Historical materialism

The scenario imagined not only by the right but by some on the left starts with a good-enough society. There are real problems, some of them quite serious, but on the whole most people are working, eating, having fun, raising families, not rioting in the streets. But the socialists condemn this society as profoundly immoral. So they recruit a few hundred people, and get some guns. They storm the capital, arrest and imprison (or worse) the government, and install themselves as the new government. They then impose a more moral society on the recalcitrant population. Which, of course, completely fails, making society worse off than it was before.

The paradigmatic "real-world" narrative is, of course, the Russian Revolution. Russia has some real problems, some of them quite serious: notably, they are doing quite poorly in WW I under the Kerensky government. However, they are a functioning society. Lenin, however, after being infected by the Marxist brain worm, decides that he cannot tolerate the immorality of Russia's burgeoning capitalism. He assembles and arms a few hundred Bolsheviks, arrests the Kerensky government, and imposes Communism on the recalcitrant Russian people. A successful defense against a Western invasion, conquering an empire starting with only wood for fuel, becoming a nuclear power, developing a somewhat successful space program notwithstanding, Russia under Lenin and his successors starts off a complete failure and only deteriorates from there, proving that anything other than laissez-faire capitalism can do nothing but doom society to poverty and misery.

For those of you who unable to detect the creeping sarcasm, the above is complete and total bullshit. The first paragraph does not represent how any social change, much less a social change to socialism, actually happens. The second paragraph is not at all how the Russian Revolution happened.

There's another scenario: human society is making progress. Not any old progress (which is just the trivially true change over time), but a certain kind of progress. Our society today is better than it was 100 years ago, and that society was better than it was 500 years ago, which was it was a 1000 years ago, and so on. The progress has not been linear of course; there have been interregna and backsliding, but overall society has been progressing. We are not yet at an ideal society, but we are closer than we were. And progress towards an ideal society might be asymptotic, but we should be closer still in another century.

This scenario too is bullshit, albeit more subtle bullshit. There's no objective way to evaluate any society. Most of us like our own society because it's the society we were indoctrinated as children to like. And, of course, those of us with privilege like our society because we have privilege; therefore, we believe we deserve privilege, and it would be an injustice to lose that privilege to those less deserving. We see our society as closer to the ideal than any other kind of society just because it is what we actually have, not because it actually is closer to some mythic ideal.

Historical Materialism

Marx himself believed his great contribution to the world of ideas was not class struggle (Smith and Ricardo precede him) but the idea of historical materialism, which hardly anyone really understands or takes seriously. I take historical materialism seriously. I'm not sure I myself understand it, but I will share my thoughts anyway.

The "materialism" part means that human beings are constantly faced with material (concrete, real-world) problems presented by the environment Which berries are good to eat, and which will cause sickness or death? How can I kill this beast and eat its tasty flesh? What do we do about that asshole who hogs all the good food?

The "historical" part means that we reproduce these solutions in consecutive generations. Our children don't have to think too hard about the solutions their parents came up with, at least the solutions that work well enough. One specific part of these historical solutions are patterns of social relations. Hunter gatherers get used to one pattern of relating to each other, pastoral, horticultural, agricultural, and industrial societies get used to their own specific patterns.

Marx argues* that the material problems of the production (as well as distribution and consumption) of material stuff are of if not exclusive then at least primary importance and these problems "determine" (or at least strongly constrain) historically transmitted social relations. In other words, the means of production determine the social relations of production.

*Marx might not really argue what I say he argues. I put the arguments in his mouth not only to lend them additional authority but also because I present my understanding of Marx's arguments with considerable and possibly undeserved charity.

We have heritable variation and natural selection, so we expect that the "determinism" is in some sense evolutionary. Specifically, patterns of social relations that have relatively better (more or better distributed) material production will have a selective advantage over patterns with relative worse production.

Marx argues that "materialism" means that big changes in the means of production cause big changes in the patterns of social relations rather than the opposite. Marx further argues "historical" means that the the specific character of the pattern of social relations obtaining at any specific time and place as the means of production are undergoing a big change there cause the specific pattern of changes to the social relations of production in response to the changes in the means of production.

(Please remember social scientists look at causality very differently from physical scientists: societies have orders of magnitudes more moving parts than even the most complex engineering projects. I will try to be more precise in more detailed explanations, but for here, causality in the weak sociological sense, as opposed to the the physical or even economic sense, is sufficient.)

Although this basic description is good enough for now, we can improve this theory considerably (notably that social relations can also cause changes to the means of production, hence the alternative label of dialectical materialism). I will also discuss some good and bad criticisms of historical materialism elsewhere. Here, I want here to discuss some implications of Marx's theory assuming he's really on to something worthwhile.

One implication is the denial of idealistic progression as mentioned above. We do not, we cannot, improve society by coming up with radically new and better patterns of social relations. Instead, we change our patterns of social relations in response to changes in the means of production. Briefly, Adam Smith and capitalism did not cause industrialization; industrialization in the specific historical context of late 18th and 19th century Europe, especially Great Britain, caused capitalism and Adam Smith. Similarly, if we end up with something like "socialism", it will not be because we imposed a socialist pattern of social relations on a more-or-less working capitalist society, but because capitalist society has itself created the conditions for revolution.

Revolution

Revolutions happen because of the specific way we create social systems. Human beings rarely think everything through from first principles: that's a prohibitively cognitively expensive way to solve most problems. Instead, we "reason" by habit, analogy, and tradition. If the means of production are relatively stable, then social relations will stabilize and reach a local maximum of productive efficiency. However, when big changes to the means of production happen (whether exogenously or endogenously), the regime of social relations of production are adapted to the old means of production. We retain this old regime out of habit and tradition.

Marx argues that new patterns social relations better adapted to the new means of production emerge within the old pattern. Because social relations generally entail power differentials, those with more power under the old regime are loathe to change it, protecting their power with even the most frightful violence. But because the new regime is more economically efficient, it has a real opportunity to successfully overthrow the old, but usually only after violent struggle.

Coda: The Bolshevik Revolution

In Russia in 1917, the Tsar lost legitimacy and abdicated, Kerensky's bourgeois "democratic republic" lost legitimacy, and everyone else, including the soviets, lacked the power or will to form a government. The Bolsheviks were not just a few (or even a few hundred) people: they had influence and popularity across Russia. Once literally everyone who might have had more power bowed out, only the Bolsheviks had sufficient legitimacy to form a government. So they did. And then they started solving Russia's considerable problems. From that effort arose Soviet communism, with all its pros and cons.

The base alloy of hypocrisy

"When it comes to [anti-immigration nativism,] I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. — Abraham Lincoln, qtd. by Manisha Sinha

Hard Hats, Hippies, and the Real Antiwar Movement

Hard Hats, Hippies, and the Real Antiwar Movement

Over the months that stretched to years—staffing tables, working on resolutions, and organizing protests, petition campaigns, and other events—I spoke with fellow labor activists about their experiences within the Vietnam antiwar movement. They remembered the college students, the educated and religious pacifists, Eugene McCarthy, and the Weather Underground.

But these colleagues, whose days in labor and/or peace politics spanned the three decades between the wars, remembered more: the high-school kids from Brooklyn and the Bronx, for whom college was a remote dream, who left school by the thousands to protest the war; their working-class communities, which loved their soldier-sons but abhorred the war; the unions that took out advertisements condemning the war, sponsored labor-education programs about Indochina, co-sponsored rallies, and started petition drives; the draft resisters, who were often as concerned with the class inequities of the Selective Service System as they were with the immorality of the war itself; the veterans, most of whom had never protested before, joining and helping to lead the movement when they returned stateside; the working-class GIs who refused to fight; and the deserters who walked away.

via Corey Robin

Socialized medicine... in 1798

Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance - In 1798

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed - “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.

Testimony of Marriner Eccles

London Banker excerpts the testimony of Marriner Eccles to the Senate Committee on the Investigation of Economic Problems in 1933 (complete transcript [pdf]). Eccles quotes an unknown economist:

It is utterly impossible, as this country has demonstrated again and again, for the rich to save as much as they have been trying to save, and save anything that is worth saving. They can save idle factories and useless railroad coaches; they can save empty office buildings and closed banks; they can save paper evidences of foreign loans; but as a class they can not save anything that is worth saving, above and beyond the amount that is made profitable by the increase of consumer buying. It is for the interests of the well to do – to protect them from the results of their own folly – that we should take from them a sufficient amount of their surplus to enable consumers to consume and business to operate at a profit. This is not “soaking the rich”; it is saving the rich. Incidentally, it is the only way to assure them the serenity and security which they do not have at the present moment.

(via Yves Smith)

The historical method

The First Rule of Historical Method is: don’t believe everything you read. A believable history has to be constructed from several converging lines of evidence that have been critically and skillfully examined, and not every piece of evidence is equally trustworthy. Humans are notorious liars, eager exaggerators, and happy to believe almost anything they agree with. Skepticism is a virtue—but unfortunately a rare one, even rarer than honesty.

— Richard Carrier

(via Open Parachute)

On the collapse of the Soviet Union

Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong

Every revolution is a surprise. Still, the latest Russian Revolution must be counted among the greatest of surprises. In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin's control over its domestic and Eastern European empires. Neither, with one exception, did Soviet dissidents nor, judging by their memoirs, future revolutionaries themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, none of his contemporaries anticipated a revolutionary crisis. Although there were disagreements over the size and depth of the Soviet system's problems, no one thought them to be life-threatening, at least not anytime soon.

(via a reader)

Does communism work?

Allen Small demands that I "show [him] an example where [communism] has worked or even partially worked now or in the past." It's pretty much a stupid demand; at the very least it condemns any sort of novelty or progress. But it got me thinking.

Of course, we have to be a little more explicit about what we mean by "communism", "working" and "partially".

There are three good definitions of communism. First, the "minimal" definition that I use: the social ownership of the means of production. The second is the "Marxian" definition: socialization of capital, participatory democratic government of enfranchised workers (a la the Paris Commune), and central planning of the consumer economy. The third is the "Soviet/Chinese" definition, oligarchical rule of the Communist Party to own and administer the means of production and implement central planning. I personally endorse only minimal communism, but both Marxian and Soviet/Chinese communism include minimal communism.

It's a little more difficult to define "working". Allen has, of course, set me a task that I suspect he considers impossible. He condemns all of Western civilization as "statist" and appears to consider them the moral equivalent of communism and fascism; presumably does not believe that any civilization, society or government actually works or has worked. But of course Allen is that curious rarity, a complete idiot; most sensible people I think will have somewhat less dogmatic and more pragmatic standards of what works and what doesn't work.

I think we can take Fascism — defined as the political-economic and social systems actually in place in Italy, Japan and Germany from the early 20th century until the end of the Second Imperialist War — as near-ideal exemplars of "not working": they ended in the economic ruin, military defeat and unconditional surrender of their respective countries and criminal prosecution and near-complete discredit of Fascist politics and politicians. (Political parties and movements in the West may include elements of Fascism, a worrying phenomenon, but they also fail to include some essential features. And the more features of Fascism present-day political movements include, the more marginal they appear to be.)

I think we can take "Western capitalism" — loosely defined as the international system pioneered in England in the 17th and 18th centuries and finding common expression in most European, North American, (to some extent) Central and South American countries as well as Southeast Asia and (to some extent) the Indian subcontinent — as an exemplar of "working". Which is not to say that I endorse Western capitalism, but it has certainly done the opposite of the catastrophic failures of Fascism.

Taking these as our examples, it is important to note that the presence or absence of horrific atrocity doesn't really distinguish between "working" and "not working". The litany of horrific atrocity in Western capitalism is depressingly long: chattel slavery, genocide, wars of aggression, millions killed in the First and Second Imperialist wars, epidemics and famines caused or exacerbated by societal incompetence and indifference, etc. ad nauseam. Again, to say that horrific atrocity is not a component of "working" or "not working" is not to say that I endorse or even excuse atrocity; I'm saying only that it is not a particularly useful criteria for historical comparison. (Indeed I share to no small extent Allen's disdain for all human civilization. And, like Allen, I think our near-universal history of really stupendous atrocity calls for truly radical societal change. Allen and I disagree only on what kind of radical change to implement.)

If we adopt the minimal criteria necessary to call Western capitalism as working, it straightforwardly follows that communism has at least partially worked in a couple of ways.

First, the Soviet Union and Communist China lasted a lot longer than the Fascist countries. Although communism fell — definitely in the Soviet Union and arguably in China — these countries did not fail in the spectacularly catastrophic fashion as did the Fascist countries. Furthermore, both the Soviet Union and China transformed backwards, illiterate, agrarian countries that were manifestly subservient to Western imperialism into industrialized, nuclear-armed world powers. And they did so in considerably less time than did the Western nations. This is not a stunning success — neither the Soviet Union nor China achieved their greater goal of exporting communism to the world, and they achieved what they did at a staggering cost in human suffering — but I think we are justified in considering them at least partially working, by the minimal standards we must adopt to label Western capitalism as "working".

Second, and perhaps more importantly, all Western democracies have partially implemented components of minimal communism. Almost all features of "welfare capitalism" are direct consequences of communist and communist-inspired political activism in the early and middle 20th century. These features include a dramatic de facto and de jure increase in the political franchise, substantial regulation of the capitalist ruling class, workers' political and economic empowerment through unions, heavily progressive taxation, and one or two orders of magnitude increase in direct government economic participation. And the historical record is crystal clear: The more Western capitalism has adopted communist elements, the better it has performed by every metric — economic, social and political — except the privilege and absolute power of the capitalist ruling; the more Western capitalism has abandoned communist elements, the worse it has done.

If we are going to condemn all human civilization — an exercise I have a lot of sympathy for — historical comparison is irrelevant: We must rely on purely theoretical comparison. If, however, we are going to employ historical comparison, communism seems to come out at least as well as — and on some accounts considerably better than &mdash its antinomy of laissez faire capitalism.

The resurrection of Jesus

I have an enormous body of evidence that people do not rise from the dead. Billions of people have died, and I know that most of them have stayed dead. Everything we know about biology, physics, and medicine leads to the conclusion that people cannot rise from the dead. I could — in theory — be persuaded to change my mind. But I would have to see evidence that outweighed the enormous body of evidence presented above. And that seems like a difficult, practically insurmountable task.

I also have a lot of evidence that people exaggerate, fill in the blanks in their perceptions, take things for granted, make up fictions and sometimes lie outright. Ancient history is lousy with stories of resurrected gods:

Male examples include Asclepius, Orpheus, Mithras, Osiris, Tammuz, Jesus, Zalmoxis, Dionysus, and Odin. Female examples are Inanna, also known as Ishtar, whose cult dates to 4000 BCE, and Persephone, the central figure of the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose cult may date to 1700 BCE as the unnamed goddess worshiped in Crete.

And that's just in Western civilization.

Also, the body of evidence underlying our knowledge of ancient history is equivocal or ambiguous about a lot claims that don't contradict my prosaic and scientific knowledge about the world. Who, for example, were the Sea Peoples? How were they able to cause the collapse of the international civilization of the Late Bronze Age? Where did they go? Why was a new international, seafaring civilization (the Phoenicians) able to spring up so quickly in their wake? Nobody really knows.

So you have an enormous body of evidence that undermines the primary idea of a resurrection, a tiny and equivocal body of evidence from which we might support the idea, and considerable evidence that people love to make up myths of resurrected gods.

Furthermore, I cannot investigate every claim directly. I have to, at some level, trust the scholarship and intellectual integrity of others to summarize and present the important evidence in an honest and convincing way. I know no small few scholars of ancient history, professional and amateur, and I find that those claiming insurmountable problems supporting the physical reality of the resurrection of Jesus typically gain my trust. More importantly, I find those historians who claim ancient history does indeed support the physical reality of the resurrection of Jesus invariably undermine and compromise my trust, in ways that have nothing to do with their primary claims.

Given the practical reality, the whole idea of the resurrection of Jesus is a complete non-starter. If you have converted to Christianity on the basis of the historical truth resurrection, you are at best woefully ignorant of basic standards of critical thought and scientific investigation.

Britain's child slaves

Britain's child slaves:

The tunnel was narrow, and a mere 16in high in places. The workers could barely kneel in it, let alone stand. Thick,choking coal dust filled their lungs as they crawled through the darkness, their knees scraping on the rough surface and their muscles contracting with pain.

A single 'hurrier' pulled the heavy cart of coal, weighing as much as 500lb, attached by a chain to a belt worn around the waist, while one or more 'thrusters' pushed from behind. Acrid water dripped from the tunnel ceiling, soaking their ragged clothes.

Many would die from lung cancer and other diseases before they reached 25. For, shockingly, these human beasts of burden were children, some only five years old.

19th century Britain was hardly a backward country; it was at the time the acme of capitalism. Is it any wonder that Marx believed we could do better?

Subway science map

Totally, incredibly, awesomely cool, in a totally geeky way.


click to embiggen

The Original Post (with commentary)

Also check out the Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense:


click to embiggen

(via Ken)

The easy way and the hard way

The communist movement missed an historic opportunity to implement communism the "easy way", i.e. by accumulating economic power and using that economic power to effect a revolution against the capitalist ruling class.

In the mid to late 19th century, the sine qua non of economic power was control of physical, industrial capital. The supply chain was very short, consisting of only one or two steps of industrial production: trees to lumber mills to factories to furniture. Control the factories and at the very least you have a fighting chance against the imperialist control of raw materials and emerging markets. And with an organized, unionized industrial labor force, you have the real possibility of physically controlling the factories either directly by actually taking over factories or indirectly through the threat of local and general strikes.

And the world came very close to actually trying this kind of revolution. The first Imperialist War, which was primarily a struggle for the great imperialist powers to control sources of raw materials and (to a lesser extent) emerging markets, had the secondary effect of breaking the power of industrial labor in Europe to effect any kind of revolution.

We cannot at all blame the capitalist ruling class for this failure. We should expect them to hold onto their power and privilege by any means necessary, including the deaths of tens of millions of people. Thus it has been with every ruling class in the history of humanity; we cannot expect any better of the capitalists, regardless of their propaganda. We must lay the blame, I think, at the feet of the European Democratic Socialists of the 19th and early 20th century.

The "essence" of Democratic Socialism* is, I think, the position that we should improve the position of labor within the capitalist system while preserving and maintaining the capitalist system itself. The aim is not "true" socialism: the actual control by the working class of the government and pervasive social and political constructions. The Democratic Socialist position is at least superficially admirable: their aim was, I think, very similar to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (except without Keynes understanding of economics), which was in its limited way moderately successful.

*In other words, it is reasonable to label this political position as "Democratic Socialism" for the purpose of discussion.

But as superficially admirable as it was, it was not really feasible without Keynes' contributions to economic theory and, on the eve of the First Imperialist War it was a position that transcended simple naivete and fell firmly into a treasonous betrayal of the working class by politicians and leaders who had promised to protect and extend the interests of the working class.

On the eve of the First Imperialist war, the specific historical conditions of capitalism in opening years of the 20th century Europe demanded a continent-wide war, as the various capitalists competed violently for access to raw materials and a hyper-exploitable population of workers to extract those raw materials. This war could only be fought by the working class itself — the idea of the capitalists themselves picking up guns and fighting each other directly was obviously ludicrous. So the Democratic Socialists were in a bind: supporting capitalism meant supporting the war, a war that would be fought by worker against worker, both in the trenches and in the factories; opposing the war meant making a decisive break with the industrial capitalist ruling class. The position of the Democratic Socialist leaders themselves was in no small part supported by a faction of capitalist class: the Democratic Leaders could no longer stay on the fence.

As history has shown us, the leaders of every socialist movement in every European country at the eve of the First Imperialist war — with the exception of Lenin's Bolsheviks and a few dissident figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht — came down on the side of capitalism. Either they were absolutely cynical or they utterly naive and believed that the capitalist ruling class of the winning nations would be sufficiently grateful for the working class's blood and suffering on the capitalists behalf that they would offer the workers substantial concessions.

As history has shown us as well, the "winners" of the First Imperialist War showed no gratitude at all to the working class that had shed so much blood on its behalf. The close of the war saw an increase in the exploitation and oppression of the industrial workers and a catastrophic global financial crisis a mere two decades after the war's end. (Remember: a financial crisis — the Great Depression as well as today's economic catastrophe — is a failure of capitalism itself, not an "external" crisis that individual capitalists fail to adequately respond to.)

We missed two further opportunities for a relatively "easy" revolution.

In Failure of a Revolution, Sebastian Haffner documents a popular socialist uprising after Germany's humiliating defeat in the First Imperialist war. This uprising failed not just because it was opposed by the German capitalist class, but also because the socialist leaders of the time actively betrayed the people they had promised to represent and recruited and encouraged the extreme right wing to violently suppress the revolution. This right wing opposition to the popular uprising formed the seeds of Nazi Germany and an important foundation of the Second Imperialist War.

The last opportunity was the co-option of the socialist left by "Democratic Socialism" (by this time beginning to transform itself into the capitalist welfare state) in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. As Norman Thomas famously remarked, "Emphatically, Mr. Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher." The co-option of the socialist left by Democratic Socialism and the formation of the capitalist welfare state is prefigured in the conflict within the labor union movement. Elena Kagan describes one aspect of this conflict in her senior thesis, To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City. Grasping this opportunity was a slim chance, but it was the final chance to gain the economic power necessary to fight the capitalist class toe to toe.

Now, of course, it's just too late to do things the "easy" way. The supply chain for even the simplest industry such as food production is tens of layers deep and includes thousands of interacting companies, factories, and supply and distribution channels. Even if the workers managed to decisively control all the physical industrial capital (farms, factories, trains and trucks, grocery stores) productivity would grind to a halt without the finely tuned web of relationships, promises and obligations of the global financial system, a system firmly in the hands of the capitalist class and the upper levels of the professional-managerial class who can be absolutely trusted to maintain the power and privilege of the capitalists.

If we are to have a communist revolution, it will have to follow the catastrophic and complete internal failure of the capitalist ruling class. We will have to rebuild the global industrial and productive infrastructure after it has collapsed. The price of this catastrophe and rebuilding will be immense and terrible, so terrible that I do not believe any person with the conscience, love of humanity and hatred of human suffering necessary to be what I would call a good communist could possibly contemplate actively bringing about, even if it were feasible to do so, which it probably isn't.

But the capitalist ruling class, and the contradictions inherent in capitalism, seem poised to bring about this catastrophe on itself — and, unfortunately, all of us. All we can do is (1) continue to point out that capitalism is nowhere close to the best that humanity can do, (2) build some sort of communist economic and political theory that will be applicable to conditions following capitalism apparently imminent demise and (3) create enough of an organization so that humanistic communism has sufficient social credibility and power to take control after the collapse of capitalism. We must become, I think (and if you'll pardon the hackneyed fantasy) at least metaphorically like Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

A communist programme: Preamble

I want to outline a skeleton programme for a "dictatorship of the proletariat". It's important to understand, though, that if there were a communist revolution, and the power and privilege of the capitalist class were decisively broken, at least temporarily, the actual programme immediately following must and should be a matter of politics, i.e. negotiation and compromise (with some propaganda thrown in). What follows is just a collection of ideas, not a system of government I think a successful revolutionary force should impose in toto following a revolution without regard to the specific opinions and preferences of those with some social and political credibility.

It's also important to remember that the governments immediately following the Russian and Chinese revolutions faced a severe theoretical problem: the actual industrial proletariat in those societies was a minority, overwhelmed numerically by a class seen only in primitive feudal societies: the mostly illiterate agricultural peasant class. Agricultural peasants have a very different economic relation to the feudal landowners than industrial workers have to the owners of capital. Canonical Marxist theory (i.e. the theories that Marx and Engels themselves proposed) depended not just on the industrial proletariat forming a numerical majority, but also on specific features of the industrial proletariat and their relation to the capitalist class. Most of the pre-Lenin communist, socialist and anarchist theoreticians were, after all, living in the rapidly industrializing Western Europe.

Lacking this majority, and starting from the majority with an entirely distinct set of economic relations between peasant and landowners, the Russians and Chinese revolutionaries faced enormous uncharted theoretical ground. And they did so under the enormous pressure of life-and-death expediency faced by rulers of countries not just faced by primitive on-the-verge-of-starvation productive forces but also countries under the pressure of severe international hostility. The nascent Soviet Union started out with a primitive agrarian economy; what little industry they had was mostly colonial-submissive and administered by its foreign owners or those specifically chosen for their submission to those foreign owners. And then this primitive economy and its labor force was shattered by the First Imperialist War. Lenin inherited a country in shambles. And then they had to overcome a civil war and blockade fomented and encouraged by the capitalist West, knew that a Second Imperialist War was in the works (it's arguable that the West's hesitancy in confronting Hitler was in no small part due to Hitler's hostility to the Bolsheviks), and even afterward knew that there was substantial support for a Western invasion of the Soviet Union.

Similarly, forty years later Mao Zedong had to take seriously the profound existential threat of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union already leaning away from internationalizing socialism and toward its own brand of imperialist hegemony. And of course revolutionary China escaped actual nuclear war with the United States only by the narrowest of margins: MacArthur actually had nuclear weapons (granted to him by the Joint Chiefs of Staff) with the explicit intent of using them on China when Truman successfully faced down what was a de facto military coup. if Dewey had won the election, if Truman didn't have (if you'll excuse the gendered metaphor) balls of steel, if MacArthur hadn't backed down, things might have turned out very differently.

I've had a gun pointed at me, and I know you do whatever you have to do at the moment to survive. I can't really judge the behavior of a government that has nuclear weapons pointed at their country.

Regardless of the specific conditions that might obtain immediately after a communist revolution, we don't face these conditions in the United States. We will not face the predominance of an illiterate peasant class and their economic relations to a feudal land-owning class. We will not start from a barely subsistence-level economic infrastructure. While we might have to deal with some destruction of infrastructure caused by civil conflict, we won't have to face the devastation of an international war against a determined and industrialized enemy. We will probably not face an existential threat from the remaining nuclear powers: China, the European Union, India/Pakistan, and possibly a Brazilian dominated South America. We will have considerably more freedom and luxury to experiment, as well as to tolerate temporary inefficiency.

There are only two conditions that historically have led to an internal revolution. First, some class by virtue of its socially constructed characteristics achieves substantial economic power unavailable to the contemporaneous ruling class, and resists and overthrows the ruling class from a position of strength. These conditions allowed the nascent merchant and industrial-owning "middle" classes to overthrow the feudal ruling class. Second, the ruling class completely self-destructs, and whoever happens to be the most organized at the time has the reins of power thrust into their hands. These conditions placed power in the hands of the Russian Bolsheviks and Mao's Chinese Communist Party. (To a certain extent, the Chinese Revolution was a mixture of the two conditions: Mao had gained at least some economic power before the revolution by organizing and governing areas in China's interior.)

In all probability, the conditions that would obtain for a communist revolution in the United States would, regrettably, be the latter. (Although, like Mao, it is possible for communists to create some sort of economic base before a revolution.) This means that while a communist revolution would not be starting with a fundamentally subsistence-level economy, they probably will be starting with an catastrophic economic conditions that will be causing profound suffering, starvation and disease, and that will require immediate measures to correct. They will inherit quite a few pervasive social and economic conditions favorable to increased production; they will have some luxury for experiment and inefficiency, but the devastation will limit these options. It is with these historical observations and imaginative conditions that I'll be outlining a proposed skeleton programme for a post-revolutionary communist government.

A Journey

Peter Stothard reviews A Journey, Tony Blair's new memoir:

Tony Blair’s political memoir has been pulled apart this week as though it were the palace of a fallen dictator, not so much reviewed as ransacked. Reporters have raced through its 700 pages as though each were some hitherto shuttered room hiding unused ammunition, looted antiquities, piles of purposeless propaganda, racks of vintage wines and extravagant wardrobes. With no prior newspaper serialization deal, there was a stampede for stories that matched the frenzy for Saddam’s Picassos or Mrs Marcos’s shoes. The British may not like him much any more but the media remain fascinated by the man who led their government for a decade, led an unelectable party to three election victories, followed an unprecedentedly unpopular American President into even more unpopular wars and redefined the role of Prime Minister for an age in which the lines between the political and the personal were themselves being redefined.

Labor Day, 1894

Labor Day, 1894

Once the people—the adult, male, white people that is—had the vote, what were they going to do with it?

Something for nothing

One cannot but wonder at this constantly recurring phrase getting something for nothing, as if it were the peculiar and perverse ambition of disturbers of society. Except for our animal outfit, practically all we have is handed us gratis. Can the most complacent reactionary flatter himself that he invented the art of writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic, and moral convictions, or any of the devices which supply him with meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may derive from literature or the fine arts? In short, civilization is little else than getting something for nothing.

— James Harvey Robinson

(via my history professor)

HG Wells on Russia

Russia in the Shadows:

And this spectacle of misery and ebbing energy is, you will say, the result of Bolshevist rule! I do not believe it is. I will deal with the Bolshevist Government when I have painted the general scenery of our problem. But let me say here that this desolate Russia is not a system that has been attacked and destroyed by something vigorous and malignant. It is an unsound system that has worked itself out and fallen down. It was not communism which built up these great, impossible cities, but capitalism. It was not communism that plunged this huge, creaking, bankrupt empire into six years of exhausting war. It was European imperialism. Nor is it communism that has pestered this suffering and perhaps dying Russia with a series of subsidised raids, invasions, and insurrections, and inflicted upon it an atrocious blockade. The vindictive French creditor, the journalistic British oaf, are far more responsible for these deathbed miseries than any communist...

(via Brad DeLong)

It can't happen here

Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns HIS State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Ku Klux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? … Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? … Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they MIGHT be transporting liquor—no, that couldn't happen in AMERICA! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start on a Children's Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!

— Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

(via PZ Myers)

Let me add this:

[V]oice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

— Hermann Göring

Radicals and sectarianism

From the New York socialist movement's birth, sectarianism and dissension ate away at its core. Substantial numbers of SP members expressed deep and abiding dissatisfaction with the brand of reform socialism advocated by the party's leadership. To these left-wingers, constructive socialism seemed to stress insignificant reforms at the expense of ultimate goals. How, these revolutionaries angrily demanded, could the SP hope to attract workers if it did not distinguish itself from the many progressive parties, if it did not proffer an enduring and radiant ideal? How, the constructivists angrily replied, could the SP hope to attract workers if it did not promise them immediate benefits, if it did not concern itself with their present burdens?...

Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP exhausted itself. forever.... The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism's decline, still wish to change America. Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one's fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe. Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.

— Elena Kagan, 1981 undergraduate thesis, Princeton University

(via Brad DeLong)

[Note: Princeton University has blocked the internet distribution of Kagan's thesis. The thesis is available from Princeton University for $54.60.]

10 worst riots in American history

A reader alerts me to this interesting article detailing the 10 worst riots in American history.