Marxism, p.20
Marxism, page 20
Some Marxists—notably Eduard Bernstein and his followers among the German Social Democrats—revised Marxian theory. Lenin, however, took the position that capitalism itself had been revised. Lenin spoke of a "new capitalism,"[906] different from that of Marx's time—a capitalism which, since the beginning of the twentieth century was "transformed into imperialism."[907] The new capitalists do not merely exploit their own proletariat but "plunder the whole world" and out of their "enormous super-profits" are able to bribe the leaders and upper strata of the working class into acceptance of capitalism. Thus there are in imperialist nation "millions of toilers who live in more or less bourgeois conditions of life."[908]
Despite "the prodigious increase of capital, which overflows the brim,"[909] capitalism escapes catastrophic crises at home by "exporting capital abroad to the backward countries."[910] This "necessity for exporting capital," according to Lenin, arises because "capital cannot find 'profitable' investment" at home.[911] But this is no permanent solution for capitalism. Once "the world is completely divided up" by imperialist nations, only redivision is possible[912] and redivision means war among the imperialists, hastening the end of capitalism. Thus imperialism is at the same time the highest stage of capitalism and the era of "the parasitism and decay of capitalism."[913]
Lenin's classic work Imperialism contained much statistical data—but it was used to illustrate, rather than to test, his theory. Imperialism documented extensively what was never at issue—that foreign investments were growing,[914] that railroad track mileage was increasing around the world,[915] that bank deposits were growing,[916] etc. What was not tested was the central proposition that "backward countries" played a major role in absorbing foreign investment capital. Lenin tried to insinuate this instead.
After adding together the total foreign investments of Britain, France, and Germany, and presenting the total with a long string of zeroes, Lenin asked: "Where does it go?" This crucial question he never answered. He claimed to give "an approximate answer."[917] But the flaw in this answer, even as an approximation, was that the categories of investment recipients were whole continents and even multiple continents added together. Lenin put the recipients of foreign investments into three vast categories: "Europe," "America" (i.e., the entire Western Hemisphere), and—as one category—"Asia, Africa, and Australia." The enormous range of industrial and non-industrial countries in each of these categories made it impossible for his data to show whether foreign investments were flowing from industrial economies to non-industrial economies, or vice versa.
Statistical data on a country-by-country basis show very nearly the opposite of what Lenin claimed. Industrial nations tend to send their foreign investments to other industrial nations, rather than to industrially undeveloped nations. The United States, for example, has more invested in Canada than in Asia and Africa put together—and it has more invested in Europe than in Canada.[918] In Marxian jargon, it was "no accident" that Lenin chose such loose categories. Even his own table of Imperialism showed that France and Germany each had more than twice as much invested in "Europe" as in all of "Asia, Africa, and Australia" put together.[919]
The logic of Lenin's economic argument was that "surplus capital" that would otherwise produce crises in industrial nations. But if instead it is largely re-shuffled among industrial nations, this does not serve as a safety valve for capitalist nations as a whole. Nor can the rise of workers' incomes in industrial capitalist nations then be depicted as the fruits of exploitation in non-industrial countries. Indeed, it is by no means clear that there is any net flow of capital to the non-industrial world, given the propensity of the more affluent classes in less developed countries to put their money in Swiss bank accounts, American corporations, and other investments in the industrial nations.
Human Capital
In common with Marx and other believers in "exploitation" as the explanation of profits and income disparities , Lenin paid little attention to the role of human capital, except to dismiss or discredit its significance—before he came to power. But after being in power for a few years, and discovering the catastrophic effects of neglecting this factor, his later writings reflected a new respect for skills, administrative abilities, and other forms of human capital. He did not, however, take this new insight all the way back to his fundamental vision of "exploitation" as the explanation of income disparities among classes and nations.
On the eve of revolution, Lenin declared that measures for controlling and directing the society were "generally known and easy to put into effect."[920] He said:
Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc. and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old "state power" have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simply operations of registration, filing and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary "workmen's wages"...[921]
Lenin admitted that a revolutionary government could not immediately "dispense with subordination, control and foremen and bookkeepers,"[922] but argued that such people need receive "salaries no higher than a workman's wage" while "under the control of the armed proletariat."[923] In short, power was all that was really needed to coordinate social processes. Lenin saw "accounting and control" as the key variables that capitalism had already "reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations—which any literate person can perform—of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts."[924] He rejected Kautsky's claim that bureaucracy would remain under socialism, for these very simple functions required no permanent class of functionaries, but only easily replaceable individual with no economic priviledge or official grandeur.[925]
Once in power, however, Lenin discovered how much more complicated it all was. Within a few years he was writing of a "fuel crisis" that "threatens to disrupt all Soviet work,"[926] of "ruin, starvation, and devastation" in the land,[927] of "famine" and even admitted that peasant uprising had become a "common occurrence" under his regime.[928] Factories were closed for lack of raw material, and peasants were destroying their own grain and livestock rather than see them requisitioned by the Communists.[929] Workers demonstrated against Lenin in Petrograd—and their leaders were shot by the Soviet police.[930] Thousands of sailors, who had been staunch supporters of Lenin before, revolted in Kronstadt—and were massacred by the Red Army.[931]
At this desperate juncture, Lenin announced his New Economic Policy, allowing peasants and small capitalists to sell in the marketplace. He also drastically revised his view of the importance of skills. Lenin declared before the Communist Part Congress in 1920 that "we need people who are versed in the art of administration," and admitted that "there is nowhere we can turn to for such people except the old class."[932] As the New Economic Policy unfolded, Lenin came down hard on the side of capitalist management prerogatives, including "authority independently to fix wages" in order to make each business "pay its own way" to produce "increasing profits," with attention to "carefully selecting the most talented and capable administrative personnel."[933] He warned that "all direct interference by the trade unions in the management of factories must be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible."[934] Indeed, he declared the role of trade unions to be "to act as mediators" between workers and management,[935] and their success to be judged by "the degree to which they succeed in averting mass disputes."[936] In his 1920 address to the Communist Party Congress, Lenin declared: "Opinions on corporate management are all too frequently imbued with a spirit of sheer ignorance, an anti-expert spirit."[937] He did not say who had promoted such a spirit, but his own ideas on this subject had now turned completely around.
An Assessment
Marx and Engels argued that an individual or an era must be judged not by what they intend or conceive, but by what they actually accomplish.[938] Marxism itself cannot be exempt from this standard. What Marx accomplished was to produce such a comprehensive, dramatic, and fascinating vision that it could withstand innumerable empirical contradictions, logical refutations, and moral revulsions at its effects. The Marxian vision took the overwhelming complexity of the real world and made the parts fall into place, in a way that was intellectually exhilarating and conferred such sense of moral superiority that opponents could be simply labeled and dismissed as moral lepers or blind reactionaries. Marxism was—and remains—a mighty instrument for the acquisition and maintenance of political power. Once such an instrument has come into existence, those who wield the enormous power makes it possible have every incentive to use it and preserve it for their own purposes, regardless of what purposes may have motivated Marx or Engels.
But however instrumental Marxism becomes in the hands of latter-day power-wielders, its intellectual structure and foundation do not become irrelevant. On the contrary. Precisely as it is applied in the real world, intellectual flaws and blemishes too slight to be noticed amid the heady rhetoric become manifest in terms as concrete as hunger, terror, and death. Lenin was unique in having to confront the failure of his assumptions and having to improvise an alternative while literally millions died around him—some from starvation and others slaughtered by his secret police and the Red Army, both of whom drowned in blood the revolt of the very masses whose name he ruled.
While in one sense this represented the unfolding of erroneous assumptions implicit in Marxism, in a larger sense it represented the hubris of imagining that a whole society could be constructed from the ground up on the vision of one man, rather than evolving from the experience of millions, spread over the generations or centuries. It is not simply that Marx happened to be unequal to the task, but that anyone was foredoomed to be unequal to such a task.
Despite choosing a world stage on which to operate, Marx's vision was a very insular one. Much of Marx's conception of the capitalist and of the capitalist economy reflected the insularity of the urban intellectual. Marx repeatedly depicted and disdained the capitalist entrepreneur as an uncultured parvenu[939]—someone lacking in bookish accomplishments, as if these were the universal litmus tests of contributions to society. Marx's own life was the most overwhelming evidence that bookish accomplishments and economic effectiveness had no necessary correlation. Similar narrowness and snobbery were evident toward what the Communist Manifesto called "the idiocy of rural life"[940]—a foretaste of Marxists' inability to take farmers seriously, or to manage agriculture effectively.
The Marxist constituency has remained as narrow as the conception behind it. The Communist Manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods—much less for the social consequences of their vision—has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people. The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements from the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and their lesser counterparts around the world and down through history. The sheer reiteration of the "working class" theme in Marxism has drowned out this plain fact. But the crucial point is not privilege, as such, but the insulation from responsibility that provides, particularly during youth.
Intellectuals enjoy a similar insulation from the consequences of being wrong, in a way that no businessman, military leader, engineer or even athletic coach can. Intellectuals and the young have remained historically the groups most susceptible to Marxism—even though the young have often abandoned it as they grew older and more experienced, being replaced by ever renewed sources of more youths following in their wake.
The disjuncture between vision and experience was nowhere better illustrated than in the traumatic post-revolutionary experience of Lenin, as he applied the Marxist vision and watched a whole nation sink into economic chaos and starvation by the millions. The Leninist-Stalinist modifications—or "betrayals"—of Marxism have mitigated the severity of the Soviet Union's economic problems, but at the cost of turning a humanitarian creed into a ruthless mode of power consolidation. Both denunciations and apologetics for this often miss the point that a vision departs from reality must either be abandoned or changed.
Despite the massive intellectual feat that Marx's Capital represents, the Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx ever existed. This neither denies nor denigrates Capital as an intellectual achievement, and perhaps in its way the culmination of classical economics. But the development of modern economics had simply ignored Marx. Even economists who are Marxists typically utilize a set of analytical tools to which Marx contributed nothing, and have recourse to Marx only for ideological, political, or historical purposes.
In professional economics, Capital was a detour into a blind alley, however historic it may be as the centerpiece of a worldwide political movement. What is said and done in its name is said and done largely by people who have never read through it, much less followed its labyrinthine reasoning from its arbitrary postulates to its empirically false conclusions. Instead, the massive volumes of Capital have become a quasi-magic touchstone—a source of assurance that somewhere and somehow a genius "proved" capitalism to be wrong and doomed, even if the specifics of this proof are unknown to those who take their certitude from it.
In agriculture especially, Marxists' grand dismissals of what they did not understand had far-reaching practical consequences, including desperate food shortages in modern Communist nations, dependence on grain imports from the West, Stalin's wholesale slaughter of the kulaks, and innumerable agricultural reforms—the most effective of which proved to be allowing some portion of agriculture to operate through a market system. In the Soviet Union, the market sector occupies only about 2 percent of the farm land, but produces about 30 percent of Soviet agricultural output.[941]
The supreme irony of Marxism was that a fundamentally humane and egalitarian creed was so dominated by a bookish perspective that it became blind to facts and dead to humanity and freedom. Yet the moral vision and the intellectual aura of Marxism continued to disarm critics, quiet doubters, and put opponents on the moral defensive. It has provided both intellectual and moral insulation for those who wield power in its name. Some of the most distinguished names in Western civilization—George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, among others—have become apologists for brutal dictatorships ruling in the name of Marx and committing atrocities that they would never countenance under any other label. People who could never be corrupted by money or power may nevertheless be blinded by a vision. In this context, there are grim implications to Engels' claim that Marx's name and work "will endure through the ages."
* * *
[1] Karl Marx, "The Leading Article of No. 179 of Kölische Zeitung," K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), p. 31.
[2] Georg Wilhelm Frederich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), pp. 410-411.
[3] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1919), p. 823.
[4] Ibid., p. 25.
[5] Ibid., p. 24. See also Ibid., p. 22.
[6] Joseph A Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 392.
[7] A landmark in this particular approach was Paul A. Samuelson, "Wages and Interest: a Modern Dissection of Marxian Economic Models," American Economic Review, December 1957, pp. 884-992. Other distinguished economists have managed to tie Samuelson's record for zero citations from Marx in a scholarly critique of Marxism. For example, Martin Bronfenbrenner, "Das Kapital for the Modern Man," Science and Society, Fall 1965, pp. 419-438; William Fellner, Modern Economic Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1960), pp. 121-141. Others who came close to these performances in ignoring Marx while discussing "Marxism" include Fred M. Gottheil, "Increasing Misery of the Proletariat," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, February 1962, pp. 103-113.
[8] For example, Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 6, 65, 66, 69-70, 72, 86, 93, 143, 144, 153, 178n-179n, 229, 235; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row Brothers Publishers, 1950), pp. 11, 39n; David McLellan, Engels (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), pp. 69, 70-71, 73; John Weeks, Capital and Exploitation (Princeton University Press, 1981), 8, 26, 28, 36, 41, 53, 57, 61, 62, 93, 94.
[9] Saul K. Padover, Karl Marx (New American Library, 1980), p. 190.
[10] Robert Payne, Marx (Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 269. See also Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science [Anti-Düring] (International Publishers, 1939), P. 13; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II, pp. 7-8.
[11] "The semi-Hegelian language of a good many passages in my old book is not only untranslatable but has lost the greater part of its meaning even in German." Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Letters to Americans, translated by Leonard E. Mins (New York: International Publishers, 1953), p. 151. See also J.A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 438n; Allen Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 3-15, 189-206; Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Heyel and The Rise of Social Theory, 2nd edition (New York: The Humanities Press, 1954), passim.
[12] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1919), pp. 24-25; Karl Marx, Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1904), pp. 292-294; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, translated by Dona Torr (New York: International Publishers, 1942), p. 496.
[13] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1919), p. 25.
[14] Frederick Engels, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy," Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, edited by Lewis S. Feuer (Anchor Books, 1959(, p. 219; Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science [Anti-Düring] (International Publishers, 1939), p. 117; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, translated by Dona Torr (International Publishers, 1942), p. 485n; Karl Marx, "Wage Labour And Capital," Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Volume I (Foreign Languages Published House, 1955), p. 83; Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 548-549; Frederick Engels, Engels on Capital, translated & edited by Leonard E. Mins (International Publishers Co., Inc., 1937), p. 60; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, pp. 71, 77, 124, 128, 132, 139, 146, 162, 837; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II, pp. 36, 51, 59, 112, 120, 130, 131.
Despite "the prodigious increase of capital, which overflows the brim,"[909] capitalism escapes catastrophic crises at home by "exporting capital abroad to the backward countries."[910] This "necessity for exporting capital," according to Lenin, arises because "capital cannot find 'profitable' investment" at home.[911] But this is no permanent solution for capitalism. Once "the world is completely divided up" by imperialist nations, only redivision is possible[912] and redivision means war among the imperialists, hastening the end of capitalism. Thus imperialism is at the same time the highest stage of capitalism and the era of "the parasitism and decay of capitalism."[913]
Lenin's classic work Imperialism contained much statistical data—but it was used to illustrate, rather than to test, his theory. Imperialism documented extensively what was never at issue—that foreign investments were growing,[914] that railroad track mileage was increasing around the world,[915] that bank deposits were growing,[916] etc. What was not tested was the central proposition that "backward countries" played a major role in absorbing foreign investment capital. Lenin tried to insinuate this instead.
After adding together the total foreign investments of Britain, France, and Germany, and presenting the total with a long string of zeroes, Lenin asked: "Where does it go?" This crucial question he never answered. He claimed to give "an approximate answer."[917] But the flaw in this answer, even as an approximation, was that the categories of investment recipients were whole continents and even multiple continents added together. Lenin put the recipients of foreign investments into three vast categories: "Europe," "America" (i.e., the entire Western Hemisphere), and—as one category—"Asia, Africa, and Australia." The enormous range of industrial and non-industrial countries in each of these categories made it impossible for his data to show whether foreign investments were flowing from industrial economies to non-industrial economies, or vice versa.
Statistical data on a country-by-country basis show very nearly the opposite of what Lenin claimed. Industrial nations tend to send their foreign investments to other industrial nations, rather than to industrially undeveloped nations. The United States, for example, has more invested in Canada than in Asia and Africa put together—and it has more invested in Europe than in Canada.[918] In Marxian jargon, it was "no accident" that Lenin chose such loose categories. Even his own table of Imperialism showed that France and Germany each had more than twice as much invested in "Europe" as in all of "Asia, Africa, and Australia" put together.[919]
The logic of Lenin's economic argument was that "surplus capital" that would otherwise produce crises in industrial nations. But if instead it is largely re-shuffled among industrial nations, this does not serve as a safety valve for capitalist nations as a whole. Nor can the rise of workers' incomes in industrial capitalist nations then be depicted as the fruits of exploitation in non-industrial countries. Indeed, it is by no means clear that there is any net flow of capital to the non-industrial world, given the propensity of the more affluent classes in less developed countries to put their money in Swiss bank accounts, American corporations, and other investments in the industrial nations.
Human Capital
In common with Marx and other believers in "exploitation" as the explanation of profits and income disparities , Lenin paid little attention to the role of human capital, except to dismiss or discredit its significance—before he came to power. But after being in power for a few years, and discovering the catastrophic effects of neglecting this factor, his later writings reflected a new respect for skills, administrative abilities, and other forms of human capital. He did not, however, take this new insight all the way back to his fundamental vision of "exploitation" as the explanation of income disparities among classes and nations.
On the eve of revolution, Lenin declared that measures for controlling and directing the society were "generally known and easy to put into effect."[920] He said:
Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc. and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old "state power" have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simply operations of registration, filing and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary "workmen's wages"...[921]
Lenin admitted that a revolutionary government could not immediately "dispense with subordination, control and foremen and bookkeepers,"[922] but argued that such people need receive "salaries no higher than a workman's wage" while "under the control of the armed proletariat."[923] In short, power was all that was really needed to coordinate social processes. Lenin saw "accounting and control" as the key variables that capitalism had already "reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations—which any literate person can perform—of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts."[924] He rejected Kautsky's claim that bureaucracy would remain under socialism, for these very simple functions required no permanent class of functionaries, but only easily replaceable individual with no economic priviledge or official grandeur.[925]
Once in power, however, Lenin discovered how much more complicated it all was. Within a few years he was writing of a "fuel crisis" that "threatens to disrupt all Soviet work,"[926] of "ruin, starvation, and devastation" in the land,[927] of "famine" and even admitted that peasant uprising had become a "common occurrence" under his regime.[928] Factories were closed for lack of raw material, and peasants were destroying their own grain and livestock rather than see them requisitioned by the Communists.[929] Workers demonstrated against Lenin in Petrograd—and their leaders were shot by the Soviet police.[930] Thousands of sailors, who had been staunch supporters of Lenin before, revolted in Kronstadt—and were massacred by the Red Army.[931]
At this desperate juncture, Lenin announced his New Economic Policy, allowing peasants and small capitalists to sell in the marketplace. He also drastically revised his view of the importance of skills. Lenin declared before the Communist Part Congress in 1920 that "we need people who are versed in the art of administration," and admitted that "there is nowhere we can turn to for such people except the old class."[932] As the New Economic Policy unfolded, Lenin came down hard on the side of capitalist management prerogatives, including "authority independently to fix wages" in order to make each business "pay its own way" to produce "increasing profits," with attention to "carefully selecting the most talented and capable administrative personnel."[933] He warned that "all direct interference by the trade unions in the management of factories must be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible."[934] Indeed, he declared the role of trade unions to be "to act as mediators" between workers and management,[935] and their success to be judged by "the degree to which they succeed in averting mass disputes."[936] In his 1920 address to the Communist Party Congress, Lenin declared: "Opinions on corporate management are all too frequently imbued with a spirit of sheer ignorance, an anti-expert spirit."[937] He did not say who had promoted such a spirit, but his own ideas on this subject had now turned completely around.
An Assessment
Marx and Engels argued that an individual or an era must be judged not by what they intend or conceive, but by what they actually accomplish.[938] Marxism itself cannot be exempt from this standard. What Marx accomplished was to produce such a comprehensive, dramatic, and fascinating vision that it could withstand innumerable empirical contradictions, logical refutations, and moral revulsions at its effects. The Marxian vision took the overwhelming complexity of the real world and made the parts fall into place, in a way that was intellectually exhilarating and conferred such sense of moral superiority that opponents could be simply labeled and dismissed as moral lepers or blind reactionaries. Marxism was—and remains—a mighty instrument for the acquisition and maintenance of political power. Once such an instrument has come into existence, those who wield the enormous power makes it possible have every incentive to use it and preserve it for their own purposes, regardless of what purposes may have motivated Marx or Engels.
But however instrumental Marxism becomes in the hands of latter-day power-wielders, its intellectual structure and foundation do not become irrelevant. On the contrary. Precisely as it is applied in the real world, intellectual flaws and blemishes too slight to be noticed amid the heady rhetoric become manifest in terms as concrete as hunger, terror, and death. Lenin was unique in having to confront the failure of his assumptions and having to improvise an alternative while literally millions died around him—some from starvation and others slaughtered by his secret police and the Red Army, both of whom drowned in blood the revolt of the very masses whose name he ruled.
While in one sense this represented the unfolding of erroneous assumptions implicit in Marxism, in a larger sense it represented the hubris of imagining that a whole society could be constructed from the ground up on the vision of one man, rather than evolving from the experience of millions, spread over the generations or centuries. It is not simply that Marx happened to be unequal to the task, but that anyone was foredoomed to be unequal to such a task.
Despite choosing a world stage on which to operate, Marx's vision was a very insular one. Much of Marx's conception of the capitalist and of the capitalist economy reflected the insularity of the urban intellectual. Marx repeatedly depicted and disdained the capitalist entrepreneur as an uncultured parvenu[939]—someone lacking in bookish accomplishments, as if these were the universal litmus tests of contributions to society. Marx's own life was the most overwhelming evidence that bookish accomplishments and economic effectiveness had no necessary correlation. Similar narrowness and snobbery were evident toward what the Communist Manifesto called "the idiocy of rural life"[940]—a foretaste of Marxists' inability to take farmers seriously, or to manage agriculture effectively.
The Marxist constituency has remained as narrow as the conception behind it. The Communist Manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods—much less for the social consequences of their vision—has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people. The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements from the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and their lesser counterparts around the world and down through history. The sheer reiteration of the "working class" theme in Marxism has drowned out this plain fact. But the crucial point is not privilege, as such, but the insulation from responsibility that provides, particularly during youth.
Intellectuals enjoy a similar insulation from the consequences of being wrong, in a way that no businessman, military leader, engineer or even athletic coach can. Intellectuals and the young have remained historically the groups most susceptible to Marxism—even though the young have often abandoned it as they grew older and more experienced, being replaced by ever renewed sources of more youths following in their wake.
The disjuncture between vision and experience was nowhere better illustrated than in the traumatic post-revolutionary experience of Lenin, as he applied the Marxist vision and watched a whole nation sink into economic chaos and starvation by the millions. The Leninist-Stalinist modifications—or "betrayals"—of Marxism have mitigated the severity of the Soviet Union's economic problems, but at the cost of turning a humanitarian creed into a ruthless mode of power consolidation. Both denunciations and apologetics for this often miss the point that a vision departs from reality must either be abandoned or changed.
Despite the massive intellectual feat that Marx's Capital represents, the Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx ever existed. This neither denies nor denigrates Capital as an intellectual achievement, and perhaps in its way the culmination of classical economics. But the development of modern economics had simply ignored Marx. Even economists who are Marxists typically utilize a set of analytical tools to which Marx contributed nothing, and have recourse to Marx only for ideological, political, or historical purposes.
In professional economics, Capital was a detour into a blind alley, however historic it may be as the centerpiece of a worldwide political movement. What is said and done in its name is said and done largely by people who have never read through it, much less followed its labyrinthine reasoning from its arbitrary postulates to its empirically false conclusions. Instead, the massive volumes of Capital have become a quasi-magic touchstone—a source of assurance that somewhere and somehow a genius "proved" capitalism to be wrong and doomed, even if the specifics of this proof are unknown to those who take their certitude from it.
In agriculture especially, Marxists' grand dismissals of what they did not understand had far-reaching practical consequences, including desperate food shortages in modern Communist nations, dependence on grain imports from the West, Stalin's wholesale slaughter of the kulaks, and innumerable agricultural reforms—the most effective of which proved to be allowing some portion of agriculture to operate through a market system. In the Soviet Union, the market sector occupies only about 2 percent of the farm land, but produces about 30 percent of Soviet agricultural output.[941]
The supreme irony of Marxism was that a fundamentally humane and egalitarian creed was so dominated by a bookish perspective that it became blind to facts and dead to humanity and freedom. Yet the moral vision and the intellectual aura of Marxism continued to disarm critics, quiet doubters, and put opponents on the moral defensive. It has provided both intellectual and moral insulation for those who wield power in its name. Some of the most distinguished names in Western civilization—George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, among others—have become apologists for brutal dictatorships ruling in the name of Marx and committing atrocities that they would never countenance under any other label. People who could never be corrupted by money or power may nevertheless be blinded by a vision. In this context, there are grim implications to Engels' claim that Marx's name and work "will endure through the ages."
* * *
[1] Karl Marx, "The Leading Article of No. 179 of Kölische Zeitung," K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), p. 31.
[2] Georg Wilhelm Frederich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), pp. 410-411.
[3] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1919), p. 823.
[4] Ibid., p. 25.
[5] Ibid., p. 24. See also Ibid., p. 22.
[6] Joseph A Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 392.
[7] A landmark in this particular approach was Paul A. Samuelson, "Wages and Interest: a Modern Dissection of Marxian Economic Models," American Economic Review, December 1957, pp. 884-992. Other distinguished economists have managed to tie Samuelson's record for zero citations from Marx in a scholarly critique of Marxism. For example, Martin Bronfenbrenner, "Das Kapital for the Modern Man," Science and Society, Fall 1965, pp. 419-438; William Fellner, Modern Economic Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1960), pp. 121-141. Others who came close to these performances in ignoring Marx while discussing "Marxism" include Fred M. Gottheil, "Increasing Misery of the Proletariat," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, February 1962, pp. 103-113.
[8] For example, Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 6, 65, 66, 69-70, 72, 86, 93, 143, 144, 153, 178n-179n, 229, 235; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row Brothers Publishers, 1950), pp. 11, 39n; David McLellan, Engels (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), pp. 69, 70-71, 73; John Weeks, Capital and Exploitation (Princeton University Press, 1981), 8, 26, 28, 36, 41, 53, 57, 61, 62, 93, 94.
[9] Saul K. Padover, Karl Marx (New American Library, 1980), p. 190.
[10] Robert Payne, Marx (Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 269. See also Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science [Anti-Düring] (International Publishers, 1939), P. 13; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II, pp. 7-8.
[11] "The semi-Hegelian language of a good many passages in my old book is not only untranslatable but has lost the greater part of its meaning even in German." Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Letters to Americans, translated by Leonard E. Mins (New York: International Publishers, 1953), p. 151. See also J.A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 438n; Allen Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 3-15, 189-206; Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Heyel and The Rise of Social Theory, 2nd edition (New York: The Humanities Press, 1954), passim.
[12] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1919), pp. 24-25; Karl Marx, Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1904), pp. 292-294; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, translated by Dona Torr (New York: International Publishers, 1942), p. 496.
[13] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1919), p. 25.
[14] Frederick Engels, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy," Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, edited by Lewis S. Feuer (Anchor Books, 1959(, p. 219; Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science [Anti-Düring] (International Publishers, 1939), p. 117; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, translated by Dona Torr (International Publishers, 1942), p. 485n; Karl Marx, "Wage Labour And Capital," Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Volume I (Foreign Languages Published House, 1955), p. 83; Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 548-549; Frederick Engels, Engels on Capital, translated & edited by Leonard E. Mins (International Publishers Co., Inc., 1937), p. 60; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, pp. 71, 77, 124, 128, 132, 139, 146, 162, 837; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II, pp. 36, 51, 59, 112, 120, 130, 131.
