A RESPONSE TO AN INTERESTING COMMENT

There were several interesting responses to my outrageous effort to evaluate Piketty’s new 1000 page book on the basis of a close reading of the first 8 pages.  One comment, by Asgeir, raises questions that have long interested me and on which I have written [in my essay, “The Future of Socialism”], so I thought I would respond while waiting to take a walk with my wife to combat our cabin fever.  Asgeir writes this [I am sorry – I searched the enormous Word database of special characters and could not find a capital A with an acute accent]:

“One question, Professor: If the political-ideological sphere is not autonomous, isn't it completely pointless to agitate for social change, especially socialism? How can one be a Marxist, if it is committed to the negation of Piketty's thesis, and think that political work is worth engaging in in the first place? If the "iron laws of history" are so rigid, how could we even try to abolish capitalism?

In a footnote in one of his papers "Why Marxism still does not need a normative theory", Brian Leiter seems accept the premise of my question and writes: "All the professed Marxist revolutionaries of the 20th-century—Lenin, Mao, Castro, others—clearly had no understanding of the explanatory theory, or every one of them would have instituted a free market economy in their agrarian and preindustrial societies. Why they were such incompetent readers of Marx is a topic for a different day."

Is that really plausible, that all these luminaries were such bad readers of Marx? And doesn't Leiter's point also apply to Marx himself—and most marxists, for that matter?”

There is a lot to unpack here.  Let me start by noting that there actually was a vigorous debate among the early Bolsheviks [i.e., the members of the majority in the Russian Social Democratic Party.  “Menshevik” means “member of the minority.”] about whether it was possible to go directly from Russia’s feudal economy to a socialist economy without first going through a capitalist phase.  This was called “skipping a stage.”  Those who said it was impossible were of course correct, but when you have just seized control of an enormous sprawling country at great personal risk and confront a foreign military effort to defeat you and put you to death, it seemed, how shall I put it, a trifle quaint to say:   “We have conquered Mother Russia.  Now we must scare up a few capitalists and turn things over to them for several generations before our grandchildren can return and take up the struggle for socialism.”  So the Bolsheviks did the only thing they could.  They instituted state capitalism and called it communism.

One of the more bizarre misreadings of Marx has it that he thought capitalism would turn into socialism behind our backs, as it were, regardless of what anyone did.  Marx was a social scientist.  He was not an Old Testament prophet, he was not a soothsayer, he was not a moralist, he was not, God help us, a neo-classical economist.  Did Marx think it was pointless to agitate for social change?  Of course not!  He thought such agitation was essential to bringing about social change.  But he also thought, quite correctly in my judgment, that irrespective of this agitation, capitalists were presented with choices and challenges that led them to make changes in the way they did business, changes that, unintended by them, prepared the way for new forms of capitalism and eventually for the possibility of socialism [not its “inevitability.”]

What sorts of changes?  Well, bringing carders and spinners and weavers out of their cottages and into factories [“manufactories,” i.e places where things are made by hand] to make woolen cloth; routinizing that work so that some people only carded and others only wove; substituting steam powered looms and spinning wheels for those operated by hand.  And so on and on.  In the early stages of the evolution of capitalism, the impersonal “higgling and jiggling of the market,” in Adam Smith’s wonderful phrase, was a better determinant of efficient pricing than any central plan could be, but by the middle of the 20^th century the internalization within the firm of intermediate stages in production made it literally impossible to rely on market prices to determine corporate decisions, so a form of proto-planning had to be adopted within the firm.  The conditions of the new order were growing in the womb of the old.  [See my paper, “The Future of Socialism,” for a much more elaborate version of this sketch.]

Well, time for my walk.

Stay safe.