In case you were wondering what "Marxism" might be other than a Republican swear word ...

This may only be of interest to political theory geeks. Ramsin Canon published a good discussion a couple of years ago of a framework for understanding historical Marxism from today's perspective. (What It Means to Be a Marxist Jacobin 12/11/2018)

But because Marxism has a massive worldwide history extending back to at least 1848, the year the Communist Manifesto was published, it has had many variations. Most of which would define the other Marxist trends as not truly Marxist, or faulty brands of Marxism.

And of course those who reject Marxism with various degrees of passion have their own versions of what the "Marxism" they reject is. At the moment in the US, it's become fairly common for Republicans to refer to even moderate Democratic candidates who wouldn't hink of calling themselves Marxists as socialists, Communists, Marxists, and radicals. And ones that adhere to QAnon conspiracy theories have even wilder accusations.

Jacobin identifies its mission as "offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture." In contemporary terms, I would say they fall into a left-social-democratic spectrum.

Canon's broad framework is this:

Marx himself famously once said that he himself was “not a Marxist” if certain askew interpretations of his theories of historical materialism and capitalism were “Marxist.” Part of the problem is that the theories and processes that Marx helped create are too big to fall under a single -ism; Marx was a philosopher (and sort of historian) of political economy, that is, the study of production and trade in relationship to laws, customs, and human systems, whose theories helped inform numerous other disciplines and practices: economics, sociology, history, literature, and practical politics, among others.

The closest analogy that I can think of is to what we would today call “Darwinism,” the theories of nineteenth-century biologist Charles Darwin. Darwin didn’t invent biology, paleontology, genetics, or any of the numerous disciplines and practices that are informed by “Darwinism.” And in fact, there are many aspects of classical “Darwinism” — the theories and conclusions arrived at by Darwin and his immediate disciples — that have been outright revised or rejected by people who today would still consider themselves “Darwinists.” Since Darwin published On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, hundreds if not thousands of scientists and philosophers have expanded on and improved Darwin’s theories (the so-called “modern synthesis”) — obviously a necessity since during Darwin’s lifetime there was no deep concept of molecular genetics. [my emphasis in bold]

Canon's article does contain a technical mistake. He discusses the very controversial notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," and his brief discussion strikes me as a good explanation of how Marx understood the concept. But he writes that the particular phrase, dictatorship of the proletariat, ”comes from the Manifesto and a work called Critique of the Gotha Program."

The phrase does appear in the latter: "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

But not in the Manifesto itself.

For more on the history of that particular concept after Marx' passing, see: Robert Mayer, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Plekhanov to Lenin Studies in East European Thought 45:4, Dec. 1993.

The first chapter of Hal Draper's The "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" from Marx to Lenin (1987) that deals with Marx' own version is available online, The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ in Marx and Engels Marxists.org.

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.

A perestroika era look at capitalism, socialism, and democracy (1 of 2)

This year we're getting retrospectives of the Revolutions of 1989, when Soviet-model socialist governments in eastern Europe entered the political crises that finally ended them.

I'll make a tiny contribution here by discussing a long essay I finally got around to reading that had been in my mental queue for a while. It's a German translation of an essay by a dissident Soviet writer, Juri Burtin, Die Achillesferse der Marxschen Geschichtstheorie ["The Achilles Heel of the Marxist Theory of History"] that appeared in the annual journal Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 13 (1991), then published in East Germany for the Institute for Marxism-Leninism in Moscow. Burtin's essay was first published in the USSR in 1989.

I was interested in it as an example of someone examining the changes during a huge transitional moment in the socialist world.

I have to admit Burtin's essay was a somewhat disappointing experience. The most engaging thing about it was to disaggregate the various strands of the argument. It reads to me like the work of a committee, or like a discussion by three main participants that was summarized by someone else into an article using a single voice. One of the participants argues that Marxism was a dynamic democratic theory that has continuing significance and application. Another argues that, okay, the whole thing sounded good a century ago but it missed pretty much everything that was important. Another one is looking for a gig as an advocate for neoliberal, "free-market" radical reform in socialist countries. All combined into one by by feature writer that tosses in some dignified coffee-table-book reference to make it all sound sensibly important.

It is a transition piece in that it tries to argue for the complete failure across the board of Marxist thinking while trying to frame it in the traditional Soviet style of proceeding from Marxist premises in developing the argument.

Since Burtin is trying to argue on a Marxist theoretical basis, he praises Marx and Engels toward the end as incredible geniuses when it came to analyzing the developments of their own time and finds them thoroughly committed to democracy. But he also argues that they were massively deceived about the nature of capitalism and that the path their embraced inevitably leads to dictatorship, even one-person dictatorship.

We might say that it's not an entirely consistent picture. Not even in a "dialectical" sense. Although he does make some effort to present it that way, also not very convincingly.

I'm doing this in two separate posts. This one focuses on ...

Democracy

Burtin makes a version of the democratic determinist argument so popular among Western neoconservatives at the time, which is that capitalism inherently tends to produce liberal democracy:

... die für Diktatoren aller Zeiten und Volker „überflüssige" Demokratie eine Lebensbedingung der modernen Gesellschaft - nicht mehr und nicht weniger -; sie ist ebenso nötig wie Luft und Wasser. (S. 197)

... the democracy that for dictators of all times and peoples is "superfluous" is no more and no less the condition for life of modern society; it is just as necessary as air and water.

(All translations from the German in this post are mine.)

This was the era that spawned celebratory optimism about the definitive triumph of both Western-style liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism. Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History?" gave this view its iconic name. It was appealing for for advocates of the neoliberal position on economics that came to be known as the "Washington Consensus" because it allowed them to argue that spreading conservative economics and corporate-deregulation trade treaties would promote conditions leading to liberal democratic governance and its maintenance.

In 2019, in the times of Putin and Orbán, Bolsonaro and Modi, Trump and Salvini, the notion that liberal democracy is inevitably advancing in the world seems downright quaint.

But people in 1989 didn't need 30 years of future vision to have reservations about that idea. The 19th century examples of Britain and the United States could support that understanding. But capitalism was also developing in France and Germany, the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian Empires, and they don't fit as well into the framework of liberal democracy being inevitably produced by capitalism. The Italian Fascist and German Nazi regimes were both brutal examples of capitalist countries with non-democratic regimes. Both also provide dramatic cases of big capitalist interests decided they thought democracy was not in their interest.

And the brand of neoliberal capitalism that became the standard for the "end of history" was pioneered and tested in the military dictatorships of Chile (1974-90) and Argentina (1976-83). No, the necessary link between democracy and capitalism is not self-evident.

But in 2019, this provides a nostalgic take as an argument for democracy:

Was nun die eigentliche Demokratie betrifft, so genügt es zu ihrer Charakterisierung vielleicht, sich an einen einzigen Fakt zu erinnern - Watergate, die Geschichte, wie der „Durchschnittsamerikaner", gekrankt durch die Unehrenhaftigkeit seines Prasidenten, diesen aus dem WeiBen Haus verjagte. (S. 198)

[As for democracy, perhaps it suffices here to characterize it by remembering a single fact - Watergate, the story of how the "average American," sickened by the dishonorable conduct of his President, chased him out of the White House.]

Yes, in 1989, America's willingness to use the impeachment process to force out a criminal President could be used as an obvious argument for the value of democracy. Nixon's resignation was only 15 years in the past then. Thirty years later, American democracy isn't looking quite so robust in the face of far more serious misconduct by the White House's current occupant.

The parts of the essay on democracy are basically a polemic against the idea that concentrated wealth, class realities, or oligarchical corruption can put any meaningful constraints on democracy. And therefore for the idea that it's illegitimate to talk about such problems restricting democracy.

Burtin actually makes a Burkean argument about democracy, nominally democratic but actually reactionary. Since he's framing the argument in terms of historical Marxism, he discusses Marxist and Leninist concepts of democracy and makes ritual invocations of "the classics of Marxism" (194)

He simultaneously argues that Marx and Engels had a radical democratic perspective and that their perspective was fundamentally anti-democratic:

Der Kern meines Gedankens besteht darin, daB wir Menschen am Ende des 20.Jahrhunderts in einer Welt Ieben, die schlecht oder gut sein mag, die aber von der, auf deren Boden die ldeen nicht nur von Marx, sondern auch von Lenin geboren wurden, wie der Himmel von der Erde entfernt ist. (S. 205)

[The core of my thought is that at the end of the 20th century we humans live in a world that may be bad or good, but on whose soil the ideas born not only from Marx but also by Lenin, are as far removed as the heavens from the earth.]

Burtin makes what amounts to a conventional Cold War commentary on the Marxist concept of "dictatorship of the proletarian". Here the broad theoretical argument about Marxism as an economic-social-political worldview is complicated by the particular forms the workers' state took in the Soviet bloc and China and related systems. In the 19th century, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was connected with the Marxist notion that government under capitalism functions as a de facto dictatorship of the capitalist class. The broad social-democrtic and Marxist goal then was to fight for parliamentary democracy with the goal of achieving control of the governmental organization and reorient it to policies in the interest of the working class and the establishment of socialism. In the classical Marxist conception, this would be a government representing the majority that would have to resort to "dictatorial" means in the case that the capitalist opposition would attempt to overthrow the democratic government by force.

The concept of the "withering away of the state" identified with Engels that also engendered much discussion, controversy, and a flood of polemics over the last couple of centuries is also related to the classical Marxist definition as the state as an instrument of class control. Once classes in the historical sense are abolished, a state in the sense of a mechanism of class domination would no longer exist. Public administration would still be needed, including very complex types. But that would not be a "state" in the previous sense.

(If anyone feels inspired to run down Frederick Engels’s version of this, it’s in Anti-Dühring, Part 3 (Socialism) Chapter 2 (Theoretical), where he writes that in the transition to socialism, The proletariat [working class] seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state.“)

It's safe to say that the general understanding of what governments ("states") are today would also view administration of a classless society as a "state". If those 19th-century concepts seem quircky in contemporary terms, I would argue that that is also related to how Marx and Engels translated the Hegelian notion of the end of history. It wasn't because they were engaging in fuzzy utopianism, as Burtin heavily insinuates.

It was also a matter of practical discussion in Engels' time what form the democratic state should take, i.e., the social democrats tended to favor a unitary parliamentary government and weren't especially fond of Madisonian-Montesquieuian notions of separation of power and checks-and-balances, which also provide a supply of quotes that can be used polemically in Burtin's style of polemics.

Burtin's gauzy theoretical arguments on those historical concepts say nothing particularly meaningful about the real existing democratic deficits in the socialist countries of 1989. And his treatment of the history of democratic concepts is interesting as an example of an 1989 attempt at theoretically understanding an important transitional historical moment. But as historical arguments, they are notably lacking.