A perestroika era look at capitalism, socialism, and democracy (2 of 2)

This is the second of two parts on a 1989 essay by Soviet dissident writer Juri Burtin. The first part is here.

Capitalism vs. Socialism, 1989

A key argument of Burtin's is that capitalism proved itself to be far more adaptable than Marx and Engels and their adherents perceived. And that the economic performance of the socialist economies was obviously inferior to that of capitalist countries. Jordan Peterson could take chunks of this part of the essay into something he writes and no one would think notice a difference in quality. Some of it is downright trite, in other words. Including talking about conservative economics as "the market," actually (albeit vaguely) arguing that markets didn't exist in the Soviet Union.

Burtin makes a long argument about how the actual intensity of work and the social importance of a particular type of work is absolutely unmeasurable. And then proceeds to argue that's why people higher up in a hierarchy should be materially the most rewarded because otherwise everybody gets lazy and has no ambition. Stock Jordan Peterson stuff.

He also indulges in a College Republican brand of argument, taking a broad theoretical argument from Engels in Anti-Dühring about how a socialist organization of society would recognize and do fuller justice to the function of social capital in individuals' work than capitalism does. And responds to it with a Petersonian argument of, oh yeah, how you gonna do that, huh? Doesn't that mean that you still have a market which is what you want to do away with huh, huh? In other words, answering a broad argument about society by asking what does that have to do with managing an individual machine shop. It's a polemic debating approach, not an actual analysis. And then winds up arguing that there's no actual way to measure work effort and intensity. (pp. 186-8)

The essay is structured as a criticism of Marxism, but actually it uses superficial framing with an assumption that Western "market" capitalism is economically and (apparently) socially in all ways superior to the Soviet model of socialism.

Juri Burtin adapts the post-First World War Communist critique of Social Democracy, that the Second International had adopted a strictly deterministic notion that capitalism would inevitably turn into socialism by a more-or-less automatic process and makes it a criticism of the entire Marxist/socialist/social-democratic outlook.

The most interesting theoretical moment of the whole essay is the part in which Burtin describes the Marxian notion of the transformation of capitalism into a classless socialist-communist society that highlights a certain analogy to Hegel's concept of the end of history, the end or art, etc. But he doesn't pursue it even so far as to mention Hegel at that point.

He argues at length that Marx and Engels failed in their understanding of the flexibility of capitalist rule. But he also cites them as foreseeing what he criticizes them for not having forseen:

In the given case, it is not so much the concrete side of Marx's presumption that is interesting for us, but rather the precedent-theoretical side of Marx's presumption: the possibility of suppressing a progressive movement by another, no less progressive, but a movement that belongs to a different level (or limitation) of the process." (p. 202; my translation)

The kinds of issues that Burtin raises as supposedly devastating critiques of elementary ideas of Marxist economics and historical philosophy actually read more like routine and shallow Chamber of Commerce type arguments against government restrictions on business and against labor unions. The kind of arguments he raises as blind spots in 19th-century Marxism are largely issues that non-Marxist economics, sociologists, and management theorists had already been discussing and studying long before 1989.

The very respectable management theorist Peter Drucker, for instance, pointed to the case of sports teams to challenge the notion that managers should get paid more than their employees/subordinates. A star football or basketball player or superstar entertainer may make considerably more in a given year that their coaches or executives of the corporations with which they work. In sales departments, it's also not unusual for an individual salesperson working on commission to earn more in a given time period than their managers or their managers' managers. There's a long-running discussion about whether it makes sense for a company to promote the most successful salespeople to be managers, because the skills required by organizational management are not identical to those required to be a successful salesperson. A counterargument is that if a company doesn't give top salespeople priority for promotion, it would undermine the motivation of the salespeople.

Even in basic capitalist "free-market" considerations, the difficulty of the job does play some role in the pay offered. I remember back in the 1990s hearing some Republican politician complain about how some bus drivers in Los Angeles earned $70,000 a year! (Which would be more like $120,000 or so today.) He assumed that his audience would be obviously outraged by that. But my immediate thought was to wonder if he was talking about drivers working overtime and/or the most unpopular shifts. But my main thought was, there are probably some areas of Los Angeles that I wouldn't want to be a bus driver for twice that amount.

Juri Burtin's essay could give the impression that no one had ever taken such notions seriously before.

John Kenneth Galbraith, a famous if often dissenting economist, used to heap Thorstein-Veblen-style scorn on the notions that CEOs earn enormous salaries because of the great difficulty of their jobs. In his last book published during his lifetime, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (2004), he wrote:

"Work" describes both what is compelled and what is the source of the prestige and pay that others seek ardently and enjoy. Already fraud is evident in having the same word for both circumstances.

But this is not all. Those who most enjoy work - and this should be emphasized - are all but universally the best paid. This is accepted. Low wage scales are for those in repetitive, tedious, painful toil. Those who least need compensation for their effort, could best survive without it, are paid the most. The wages, or more precisely the salaries, bonuses and stock options, are the most munificent at the top, where work is a pleasure. This evokes no seriously adverse response. Nor until recently did the inflated compensation and extensive perquisites of functional or nonfunctional executives lead to critical comment. That the most generous pay should be for those most enjoying their work has been fully accepted.

The notion that "the market" somehow mystically produces just and rational outcomes from a societal viewpoint is at least as much in question now as it was in 1848, when the Communist Manifesto was first published. Even if from the perspective of 1989 in the USSR, that may not have seemed quite so obvious to Juri Burtin.