union
simply evaporates. There isn’t any proper civil war. Nobody
fights to protect the supposed collective property. The
highest ranking communists in the USSR, Gorbachov,
Yeltsin, and Putin simply take of their Communist coats and
put on capitalist coats.
Indeed, the claim of Communist sovereignty evaporates
throughout almost all of Eastern Europe.
Let us bring the story up to date.
There are nominal Communist regimes in east Asia, Cuba,
and Zimbabwe. At the same time, Castro tells a journalist
in 2010 that socialism in Cuba was a mistake. At the same
time, the assertion by the true believers that China is still a
Communist country becomes more and more unreal.
G.
We now have to interrupt this chronology and ask a question
of principle. Marxism demands that every historical era be
assigned a ruling class with a historical mission. So: what
was the Soviet Union and why did it suddenly evaporate?
Given that it had headed a world movement and had claimed
to be a higher civilization, what happened? I would have
expected somebody to publish a grand theory on this
question. Instead, the post-Bolshevik fraction of the Left
was content to polish the Soviet Union as an icon—while
the cocktail-party intellectuals derided the Soviet Union; no
matter what, the Soviet Union was finally swept under the
rug.
Today, you have Marx revival groups like Historical
Materialism and theorie communiste and Platypus. They
are simply ignorant of Bukharin-Rakovsky on the proletariat,
Bukharin on higher civilization in 1931, Trotsky in 1931-33
on the Soviet economy—and they ignore the killing of tens
of millions of people because Marx did not prophesy it as
Communism’s greatest deed. The revival groups are trying
to get more mileage out of a cult. They have nothing to do
with wanting to win any historic social victory. They want
to fail, and they love the little cash cows which their cults
provide them.
In the interests of brevity, I have to announce my
conclusions dogmatically. Russia and its empire never
ceased to be capitalist. What was the difference between
the NEP and today’s Chinese Communism? The CPSU
smashed the private economy when it threatened the
CPSU’s hegemony. But that was because modernization
could still be spurred by terroristic regimentation. China may
have passed that point.
Trotsky’s broad affirmation of market socialism is highly
revealing.
If Lenin and Trotsky were ever sincere, where they went
wrong was in assuming that nationalization of industry was
enough to guarantee a slide to socialism. Only nationalize,
and a society would slide to socialism like a stone rolling
downhill. That has proved to be utterly false.
The floor of capitalism is commodity production by wage
workers — all of it mediated, of course, by a currency.
(Whether that currency is hard or soft does not decide
whether a system is capitalist or not.)
Capitalism can persist when the state seizes the means of
production—but this variant is an aberration.
To resume from I.A.xi above. In 1967, I thought that the
Soviet Union was a new mode of exploitation that could
potentially outdo capitalism. Much historical experience at
the time lent itself to that theory.
One reason why I got it wrong was that I was not yet familiar
with capitalism as a system of behavioral strictures. That
only becomes clear to the advanced student of academic
economics.
What is shocking is that no pundit has stepped forward to
give a magisterial appraisal of the Soviet regime’s mission
or non-mission in history. When the republican project was
announced in the modern West, especially at the end of
the eighteenth century, something real was at stake. While
the road was filled with potholes, eventually the bourgeois
republics began to deliver an obviously superior mode of
life. With the Soviet Union, history seems to have wasted
a century, and wasted tens of millions of lives. There is no
precedent for such a vast undertaking to capture the future
that ends by converging with the banal modernity it was
supposed to supplant.
As Fouret said, it was a tragic detour. In fact, the only way
you can justify the Soviet episode is by saying that it was
about forced modernization. Terroristic regimentation was
adapted to catching up with the developed nations. When
the regime had done its work, it evaporated because it
was now irrelevant. What did endure was the tendencies
to autocracy in regions of the world that had never had
Europe’s “civil society” culture. (Civil society: a network
of voluntary organizations that are self-governing and thus
prepare people for a national democracy.)
What we now know — I am speaking dogmatically.
The Soviet Union was never anything more than an
aberrant variant of capitalism. Its historic mission was the
modernization of a backward country by terroristic totalitarian
methods. (The ideological basis could be found in Lenin’s
democratic centralism, but before that, in Marx-Engels 1850,
Address of the Central Committee.) As soon as the society
was “near enough” to capitalism—and market signals/
incentives were breaking out everywhere—the so-called
socialism evaporated. What remained was a nuclear-armed
imperialist state. [The proof that contemporary Russia and
China are imperialist is a matter of theory and is not trivial.]
•
II. Morality
We have to speak about moral judgments. Not because I
am sanctimonious. Not because I get an ego-boost from
scolding people from a pedestal.
We have to speak about moral judgments because of the
peculiar and extraordinary role they play in Left discourse.
Moral judgments are showcased throughout Left discourse.
We may well ask what they are doing there at all. The Left is
so primitive philosophically that it doesn’t even ask by what
right it delivers moral judgments.
A.
There is nothing in Marx’s philosophy of materialism that
warrants any moral judgment whatever. Any use of moral
language by Marx or his followers is flagrant deceit. I
remember complaining about that in the “introduction to the
universe” course I had to take at Harvard in 1958. In the
classroom exchange, a defender of Marx told me, by ‘good’
Marx means ‘the future’. And how does that translation of
moral language enable you to judge the events mentioned
here? °3
B.
Marx’s whole analysis of capitalism turns on the idea that
profit is stolen from the workers. Marx presents that as if
it is susceptible of clinical proof. The reaction of academic
economists is summarized in Mark Blaug, A Methodological
Appraisal of Marxian Economics, 1980.
C.
But the Left cannot leave sanctimony alone. If anything, its
sanctimony is hysterical.
C.1. The Left’s investment in a rhetoric of pathos.
The Marxist tradition has a crackpot theme to the effect that
the perfect society is simply a matter of the least becoming
most, of the most rejected and despised getting payback.
All you have to do is to put the indigent on the throne. To
establish a dictatorship of those at the bottom of the social
ladder. That was an ideological package meant to create a
constituency. The Left thought that the only place it could
find people who would not rest content with the status quo
was at the bottom. By that test, the American Left ought to
be primarily about Native Americans.
In fact, the fact that people are poor may make them
prospects for illegal opposition to the regime, but it does not
give them a formula for a more advanced social formation.
A so-called “new” society would have to preserve every
advance already made. Luddism is out of the question.
Whether we are talking about urban gangs, or whether we
are talking about low castes getting a piece of the action,
or whether we are talking about colonial subjects becoming
masters in their own house, in no case does this lead to
anything remotely like a more advanced social formation.
What you get is vicious despots, mobbed up with the drug
traffic, with a literal slave trade (Uganda in Iraq), lording it
over populations that live in more squalor than they did when
they were ruled by the bad people.
“Poverty” and so forth expose the macabre side of
capitalism. A literally communist society would deliberately
get rid of the privileges and badges of class and caste:
assuming that human nature can abide equality.
(Supposedly Castro eliminated whatever vestiges of racial
caste there were in Cuba. But there are rumors that all was/
is not beautiful in Cuba.) [But wait. Where does the 1926
Soviet project to create submen in Africa fit in this picture?]
All the while, “poverty” does not give the poor a plan of a
more advanced social formation at all. It says nothing about
what to do about info tech, about nanotech, about nuclear
power plants, about outer space, etc. etc.
It was a truism to insiders from the beginning of the twentieth
century that the chimerical monster called finance is the lord
of capitalism. But now they cannot get this revelation off the
front pages.
The poor and the pathetic do not have a game plan what to
do about finance. Glass-Steagall? Why that? And have the
poor even heard of it?—do they even care?
Islamic banking? A zero-interest rate economy (ZIRP)?
They do not know the history of attempts by contemporary
nations to have capitalism without interest charges, and how
unpromising those attempts have proved to be.
Marx had a theory of why the proletariat needed to be the
revolutionary subject which may have been credible in his
day, because it was not yet clear how technological and
how intellectual society had to be to keep going. But Marx
already bundled this clinical elevation of the proletariat with
a “Sermon on the Mount” morality. “The proletariat has
nothing to lose but their chains; they have a world to win!”
That’s magical thinking. Simply unleash the most beaten,
the most miserable, the illiterate, the untrained, the starving,
and a higher civilization will spring forth by intuition!
The revolutionary protagonist?! Over the decades, the
emphasis on the part of many in the Left shifted away
from the proletariat to the underclass, the chronically
unemployed—a class that Marx explicitly disdained. That
represents a complete abandonment of Marx’s theory of
why the revolutionary protagonist is who it is. Marx chose
the proletariat because he thought it was the producing and
indispensable class. He did not know how important white-
collar was going to become, but if he had, he would have
had to combine them with blue-collar to uphold his doctrine
of functional indispensability.
The underclass is not functionally indispensable. Its claim
on the Left is a tug at the heartstrings. There has been a
shift toward who can claim the most rejection. “Somebody
who is so poor that he doesn’t even have a street to lie down
in so a truck can run over him.”
This Sermon on the Mount—a pity-centered ideology. It
takes us away from any advanced reconstitution of the mode
of production.
Measures taken by reformist capitalism that do, or do not,
alleviate poverty do not touch the core machinery of the
system. That has been one of the historic pitfalls of the Left.
Was it the Bonus marchers of 1932, who were driven away,
then put their case again in 1936 and won their demand,
who brought us nearer to a more advanced social formation?
(Note that FDR was against the Bonus March demand.)
The composite of the mid-1930s may (or may not) have
been a more advanced capitalism, but the Bonus marchers
were not its architects.
FDR was far more conciliatory to the bankers than Tugwell
wanted him to be. The New Deal did not nationalize the
banks.
The poor may be more inclined to wax cynical about
capitalism—until the day they get a piece of the pie—
but their jibes at the fat cats do not qualify them to
conceive a higher civilization. They find their fulfillment in
reservation casinos and the city governments of second-
tier metropolises. And in the palace guard in Zimbabwe.
Of course there are going to be people who are thrilled that
they have a piece of the pie or a seat at the table. But it
has nothing to do with the economic formation communism
promised us.
So the Left has nullified its entire goal by embracing a
rhetoric of pathos in an attempt to become more relevant.
C.2. The question of how the Left handles moral claims in
its rhetoric has a second dimension which requires close
readings for its appreciation.
The Left derives its judgments on different historical
episodes from entirely different bases.
The Left’s sanctimony is a patchwork.
— What is the far Left’s appraisal (moral judgment included)
of slavery, colonialism, African-Americans in the U.S.? I
would have to study the texts carefully to see whether the
verdicts are original and what sort of judgments are being
delivered. It calls for extensive and delicate scholarship.
— In the case of other “crimes of the Right,” the Left simply
stipulates the moral appraisal. °4
—The Soviet political killings. Some Left adherents blame
them on Stalin and thereby excuse themselves and render
the occurrence unimportant. °5
—Israel. A decisive case, because the Left cannot mention
Israel apart from “blame.” But who gets the blame? The
Left blames Anglo-American imperialism totally for the
existence of Israel. The Militant, 29 January 2007. But does
the WZO give them permission to say that? Should Herzl
not be buried in that graveyard?
—As to what the human rights proponents call the Chinese
mass murder, the Left has never admitted that it happened.
—There was the Cambodian genocide of c. 1978. There
was the Ethiopian famine of c. 1981, for which Mengistu has
been convicted in absentia for genocide.
The numerically largest mass murders of the twentieth
century were perpetrated by communism. The response of
the Left in every case: simple concealment.
Continuing our survey of moral judgments of social
episodes, what about the Chinese despoilation of east Africa
that is going on right now? Zizek is indignant. Does his
indignation have Left validity?
In short, there is a towering issue here. The point is not to
exact condemnation or non-condemnation of this or that
massacre. The point is: how does the moral bobbing and
weaving light up the structure of Left ideology?
•
III. Communism as a generic idea
A. Historical schemes and historical practice
The notions about what Communism was going to be were
crackpot. That is why communism and socialism have been
abandoned as demands by the Left except as perfunctory
asides at the end of articles.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no public
attempt to reimagine communism except in my Ph.D.
dissertation and on my web site. The public ignored my
offerings.
One organization, Sparticist, told us that we should simply
go back and repeat what the Soviet Union did, taking
Trotsky’s divergence from Stalin in 1932 as compass North.
But Trotsky’s thesis was that NEP should not have been
abandoned. So Sparticist is telling us to recreate NEP in
the United States, for example. It is so pathetic that I don’t
expect anybody will listen.
Communism first appears in the Book of Acts in the New
Testament. That experiment quickly fell apart. The way that
Communism has been imagined throughout its high-profile
public history has been crackpot.
Cf. the way that human flight was imagined by the ancient
Greeks and by Leonardo. Totally crackpot.
Marx and Engels told their followers that the new
shareholder capitalism was only a hair’s breadth away from
Communism.
The most pretentious claim of achieved communism was
made in Bukharin’s address in London in 1931. He claimed
that the Soviet Union was a higher civilization based on
central planning.
Their catch-phrases were material balances and cost
accounting.
But what observers, then and now, realized was that Soviet
planning could not be the glistening magic that it claimed to
be. Trotsky pointed out in his papers that the universal plan
had to be a hoax, since:
i. So-called material balances could only balance direct
supply and consumption of one product.
ii. They did not have a gold-backed currency by which to
make different goods comparable.
iii. There was an information problem so large that only a
market could solve it. The idea that it could be solved by
pencil and paper, or abacus, was ludicrous.
If one consults the publications the Soviet Union created to
train economic officials, they take their paradigms from the
New Deal and from operations research.
What it seems the Soviet government officials did was to use
the statistics for the previous year’s production as the basis
for their plan. (P.C. Roberts.)
They tried to send all instructions from the center, so that
a factory manager’s job was only to get targets fulfilled.
(According to Gregory and Stuart, for whatever they are
worth.)
The truth is that the Soviet Union never had a glistening
formula for economic paradise. It never had an operative
doctrine worthy of presentation.
It would be highly worthwhile to make an anthropological-
sociological study of what Soviet “planners” actually did,
based on interviews and old records. But the officials are
going to die before anyone does that. Nobody wants to
know. (Merle Fainsod’s 1958 book hardly suffices.)
That the Soviet Union did something and produced
something was not a hoax. The Soviet Union was able to
produce. As it happens, it was all guns and no butter.
But perhaps that is no more remarkable than the war
socialism of Kaiser Germany. As Lange said, the Soviet
economy was run like a bourgeois economy in war.
My claim here is that the skimpy explanation we are
furnished of how they directed and coordinated production
quantitatively (e.g. material balances) was a hoax.
[I am not convinced that the Soviet Union even solved
the agriculture problem politically. Conversion to factory
farming, as in the U.S., has to take place organically. If you
disentitle farmers as a class in a single day, that will provoke
rebellion.]
What Trotsky believed was that socialism was a labor
union that had seized power. Once the owners were
expropriated by a workers’ committee, the society would
slide to socialism like a stone rolling downhill. Lenin said in
State and Revolution that a high-school student could keep
the accounts of a factory. He did not realize that there is a
quantitative question here, how one economic “node” relates
to another.
[[Bernard Baruch visited the Soviet union in 1919 and Lenin
and Trotsky tried to hire him to be the Soviet economic czar.
That was not gratuitous. Baruch was famously the U.S.
production czar in the First World War. Baruch was not
unsympathetic to socialism.]]
B. Imagining communism, as a scientific problem
1. Overview
Communism would be intrinsically high-tech.
The easiest way to arrive at Communism would be to get
into a space ship and go to a planet where they already have
it.
To use the language of the present civilization (which I
despise, don’t blame me) the problem of communism is
primarily a problem in physics. The first person to “solve”
communism should get the Nobel Prize in physics.
a. Communism impossible?
It is legitimate to ponder conditions which might make
communism impossible. This is not a cult and I’m not trying
to deceive you about what is possible.
We may be starting too late ecologically.
The same technology that is so liberating is so dangerous
that it has outrun communist assumptions. “All people
are the same.” But the biologists are already scheming to
undercut that.
It is a problem that manufacturing has left the United States:
communism would have to have the whole world under its
control in order not to be hindered by the need to create
autarkic societies everywhere.
Selection of the revolutionary protagonist: see below.
The human nature argument. People are fawning and
hollow—hidebound, frivolous, and gullible. That is why they
love status symbols, and why a public demands somebody
to take on the role of a god. See below.
Menial labor.
We have learned to our shock that the Soviet Union
tried to create a race of submen in Africa in 1926. (The
commentators differ on what would have been done with
the submen.) While we knew that Stalin used second tier
labor—individuals who were imprisoned for deviation and
deliberately worked to death—we did not until recently
grasp how much Stalin relied on that tier in his economic
development scheme. We thought the Marxist tradition
provided for restructuring work so that there would no longer
be a bottom rung of menial laborers. Graham Priest: you
will never do it.
The Transition argument. How do you leave capitalism
by passing through capitalism? You could not instantly
get rid of the market and wage labor. (give or take War
Communism.) “Socialism in one country” could never
instantly get rid of banking. if all these elements of
capitalism were still in play, then why wouldn’t capitalism
simply knit itself back together?
b. The coordination problem
Communism can be imagined only if one takes economic
coordination as part of the core problem. To see the
economy from the vantage-point of how economic activity is
coordinated in the absence of:
prices,
markets,
money incentives for work.
To imagine this would require a scientific revolution in
economics—or, one could say, against economics.
Since official economics propounds that all economies
spontaneously arrange themselves as if a capitalist
maximization were going on. There is an interest rate
whether there is money or not.
Since bourgeois economics has grown together with
physics, so that the laws of capitalism can now be pictured
as laws of nature. Scientific American runs articles on
national economies as “science.” (E.g. the article on the
Jeffrey Sachs big bang in Poland.)
Interchange between center and periphery would have to be
solved, since the whole notion of turning peripheral actors
into mere robots is insane. We are told that Stalin did that.
If so, it would have been a neo-serfdom, literally.
Automation and the reorganization of work, shifting away
from low-skill labor.
Capital construction would have to be solved. Almost
surely the solution would be computer modeling in physical
quantities.
So, again: let us be clear that we are talking about
communism as something other than Biblical simplicity and
squats and tent cities.
I cannot emphasize enough how rare the question has
become. “Socialist” splinter groups declare for socialism in
the last sentence of their little articles as mere ritual.
Authors today who want to talk about communism as an
advance (rather than a New Testament regression) can be
counted on the fingers of one hand.
Jacque Fresco of Florida. He is an elderly eco-futurist. He
wants to discover the economy of the future in the latest
gadgets, photovoltaic paint, three-dimensional printing,
Maglev trains, etc. Most of his exposition is concerned with
the geometry of city layouts. Actually, the geography of
human settlements would be important in conjunction with
the reorganization of production and consumption. But the
solution cannot start there.
Unless you have a principle of economic coordination
without money and markets,
unless you solve the economic interchange of center and
periphery,
unless you provide for a central authority that will not
become malignant (#),
unless you solve the planning of capital construction in
physical quantities,
there is nothing to talk about.
Joseph Seymour. Seymour spends half of his exposition of
communist economics detailing his daughter’s “shop till you
drop” lifestyle. And detailing the time he spends serving her
(and her husband) and their lifestyle. It’s amazing that he
would become that confessional and that the newspaper
would let it slip through.
When you get past that, you find that he basically wants the
United States to retrace the path of the Soviet Union (coming
out at capitalism at the other end?!).
He seems to have taken a college course in comparative
economics which fed him the Spulber line about the
economic brilliance of the early Soviet Union.
He has never seen honest-to-God Soviet textbooks like
Industrial Management in the U.S.S.R. (1950)
I.A. Yevenko, Planning in the USSR (undated, 1965).
Seymour is a Trotsky adherent, and he knows the
Trotsky “market socialism” article that was published in
1932. Seymour doesn’t know Trotsky’s two unpublished
documents on market socialism, apparently under one
number in the Trotsky Archives.
T-3493-4
Basically, Seymour would go back to the starting point of
the Soviet Union and play out the whole horrible scenario,
grinding through the NEP and then, in accordance with
Trotsky, continuing the NEP indefinitely. After you had got
through murdering 25,000,000 people, you would come out
at the other end with nuclear-armed capitalist imperialism.
What Seymour wants is not a transition from capitalism,
but a transition to capitalism. [Communist Yugoslavia as a
possible exemplar of his economic scheme.]
Then we have to suffer with comparative economics, a
bizarre subdiscipline of Western economics. The slogan of
command economy versus demand economy. “The Soviet
Union had an evil command economy.”
(And was it evil for Roosevelt to mobilize for the Second
World War?)
Comparative economics became a refuge for Western
professors who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. They
wanted to convince their students that the Soviet Union
indeed had a formula. That was Roberts’ complaint, as a
matter of fact.
So: they explained how the USSR planned its economy by
instructing the reader in linear programming, explaining that
LP is so advanced that you don’t have to read that section of
the textbook.
As a matter of fact, that is what the later Soviet textbooks
were saying. They didn’t use LP: they taught it to create the
illusion that they had a formula.
Again I.A. Yevenko, Planning in the USSR.
Linear programming seeks a maximum on the basis of:
prices which are a vicious circle, since you need prices
to write the objective function and yet the point of the
calculation is to arrive at a tight price system.
What is more, the equilibrium laboriously arrived at in a
Debreu general equilibrium is only a snapshot, a formula that
clears all markets instantaneously. It tells you nothing about
maximization in the sense of steering an evolving economy
in the direction of “more.”
Roberts found an example from a Polish economist in 1961
which is the last straw. This economist tries to show that a
socialist economy can be run by the very principles taught
in a neoclassical micro textbook, complete with revealed
preference and a tangency which rigorously determines
prices.
In 1961? Workers World didn’t tell me about that because,
frankly, they were stumblebums. If they had disclosed it,
it would have given the whole game away. The Eastern
bloc had no ideas — nothing. It’s like claiming a solution to
antigravity: and it turns out that what you have is Newtonian
physics.
Market socialism cannot be an equilibrium. The players will
successfully fight the politicians to free the economy for free
enterprise.
The one thing in Seymour’s exposition which cannot be
dismissed out of hand. Communism would require a vast
reconstruction affecting the organization of necessary labor,
affecting motivation, bringing “transactions” in planning’s
purview, etc. Among other things there would be a vast
capital construction program. Given that it is so different,
how would we get from here to there? That is why I say that
the easiest way to arrive at Communism is to get in a space
ship and travel to a planet where it already exists.
Would any part of the Transition look like what the Soviet
Union did? The first concern of the Soviet Union was to
nationalize property. [From then on, they zigged and zagged
between petty-bourgeois revival and war socialism, always
reacting to political emergencies (famine or the rebellion of
the kulaks or military preparedness).]
c. The constituency
Communism is like a moon shoot or a network of nuclear
power plants. The indispensable personnel are the
experts. But who do the experts answer to? Who is the
constituency?
Of course Seymour says that it is the proletariat. He simply
refuses to acknowledge, much less challenge, the “peasant”
nominations, “Third World” nominations, and black separatist
nominations. “His” proletariat hasn’t acted as a revolutionary
subject in a long time. From the other side, the celebration
of the proletariat harkens back to the crackpot days when
it was assumed that communism would be a primitive
communalism, or at best, would be a syndicalism. Of course
Seymour is unaware of the Bukharin-Rakovsky argument
that the proletariat cannot be a ruling class.
I am prepared to make the case for a revolutionary junta
which will be hand-in-glove with the experts.
But who, from the general population, will cooperate with
them and why?
There was a reason why communism got pictured by the
classic authors as a communalism which required no more
than a high-school education to manage. It was to make
the deprived feel that it was their system. The revolutionary
leaders did not want to picture communism as if it were a
moon shoot, where the only role of the public is to pay for it
and to applaud.
I can supply part of the answer to my question. My point
is that there is no serious discourse about communism as
a prospect. If Fresco and Seymour are the only authors
I can cite other than myself, that’s pathetic. Communism
needs to become a studied question as if it were a question
in “physics.” A coalition may be very possible of people who
feel battered by the system and despise what it is doing.
They will have to be offered a genuine escape route. A
charade of reversion to primitive communalism is not an
escape route.
2. More specifics
Let me speak in a little more detail about some of the
problems that would have to be solved to arrive at
communism.
We have to spend the most time talking about the
consideration that non-economists do not see, the
coordination problem.
When you remove money and finance from the picture,
and define the economy as production for collective need,
you see for the first time how complicated the economy
is legitimately. Product choice. Capital construction.
Infrastructure. Environmental impact. Whether nuclear
fission power at all? Whether nuclear fusion power is
realistic? Whether the petrol engine and the highway
system should be phased out? Bicycles.
Automobiles have been vastly upgraded technically.
So have eyeglasses! So have toothbrushes and dental
floss. How much of that should be retained and how much is
mere marketing (product differentiation)?
You need experts to bring expert knowledge to bear to the
best of their ability.
You need an “army” (staff) of industrial experts to design and
run the system.
Everybody’s contribution is expert and important, but if
things are done as in the past, then there will be generalists
who outrank specialists. The generalists decide “how deep
you are going to go into the wish list”—and whether you
are going to choose one alternative rather than another
because it drains less resources. Old words like “expensive”
would acquire a new meaning. Also the word “dangerous”
(environmentally unsound).
If mid-tech solutions such as the petrol engine were still
in play. Using an auto would be like going to a car rental
without money. Getting a bike. Take one from the rack.
Would you return on the same bike you arrived from?
How people live is going to have to be redesigned by
engineers who come up with solutions that people discover
they prefer. You don’t want to impose solutions on people
that they hate.
At the same time, a layperson cannot design a new
transportation system and figure what it will mean in terms of
retooling and new construction.
Many people happily take the products Apple gives them.
Apple has solved consumer satisfaction. But the larger
point: For the laity to create the mass-produced products for
themselves is out of the question.
the planning staff
general coordinators. deciding how much you can do and
where everything is delivered. (#)
environmentalists
systems engineers: if there is going to be a Maglev railroad.
capital engineers: one Maglev train
consumption engineers: clothes, food, etc.
(#)The political problem of preventing usurpation by
authorities with the broadest purviews.
It includes the rather fascinating issue of fraternization
among people who differ vastly in talent and in the demands
they place on themselves. It can’t work unless people
understand humility and espouse it. It’s like being at a
snack-and-conversation mixer with a psychiatrist (especially
one with the power to commit) or a power plant designer.
Reciprocal humility?
Problem of the Transition. The Transition to communism
needs an incredible diversity of genuine expertise and an
incredible diversity of plant and equipment.
The decision to produce one shirt more or less — vs. — the
decision to produce one nuclear power plant more or less.
penalties for expert incompetence?
One of the problems with communism is that if a head
engineer erects an faulty nuclear power plant, how do you
penalize him for the people he kills and the environment he
poisons?
°6
People are supposed to be provided with a comfortable
standard of living as if they were family members. Physical
survival is not earned. In the Transition, assuredly, people
will negotiate what they give back (their jobs) with some
authority or other. In fact, in many cases they will already
have negotiated a lengthy and arduous preparation. Then
they have to show up and work with pride. From a dentist up
to today’s standard much is expected. That is not to mention
all the jobs that are far more expert. So, being a brain
surgeon or a nuclear power plant technical administrator is
not “fun.” Some will have access to extremely expensive
and dangerous props. (Physician or nuclear power plant
engineer or airline pilot.) We don’t even want to frighten
ourselves with the amount of damage a rogue could do.
For Communism, the capitalist argument that experts need
to be high-paid because their education is expensive does
not apply.
Both instruction and subsistence are provided “free” to
somebody being schooled. But if you are training for an
expert job, you will have to earn your place at every step
by your performance. Does the Catholic Church offer a
model? The army offers a model, but rank creates a very
visible class system correlative to very different levels of
accommodation. And let us never forget that the army is a
prison.
So communism in the Transition does not abolish your
responsibility to other people. It does not abolish supervisor
relationships. Surgeons, for example, cannot be prepared
without supervision. In fact, major surgery is performed
by teams, and they all have to work with pride. You don’t
want to lose a patient in a twelve-hour operation because
the anesthesiologist is incompetent. Similarly for all expert
and responsible jobs. The real obstacle may be that people
acquire certification without being really good. Counterfeit
experts. In fact, in our society, superb doctors can become
less than superb as their careers wear on. They become
more mercenary or more perfunctory.
Communism requires an esprit so that people will do
necessary jobs and expert jobs without being threatened
with loss of consumption as a penalty and without being
induced with luxury consumption. Indeed it really goes
against the grain of how things are done now.
If you are scheduled to do an important job, such as taking a
shift as a physician in a medical clinic, not to show up can be
a disaster to people who depend on you.
I don’t know that much about the Jesuits, but the Jesuits
may have pioneered a sodality where performance is
expected and delivered independently of whether the
member will be fed and housed. But in other respects, the
Jesuits are a prison sodality.
to expand
subsistence is guaranteed.
the avenues of distribution of consumer goods to
consumers. they have to be spelled out.
the collective does not promise to grant every wish you can
conceive—so don’t ask, as Sartre asked Castro, “what if
they want the moon?”
vital distinction: what is an entitlement?
vs. what is discretionary? (i.e. you have to convince the
authorities to provide you with a supply. but the authorities
may want to lay it off on you.)
people who want to do their own cooking. they volunteer
labor not requested by the central authority to assist in
provisioning themselves, boutique style.
there would be discretionary projects that ask planners for
resources.
creative work would be donated.
If others prefer to dine on the above-mentioned custom
cuisine, the chef’s labor has to be a gift until it reaches the
point where a multitude want that cuisine. Then either i)
people duplicate the custom preparation (learn to cook),
or ii) the system adopts the cuisine for the official menu.
(Japanese tacos.)
necessary labor is giving something back. necessary
work does not depend on mere good will to get done. the
central authority will be cognizant what the requirements of
necessary labor are, and steer people toward them.
people who want to contribute in several disciplines would
presumably have more leeway to do so.
What occupations satisfy the necessary work requirement?
a. It’s totally a judgment call, whether to configure
entertainment or boutique cuisine as necessary work. It’s
totally a test of how the necessary work boundary is drawn.
I’m inclined against the lax approach.
If the central authority deems this or that worth doing, it will
supply the resources to do it. An operating theater.
b. Music is in a category of necessary recreation for the
nonce. I don’t imagine communism having official musical
ensembles like military bands. The central authority puts
musical instruments on the manufacturing schedule because
people want them.
c. Are you going to be allowed to take lessons when you
aren’t any good? Isn’t the decision up to the teacher? But
wait. a purpose is served by allowing non-degree students
to audit or sample courses. For some music students,
merely taking the lessons is the goal.
For heavens’ sakes, going to Harvard was indispensable for
my life even though I did not complete a degree.
d. Is the society going to supply you with substantial
resources for a venture that needs substantial resources?
(Ventures come in all descriptions.)
A boutique restaurant: it has a success criterion and will be
closed if it doesn’t succeed.
Screened access to resources for venture projects. Time
on the Mt. Palomar telescope. It was a real issue for an
astronomer whom some called a crackpot.
It is precisely at the point of who gets the big megaphone
that the danger of discriminating against the better arises.
C. A communist conduct code and related issues
1. Specifics
Not to manufacture clothes or accessories that would allow
people to display rank.
Locked private dwellings? Protection from snooping and
theft and from unreasonable search and seizure?
Problem of being dependent on the good will of a petty
authority. Especially serious when somebody becomes
an authority who is a counterfeit as far as the expertise
is concerned but who has an egoic need to push people
around.
That is more of an issue in “prison communism” like a child’s
summer camp or a psychiatric ward.
An official assigns you to the wrong job because he doesn’t
like you or because he simply wants to show who’s boss.
In using a public library, one unreasonable librarian cannot
really obstruct you indefinitely.
We could pull all these cases out and list them under “risks
of abuse.” These risks should not be fatal.
Equipment maintenance—can easily assume crisis
proportions when equipment is pounded by many users. Or
if the equipment is not designed well.
It is extremely serious when people have responsible jobs
and simply don’t show up, or become selfish about refusing
to do their job. A shift as a physician in a medical clinic. If
you have a temporary or permanent disability that prevents
you from doing your job, somebody else must be recruited.
Services must not be allowed to collapse because of
dereliction.
2. Courtesy
Courtesy takes on an unexpected importance as soon as
sharing becomes all-important. Here is where spontaneous
discipline by the collective comes in.
Boorishness and rudeness in the use of communal property.
People must bus themselves in cafeterias.
They must respect restrictions, not conversing in no-talk
zones.
They must not lay claim to equipment and let it stand
unused.
Being too nice (misplaced altruism) with first-come first-serve
facilities. E.g. holding an elevator in an elevator bank for
one straggler after another.
3. Values
We have already said that you have to espouse humility. I
can’t embark on a long definition of humility here, but it is
alluded to, clumsily, in such phrases as “we are all in the
same boat” or “puts his pants on one leg at a time.”
Or, for example, ‘brat’ is the antonym of ‘an humble person’.
The topic deserves a lot more than this. I tried to write about
it in a previous decade and wasn’t up to it: because I could
only understand humility as gullibility and subservience and
awe of the mediocre and the menial. Those are faults. But
there is a lot more to humility than that.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union’s 1926 submen project
destroyed the point of humility—and left one wondering
what communism was supposed to mean. That is why it is
not sanctimony to demand clarity on “values.” Woe to the
person who gets caught in a society which points right and
marches left.
As far as gullibility and subservience and awe of the menial
and mediocre are concerned, we don’t want them.
The point of communism (I would have thought) is to enable
people’s originality. (Whereas it is typical for people to
waste their originality.) Individual talent is part of the wealth
of the human race. You owe it to the species which brought
you forth to bring your talent to fruition.
But that does not mean that other people are best qualified
to tell you who you are and what you should do. People
at large are shockingly hidebound, frivolous, gullible, etc.
There seems to be a social biology specific to humans
where a public demands somebody to take on the role of a
god. It’s human because it’s ideology-intensive. Reciprocity
is all-important. If it is a fault to worship a con man, it is also
a fault to enjoy being worshipped by one’s dupes. And yet
there are so many private empires in the U.S. in the religious
field (not to say the New Age field) and on the political fringe.
People care notoriously for riches—but they care even more
for symbolism and redemption in fantasy.
So: if, in cultivating your originality, you encounter a problem
with other people, it is not acceptable to petulantly stand
down, as I have seen so many people do, or simply to sell
yourself short, as I have seen so many people do. You have
to take the individual road.
John Alten said that the test of communism is the quality
of love it enables. I would say that it is the quality of
individuality that it enables. (Whereas we so often see
talented people crushed by having to pour themselves into
mercenary channels.) Well, if Alten were here, we would
probably agree: we’re both right.
We have just admitted that there can be valuable knowledge
which these people or those people don’t deserve. Should
valuable knowledge be withheld from those who don’t
deserve it?
Leonardo, dissecting cadavers in secret.
Scientists like Copernicus and Lichtenberg (d. 1799) who
held back work for posthumous publication.
A solution unique to modern society is to put the books in
libraries and assume that the unworthy people will never
notice them.
A lot of the time, that works.
•
IV. The two-hundred year history of the Left—some
important comments
1. Communism did not start with Marx, and people who treat
Marx as the Jesus of Communism are cult adherents.
It started with the Book of Acts.
First modern version, Babeuf and Buonarotti.
Important side issue: the Illuminati. They relate to secret
society revolutionism, and the elitist version of social
democracy that goes right through people like Wells and
Toynbee and Joad and Coates?
Where did the prophets of communism go wrong? They
assumed that it was reversion to a primitive way of living.
They assumed that it did not require any revolutionary
scientific solutions.
2. Marx. Various wrong turns.
i. The rise of the shareholder corporation is the anticipation
of communism. All that is necessary is to nationalize the
ownership, and communism will follow like a stone rolling
downhill.
ii. the problem of communism is the same thing as present-
day outrage against social injustice. The way you help
communism along is to sign on to today’s oppositional
struggle against whoever is the bad guy of the moment.
iii. Marx believed that capitalism had exhausted its historic
mission by 1848 at the latest. His 1850 documents assume
that communism is the order of the day. His Civil War in
France assumes that the only reason France did not become
communist in 1871 was that the Communards made tactical
mistakes.
(i) and (ii) are terribly counter-productive.
To expand on (ii), Marx united with the topical target of
moral outrage. That is a screaming betrayal of his own
materialism. When he was being “scientific,” he said that
moral norms are correlative to the mode of production. [[St.
Paul, telling Christian slaves not to disobey their masters.]
] Your ability to be fair to people depends in part on how
sophisticated the mode of production is.
3. A deep study would review all the reformism that has
been correlative to Marx. German Social Democracy.
Fabianism. The New Deal. But that is beyond the scope
here.
4. Soviet Union. We already covered the most acute
developments.
Substitution of the democractic centralist party for the class.
“Democracy is a useless, harmful toy.”
Socialism first in a backward country.
Socialism in a country in which the proletariat is not the most
numerous productive class; the peasantry is.
What was called the turn to the East.
Tagore, Sultan-Galiev, Roy.
The Soviet Union went through amazing improvisations in
trying to transform Party control of the means of production
into a functioning economy.
War Communism
NEP
liquidation of the kulaks
central planning, and the higher civilization claim of 1931
The Soviet project to create a man-ape hybrid in 1926.
The animal scientist Ilya Ivanov goes to West Africa to
conduct the experiment. The project fails, of course. China
announces a human-rabbit chimera in 2003.
The USSR’s imperialist relation to the Republic of Spain
c. 1938, immensely important as evidence of what sort of
society the USSR was.
5. 1949. The Chinese revolution. The arena of revolution
is no longer the urban insurrection in Europe ; it is now
peasant guerrilla war at the periphery of empire.
Alliance of four classes.
The turn to the East. Began in the Soviet Union, but will
be captured by the Chinese Communists. Anti-colonialism
becomes the primary issue. The Third World will become
the revolutionary arena.
Picking up from du Bois and 1903, the color line.
6. 1959. Cuba. Communist revolution without a vanguard
party.
°7
7. 1963. Robert F. Williams in China. RAM in Philadelphia:
Williams acquires an American following. Now Europe is
the bourgeoisie and the Third World is the proletariat. Class
polarization has been replaced by race, but it is a mystique
of race that could only have come from the caste status of
Africans in the U.S. It knows nothing about what the Arabs
did in Africa or even what race physical anthropologists
assign Arabs to.
They want a black world dictatorship. Is it OK if that
dictatorship looks like Zimbabwe? Somehow they still use
Mao, even Marx, even Monthly Review. They infiltrate
SNCC, and convince SNCC to expel whites in December
1966.
1966. State-to-state hostilities between China and the
USSR.
1969. The Sino-Soviet border war. It may be the most
important single symptom of the nature of the regimes.
1973. Mao declares the USSR capitalist.
c. 1978. Cambodian genocide.
1979. War between China and Vietnam.
1981. Ethiopian famine.
The attempts in black communism in Africa. Ethiopia,
Eritrea, Zimbabwe. Unlike China, several third-world
countries were not able to purchase rapid modernization with
mass murder.
Baraka in Newark: calling himself a Marxist-Leninist, his
revolution consists in gaining offices in city government for
blacks.
c. 1991. The “evaporation” of the USSR. The new capitalist
leaders of the USSR were not flown in from California. They
were the men at the top of the Communist pyramid. They
had the power to order the death of individuals, even in the
Party, who were not Communist enough. Then, one day,
they put on new coats. Now they themselves were one
hundred per cent capitalist.
There was no civil war; communism evaporated. WHY?
Because nobody wanted it.
After 2000. Chinese Communism is hollowed out until only a
shell is left. (“Red capitalism.”)
2003. The Chinese medical experiment in human-rabbit
fusion.
2010. Castro says that socialism in Cuba was a mistake.
Anti-colonial ideology in the faculty lounge, pioneered by
such as Sartre, is updated to become the politics of “others,”
or Postmodernist combined victimhood.
Postmodernist combined victimhood is inseparable from
indignation and accusations of injustice, even though:
i. Deconstructionists have no basis for any moral judgment
and in fact parade their cynicism.
ii. The advantage of Europe over Islam (for example) is
merely circumstantial. It does not in the least mean that
Arabs or Persians never engaged in conquest. If you want
people who are essentially non-imperial, try Australian
aborigines. Being imperial is the same thing as living in
civilization.
The upshot is that the Left is now co-opted by
the struggle for recognition
identity politics.
The Draper program at NYU, a potpurri of transvestism,
Lesbianism, critical race theory, Judith Butler and “bodies,”
etc. etc.
No economic analysis whatever.
AGAIN
History poses sociological questions that scream to high
heaven.
What was the USSR?
What, then, is capitalism?
Who is the revolutionary protagonist in the campaign for
communism?
Would the Transition to actual communism look like anything
that was done in the USSR?
•
•
•
SELECTED SOURCES
What did the Soviet economy do, or claim that it did?
Industrial Management in the U.S.S.R. (1950) HC335.A82
Joseph Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (1957)
Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (1958)
HN530.S6 F3
I.A. Yevenko, Planning in the USSR (undated, 1965).
[no library; Google books]
Robert Linhart, Lénine, les paysans, Taylor (1976)
Paul Craig Roberts, dissident, Neoliberal Sovietologist.
The sharpest critic of the notion that the Soviets planned
according to some abstruse and glittering formula.
Marx’s Classification of Economic Systems and the Soviet
Economy
√ The Polycentric Soviet Economy (1969)
War Communism (1970)
Review of The Soviet Economy (1971)
The Concept of Planning in the Soviet Union (1973)
The Theory of Socialist Planning (1973)
How will communism work?
Henry Flynt, web site and unpublished, including The Theory
of Socialist Economic Administration, NSSR, 1978
Joseph Seymour, “Economics of a Workers State in
Transition to Socialism,” Workers Vanguard, 28 October
2011.
Jacque Fresco, quasi-communist eco-futurist
•
Key Works in unfolding Marxist ideology
Marx, 1844 Manuscripts
Marx and Engels, German Ideology (1846)
Marx and Engels, Address (1850)
Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902) Chapter IV for the
famous “twelve wise men.”
Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)
Lenin tells us that fully realized communism will look like the
simple communalism promised by the anarchists (cf. Emma
Goldman).
Selected Works of M.N. Roy [must check for 1920]
Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (1920)
Trotsky makes the case for (revolutionary) despotism, but is
silent on the actual Red Terror that started after the attacks
on Soviet leaders on 30 August 1918.
Trotsky, Between Red and White (1922)
The defense of the Soviet take-down of the Menshevik
regime in Georgia. Trotsky announces that national self-
determination was never meant as anything other than lip
service.
Trotsky, Problems of Civil War (1924), on the 1923
Communist uprising in Germany
[cf. 13 Nov. 1929, “The Austrian Crisis and Communism”]
This address was delivered at the Soviet Military College
in the aftermath of the failed 1923 insurrection in Germany.
Lenin’s ancestors were from Germany. Trotsky had lived
in Germany. Lenin had tried to conquer Germany outright
by knifing through Poland. Karl Radek had already been
selected as the Soviet dictator of Germany once the Soviet
Union seized Germany. Radek was repeatedly infiltrated
into Germany.
Trotsky promises a manual of insurrection in this pamphlet,
but all he delivers are platitudes. The disquisition consists of
abstractions, is self-serving, picks fights over points which in
reality would be decided by circumstance (such as whether
to schedule the insurrection for a definite date). Trotsky was
speaking not to the League of Nations, but to the Soviet
Military College. If Trotsky had any operative wisdom,
now was the time to deliver it. He didn’t. It is an appalling
example of executive bluster. Trotsky was a counterfeit
commander. I can’t explain his victories in the Civil War. It
is much easier to understand that Zinoviev and Kamenev got
him fired for incompetence in January 1925.
At the end, he announces that the Soviet regime is
slandered as subversive by the great powers, that it
only wants peace. And yet Soviet sorties and the Soviet
subversive apparatus were perfectly visible. Today we can
fill in a rather full list of the Comintern and NKVD agents who
were roving the world managing insurgencies and purging
the Soviet-created organizations. Trotsky is slapping the
world’s face with a lie as if that’s how you get over. He did it
again and again and again.
Nikolai Bukharin, Science at the Crossroads (1931)
Trotsky, The USSR in War (1940) Trotsky’s Golgotha.
RAM, The World Black Revolution (1966)
◊
The embrace of market socialism by Trotsky
Trotsky Archives, No. T-3493-4 [1931]:
it is necessary to restore the free market. NEP was
abolished too soon.
how would Trotsky prevent market relations from going hog
wild? By proletarian class struggle (for higher wages?).
Byulleten’ Oppozitsii, XXXI (1932), 5:
To pursue autarky [socialism in one country] is to follow
Hitler rather than Marx.
Trotsky propounded in this 1932 period that “total plans were
a figment of the bureaucratic imagination”
Trotsky, “The Soviet Economy in Danger,” 1932, the Soviet
Union needs the market.
source cites this from
TA, No. T-3542, but it has been published
Trotsky had an unpublished document from 1933,
TA, No. T-3493-4 [oh, oh, this is same number as 1931]
during the entire transitional epoch, the currency must
remain “a universal equivalent, and consequently must be
grounded on precious metal.
“… it is impossible to create a universal plan without
reducing all its branches to one and the same value
denominator [i.e. a hard currency].”
◊
Historical materials on the Communist International:
On A Field of Red (1981) HX11.I5
AUTOPSY OF THE LEFT
Chronology for an address, 18 December 2011
© Henry A. Flynt, Jr.
last changes 12 March 2012
1776. The law professor Adam Weishaupt founds the
Illuminati in Bavaria on May 1. In 1777, he takes it inside
Bavarian Freemasonry as a secret society within Masonry.
1786. The Elector of Bavaria cracks down on the Illuminati.
Weishaupt flees to Gotha, Germany, and commences a long
career as an author.
1794. The Martinovics conspiracy is shattered by Emperor
Joseph of Austria. The last provable operation by veterans
of the Illuminati.
1796. Modern communism is announced by Gracchus
Babeuf. He is executed in 1797. His colleague Filippo
Buonarroti will become a top revolutionary conspirator in
Europe, equaled only by Mazzini.
1811. The alleged year in which the Carbonari in Italy
is founded. A speculation that they stemmed from the
Illuminati in the region of Italy that was an Austrian colony.
Their glory years are 1820-1831.
1847-8. The German League of the Just commissions
Marx and Engels to write the Communist Manifesto.
Engels adapts it from Victor Considérant, Manifeste
de la démocratie, 1845. (Considérant did not call for
Communism.) Marx’s contribution is to add the “IT” rhetoric.
According to the Manifesto, capitalism is at the end of its
rope.
1850. Marx and Engels, Address of the Central Committee
to the Communist League, March 1850. The most important
Marx-Engels document if one wants to know what they really
thought. Intimations of Stalinism.
1867. Publication of Marx’s Capital, the first volume.
Its “theft” explanation of profit will start a controversy that will
find all professional economists ranged against Marx. The
best reference, Mark Blaug, A Methodological Appraisal of
Marxian Economics, 1980.
1871. The Paris Commune. Regarded by Marx as a pilot
project for communism. Marx scolds the Communards for
not nationalizing the banks. Marx’s Civil War in France
famously gives rules for communism that picture it as a
simple workers’ democracy. No awareness whatever of the
economic coordination problem. The 1872 Preface to the
German edition of the Communist Manifesto will famously
say that communism cannot make do with the bourgeois
state.
1875. Marx writes the Critique of the Gotha Program. The
most important of the four Marx-Engels documents on how
communism is going to work.
1894. Synarchism is given shape in Papus’ book Anarchie,
Indolence et Synarchie. The crowning document is the
secret Pacte Synarchique, which becomes public in 1941.
(The point here is the Pacte’s content, not the reservations
historians have about its source.) No Left significance:
except that French synarchism evinces the overlap
between social democracy and international cartelization.
(Synarchism as a political party would move to the far Right.)
Cf. the Fabian J.B. Coates.
1902. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? The famous pamphlet
in which Lenin substitutes the democratic centralist party
for the proletariat. In Chapter IV, Lenin expounds the need
for “twelve wise men.” Lenin’s supporters try to cover up
what Lenin is saying here. Lenin’s defenders need a Lenin
who is a human rights philanthropist. The prospect of
a “mean” Lenin terrifies Lenin’s present-day supporters.
1904. Helphand conveys the theory of the permanent
revolution to Trotsky in Munich. The name is a terrible
misnomer. What it means is that the revolution can come
first in a backward country. There, the proletariat (read
the Party) will substitute for the bourgeoisie in modernizing
the nation. This is the first glimpse of what historical
Communism will be, a “disease of the development process”
(W.W. Rostow).
1914. The “war socialism” of Kaiser Germany. The model
that would be adopted by the Bolsheviks even before the
war’s end.
1917. Lenin, The State and Revolution. A vigorous
statement that the bourgeois state is beholden not primarily
to voters but to the grand bourgeois patrons of the military.
The account of how communism is going to work in this
pamphlet is absolutely childish.
1917. The Bolshevik Revolution. Socialism comes first in a
backward country. Substition of the Party for the proletariat.
The peasantry as the major producing class.
1919. Establishment of the Comintern as a world
association of illegal parties, literally. In actuality, direction
comes entirely from the apex, from Moscow, via its
extraordinary roving operatives. (Gerhard Eisler will do a
tour of duty as secret head of the CPUSA.)
1920. M. N. Roy’s debate with Lenin at the Comintern can
be taken as a key moment when color-line politics and East-
West polarization enter Marxism as a reinterpretation of the
class struggle. Western education is always forgetting that
Russia was always an Asian power. Cf. Sultan-Galiev and
the Soviet opening to Islam (in the central Asian states).
1921. The Soviet Union overthrows the Menshevik
government of Georgia, re-annexing Georgia. Trotsky will
publish a pamphlet elaborately defending these measures in
1922, Between Red and White.
1922. Mussolini takes power in Italy. Mussolini had been a
socialist, but the operative precedent for fascism went back
through Bolshevism to German “war socialism.”
1924. Trotsky’s speech at the Soviet war college on the
1923 Communist uprising in Germany. Problems of Civil
War. This lecture crystallizes the long-standing model of the
Communist seizure of power as: insurrection in a capital
city.
1926. A Soviet animal breeding expert, Ilya Ivanov, goes
to West Africa with his son to breed submen. The project
is state-funded (otherwise it wouldn’t be happening).
Commentators are not unanimous on whether Stalin knew
and what he intended to do if the project was successful.
1931, THE WATERSHED YEAR
1931. Liquidation of the kulaks, the first mass episode in the
killing of 25 million people for political reasons in the Soviet
Union. (The Soviet terror was instituted in 1918.)
1931. The Soviet Union commences use of arrested
deviationists as a second tier labor force, deliberately
working prisoners to death like Iditarod dogs. The White
Sea – Baltic Canal; the Moscow – Volga Canal. The
canals will be introduced to the world as showpieces of the
economic Plans. This second-tier labor force allowed the
Soviet Union to take the economic path that it did. (If Stalin
had intended the 1926 submen as soldiers, then this was an
alternative.) There will be quotas for arrests to assure the
supply. Total deaths via this route can fairly be set above a
million.
1931. Bukharin announces in London that the Soviet Union
is a higher civilization with an economy based on central
planning. Science at the Crossroads. Immensely important
as the most elevated definition of the Soviet Union. There
is a terrible irony, partly because 5 or 10 million kulaks
are being killed as Bukharin speaks, and partly because
Bukharin is already sliding into deep personal trouble with
Stalin. Bukharin will soon meet up with the torturers and the
firing squad.
1931. Between this year and 1933, Trotsky produces
a series of documents, all but one unpublished, which
disparage central planning, and commit totally to market
socialism, complete with a gold-backed currency. Trotsky’s
position is that NEP was abandoned too soon. And how will
market socialism be prevented from growing into outright
capitalism? By labor struggle. This facet of Trotsky’s
perspective has been carefully concealed by his followers
to preserve his Che-like image as an eternal revolutionary,
always leaping to the barricades. What Trotsky has really
discovered in these documents is what capitalism really is.
He is not against core capitalism at all; he is in favor of it.
1938. The Soviet Union acts as a colonial power in
republican Spain, ruling Spain via the NKVD. The Soviet
Union spirits away two-thirds of the massive Spanish gold
reserves. Extremely revealing about the nature of the Soviet
Union.
1938. Bonnet and Ribbentrop sign the Franco-German
Friendship Pact on 6 December. Although we now know
that this was one of Hitler’s deceptions, it gave operative
meaning to a Franco-German alliance and thus to cartel-
based schemes of European federation such as synarchy
and Fabianism.
1939. The Stalin-Hitler pact. Stephen Koch, Double Lives,
provides documentation that the Soviet love affair with the
Nazis goes back well before 1939.
1939. Trotsky supports the Stalin-Hitler pact. Trotsky
finds himself repositioning his perspective, since he has to
defend it against his followers who say that the pact proves
that Germany and Russia (and the U.S.) are ruled by the
same new exploiting class. Burnham; Shachtman. Trotsky’s
USSR in War.
Trotsky announces that the Stalinist formation cannot
survive the (1939) war.
1949. Chinese Communists come to power. Alliance of four
classes. Mao’s victory establishes the encircling guerrilla
war as the model of Communist revolution, obviating the
urban insurrection model ensconced in Trotsky’s speech to
the Soviet war college.
1957. Mao declares in Moscow that “the East Wind prevails
over the West Wind.” Substitution of anti-colonialism, not to
say race, for class struggle. Mao’s Russian audience could
not possibly have understood the earthshattering portent of
these simple words.
1958. Commencement of the great famine in China as a
result of Mao’s crackpot policy. Human rights advocates
call it a mass murder of 45 million people. Historians differ
on whether cannibalism during this episode was marginal or
systematic. This episode is known only to expert historians.
The Left refuses to admit that it happened.
1959. The Cuban revolution. Communist revolution without
a Party.
1960. Withdrawal of Soviet technicians from China.
Arguably, the Chinese drove them out. The East Wind
prevails over the West Wind. [cf. Politics in China since
1949.]
1962. Mao’s split with Italian/Soviet revisionism becomes
public.
1963. RAM is constituted in Philadelphia as a black
separatist Marxist organization, with Max Stanford as its
leader. Stanford is deeply influenced by Mao’s endorsement
of Robert F. Williams in this year.
1965. Massacre of Communists in Indonesia. The Soviet
Union and China stand by and do nothing—leading to
the suspicion that neither wants another race to step on
the stage and comprise another headquarters of world
Communism. Confirmation of my “imperialist new class”
theory before I had even formulated it?
1966. Commencement of state-to-state hostilities between
China and the Soviet Union at the Soviet embassy in Beijing.
1966. RAM infiltration of SNCC induces the latter
organization to expel its white members. RAM has already
issued The World Black Revolution.
1967. I formulate and privately circulate my “imperialist
new class” theory. As it turned out, it gave institutional
Communism too much credit, assuming that it was an
authentic “new system.” What led me astray was that the
system survived the Second World War, and spread over
a third of the globe. Even though I saw how desperate the
Soviet leaders were for bourgeois validation, I thought that
Stalinism was a genuine new mode of exploitation. There
was an authoritarian-collectivist mode of production which
was not a paradise of equality. My analysis seemed to
be confirmed by the numerous wars between Communist
countries that broke out in 1969 and after. (See below.)
The regimes essentially had the character of authoritarian
national hierarchies that unavoidably found each other
threatening. We had already had a glimpse of it in the
Indonesian episode of 1965. But I was not ready in 1965 to
draw such a conclusion.
What I now think is that the system was a statist-
authoritarian deformation of capitalism wearing a workerist
mask. (In conversation, Sam Marcy said, social democracy
with fascist controls on the population. He knew. But he
couldn’t put it in writing without knocking the stuffing out of
his life.)
I could not draw the conclusions I do now until I was ready
to redefine the core of capitalism. For better or worse,
my redefinition is entirely new. If you think that capitalism
requires the workers to be privately employed, as almost all
social thinkers do, you can’t solve the problem. The private
employer is not the essence—merely the norm!
1969. The Sino-Soviet border war, raising the possibility of
total war between China and the Soviet Union. A revealing
event indeed. Seemed to confirm my “imperialist new class”
theory.
1973. Mao proclaims the Soviet Union to be a capitalist
country. He makes this assertion outside of any theoretical
framework. Whereas the question of the character of the
Soviet formation evoked a lacerating debate in 1939-40,
Mao’s pronouncement, a mere use of ‘capitalist’ as an
insult, evokes no debate on principle. “Evaluation of social
formations,” a founding principle of Marxism, now has no
public audience. Whether people will say it or not, they
believe that there is only one social system, now and ever:
market imperialism.
1975. Angola becomes independent. A civil war breaks
out between a Soviet-backed tendency and a (white!) South
Africa-backed tendency supported by China (!). (The China
that endorsed Robert F. Williams in August 1963.) So, a
proxy war between the Soviet Union and China. Another
seeming confirmation of the “imperialist new class” theory.
The civil war will go on until 2002, although of course the
Soviet Union and Cuba will cease to be what they were.
1978. In the course of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, one
or two million Cambodians are killed. Khmer Rouge rule is
brought to an end in this year by a Communist war between
Vietnam and Cambodia. Another seeming confirmation of
the “imperialist new class” theory. The premise of the mass
murder was class war against the white collar class.
1979. War between China and Vietnam. Another seeming
confirmation of the “imperialist new class” theory.
1981. The famine in Communist Ethiopia. Now known to
be the second Communist famine. (In 2006, Mengistu was
found guilty in absentia of genocide.) During this period,
there was a running war between Ethiopia and Eritrea,
both claiming to be Communist. Another war between
Communist countries. Another seeming confirmation of
the “imperialist new class” theory.
c. 1991. Communism in the Soviet Union suddenly
evaporates. The heads of the Communist apparatus
become Russia’s capitalist leaders overnight. By this point,
my “imperialist new class” explanation has to be abandoned.
Communism is a transient deformation of capitalism
which succeeded in modernizing two imperial powers,
while spectacularly failing in other backward countries.
The purpose of Communism is to arrive at capitalism
by authoritarian-terroristic methods. Twentieth-century
Communism had capitalism not in its past, but in its future!
2003. In August, researchers at the Shanghai Second
Medical University in China fuse human skin cells and dead
rabbit eggs to create the first human chimeric embryos.
The continuing preoccupation of Communism with creating
submen.
2008. China assumes a major economic role in relation to
the MPLA government in Angola, the very tendency China
fought from 1975 to 2002.
2010. Castro tells a U.S. reporter that socialism in Cuba
was a mistake. After an outcry, there is evidently some
attempt to cover up this embarrassment.
not covered here because it cannot be dated
• Derrida’s politics of “others” and multiculturalism as a hip,
faculty lounge substitute for liquidation of the bourgeois state
and a Communist higher civilization
• identity politics
• the struggle for recognition
• the Left as a throng of panhandlers who assume that the
fat cats will be around forever for them to hit on and that they
will never have to assume responsibility for their own fate
AUTOPSY OF THE LEFT
Headlines for an address, 18 December 2011
© Henry A. Flynt, Jr.
latest changes 12 March 2012
IS MARX OUR PROPHET?
Treating Marx as scripture and going back to Marx is insane.
The institutions which have claimed the Marxist mantle have
taken so many turns that their endeavors and their goals
today approach the very opposite of what Marx promised.
The historical lessons that concern us begin with
Bolshevism.
The proletariat was abandoned as the revolutionary
protagonist by 1920 at the latest. Communism’s materialism
and opposition to religion collapsed when Marxism began
conciliating Islamic fundamentalism. But that had been
anticipated in the early Soviet Union, which had a vast Turkic
hinterland.
• The experience of the Soviet Union made two of the most
sincere and astute Bolsheviks doubt that the proletariat
could be a ruling class. Bukharin and Rakovsky. it is
outrageous that these documents have never been
published in translation.
• The NEP, and not only that, Trotsky’s extrapolation from
the NEP to full-fledged market socialism.
(Only one of Trotsky’s three crucial papers has been
translated and published.)
• The 1926 Soviet project to create a race of submen in
Africa, for which animal biologist Ilya Ivanov was sent to
West Africa.
• Soviet colonialism in republican Spain. Immensely
important today as a precedent for what China is doing in
east Africa.
• War between communist countries. The Sino-Soviet
border war of 1969. The proxy war between the Soviet
Union and China in Angola which started in 1975. The
Vietnam-Cambodia war. The China-Vietnam war of 1979.
The long-running Ethiopia-Eritrea war.
• The circumstances under which communism suddenly
evaporated and was succeeded by capitalism in a matter of
one day—or in which Communist tyrants began to preside
over economies that were entirely about capitalism. An
exemplary date: 1991.
Marx’s doctrine was faced with a disparity between the
society of the future which Marx sometimes promised—
and—the desire to be relevant, to be down with the struggle.
As of the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx still thought that
the actual struggle held the promise of sweeping capitalism
away and replacing it with a higher formation.
Since then, the attempt to be down with the struggle has
brought the Left farther and farther from the path marked out
by Marx.
There was a long period when the disparity between Marx’s
game-plan and Communist regime practice was mediated.
Trotsky and Stalin may have cavorted as enemies, but
official Communism was the sum of socialist primitive
accumulation (Trotsky) and enclave socialism (Stalin).
Today we know that catch-up socialism has as its end result
… ordinary capitalism, and above all, capitalist imperialism.
This is not a mere mistake. There are deep reasons why
this is so: social thought needs to be re-written wholesale to
incorporate them.
As a small example of how the perspective simply forgot
Marx. Consider a Bob Avakian leaflet on OWS, c.
December 1, in which Avakian’s analysis of castes in U.S.
society does not have any blue-collar workers at all.
MARX’S “THEFT” THEORY
Marxist doctrine postured itself as to some degree scientific
or clinical. Marx explained profit as a theft from the
workers—as appropriation without equivalent—but this
argument supposedly did not need indignation. It was
susceptible of mathematical expression.
For whatever this is worth, Marx’s “theft” theory has failed to
convince any academic economist, including the “Marxist”
Robert Paul Wolff. The best source on that is Mark Blaug,
1980.
Marx chose the proletariat as the protagonist of the
revolution. This choice was not based on pity, supposedly.
If it had been a question of pity, rival claimants were the
peasantry and the underclass. (As for the colonies, Marx
did not give them much attention.) Even though Marx and
Engels waxed indignant about the Irish and about slaves in
the U.S., they still chose the proletariat as the protagonist of
the revolution.
That was because it was still credible that the proletariat was
the indispensable class, the producer class. The proletariat
was “rendered social” by the conditions of its work. (Marx
had a whole theory about why he excluded the peasantry.)
Let it be clear that when Marx first began talking about the
workers, he meant artisans, not factory workers. Marx did
not live to see syndicalism, the attempt to make a holistic
politics out of unionization.
WHY THE LEFT STEERED TOWARD A DEBACLE
Marx assumed that the oppositionalism of the day had literal
communism as its immediate outcome. By supporting the
oppositionalism of the day, you could bring communism.
The great event of Marx’s life that seemed to confirm that
was the Paris Commune of 1871.
But a few years before the Paris Commune, Marx had
already made a choice that would prefigure the debacle.
Marx’s unconditional support for the Union in the U.S.
Civil War could only be unconditional support for U.S.
imperialism. If you say it was too early for Marx to know
that, it was not too early for Walt Whitman to know it.
(Respondez!)
Why did Marxism keep taking turns that brought it farther
and farther from the promise of an advance over capitalism?
Communism arose at a conjuncture when it was possible
to believe that actual social unrest and actual subversion (!
) could throw society into a future beyond capitalism. What
happened was that Marx’s drastic measures were co-opted
by desperate, determined oppositionalisms—in the first
instance, by nationalisms determined to modernize their
backward nations. The national elites in the colonies were
so provoked by the European invasion that they turned to
Communism as a way to retaliate and catch up at the same
time.
Those in the Marxist tradition unexpectedly had to choose
between the original promise and actual oppositionalism.
They always chose the latter. They always embraced the
latest oppositionalism. In 1920 at the latest, that meant
anti-colonialism and the color line. It would become the
reconstitution of the communist agenda correlative to
Maoism.
What gave a fig leaf to the abandonment of Marx was
precisely the fantasy that communism could fast-track a
colonial society to modernity and become socialist in the
process. Stalin may have been responsible for the idea
that you could have a socialist enclave, but Trotsky was
the greatest publicist of the notion that socialism could be a
strategy of modernization. The actual development made
Stalin and Trotsky into a single package.
That is why, by the end of the twentieth century,
Communism had virtually been replaced by feminism, gay
rights, and Islam, all at the same time. The leading theorists
were now Derrida and Butler, prophets of Postmodernist
combined victimhood. There was no place in the doctrine
of “others” for economics or class.
THE BURGEONING OF THE RHETORIC OF PATHOS
Marx’s original account purported not to infer from
indignation but from science. Capitalism was doomed
not because it was evil (although at times Marx seems to
say that it was evil) but because it unleashed progressive
forces which it could not contain. The proletariat was
the revolutionary subject not because it was the most
wretched (although at times Marx seems to say it was the
most wretched) but because human existence was about
production and the proletariat was the indispensable class.
If it were about pathos, Marx would have put the peasantry
and the underclass on a pedestal.
But, as the Left chased after one oppositionalism and then
another, it became more and more invested in a rhetoric of
pathos. For the longest time, Leftist discourse has morally
bodyslammed whoever it is talking to.
The Marxist tradition has a crackpot theme to the effect that
the perfect society is simply a matter of the least becoming
most, of the most rejected and despised getting payback.
(Cf. the Sermon on the Mount.) All you have to do is to put
the rejected and despised on the throne—to establish a
dictatorship of the bottom rung. In RAM’s 1966 pamphlet, it
becomes explicit.
THE LEFT’S MORALITY
I say rhetoric of pathos, not morality of pathos. Left morality
requires a very different appraisal.
Certainly the Left bursts with indignation at ideologically
convenient enemies.
But there is a significant difference in the way the crimes
recognized by the Left are treated.
Then there are the Left’s great silences.
The human rights violations, or mass murders, of the
twentieth century were overwhelmingly perpetrated by
Communism. The Left does not care about Mao’s mass
murder of the late 1950s, and does not even admit that it
happened.
Maciunas’ genocide flag does not have Mao at all!
Mokwugo Okoye, in World Marxist Review, March 1962
No doubt some will suffer in the process of the
revolution, but the conquest of the Promised Land, not
the consolation of laggards and stragglers is the main
thing: regimentation is bad, it is true, but vegetation is
worse, and it is salutary that the collective will of the
community shall prevail over the egomania of the few.
Then, again, the 1926 Soviet project to produce a race of
submen in Africa. It makes us realize that we had no idea
what the actual leaders of Communism wanted.
THE “SOCIALIST INEVITABILITY” PREMISE
How was the communist paradise imagined from Babeuf
to the Lenin of State and Revolution? Communism was
going to be essentially primitive, not that different from the
Book of Acts in the New Testament. What is more, the best
intellectual preparation for communism was not going to be
thinking about economic theory or technology. It was going
to be the rhetoric of pathos that came to saturate the Left.
[[what the Marxists believed was that capitalism was private
ownership of the means of production.]] Trotsky said
that socialism amounted to a labor union seizing power.
what they believed was that all you had to have was this
seizure of power by a labor union and nationalization of
the means of production. Then, by virtue of historical
inevitablilty, society would slide toward socialism like
a stone rolling downhill. Socialism would knit itself
spontaneously as capitalism had. All this was coupled
with a vast underestimation of the economic coordination
problem. When Trotsky finally grasped the dimensions of
the coordination problem after 1931, he became an ardent
market socialist—tantamount to a social democrat, although
he dared not say it.
[[the “stone rolling downhill” model of the transition to
socialism, combined with the notion that the economic
coordination problem merely requires an accountant at each
factory with a high-school education (Lenin in State and
Revolution). Crackpot retardation.]]
At times, and all the more, recently, people were encouraged
to think of communism as if it would be like a hobo camp.
[[Foucault, the Italian squat movement, Agemben, and the
French group Tiqqun carried on precisely that tradition.]]
CAPITALISM HAS NOT BEEN GIVEN A CREDIBLE
OFFICIAL DEFINITION
We have to rethink what capitalism is. In 1967, I thought
that the Soviet regime was a genuinely new class of
exploiters. It had survived the Second World War and
many other shocks, and it seemed able to reform without
liquidating itself.
Today, that explanation is not tenable.
And Trotsky’s endorsement of market socialism is crucial.
The historical experience forces us to analyze the Soviet
Union as a distorted capitalism: a totalitarianism legitimating
itself with workerism instead of Mussolini’s corporativism.
Cf. the “war socialism” of Kaiser Germany.
Cf. Oskar Lange: the Soviet model is the model of a
bourgeois economy in war. Planning on the basis of
government-dictated demand.
Important theoretical point: just because there was no
provision for the bequest of personally accumulated wealth
in the Soviet Union, that does not mean that there was no
exploiting class. We know from history that property relative
to the mode of production is not defined by whether the
ruling class is individual or corporate, and by whether the
bequest of personal wealth is allowed.
The Soviet Union unleashed totalitarian mobilization:
because there was an elite in Russia with an desire to
modernize at all costs. In other words, the CPSU and the
CCP were the modernizing bourgeoisies from Hell. They did
the workers favors, but at the same time they treated them
far more viciously than capitalist bosses had dared to do.
Stalin made absence from work a criminal offense.
What is capitalism? The floor of capitalism is commodity
production and wage labor. Icing on that cake is a hard
currency. It is the capitalist behavioral rules that make
capitalism, not private ownership of factories. The entire
economic intelligentsia in the Soviet Union was moving
toward the celebration of capitalist behavioral rules, e.g.
Liberman, e.g. that physicist (Kaptisa?).
On the other hand, the goal of capitalism is not to throw a
cornucopia of products on the market. The latter is just a
prop. The goal of capitalism is finance. Moreover, I cannot
agree with the subsidiary, non-productive role Marx assigned
to finance.
All finance is a Ponzi scheme. All financial news is liar’s
poker. Exhibit A: the article in the Financial Times of 27
November 2011 to the effect that Europe would die in ten
days.
REVIVING THE COMMUNIST IDEA: WHY ISN’T “MARKET
DEMOCRACY” THE LAST STOP ON THE TRAIN?
Why do I think that communism is a serious consideration,
even though it is at its lowest ebb as an idea? Unless
the human race is fated to blow itself up, in which case it
would prove to be a failed experiment, I cannot believe
that we have arrived at the summit of social organization. I
cannot believe that neoliberalism is an eternal equilibrium
as Fukuyama said it is. In the vernacular sense, finance
shows itself to be irrational. People depend for their
physical survival not on their ability to work to produce what
they need, but on an incomprehensibly vast structure of
claims to money which at bottom are an assemblage of
Ponzi schemes. The Ponzi manipulators now comprise
the top rung of the social ladder: the bail-outs made that
unconcealable.
What is more, capitalism never transcends the
counterposition of profit income and wage income. When
you have a business enterprise in which the owner also
works—a classic case was the old linotype shop—the fact
that worker and owner are not separated, and overlap,
means merely that the formation has not evolved to its
conclusion. In the ultimate, the most money is made by men
who never see a tangible commmodity except when they
consume one.
There is an unending fight to steal the other guy’s lunch. As
always, capitalism enjoins you to take from the poor and give
to the rich. The flight of manufacturing to low-wage zones.
The appalling commercial despoliation of Africa that is being
carried on right now.
In this environment, the meaning of life is essentially
mercenary. Each of us throws ourself not on a metaphorical
market, but on an actual market—as a product. Everything,
as they say, has its price. There is only one standard of
value: gold.
I could go much more deeply into this. Let me just say that
as outrageous as poverty and sweatshop labor may be,
I personally am more offended by the commodification of
reality, the conduction of everything “in heaven and earth”
through the money hub.
[Economists have calculated the price that should be
charged for planet earth if Martians want to buy it. Like a
sale of the rain forest but much, much more extreme.]
To me, commodification is more wounding than having to
ride the subway instead of a limo.
REVIVING THE COMMUNIST IDEA: WHAT WOULD
COMMUNISM BE?
Communism as a generic idea. It’s essentially high-tech;
it’s essentially science fiction. It belongs in the class of
civilizations imagined by physicists.
There is a minor futurist living in Florida named Jacque
Fresco who dimly realizes that, even though he is totally
unaware of the most important questions, the economic
coordination questions.
It requires a revolution in economic theory almost at the
level of meta-technology: since it is necessary not only to
challenge “maximization,” but the action principle as the
foundation of “maximization.”
No simple worker on the shop floor will be able to
understand this problem—until decades or centuries after
it is solved. (It’s like the earth going around the sun. Only
after the experts have had centuries to digest the idea is it
accessible to the average person.)
Arguments communism impossible
It is legitimate to ponder conditions which might make
communism impossible. This is not a cult and I’m not trying
to deceive you about what is possible.
We may be starting too late ecologically.
The same technology that is so liberating is so dangerous
that it has outrun communist assumptions. “All people
are the same.” But the biologists are already scheming to
undercut that.
It is a problem that manufacturing has left the United States:
communism would have to have the whole world under its
control in order not to be hindered by the need to create
autarkic societies everywhere.
Selection of the revolutionary protagonist: see below.
The human nature argument. People are fawning and
hollow—hidebound, frivolous, and gullible. That is why they
love status symbols, and why a public demands somebody
to take on the role of a god. See below.
Menial labor. We thought the Marxist tradition provided for
restructuring work so that there would no longer be a bottom
rung of menial laborers. Graham Priest: you will never do it.
The Transition argument. How do you leave capitalism
by passing through capitalism? You could not instantly
get rid of the market and wage labor. (give or take War
Communism.) “Socialism in one country” could never
instantly get rid of banking. if all these elements of
capitalism were still in play, then why wouldn’t capitalism
simply knit itself back together?
WHAT NOW?
The whole notion of people streaming into the streets and
making the millennial revolution now is asinine. When
people do stream into the streets, it takes at least a year,
maybe two, for the dust to settle. Then it becomes clear
that whatever the outcome was, it was not the millennium—
because there was no basis for it.
What will happen right now? There is no evidence that
capitalism is susceptible to a final crisis, a final implosion.
It is susceptible to tyranny and war. Aside from that,
capitalism will swing between “austerity” and “deficit
spending” and boom and bust for as long as it exists.
Communism needs to become a topic of discussion among
those expert enough to have something to say. Only after
there is a community of experts in agreement on some of the
economic and political solutions can anything happen at all.
We need a conversation among people who look like
physicists for a generation before one could even begin to
imagine a political shape for communism.
I am not as exercised about selecting the revolutionary
protagonist as I am about the Transition, about getting from
here to there.
I have friends who detest international federalism—who
hate the attempt to make Europe into a superstate. No
European gives Europe as his or her nationality. They point
out that the only motive of the internationalists is personal
power. Despite that, I find myself in the same boat as the
internationalists. I think that the world will have to be united
before communism can become something other than pure
speculation. Total nuclear disarmament is a precondition
for Communism. The idea that one nation would become
communist while the rest of the world would remain “global
capitalist” is insane.
Genuine communism would have to come from inside the
world federation movement and the world disarmament
movement like a chick hatching from an egg. It would come
from experts conversant with the key solutions.
Following on the experience of that Spanish anarchist
in the Spanish Civil War, I accept that there must be a
revolutionary junta—and I have studies of same on my web
site.
What will the economic measures look like? When do we
get rid of money? What amount of reconstitution of means
of production and consumption will be deemed necessary?
POSTSCRIPT: AFRICA
You might not expect my argument to arrive at Africa, but it
does. Africa is being developed or modernized right now—in
a most horrible way. If you want something to be indignant
about, be indignant about what the alliance of foreign
combines and financiers and drug lords and African dictators
is doing to Africa right now.
I do not see Africa taking a “development path” even as
South Korea did. Let us be clear that Chinese intervention in
east Africa right now is hardly philanthropic. (Cf. the pattern
that the Soviet Union established in republican Spain when
nobody suspected it of being capitalist.)
Only Communism could modernize Africa equably, pouring
resources into Africa to raise the standard of living (and
to carry out capital construction)—and at the same time
integrating Africa’s untapped resources in the global
resource bank that would be used by capital construction
planners.
OWS
What some of my friends want to believe is this. You
become indignant at the bank bailouts, the mortgages,
the student loans. So they want the solution to be that
you establish a hobo camp in the middle of a big city, and
that will magically spread to become a utopia. But on the
contrary. As the Right-wing scold Gary Wolfram rightly
observed, the OWS ideology is a “gimme gimme” ideology
that does not see production at all—even though the unions
are backing it. OWS is a totally artificial opposition created
by public relations masterminds. My assumption is that it
has been greenlighted from the White House. It has only
one true purpose: the re-election of Obama.
As the Egyptians discovered in the Arab Spring, the idea
that the little people can start a new social system from a
hobo camp is preposterous. New social systems that have
traction are put together by educated, disciplined people. If
you don’t know that, it’s because your childhood education
lied to you about the American and French Revolutions.
Unlike the American Revolution, the French Revolution
unleashed the mob. But the mob were not its architects.
So much so that legitimate demands which arose during
the French Revolution were suppressed because the
revolutionary junta was too “square” to entertain them.
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