What were the classical socialists thinking in their confidence that it would be very easy to replace the market economic system with some combination of workplace democracy and accounting...
But who would have thought that a market economy could be built that would work without a myriad of rules and constraints that make epicycles seem simple by comparison? Would an actual socialist system really be more difficult to design given an infrastructure of laws, and regulations that we have for a market economy? Most economies are mixed - markets plus some socialist elements to mitigate some egregious market failures. So why shouldn't the balance change to be socialist with some market elements to ensure flexibility and choice? It seems to me that we use extremes as strawmen, when the goal should be a high standard of living, choice of occupation, incentives to improve, an unpolluted environment to reduce externalities, and limits to inequality.
Who would think that bees and ants could do what they do? But that (swarm intelligence/big-enough groups trying out the options) is part of why greed actually works, insofar as it does (which is pretty far). In hindsight, this might've been known, though it's a fairly obscure point, and the effort only got started a few hundred years ago, if not just in 1870, as our venerable host might argue. But we have also proven that Polanyian social interventions are both possible and crucial, if not always sure to work well.
I think I've commented here before that market based systems and socialist systems are judged by different standards. Socialist systems are deemed a failure if 20% of the population can't get shoes in their preferred color. Market systems are deemed a success even if 20% of the population can't get shoes.
The modern market based system which developed in the 18th & 19th century was amazingly productive, but by the early 19th century it was obvious that its productive capacity would exceed its distributive capacity. 200+ years later, we are still wrestling with the problem. Our market system is pretty good at getting everyone shod, but not near as good at getting everyone a place to live, food security, medical care and other basics. It's hard to call it a roaring success if one recognizes how many businesses rely on government subsidies to supplement their employees wages.
I've been reading Revolutionary Spring, an account of the European convulsions of the early 19th century. I think there was a sons of Martha, sons of Mary split. The sons of Martha could actually do things, run the factories, operate more efficient farms and so on. They were perfectly happy with the system despite its human cost, and, as far as they were concerned, this was the best of all possible worlds. The sons of Mary didn't have a clue of how to do things, but they knew that something was wrong and that things could be better. There's no surprise that they were ineffective, even harmful when granted power. On the other hand, the optimist in me agrees with them that it should be possible to do better.
The problem is more than shoe color, though. Why should social justice and poverty eradication require people to wait on line for hours for shitty and non-existent goods and services?
I never said they did. Market systems eliminate the waiting since the prices for shoes are generally known. You can either afford them or not. In the Army, you are issued shoes whether you like the way they look or not. There are lots of hybrid systems that do better than either including our own. We still wind up with people getting suboptimal shoes, but optimizing footwear isn't strictly an economic problem.
I wasn't suggesting you were saying that. But it is an assumption of command socialism. All I'm saying is that the appraisals have to be as fair and consistent as we can make them in this area.
I especially liked the post-stroke Lenin fixation with education of the proletariat to address the problems of the really existing socialism. Compare that with our need right now for retroactive civics courses in U. S. Secondary Schools!
I wouldn't put a lot of stock in civics courses. Once they were quite common, and now perhaps they're not... but check your local state standards, and they're probably still there, done under other rubrics.
What sticks from anybody's secondary education, unless it becomes central to their employment, or stokes what they're personally interested in, is pretty nugatory.
(Based on 40 years doing high school language instruction.)
Anyone who thinks there is "workplace democracy" probably hasn't worked in a workplace. Broadly, most workplaces seem like top-down, authoritarian-like mini systems that vary by the extent of decency (even wisdom) of the people on the top, with promotions/ladder being the implicit (perhaps, explicit) incentive structure.
Yes... But the idea was that once you got workplace democracy plus a light, streamlined, helpful, and efficient bureaucracy for simple coordination, things would be fine...
True, true. It is still mind-boggling that they would imagine such a solution to a set of grievances. They probably didn't specify voting rules that would govern a "workplace democracy." Majoritarian, referenda, ranked voting etc. That's a red flag. The Arrow Impossibility Theorem tells us that a solution to make every happier, so to speak, is likely impossible. So, even if such a system were enforced, there would be considerable dissatisfaction, far from a Utopia it promises. It seems to me that their proposed solution had unaddressed details, within the bigger problems you've outlined.
Touché. Perhaps the answer is as simple as the social democrats did recognize reality—and people further to the eft grabbed onto the USSR as a sea-anchor and then tried to read the SDs out of the left-wing movement...
Whilst ethnography and comparative sociology had not progressed very far by the mid-C19, it was already clear that virtually every large-scale society had invented or adopted market mechanisms for resource allocation and that moreover wherever market means were not used those used instead were despotic to an extent undreamt of in Europe. Surely if it were so trivially easy to find superior non-market mechanisms someone in the preceding four millennia (roughly the extent of the historical horizon at that time) and more ought to have stumbled on one. Is it not remarkable that none of these very clever and seriously well-intentioned theorists ever thought to reflect on this remarkable circumstance.
The usual solution has been a mixed economy, not a market economy as 19th century liberals would know it. For most of history, societies have drawn a line between the ruling class and the business class and ran societies in the interests of the former and granting market freedoms to the latter as it suited their purposes. It was possible to cross that line, but it wasn't usual.
I recommend reading Koyama, Mark; Rubin, Jared (2022): How the world became rich. The historical origins of economic growth. Medford: Polity Press. It might modify your views somewhat.
Is that the Matty who thinks that food safety laws, regulations, and inspections should be eliminated because they get in the way of the entrepreneurship just waiting to burst out of the lower classes?
What were the French revolutionists thinking in 1789 in their confidence that the monarchy could be easy to replace? Cardinal de Richelieu rather prophetically outlined, in the Political Testament he published some 40 years earlier, the chaos and violence that would follow. Chasing, or even Slouching, towards Utopia can be a mighty dangerous thing. I invite you to recall the great book by R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution -- showing how well-meaning, well-adjusted, well-accomplished persons can so easily run things into the ground, once caught up in a movement that has no viable, if any, plans for reconstruction.
I think you might be underestimating the economic determinism of Marx and Engels and thus underestimating the significance of the difference between utopian and scientific socialism. Admittedly Marx and Marxism have struggled to maintain the difference.
For M and E -- as "scientific, economic determinists -- a socialist economy is not something that has to be designed and created. It is not about ideas and theories and the willpower to re-engineer society. For M and E, the economy is already “socializing.” What they see in the industrial revolution is an unprecedented concentration of labor and capital, yielding economies of scale and unprecedented productivity. The era of manufacturing sector dominated by the individual owner-entrepreneur-master craftsman and a handful of apprentices – Adam Smith’s petit-bourgeois economy of butchers, bakers and brewers – is over, at least in the manufacturing sector. The only question is how and when the social and political insinuations will adapt to produce socialized ownership and control, and when the revolution caused by the conflict between socialized production and private ownership will occur. Interestingly, JS Mill makes the same diagnosis, but thinks that an industrial economy will naturally evolve towards workers coops. Mill sees the corporation as precisely the mechanism that will allow this cooperative ownership and management. And, indeed, if worker ownership and management of large enterprises is problematic, private shareholder ownership of large corporations is surely not without similar problems. Mill thinks the cooperative management system will be more efficient than the absentee shareholder system of corporate ownership and management, and thus the coop system will naturally out-compete the shareholder corp. My sense is that Marx and Engels think the long-term tendency is to sectoral monopolies throughout the economy, and, at that point, government public ownership/management/regulation can do no worse than private management - the choice is between state-run capitalism and state-run socialism. Mill concurs, but thinks natural monopolies are rarer and, for the most part, competition between cooperative enterprises can be maintained – so I suppose this makes him a kind of market socialist. But he is well aware of the wastes of competition in areas like postal services and railroads, apparent already in his day. Ultimately, Schumpeter concurs: corporate monopoly capitalism as opposed to monopoly socialism can continue to deliver the goods as a matter of economic efficiency, but private ownership of monopolies by absentee shareholders, who are no longer the entrepreneurs personally running the business, strips bourgeois private property I the means of production of its sociological and political legitimacy.
Similarly, I think it is ultimately wrong to think of Lenin as an orthodox Marxist – whatever generations of Marxists have thought. The orthodox Marxist of Lenin’s day is Georgiy Plekhanov, the “Father of Russian Marxism,” who introduced Lenin to Marx. Plekhanov insisted, quite correctly in my view, that the orthodox Marxist interpretation of the 1917 February revolution was that it was a bourgeois parliamentary revolution against a teetering feudal monarchist system (think Glorious Revolution). Russia, as Marx himself observed, was a far too backwards agrarian society to have an communist revolution. Plekhanov ultimately split with the Bolsheviks and Lenin on just this point, and was consequently lost to history, being recognized neither by the Bolsheviks or Menscheviks. The “utopian” and deeply un-Marxist attempt to forcibly shift Russia from an agrarian to an industrial economy was the first of many economic disasters, resulting in a horrific famine. Despite repeated attempt to force through communist revolutions in developing agrarian countries, it is very clear from Marx that a communist revolution can only occur in a mature industrialized nation, in which the economy has already evolved from small individual ownership and management. Why Russia failed should never be a problem for Marxists, why the UK and later the US never had a communist revolution is more the question.
To take up your other point from Red Plenty – regardless of whether the ownership of large corporate enterprises is private or public or cooperative, the fact remains that modern economies are driven by the economic rationality of economies of scale, and will always be vast enterprises in which individual control (freedom) is heavily diluted. Weber’s iron-cage of bureaucracy is peculiar neither to capitalism or socialism but is an artifact of industrialization.
There is a strong sense in which Marxism is theology, a Christian heresy, in fact, and so gets inevitably hung up on all the free-will-and-determinism questions: on the one hand praise the LORD, on the other hand pass the ammunition.
> Here things are moving, though slowly and in zigzags. Take for instance Mawdsley, the leader of the Lancashire textile workers. He’s a Tory: in politics a Conservative and in religion a devout believer. Three years ago these gentry were violently opposed to the eight-hour day, today they vehemently demand it. In a quite recent manifesto Mawdsley, who last year was a fierce opponent of any separate policy for the working class, declared that the textile workers must take up the question of direct representation in Parliament, and a Manchester labour newspaper calculated that the Lancashire textile workers might control twelve seats in Parliament in this county alone. As you see, it is the Trade Union that will enter Parliament. It is the branch of industry and not the class that demands representation. Still, it is a step forward. Let us first smash the enslavement of the workers to the two big bourgeois parties, let us have textile workers in Parliament just as we already have miners there. As soon as a dozen branches of industry are represented class consciousness will arise of itself.
> The height of comedy is reached in this manifesto when Mawdsley demands bimetallism to maintain the supremacy of English cotton fabrics on the Indian market.
> One is indeed driven to despair by these English workers with their sense of imaginary national superiority, with their essentially bourgeois ideas and viewpoints, with their “practical” narrow-mindedness, with the parliamentary corruption which has seriously infected the leaders. But things are moving none the less. The only thing is that the “practical” English will be the last to arrive, but when they do arrive their contribution will weigh quite heavy in the scale. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_05_21.htm>
Or consider, earlier, Marx to Liebknecht, February 11, 1878:
> The Russians have achieved one good thing; they have exploded England's “great Liberal Party” and made it incapable of governing for a long time to come, whilst the trouble of committing suicide has been officially accomplished for the Tory Party through the traitors Derby and Salisbury (the latter the real driving force of Russia in the Cabinet).
> The English working class had been gradually more and more deeply demoralised by the period of corruption since 1848 and had at last got to the point when they were nothing more than the tail of the great Liberal Party, i.e., henchmen of the capitalists. Their direction had gone completely over into the hands of the corrupt trade union leaders and professional agitators. These fellows shouted and howled behind Gladstone, Bright, Mundella, Morley and the whole gang of factory owners etc., in majorem gloriam [to the greater glory] of the Tsar as emancipator of nations, while they never raised a finger for their own brothers in South Wales, condemned to die of starvation by the mineowners. Wretches! To crown the whole affair worthily, in the last divisions in the House of Commons (on February 7 and 8, when the majority of the great dignitaries of the “great Liberal Party” – Forster, Lowe, Harcourt, Goschen, Hartington and even [on Feb. 7] the great John Bright himself – left their army in the lurch and bolted away from the division in order not to compromise themselves too much altogether by voting) – the only workers' representatives in the House of Commons and moreover, horribile dictu [horrible to relate] direct representatives of the miners, and themselves originally miners – Burt and the miserable Macdonald – voted with the rump of the “great Liberal Party,” the enthusiasts for the Tsar.
> But the rapid development of Russia's plans suddenly broke the spell and shattered the “mechanical agitation” (fivepound notes were the main springs of the machinery); at the moment it would be “physically dangerous” for Mottershead, Howell, John Hales, Shipton, Osborne and the whole gang to let their voices be heard in a public meeting of workers; even their “corner and ticket meetings” are forcibly broken up and dispersed by the masses... <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1878/letters/78_02_11.htm>
Yes, the trail is supposed to lead inevitably to the growth of class consciousness out of the necessary conception of the world imposed by the daily-life experience involved in working in the Steampower mode of production. But the donkey keeps wandering off the trail. And it needs a lot of thwacks to get it back on the path.
In the end of course, it turns into "the beatings will continue until morale improves"...
No doubt the utopian/eschatological spirit is hard to tame, and Christianity is the template. And it is always a task to keep the flock on the straight and narrow.
I've been trying to understand Schumpeter's take on Marx lately, so probably influenced by his fourfold partition of M into Prophet, Economist, Sociologist, and Teacher. S seems to like him best as a economic sociologist./historian in the mould of Weber.
If we ask Weber, of course, it is capitalism that first carries the torch of Calvinist free-will v determinism dilemma. And drawing on both Hegel and British Economists of capitalism, Marx could hardly avoid it. The British economists were all good protestants - Malthus, a pastor no less. As if to prove the point, Ricardo was jewish by birth, but apparently eloped with a quaker and converted to Unitarianism.
I'm now put in mind of your Hayekian slogan in STU "The market giveth and the market taketh away, blessed be the market." And, as well you know, Polanyi thinks it is free market fundamentalism that is dangerously utopian.
Is this what you had in mind in playing your title on "Slouching towards Jerusalem" from Yeats' Second Coming? Just how many theological tropes are there in STU?:)
I'm also put in mind of how the very term Utopia itself goes back to (Saint!) Thomas More's 1516 Utopia, written on the eve of the Reformation (right in the Verge). Marx and Polanyi both cite More's surprisingly modern analysis of how enclosure in northern England is being driven by the international wool trade with Flanders (the green shoots of global capitalism). In the main part of the text, More then presents a quite serviceable depiction of a communist society. But the ambivalence of utopian thought is there from the outset - More hints that the term could be a transliteration of eu-topia -- good place -- or u-topia, no place. I suppose that is his version of why we should at best slouch towards utopia (in this world) rather than run. Not that it stopped him from getting his head chopped off. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of treasury secretaries!
Personally, I think one part of the answer here is what Joseph Heath refers to as Enlightenment 1.x. For very understandable reasons, the folks who started the Enlightenment presumed that applying reason to facts was going to being much easier that it actually is or ever could be, on both ends (human brains are quite limited and collective outcomes exceedingly hard to plan). We desperately need Enlightenment 2.x, in which humility/experimental discipline rides shotgun; yet seem to be compassed all round by forces insisting on doubling down on old obstusenesses. Marx and Engels were very squarely part of this naive First Enlightenment worldview, of what Bertrand Russell called excessively optimistic managerialism. Imagine the old blowhards trying to factor things like cognitive bias and swarm intelligence into their model...It can be done, but only by hugely altering the general tone and trajectory.
There's an old quote that a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. "Red Plenty" turns this around by noting how communism knows the value of everything and the price of nothing.
"What were the classic socialists thinking"? The question begs the broader one of what anti-systemic protestors, of any period, are thinking. Some theorists and commentators -- I'm thinking of David Runciman in his podcast review of Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' -- seem to think that protest's refusal is sufficient, that there is no requirement to be constructive or to have worked out an alternative policy or vision. If the system is the problem, denouncing it and throwing sand in its wheels is part of the solution. Nothing nineteenth century about that attitude.
With our current system, there appears to be an exercise to capture the best of both worlds. A free market economy allows participants to be able to adjust a pivot to changing circumstances, external competition or even changes in technology, and then quickly establish a new equilibrium. The socialists, on the other hand, took more concern with how that free market treated labor, exploiting it, yet, as another commodity input to the product. Labor laws are the result. So today, we want to be able to produce using the latest technology and take advantage of markets that are unaware. For once there is a labor shortage and workers can ask for new incentives to work. Round and round it goes until something new happens.
But who would have thought that a market economy could be built that would work without a myriad of rules and constraints that make epicycles seem simple by comparison? Would an actual socialist system really be more difficult to design given an infrastructure of laws, and regulations that we have for a market economy? Most economies are mixed - markets plus some socialist elements to mitigate some egregious market failures. So why shouldn't the balance change to be socialist with some market elements to ensure flexibility and choice? It seems to me that we use extremes as strawmen, when the goal should be a high standard of living, choice of occupation, incentives to improve, an unpolluted environment to reduce externalities, and limits to inequality.
Who would think that bees and ants could do what they do? But that (swarm intelligence/big-enough groups trying out the options) is part of why greed actually works, insofar as it does (which is pretty far). In hindsight, this might've been known, though it's a fairly obscure point, and the effort only got started a few hundred years ago, if not just in 1870, as our venerable host might argue. But we have also proven that Polanyian social interventions are both possible and crucial, if not always sure to work well.
I think I've commented here before that market based systems and socialist systems are judged by different standards. Socialist systems are deemed a failure if 20% of the population can't get shoes in their preferred color. Market systems are deemed a success even if 20% of the population can't get shoes.
The modern market based system which developed in the 18th & 19th century was amazingly productive, but by the early 19th century it was obvious that its productive capacity would exceed its distributive capacity. 200+ years later, we are still wrestling with the problem. Our market system is pretty good at getting everyone shod, but not near as good at getting everyone a place to live, food security, medical care and other basics. It's hard to call it a roaring success if one recognizes how many businesses rely on government subsidies to supplement their employees wages.
I've been reading Revolutionary Spring, an account of the European convulsions of the early 19th century. I think there was a sons of Martha, sons of Mary split. The sons of Martha could actually do things, run the factories, operate more efficient farms and so on. They were perfectly happy with the system despite its human cost, and, as far as they were concerned, this was the best of all possible worlds. The sons of Mary didn't have a clue of how to do things, but they knew that something was wrong and that things could be better. There's no surprise that they were ineffective, even harmful when granted power. On the other hand, the optimist in me agrees with them that it should be possible to do better.
Well obviously in any economic system housing, food, and health care are going to cost way more than shoes.
That depends on how narrowly you define "economic system". If you mean market based economic system, then yes.
The problem is more than shoe color, though. Why should social justice and poverty eradication require people to wait on line for hours for shitty and non-existent goods and services?
I never said they did. Market systems eliminate the waiting since the prices for shoes are generally known. You can either afford them or not. In the Army, you are issued shoes whether you like the way they look or not. There are lots of hybrid systems that do better than either including our own. We still wind up with people getting suboptimal shoes, but optimizing footwear isn't strictly an economic problem.
I wasn't suggesting you were saying that. But it is an assumption of command socialism. All I'm saying is that the appraisals have to be as fair and consistent as we can make them in this area.
That sounds reasonable.
I especially liked the post-stroke Lenin fixation with education of the proletariat to address the problems of the really existing socialism. Compare that with our need right now for retroactive civics courses in U. S. Secondary Schools!
I wouldn't put a lot of stock in civics courses. Once they were quite common, and now perhaps they're not... but check your local state standards, and they're probably still there, done under other rubrics.
What sticks from anybody's secondary education, unless it becomes central to their employment, or stokes what they're personally interested in, is pretty nugatory.
(Based on 40 years doing high school language instruction.)
You are on a significant track of research and thinking about the perpetual dance between the market and society’s organization.
Anyone who thinks there is "workplace democracy" probably hasn't worked in a workplace. Broadly, most workplaces seem like top-down, authoritarian-like mini systems that vary by the extent of decency (even wisdom) of the people on the top, with promotions/ladder being the implicit (perhaps, explicit) incentive structure.
Yes... But the idea was that once you got workplace democracy plus a light, streamlined, helpful, and efficient bureaucracy for simple coordination, things would be fine...
True, true. It is still mind-boggling that they would imagine such a solution to a set of grievances. They probably didn't specify voting rules that would govern a "workplace democracy." Majoritarian, referenda, ranked voting etc. That's a red flag. The Arrow Impossibility Theorem tells us that a solution to make every happier, so to speak, is likely impossible. So, even if such a system were enforced, there would be considerable dissatisfaction, far from a Utopia it promises. It seems to me that their proposed solution had unaddressed details, within the bigger problems you've outlined.
Well, I think that’s one of the main reasons why social democracy has taken over in most of Europe.
Touché. Perhaps the answer is as simple as the social democrats did recognize reality—and people further to the eft grabbed onto the USSR as a sea-anchor and then tried to read the SDs out of the left-wing movement...
The Mensheviks were right all along.
Whilst ethnography and comparative sociology had not progressed very far by the mid-C19, it was already clear that virtually every large-scale society had invented or adopted market mechanisms for resource allocation and that moreover wherever market means were not used those used instead were despotic to an extent undreamt of in Europe. Surely if it were so trivially easy to find superior non-market mechanisms someone in the preceding four millennia (roughly the extent of the historical horizon at that time) and more ought to have stumbled on one. Is it not remarkable that none of these very clever and seriously well-intentioned theorists ever thought to reflect on this remarkable circumstance.
The usual solution has been a mixed economy, not a market economy as 19th century liberals would know it. For most of history, societies have drawn a line between the ruling class and the business class and ran societies in the interests of the former and granting market freedoms to the latter as it suited their purposes. It was possible to cross that line, but it wasn't usual.
I recommend reading Koyama, Mark; Rubin, Jared (2022): How the world became rich. The historical origins of economic growth. Medford: Polity Press. It might modify your views somewhat.
A roman-a-clef for present day "Progressives?"
As Matt Iglesias said, the conceit that the knew exactly what to do and only needed political power to put it into effect.
Is that the Matty who thinks that food safety laws, regulations, and inspections should be eliminated because they get in the way of the entrepreneurship just waiting to burst out of the lower classes?
No. that must be some other Matt. :)
What were the French revolutionists thinking in 1789 in their confidence that the monarchy could be easy to replace? Cardinal de Richelieu rather prophetically outlined, in the Political Testament he published some 40 years earlier, the chaos and violence that would follow. Chasing, or even Slouching, towards Utopia can be a mighty dangerous thing. I invite you to recall the great book by R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution -- showing how well-meaning, well-adjusted, well-accomplished persons can so easily run things into the ground, once caught up in a movement that has no viable, if any, plans for reconstruction.
I think you might be underestimating the economic determinism of Marx and Engels and thus underestimating the significance of the difference between utopian and scientific socialism. Admittedly Marx and Marxism have struggled to maintain the difference.
For M and E -- as "scientific, economic determinists -- a socialist economy is not something that has to be designed and created. It is not about ideas and theories and the willpower to re-engineer society. For M and E, the economy is already “socializing.” What they see in the industrial revolution is an unprecedented concentration of labor and capital, yielding economies of scale and unprecedented productivity. The era of manufacturing sector dominated by the individual owner-entrepreneur-master craftsman and a handful of apprentices – Adam Smith’s petit-bourgeois economy of butchers, bakers and brewers – is over, at least in the manufacturing sector. The only question is how and when the social and political insinuations will adapt to produce socialized ownership and control, and when the revolution caused by the conflict between socialized production and private ownership will occur. Interestingly, JS Mill makes the same diagnosis, but thinks that an industrial economy will naturally evolve towards workers coops. Mill sees the corporation as precisely the mechanism that will allow this cooperative ownership and management. And, indeed, if worker ownership and management of large enterprises is problematic, private shareholder ownership of large corporations is surely not without similar problems. Mill thinks the cooperative management system will be more efficient than the absentee shareholder system of corporate ownership and management, and thus the coop system will naturally out-compete the shareholder corp. My sense is that Marx and Engels think the long-term tendency is to sectoral monopolies throughout the economy, and, at that point, government public ownership/management/regulation can do no worse than private management - the choice is between state-run capitalism and state-run socialism. Mill concurs, but thinks natural monopolies are rarer and, for the most part, competition between cooperative enterprises can be maintained – so I suppose this makes him a kind of market socialist. But he is well aware of the wastes of competition in areas like postal services and railroads, apparent already in his day. Ultimately, Schumpeter concurs: corporate monopoly capitalism as opposed to monopoly socialism can continue to deliver the goods as a matter of economic efficiency, but private ownership of monopolies by absentee shareholders, who are no longer the entrepreneurs personally running the business, strips bourgeois private property I the means of production of its sociological and political legitimacy.
Similarly, I think it is ultimately wrong to think of Lenin as an orthodox Marxist – whatever generations of Marxists have thought. The orthodox Marxist of Lenin’s day is Georgiy Plekhanov, the “Father of Russian Marxism,” who introduced Lenin to Marx. Plekhanov insisted, quite correctly in my view, that the orthodox Marxist interpretation of the 1917 February revolution was that it was a bourgeois parliamentary revolution against a teetering feudal monarchist system (think Glorious Revolution). Russia, as Marx himself observed, was a far too backwards agrarian society to have an communist revolution. Plekhanov ultimately split with the Bolsheviks and Lenin on just this point, and was consequently lost to history, being recognized neither by the Bolsheviks or Menscheviks. The “utopian” and deeply un-Marxist attempt to forcibly shift Russia from an agrarian to an industrial economy was the first of many economic disasters, resulting in a horrific famine. Despite repeated attempt to force through communist revolutions in developing agrarian countries, it is very clear from Marx that a communist revolution can only occur in a mature industrialized nation, in which the economy has already evolved from small individual ownership and management. Why Russia failed should never be a problem for Marxists, why the UK and later the US never had a communist revolution is more the question.
To take up your other point from Red Plenty – regardless of whether the ownership of large corporate enterprises is private or public or cooperative, the fact remains that modern economies are driven by the economic rationality of economies of scale, and will always be vast enterprises in which individual control (freedom) is heavily diluted. Weber’s iron-cage of bureaucracy is peculiar neither to capitalism or socialism but is an artifact of industrialization.
Apologies for the lengthy post!
There is a strong sense in which Marxism is theology, a Christian heresy, in fact, and so gets inevitably hung up on all the free-will-and-determinism questions: on the one hand praise the LORD, on the other hand pass the ammunition.
Consider Engels to Plekhanov, May 21, 1894:
> Here things are moving, though slowly and in zigzags. Take for instance Mawdsley, the leader of the Lancashire textile workers. He’s a Tory: in politics a Conservative and in religion a devout believer. Three years ago these gentry were violently opposed to the eight-hour day, today they vehemently demand it. In a quite recent manifesto Mawdsley, who last year was a fierce opponent of any separate policy for the working class, declared that the textile workers must take up the question of direct representation in Parliament, and a Manchester labour newspaper calculated that the Lancashire textile workers might control twelve seats in Parliament in this county alone. As you see, it is the Trade Union that will enter Parliament. It is the branch of industry and not the class that demands representation. Still, it is a step forward. Let us first smash the enslavement of the workers to the two big bourgeois parties, let us have textile workers in Parliament just as we already have miners there. As soon as a dozen branches of industry are represented class consciousness will arise of itself.
> The height of comedy is reached in this manifesto when Mawdsley demands bimetallism to maintain the supremacy of English cotton fabrics on the Indian market.
> One is indeed driven to despair by these English workers with their sense of imaginary national superiority, with their essentially bourgeois ideas and viewpoints, with their “practical” narrow-mindedness, with the parliamentary corruption which has seriously infected the leaders. But things are moving none the less. The only thing is that the “practical” English will be the last to arrive, but when they do arrive their contribution will weigh quite heavy in the scale. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_05_21.htm>
Or consider, earlier, Marx to Liebknecht, February 11, 1878:
> The Russians have achieved one good thing; they have exploded England's “great Liberal Party” and made it incapable of governing for a long time to come, whilst the trouble of committing suicide has been officially accomplished for the Tory Party through the traitors Derby and Salisbury (the latter the real driving force of Russia in the Cabinet).
> The English working class had been gradually more and more deeply demoralised by the period of corruption since 1848 and had at last got to the point when they were nothing more than the tail of the great Liberal Party, i.e., henchmen of the capitalists. Their direction had gone completely over into the hands of the corrupt trade union leaders and professional agitators. These fellows shouted and howled behind Gladstone, Bright, Mundella, Morley and the whole gang of factory owners etc., in majorem gloriam [to the greater glory] of the Tsar as emancipator of nations, while they never raised a finger for their own brothers in South Wales, condemned to die of starvation by the mineowners. Wretches! To crown the whole affair worthily, in the last divisions in the House of Commons (on February 7 and 8, when the majority of the great dignitaries of the “great Liberal Party” – Forster, Lowe, Harcourt, Goschen, Hartington and even [on Feb. 7] the great John Bright himself – left their army in the lurch and bolted away from the division in order not to compromise themselves too much altogether by voting) – the only workers' representatives in the House of Commons and moreover, horribile dictu [horrible to relate] direct representatives of the miners, and themselves originally miners – Burt and the miserable Macdonald – voted with the rump of the “great Liberal Party,” the enthusiasts for the Tsar.
> But the rapid development of Russia's plans suddenly broke the spell and shattered the “mechanical agitation” (fivepound notes were the main springs of the machinery); at the moment it would be “physically dangerous” for Mottershead, Howell, John Hales, Shipton, Osborne and the whole gang to let their voices be heard in a public meeting of workers; even their “corner and ticket meetings” are forcibly broken up and dispersed by the masses... <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1878/letters/78_02_11.htm>
Yes, the trail is supposed to lead inevitably to the growth of class consciousness out of the necessary conception of the world imposed by the daily-life experience involved in working in the Steampower mode of production. But the donkey keeps wandering off the trail. And it needs a lot of thwacks to get it back on the path.
In the end of course, it turns into "the beatings will continue until morale improves"...
No doubt the utopian/eschatological spirit is hard to tame, and Christianity is the template. And it is always a task to keep the flock on the straight and narrow.
I've been trying to understand Schumpeter's take on Marx lately, so probably influenced by his fourfold partition of M into Prophet, Economist, Sociologist, and Teacher. S seems to like him best as a economic sociologist./historian in the mould of Weber.
If we ask Weber, of course, it is capitalism that first carries the torch of Calvinist free-will v determinism dilemma. And drawing on both Hegel and British Economists of capitalism, Marx could hardly avoid it. The British economists were all good protestants - Malthus, a pastor no less. As if to prove the point, Ricardo was jewish by birth, but apparently eloped with a quaker and converted to Unitarianism.
I'm now put in mind of your Hayekian slogan in STU "The market giveth and the market taketh away, blessed be the market." And, as well you know, Polanyi thinks it is free market fundamentalism that is dangerously utopian.
Is this what you had in mind in playing your title on "Slouching towards Jerusalem" from Yeats' Second Coming? Just how many theological tropes are there in STU?:)
I'm also put in mind of how the very term Utopia itself goes back to (Saint!) Thomas More's 1516 Utopia, written on the eve of the Reformation (right in the Verge). Marx and Polanyi both cite More's surprisingly modern analysis of how enclosure in northern England is being driven by the international wool trade with Flanders (the green shoots of global capitalism). In the main part of the text, More then presents a quite serviceable depiction of a communist society. But the ambivalence of utopian thought is there from the outset - More hints that the term could be a transliteration of eu-topia -- good place -- or u-topia, no place. I suppose that is his version of why we should at best slouch towards utopia (in this world) rather than run. Not that it stopped him from getting his head chopped off. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of treasury secretaries!
Oh, I had many, many tropes in mind... :-)
Personally, I think one part of the answer here is what Joseph Heath refers to as Enlightenment 1.x. For very understandable reasons, the folks who started the Enlightenment presumed that applying reason to facts was going to being much easier that it actually is or ever could be, on both ends (human brains are quite limited and collective outcomes exceedingly hard to plan). We desperately need Enlightenment 2.x, in which humility/experimental discipline rides shotgun; yet seem to be compassed all round by forces insisting on doubling down on old obstusenesses. Marx and Engels were very squarely part of this naive First Enlightenment worldview, of what Bertrand Russell called excessively optimistic managerialism. Imagine the old blowhards trying to factor things like cognitive bias and swarm intelligence into their model...It can be done, but only by hugely altering the general tone and trajectory.
Shorter communists: MOAR ENGINEERS!
Shorter DeLong: MOAR ENGINEERS!
The distinction is that DeLong knows that moar engineers are necessary but not sufficient.
There's an old quote that a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. "Red Plenty" turns this around by noting how communism knows the value of everything and the price of nothing.
"What were the classic socialists thinking"? The question begs the broader one of what anti-systemic protestors, of any period, are thinking. Some theorists and commentators -- I'm thinking of David Runciman in his podcast review of Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' -- seem to think that protest's refusal is sufficient, that there is no requirement to be constructive or to have worked out an alternative policy or vision. If the system is the problem, denouncing it and throwing sand in its wheels is part of the solution. Nothing nineteenth century about that attitude.
With our current system, there appears to be an exercise to capture the best of both worlds. A free market economy allows participants to be able to adjust a pivot to changing circumstances, external competition or even changes in technology, and then quickly establish a new equilibrium. The socialists, on the other hand, took more concern with how that free market treated labor, exploiting it, yet, as another commodity input to the product. Labor laws are the result. So today, we want to be able to produce using the latest technology and take advantage of markets that are unaware. For once there is a labor shortage and workers can ask for new incentives to work. Round and round it goes until something new happens.
Except that labor laws are "manage" and not "replace" the market economy...