In Theory…
Back in the mid-1990s at one point I spent a fair amount of time at Revolution Books which, at the time, was located near my house by Union Square. Heavily featured in the store was a book by Bob Avakian called Phony Communism is Dead . . . Long Live Real Communism. Avakian, you see, is chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. The mid-1990s were a problematic period for Communists, of course, because of the whole fall of the Soviet Union thing. But fortunately for Avakian, RCP-USA was (and is) a Maoist party. Consequently, he was able to lean on this to indicate that the Soviet Union’s failure merely demonstrated the failure of the wrong kind (i.e., non-Maoist) of Communism. Its failure for good news for Maoism because it would open up space on the left for the real deal.
This kind of thing was quite common in far-left circles at the time. My grandfather told me about how the Soviet Union wasn’t real Marxism, and real Marxist governance had never been tried, and my uncle explained to me about how Stalin had betrayed Lenin’s original vision.
There’s some truth to all this. Consequently, I have some sympathy with Cato’s David Boaz feebly protesting that the current economic crisis can’t discredit laissez faire because real laissez faire has never been tried:
[I]f this crisis leads us to question “American-style capitalism” — the kind in which a central monetary authority manipulates money and credit, the central government taxes and redistributes $3 trillion a year, huge government-sponsored enterprises create a taxpayer-backed duopoly in the mortgage business, tax laws encourage excessive use of debt financing, and government pressures banks to make bad loans — well, it might be a good thing to reconsider that “American-style capitalism.”
I sympathize, but there’s something vaguely ridiculous about this. It amounts to saying that we can’t make any judgments about libertarian policy ideas unless and until we empirically test what would happen if we adopting sweeping and unrealistic changes to American government and economic policy — abolition of the federal reserve, etc. (and, NB, there was no “duopoly” in the mortgage business and I’d be surprised if Cato even believes in “duopoly” as a precept of anti-trust policy). You can take that view if you want, but it means accepting total Avakian-style marginalization on the other hand. You can’t just opportunistically retreat to this view when convenient, and then wade into real-world policy disputes.
52 Responses to “In Theory…”
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October 20th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I’m working my way through Naomi Campbell’s “Disaster Capitalism” right now. I’m only a little way in, and my history is spotty generally, but she seems to argue that “real” Chicago School theories were put to the test in Chile.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I remember those days at Revolution Books and the banner that hung in the window:
Mao More than Ever
October 20th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
I remember when the Soviet Union fell I went to a meeting of the University of Chicago communists out of curiosity to how they were dealing with this issue. (I was a graduate student at UIC at the time but taking a class on the philosophy of general relativity at U of C at the time.)
Their explanation was the second one suggested above. They believe Lenin had set up the ideal system of government, but that that evil Stalin had stepped in and messed everything up.
They didn’t seem to see that the ideal system of defintion of necessity is one that cannot be messed up by one evil person stepping in.
Anyone the right age to be on college campuses knows that it was not the fall of the Soviets that was the crushing blow. It was the fall of Albania which in the more absurd circles was being touted as a workers paradise, mostly because no news was coming out, so the idea that it was a worker’s paradise was consistent with the information coming out.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Matt, surely you read this post by David Boaz, as well:
October 20th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Naomi Campbell’s “Disaster Capitalism”
I’m pretty sure you meant Naomi Wolf.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
The Trotskyite position was that the system in the former Soviet Union was really state capitalism. Their posters used to read private capitalism, state capitalism, no difference.
I once attended a lecture by the former head of the California Communist Party, Dorothy Healy, in which, after brushing off the questions from the conservatives in the audience she was flummoxed by a questioner who asked if it was in fact the case that the economic system installed by Lenin and Stalin was really state capitalism.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Whoops. That’s Naomi Klein. Can’t tell the players without a program.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Oops…
October 20th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
LMAO. Post of the year.
I’ve always thought the similarities between modern conservative thought and Communist ideology are striking. It’s almost as if spending your whole life fiercely opposed to something turns you into a mirror image of what you hate…
October 20th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Maoism may promise (for some) the cure to what ails Communism, but Maoism has its own disappointments. I spent a year in the early ’90s in China and got to know an American disillusioned ex-Maoist who was disgusted by Maoism’s failings there, and had become convinced that the solution lay with the model presented by the Shining Path. He was deadly serious about this.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Naomi Klein’s conflation of Milton Friedman with Bush-style crony capitalism has been discredited by liberals and libertarians alike.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
In other words, what John Quiggin said at CT.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I think this would be a good time to re-read Naomi Watts’ Disaster Capitalism, or even Naomi Judd’s The End of America.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
“You can’t just opportunistically retreat to this view when convenient, and then wade into real-world policy disputes.”
Yes. It’s a bait and switch. He wants to tempt us with the immaculate image of pristine libertarianism, which has never been given a real chance, he claims, and then use that temptation to get us to go along with incremental libertarian reforms. It’s not as if he’s against lowering top marginal tax rates or deregulating bankiung until the complete revolutionary laissez-faire program can be implemented.
It’s really beside the point, for most moderate democratic-minded people, whether some ideal has been fully tried or not. We’re not in a political order where we can implement ideal systems in one stroke, nor should we be. We’re in a political order where we can make reforms to an existing system which will largely remain intact. And the fact that Boaz wants to preserve the legitimacy of some ideal which we should really implement and which democratic regimes have so far refused to implement should be troubling.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
The similarity between the neo-libs and communists becomes apparent every time Mr. Andrea Mitchell opens his mouth. Why, everything would have turned out fine if only X, Y, and Z. If you have an ideology that doesn’t work in the real world, then its a failed ideology, period, so STFU already.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
“Free Bob Avakian! Release the Mao Tse-Tung Defendants!”
-Graffito abundant in D.C. ca. 1980.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
That’s more Naomi’s than you can through a cell phone at.
So can we get one of those on-line personality tests to determine if you’re a Marxist, Lenninist, Maoist, Trotskyite, Stalinist, Utopian Socialist, Socialist, or Anarcho-syndicalist?
October 20th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
>And the fact that Boaz wants to preserve the legitimacy of some ideal which we should really implement and which democratic regimes have so far refused to implement should be troubling.
This sentence is troubling. The fact that democratic governments have yet to implement something doesn’t inherently render that thing invalid. History is full of ideas/policies that, while democratic governments are/were reluctant to implement, are actually good things. Abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, gay rights, civil rights…these were all met with resistance, but that doesn’t invalidate their merit as good ideas.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Wilkinson on this here: http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/10/20/weisberg-fail/
“So what to make of the light-years-from-libertarian ideological assumptions behind the rest of the regulatory regime? Why, nothing at all! And that’s what it means to be a hack.”
October 20th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
“Back in the mid-1990s at one point I spent a fair amount of time at Revolution Books which, at the time, was located near my house by Union Square.”
Can you imagine what Republicans would do with this post if Yglesias ran for office, or served as a campaign advisor.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
You all laugh at these far-left schisms, but I had a great chuckle when I voted last week in Canada’s silly attempt at democratic exercise: in my riding there was a candidate for the Communist Party *and* the Marxist-Lenninists. If ever these two could combine forces, they just might crack 1% of the protest vote…
October 20th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
State socialism — whether Soviet or Maoist — stands absolutely contrary to the vision of libertarian socialism that both sides of the First International shared.
Why do socialists continue to waste time with these failed projects? Its humiliating.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Can you imagine what Republicans would do with this post if Yglesias ran for office, or served as a campaign advisor.
What’s more troubling is that the rabid demonization of Marx is even more entrenched than it was during the cold war.
Whether you want to seize control of the factories or not, Analytical Marxism is a cornerstone of postmodern Western thought. I can’t imagine trying to understand the world without it. It’s not necessary that one agree with its tenets–particularly its economic extensions–but you have to be able to use it as a tool to gain perspective on the world around you.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
“Free Bob Avakian!”
-Graffito on an East I-96 overpass in Detroit ca. 1980
“Who the fuck is Bob Avakian?”
- Graffito on the next overpass.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Isn’t this about the time that the country’s leading financiers & entrepreneurs disappear underground to their secret hideout in Jackson Hole, or whereever, & John Gault issues their ultimatum to the world’s governments in 60 pages of tiny type?
October 20th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
A political philosophy that demands a reboot from history and complete purity in order to work?
That’s a loser.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Re Lon’s comment “They didn’t seem to see that the ideal system of defintion of necessity is one that cannot be messed up by one evil person stepping in.”
—————
So where does that put the US government vis a vis Dick Cheney?
October 20th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
This whole business about the real laissez-faire never having been tried is the purest moonshine. Between 1850 and 1900 the huge evolving financial combinations were so new and powerful that people could hardly even imagine how to regulate them.
And the result was pure disaster. The country was in continuous economic and social turmoil as wave after wave of depression wiped out small savers repeatedly. Hundreds of people were killed each year in steamboat explosions and thousands of railway workers were killed or maimed each year for 20 years after the automatic coupler and airbrake were invented. White flour was best because, instead of being adulterated with plain dirt, it was adulterated with chalk, a mildly more digestible substance.
What we learned then was that if the government did not regulate the industries, the largest companies would rule everyone else with an iron hand. Any ‘real’ laisez-faire turns almost instantly into lese-majeste.
The current crisis does discredit laissez-faire- we didn’t get here by regulating financial industries too stringently- but it’s an afterthought. Laissez-faire was discredited a century ago and nobody was more eager than America’s businesses to bring the excesses of that period to a close.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
There are many similarities between these laments but they differ in a few regards. There have been a couple of examples of actual existing communism/socialism of whatever stripe in areas of the world. They just didn’t end up working so well, or at least in no way constituted a paradise. The argument from the apologists that the failure of these states was due to the inability/refusal of many quite dedicated civilians and civil servants to implement/practice the one true faith properly reveals that end state to be the fantastic pipedream it is.
There really has been no true libertarian laissez-faire state as dreamed by the libertarians. However, reasonably intelligent people see the results of policies similar to, more in the direction, or of the essence of what the libertarians desire and see the apologetics from libertarians for those results as actually being the fault of the little regulation that remained and draw their own conclusions.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Serial, Please learn.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
But that was only because those governments weren’t real democracies. True democracy has never been tried!!
I’m mostly joking lamely, but it’s worth noting that your first two examples of good ideas that were long in coming even in democracies — slavery abolition and women’s suffrage — doubtless would have come much sooner if all adults had been allowed a formal say in the matter.
October 20th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Ideologies always fail, as they cannot be implemented.
Classic liberalism is the anti ideology ideology because it recognizes people always work for their own self interest and it’s obvious from every ideological experiment ever tried as a governing model, exceptions to the pure ideology take place on the first day and every day thereafter, to the benefit of those in power.
Libertarians are the saddest sort of wankers in this regard. There is no arguing with them of course. As communism didn’t fail because it was never tried the same will hold true, forever, for libertarians and conservatives. Don’t waste your energy arguing with them.
October 20th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Ergonomic Slingshot, I’m willing to learn! & you know why? Because the argument you link to is anti-capitalist.
That is, if capital means a big pile of money w/which to make investments, your laissez faire is not capitalism. Such piles require the state sanctioned appropriations you descry. Your laissez faire is a nation of shopkeepers. Which is cool by me!
I’m a big fan of anti-capitalist arguments. Teach me, master!
October 20th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Christ, people are now linking to Art of the Possible posts like they’re serious history. What have you wrought, Jim Henley?
October 20th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
It amounts to saying that we can’t make any judgments about libertarian policy ideas unless and until we empirically test what would happen if we adopting sweeping and unrealistic changes to American government and economic policy — abolition of the federal reserve, etc.
The problem is that it is very difficult, as a general rule, to discover political principles from empirical research of the effects of policy. There are always confounding factors. This is what makes social science in general so hard in comparison to the other sciences. Informative, unbiased experimentation is pretty much an impossibility.
Without the scientist’s best tool, the unbiased experiment, we are reduced to using subjective data analysis. But this is just as true for policies which are actually tried as policies which aren’t. If you adopt policies A,B,C and experience a decade of economic growth, this in no way demonstrates that A,B,C are actually conductive of economic growth. Perhaps D,E,F would be even better. This is just the way social science works. It is silly to say: bad outcome happened under libertarian policy X, therefore libertarianism is discredited. You really have to come up with a logical story for why the policy actually led to the outcome experienced, and anyone can come up with a competing story which can be judged superior or inferior based on one’s logical intuition and the data at hand. It is the stories that matter, and not some kind of test of correlation.
October 20th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I’m working my way through Naomi Campbell’s “Disaster Capitalism” right now. I’m only a little way in, and my history is spotty generally, but she seems to argue that “real” Chicago School theories were put to the test in Chile.
Here’s an interesting review of Naomi Campbell’s sexy theorizing from a left perspecive.
Great post Matt. At the University of Texas Austin, I witnessed a public event debate between the free market Objectivists and the International Socialists Borg Collective campus group. They sort of spoke past each other.
October 20th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
(I was a graduate student at UIC at the time but taking a class on the philosophy of general relativity at U of C at the time.)
And this little tidbit of information is relevant to your point … how????????????????
Douche!
October 20th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
“>And the fact that Boaz wants to preserve the legitimacy of some ideal which we should really implement and which democratic regimes have so far refused to implement should be troubling.”
“This sentence is troubling. The fact that democratic governments have yet to implement something doesn’t inherently render that thing invalid.”
You’re right. What I should have said is that it seems virtually impossible that democratic publics will ever implement Boaz’s program fully and completely all at once and continue with it no matter how much it hurts. But that’s exactly what he’s demanding–a complete, unsullied economic system without any meddling from stupid redistributive democratic publics. That’s what anti-democratic libertarians have wanted for a long time–economic and even fiscal policy off-limits to democratic accoutnability and decisionmaking–and that’s what they largely got in the days of economic substantive due process in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
October 20th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Oh, I stand corrected- it seems laissez-faire was never really tried, because people actually enjoyed undisturbed title to lands.
This is just pathetic.
In reality, the imposition of strict rule by the most powerful is not the failure to try laissez-faire, it is the result of laissez-faire.
When John Rockefeller wanted to do something, he didn’t depend on a law to make it possible, and it wasn’t regulation of the marketplace that kept laissez-faire from cutting John Rockefeller down to size.
When Rockefeller needed a law to support him, he bought a judge. When he needed force to support his claim to title, he hired goons to kill people. When he needed economics to drive competitors under, he used money to make the economics laws work for him.
What Rockefeller did wasn’t constrained by law, economics, or morality. That’s laissez-faire, we tried it, and it didn’t work.
October 20th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Another one of Matt’s egregious and stupid anti-libertarian posts.
If Matt had any fucking clue about libertarianism, instead of his made-up version in his own mind, he’d know that almost nothing the US government or the Republican Party is about has anything whatever to do with “libertarianism”, despite the bullshit you get from various right wing clowns, including the Cato Institute.
Instead, he’d rather snark.
For other idiots, the “Chicago School” is NOT libertarianism, despite the fact that many so-called “libertarians” like Milton Friedman. In fact, Friedman’s son wrote a book on anarchism at one point, which was a lot closer to libertarianism than his father ever got.
In fact, the “Austrian School” is NOT libertarian either, despite the fact that Ayn Rand liked Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. The closest the Austrian School got to libertarianism was Murray Rothbard’s take on it.
However, as a radical Transhumanist, I am the first to say that libertarianism or anarchism can’t work – because humans don’t work.
Fortunately, we Transhumans have a solution to that. But you won’t like it, either.
Have a nice day, chimps.
October 20th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
I think that Alec Nove gives a good summary of why the Soviet Union, and other states built on a similar idea, ultimately collapsed, and what aspects of that collapse were necessary vs. contingent. (That said, I wouldn’t overstate the ‘collapse’- Marxist-influenced socialism has been making something of a comeback in Latin America, and of course it’s still a going concern in Cuba.)
The most important problem with the Soviet Union, China and their allies was, of course, that they fell under the sway of tyrants like Mao and Stalin. It’s true in a strict sense that we can’t really conclude too much about communism as an ideal. Nevertheless, we can take some warnings and guidelines from their sad experiences. In the foreseeable future, any feasible socialism should have a place for material incentives (as well as a place for moral incentives), should rely on the market as much as possible (like in Yugoslavia), should have a place for the smallholder and the peasant, for religion, and for human virtues like mercy and charity.
I used to get into arguments all the time with the people from Revolution Books….they weren’t big fans either of Cuba or Yugoslavia as I recall.
October 20th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
The RCP is holding major programs in NYC and LA on “Making Revolution in the U.S.” Think anyone interested in Revolution should check it out…and/or the Party’s new Manifesto. And instead of just spouting off tired old anti-communist dogma, maybe engage with the actual substance of what Avakian is putting forward. Just a thought.
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