Trotsky after Kolakowski

 As people who follow my feed know, I have recently reread the three volumes of Leszek Kolakowski’s magisterial Main Currents of Marxism. I read them first in the mid-1980s (the date when I bought them, inscribed on my copy, is June 1982), and rereading them almost forty years later. It is even more impressive now—because I know more and because the world has changed. I will write more about that in another post.

Kolakowski discusses many writers, from the Greek founders of dialectics and Hegel to Mao Zedong. His knowledge is simply astounding. With many of them he disagrees strongly, and yet Kolakowski is –discussing them on their own terms, not his—at times admirative. This is the case of Lukacs (especially) and Lenin. Lukács indeed is, after Marx, the most impressive thinker, among more than a hundred discussed in the three volumes. Young Kolakowski was, it seems evident, very influenced by Lukács.

But the person of whom Kolakowski is probably the most contemptuous (leaving aside Marcuse—who is not worth discussing) is…Trotsky. If I were to summarize it in one sentence, I would say that it is because Trotsky was Stalin without Stalin’s convictions, or rather without Stalin’s readiness to make difficult decisions when left alone (i.e. without having Lenin to back him up).  

How do we reconcile this with (I think) undeniable fact of Trotsky’s brilliance in many spheres, from writing to war-making, and his particular attraction to intellectuals? Indeed, when intellectuals who dream to change the world, think of an exemplary life, it is hard not to see that Trotsky’s probably fits the bill as one of the most brilliant such lives in history. How many intellectuals are there sipping coffee in Café Zentral in Vienna on a Friday, and leading to victory the largest army of workers and peasants in the world next Monday? How many are there writing book reviews on a Saturday, and taking hostages on the next Tuesday? Is it common to go to an art exhibition in Paris on Sunday, and to negotiate a peace treaty that gives away a third of a country’s industry on Wednesday?

The extraordinary combination of a brilliant intellectual life (for Trotsky was indeed an excellent writer) with the life of a man of action, not being afraid or deterred by obstacles, is straight out of Greek playbook of heroic lives

What went wrong? Why is that that the architect of Bolshevik victory, already by 1924 received the second least number of votes in the elections for the Central Committee? A person who was clearly number 2 to Lenin was already in May 1924, No. 2 from the bottom in terms of Bolshevik’s top echelon’s preferences.

The reason is that Trotsky’s manifold abilities could only be fully displayed  and used so long as he was put in position of command, and was ultimately controlled by, a person whom he saw as his intellectual and political equal or superior. That was Lenin. As soon as Lenin was gone from the scene, all the negative features of Trotsky’s came to the fore: his haughtiness, conceit, arrogance. His ideologically extreme positions (collectivization, willing contempt for the trade unions and workers)  were later applied by Stalin, and Trotskyists—many of them in labor camps across the Soviet Union—briefly rejoiced in their ideological victory over the “grey blur” of bureaucracy, Stalin.

It was never clear if that extremism in the 1920s was true or fake. And this is where we come to Kolakowski’s contemptuous judgment: Trotsky was a poseur. After the anchor of Lenin was gone, he did not want to take any responsibilities: he was the head of the Red Army, technically commanding millions of people, yet he refused to attend meetings; he would decline positions he was offered, including the one of Prime Minister; he would treat his comrades with contempt, so much so that they would stop talking to each other as soon as they would see him walking the corridors of the Kremlin, afraid of his biting remarks. (All of these examples are from other writings, not Kolakowsk’s book.)

His unwillingness to take charge when it was manifestly his duty to do so sowed the seeds of later defeatist outlook, and not only of the Trotskyist movement, which broke up in ever smaller groupuscules. It affected many left-wing movements that preferred to claim grandiose ideas, but were unwilling to even try to take power. Examples include the French and Italian Communist parties in the 1960-70s which totally gave up the idea of winning elections, or gaining power.

Trotsky personally did not want this to happen: he continued fighting to the end, including against his own assassin, a strong men thirty years his junior, whom Trotsky, with his bleeding head, was able to wrest to the ground. Yet by avoiding the responsibility when it was his for the taking, he charted the future path of many left-wing parties. It was reinforced by Gramsci’s oft-repeated defeatist “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. All of that meant that many left-wing politicians lost any desire to win.

“Trotskyism” eventually became a “movement” (if this term can at all be applied) of Western intelligentsia that wanted to pretend they were doing something—while in reality doing nothing. It made no inroads anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of the Spanish POUM in the 1930s. It became after World War II a useful “movement” to have nice dinner conversations and to meet clever girlfriends and boyfriends—it might have served as an eHarmony of post-war Western Europe—but it was little else.  Even worse, in its US form, it converted itself from the left to the extreme right as many formerly young Trotskyists ended up, not only supporting, but defining, the neocons’ imperialist project.

Trotsky still haunts the left: if you really do not want to win, you never will.  If it is more fun to drink cappuccinos on a square at noon then to get up at 6 am to canvass support, you will end up drinking cappuccinos.

The long NEP, China and Xi

Many journalists, commentators and political scientists see the recent policy changes in China as “the return to communism”. They in particular point out to a number of measures whose objective was to limit lending by internet companies, to ban for-profit tutoring, and to put a squeeze on companies producing internet games (the latter were, tellingly and ominously, likened to  “the spreaders of the spiritual opium among the Chinese youth”). Western commentators are shocked by Chinese government’s apparent indifference to what such measures might do to the stock markets in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. (In effect, they have all declined during the last month). This is in signal contrast with government’s concern, and even panic, when the Chinese stock market went through severe turbulence in the Summer of 2015.

The commentators “transfer” or impute to China their own ideological biases. That bias consists in an excessive focus on the stock markets as almost sole indicators of an economy’s health. This of course is not surprising in a country, like the US, where 93% of financial assets are held by 10% of the population (see E Wolff, A Century of Wealth in America). The latter are also the richest people and consequently things that affect them will be –given that they control the media either directly (as Bloomberg) or indirectly, because they are the main buyers of the news—reported much more extensively than things that affect the other 90% of the population. All of this makes stock market acquire an hypertrophied importance compared to what is its real relevance. It gives us though an excellent insight into who really controls social and economic  life of a country.  

Donald Trump was merely an extreme example of the ruling class’s singular (and fully reasonable, from the point of view of their financial interests) obsession with the stock market. Trump often decided on his policy moves, not merely domestic but even foreign,  in function of their effect on the stock market. One might recall that Thump’s only reason for not allowing infected patients to disembark from a ship in the waters off Long Beach in March 2020 was not to spook the stock market.  (Little did  he—and all of us with him—know what will happen next.)

            Let me give you a personal story that encapsulates the  importance of the stock market for the rich. In August 1991, I was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, the island rightly known as the abode of very rich democrats. (The most recent house owner there is Barack Obama.) The vacation coincided with the anti-Gorbachev coup in Moscow (August 19-22). So everybody, in  that small enclave where I was, rushed in the morning to watch TV news (these were the years before the Internet and smart phones).  Absolutely dramatic  events, with global and historical consequences,  were unfolding in Moscow: the coup leaders were giving a badly-organized press conference, the army had seized main buildings in Moscow, demonstrators began to descend in the streets, Yeltsin seized the Russian Parliament building, it was unclear if Gorbachev was arrested or not….One was watching history happening in front of his own eyes. But after about half-an-hour of live coverage from Moscow, the liberal elite decided that it was enough, and switched the channels: they tuned in on the New York Stock Exchange, and most attentively watched the developments there probably mentally calculating how good (or bad) were the events in Moscow for their portfolios.  Some of us who were more interested in the fate of the Soviet Union, communism and the world than in stock quotations were in the minority, and we had  to divine the events in Moscow from the gyrations of the stocks in the New York.

            China wants to be different. In a society of political capitalism, as I argued in Capitalism, Alone, the state tries to maintain its autonomy. In the United States, the state generally acts as a custodian  of the capitalist interest “managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.”  In political capitalism, though, the state must not allow to co-opt or to be “contaminated” by capitalist interest. In other words, capitalist interest is one of the interests to consider—but not the only one, or even perhaps not the chief one.  

            This approach is consistent with the long Chinese tradition of the state keeping merchant and capitalist interests at arm’s length. Ho-fung Hung, for example, nicely describes how the Qing bureaucracy sided in industrial disputes with workers, and not with “masters” as was commonly the case in the nineteenth century Britain (my review). The same arguments were made by Giovanni Arrighi (reviewed here), Jacques Gernet (on Southern Song China), Kenneth Pomeranz (reviewed here), and Martin Jacques (reviewed here).

Furthermore, if one looks at the current Xi-led party from a Leninist perspective (which Xi may not be loath to do), the same conclusion is reinforced. The Chinese capitalism may be seen as one “long  NEP”—which might last a century or even two--wherein  capitalists are given free hand in practically all areas of economics, but the commanding heights of the economy are preserved for the state (which means they are under CPC's control) and the political power is not shared with anyone, least of all with capitalists. Thus the state maintains freedom of action vis-à-vis socially the most powerful group (capitalists), and can ignore their complaints when an overarching social interest is at stake; as in the three examples of regulatory and legal crackdown was arguably the case.

            Can the autonomy of the state end, and will bourgeoisie take over the Chinese state as it did in the West? It is quite possible. The modernization theory argues that. There are, I think, three ways in which it could happen.

            First, there could be a middle-class or bourgeois revolution. It should be noted however that no revolution against  communist regime had ever succeeded. The one that came closest was the Hungarian revolution in 1956, but it was crushed externally, by Soviet arms. So that possibility, so long as the Party-state is united is, I think, extremely unlikely.

            The second possibility is “Gorbachevization.”  This means that the top echelons of the party move towards social-democracy. This ideologically makes lots of sense given that originally communists were part of social-democracy. So the ideological gap between the two is not very wide. The end of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union came when several communist parties, became, either at the top (like CPSU) or throughout its membership  social-democratic. The latter was the case, by 1988-88, for at least the Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian communist parties. They came close to the Italian CP, ideologically and politically.

            The third possibility is “Jiang Zeminism” whereby the party increasingly accepts among its top members capitalists, and reflects their interests. In a recent paper in the British Journal of Sociology Li Yang, Filip Novokmet and I find indeed that while CPC membership (by the end of Jiang Zemin’s rule) was more similar to the overall composition of China’s urban population than before, the top (richest) CPC members were increasingly  diverging from the rest of the membership and the population. Here is our conclusion: “While the structure of CPC membership in the recent period approximates better the population structure than in 1988, the CPC top is moving further away from both CPC overall membership structure and that of the urban population as a whole” (see here).

The “insinuation” of the rich into the top party ranks was rationalized by Jiang Zemin under the  ideology of “the three represents”. One does not hear much about “the three represents” nowadays (it seems to have been replaced by Xi Jinping Thought) so that path to change is currently being blocked.  

            The future will tell us if in one of these three ways the Chinese state gets taken over by the rich, or not—that is, whether it remains autonomous in its decision-making.

           

 

 

On Eurocentrism in economics

 Sebastian Conrad’s book “What is global history?” is in many ways important for economists and economic historians. This is not only because Conrad illustrates the way in which global studies differ from other ways to look at the world (modernization theory, world-systems theory, post-colonial studies), but also because he takes many examples from economics.

The problem of Eurocentrism, defined by Conrad as “Europe/the West.. seen as the locus of innovation, and world history…understood as a history of diffusion of European progress” (p. 74) is especially acute in economics because the very notions of “modernity”, “economic growth”, “welfare” emerged in Europe, were propagated by European thinkers, and were later adopted by thinkers from other regions of the world. What passes for global economic history is thus often a teleology which sees the non-European “peripheral” regions as retracing the steps through which the “core”, i.e. Western countries, have already passed. This is, rather obviously, true of the main variant of Marxism and of modernization theory, and perhaps even of world-systems theory (projection of the economic dominance of Europe and the US in the twentieth century back to the sixteenth, according to Conrad).

This is also true of economic histories that, in their standard format, begin either with colonization and  “the discovery” of the Americas or with the Industrial Revolution. “Interaction” or “connectivity” in these histories means simply, as Conrad writes, interaction with the West, almost never interaction between non-Western parts of the world (e.g. India with Malaya and East Africa, China with South Asia). Some are almost caricaturally Western-centric: David Landes (“The Wealth and Poverty of Nations”), or Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (“Why Nations Fail”) who, as Peer Vries writes in “Escaping poverty”, present  “a stylized generalization [sic] of a very specific, positive interpretation of the modern history of Great Britain and the USA” and simply reproduce “all the clichés when it comes to Asian institutions.”

But it is also true of books like “Global Economic history: A Short Introduction” by Robert Allen. This is an excellent book, but its approach is very standard: it begins with the Industrial Revolution, England and Western Europe, moves to the Americas only as the United States becomes an economic powerhouse, then introduces Meiji Japan, Czarist and Soviet  Russia, and finally China. Now, Allen can sensibly defend his approach by arguing that it does not privilege Europe (or the West) as such but that it simply retraces economic development measured by an objective criterion: how much above the subsistence is the average income of a society?  This is a general standard, and we go following that standard wherever it takes us. This is a good defense that can  be made also with regard to such classics as Colin Clark’s “Economic Progress”, Angus Madison’s “Contours…” or Paul Bairoch’s “Victoires and deboires”—all of them, in my opinion, brilliant works of global economic history.  

However, one could also argue that the seemingly objective criterion that is being used (has the society overcome the level of physiological subsistence for its members?) is itself Eurocentric insofar as the objective of economic growth was born with economic growth itself. The yardstick that we claim to be universal is, on the contrary, a product of a specific era—the Age of Enlightenment and the European Industrial Revolution. Both of them are local or at best regional events. There is no reason why we should take economic growth as the organizing principle to study economic history. We could, it may be argued, equally validly take social stability, or the caste-like inheritance of division of labor, or sedentary-nomadic split as central economic principles and write a book on global economic history from one of these perspectives.

It does seem to me that the latter perspectives are deficient compared to the  “desirable” objective of overcoming the stinginess of nature and generating greater wealth. But I cannot reject the notion that I hold that the organizing principle of a good book on global economic history should be a study of economic growth because I have learned that by privileging one way of looking at economics. We are back to the beginning where the “I” is simply the reflection of the dominant narrative. There is nothing independent there: if the narrative were different, the “I” would have been different.

How should we then write economic history or history of economic thought? For economics which is so intimately connected with Eurocentrism, the question is exceedingly difficult to answer. One way would be, as Conrad mentions, to do comparative history (à la Pomeranz), another would be to take more seriously postcolonial studies--even if they, as Conrad, I think rightly, argues, tend to degenerate into cultural essentialism.  Integration of studies of slavery and serfdom is perhaps a good way for economic history to move toward becoming “global”. This is because slavery and serfdom are global phenomena that long predate capitalism and Western exceptionalism. In fact, when I think of all the global economic history works mentioned in this post, I cannot see any of them integrating or paying sufficient attention to unfree labor.

The approach we should avoid is to pay lip-service to non-Western thinkers by including one or two sentences from their work without any analysis or contextualization. I have seen this done in recent histories of economic phenomena: it is now de rigueur to quote a couple of non-Western authors, mostly (I would guess) by grabbing a few sentences from a Wikipedia entry. It makes a mockery of the entire idea, but it does (formally) satisfy the thought-police who look at the “diversity” requirement as a purely quantitative target: are there quotes from a sufficiently diverse crowd of authors?  (On the other hand, a good example of real substantive engagement with non-Western thinkers is Pankaj Mishra’s “From the Ruins of Empire” that I reviewed here.)

Perhaps that global economic histories will remain difficult to write unless they are organized around a single overarching topic; for example, global economic history of gender inequality (as Alice Evans is writing now), or global history of capitalism or socialism. Writing global economic history could be thus organized around the non-spatial and long-term (perhaps beyond Braudel’s long durée) ideological constructs. It would fragment global economic history, but the alternatives would be either to continue with the standard Western-centric narratives, or be reduced to thoughtless listing of economic facts around the globe and over time.  Still even so, we would have difficulty including, without doing violence to the approach, the recent emergence of China as a global economic power. China is hard to place under any of these headings. 

Is Norway the new East India Company?

 In the eighteenth century, English-led East India Company gradually managed to gain control of most of India. Its rule was a disaster for India, but made many directors and stockholders of the company exceedingly rich. The wealth enabled many of them to play important roles in English political, intellectual and business life. As Adam Smith, an uncompromising critic of the Company, wrote: “The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.” Faced with so many depredations, the British government finally took away the monopoly of Indian trade from the company in the midst of the Napoleonic wars.

This led the Company to redouble its efforts elsewhere: to trade with China. The problem with China was that nothing that company could sell to the Chinese was of interest to them. There was a lot that the company wanted to buy from China (porcelain, tea) but nothing to sell. Until it came to the idea of using opium produced in Bengal to sell to China. Despite the ban that the Chinese government had put on opium imports there was domestic demand for it. To overcome the ban, and in order to sell a widely addictive substance that for ethical reasons it could not sell anywhere else, the company decided to engage in a war to open Chinese ports. This was the origin of the infamous Opium War whose final outcome in 1842 was the opening of five Chinese “treaty ports”, cession of Hong Kong. and extraterritoriality for foreigners living in China. The “century of humiliations” had begun. And the company could finally sell to far-away foreigners something of whose consumption the Company members in their private lives disapproved.

Norwegian government is one of the most active governments in highlighting the threat of the climate change. It tries to replace almost entirely country’s use of gas-fueled cars by electric cars. It is proud of the decrease of the footprint of its consumption. It funds international activities that are supposed to limit and reverse deforestation in the world. Yet at the same time, for half century, Norway has been one of significant world producers, and even more so important  exporters, of oil and gas/ For gas, it is the third largest in the world, and some 50% of the value Norwegian goods exports consists of gas and oil. Moreover, the government has recently decided to expand exploration and production of gas and oil in one of the areas that the very same government acknowledges are most sensitive to climate change—the Arctic Circle.

Norway thus increases the production and sales of a commodity that herself deems noxious, and sells it, like the East India Company did with opium, to far-away foreigners while staying domestically clean. “Money has no smell”.

Norway’s behavior is not only surprising because it is hypocritical: the virtue-signaling stands in a manifest contrast with what the government does. It is even more striking when looked at in the context where many climate-change activists in their struggle to reduce emissions try to convince poorer and middle-income countries of benefits of lower production and consumption.

The question can then be asked: if they are so clearly unable to convince of the benefits of climate control the population and the government of the richest country in the world, what type of arguments do they plan to use to convince Mexico, Gabon, Nigeria, Russia to reduce production of gas and oil? These are countries whose incomes are a fraction of Norway’s: for example, the median-income person in Nigeria has one-twentieth (not a typo: 1/20) of the real income of the median-income person in Norway.

I could fully understand that Mexico or Nigeria refuse to reduce production of gas and oil because without it, there would be significant impoverishment of their population. But there will be no impoverishment of Norwegian population—by any reasonable metric. Norway, a country with a very high income (GDP per capita of 66,000 international dollars, 20% higher than that of the United States) and with this income fairly equally distributed amongst its citizens (Gini coefficient of 26), should be able to give up the production of its “opium-equivalent”. But there is apparently no political support for such a measure, as the current government in its new decision about a more extensive exploration and production seems fully assured of majority support.

There is here a very important lesson for all climate change activists. They need, as I have many times insisted, to think much more seriously about the trade off between economic growth and climate change control. While in their models, the advantages of controlling climate change are incontrovertible, when they come to policies that need to be implemented, from taxes on airplane fuel, to taxes on gas (which provoked the Gilets Jaunes movement in France), they face popular resistance. The popular resistance is due to the unwillingness of almost anyone in the world to accept lower income. Climate change activists might talk in their conferences about people “thriving” on lower incomes, but when offered that alternative, even the citizens of the richest country in the world decline it.

If we want to really confront –as opposed to just talking—climate change we should first, be rid of extreme hypocrisy (as this one), and second, design policies that would be acceptable to the population. And we should start with rich countries, not only because historically they have been the most important contributors to climate change (through historical accumulation of emissions) but because they should be able to bear costs more easily than the rest. 

On luxury

 Is luxury consumption  bad? Should it be limited? At the time of high inequality, and especially inequality driven by the very top of income distribution (1 percent and higher) these are legitimate questions. The answer however is not easy.

Keynes in his famous opening of The Economic Consequences of the Peace speaks  of a social compact (although he does not use the term) that, according to him, existed between the rich and the rest before World War I where the rich were “allowed” to amass huge wealth but on the understanding that they would use it for investments (and thus further growth), not for ostentatious consumption.

The same idea is present in Max Weber’s description of Protestantism: accumulation of wealth and austere living: “Wealth is …bad ethically only in so far as it is a temptation to idleness and sinful enjoyment of life, and its acquisition is bad only when it is with the purpose of later living merrily and  without care” (The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism).

Recently I listened to Pierre Rosenvallon proposing the reintroduction of sumptuary laws that would not allow certain types of consumption. (This is clearly impossible to implement today, but the idea that one needs to do something with excessive wealth underlines Rosenvallon’s concern).

In the last week’s Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim, reviewing a new book on John Adams notes Adams’s concern with American elite’s accumulation of wealth and luxury consumption that might lead to the vices of indolence and decadence.

Display of wealth is, by all these authors, and probably thousands more, criticized for two separate reasons:  a social one, viz. that it provokes resentment and envy among those who cannot afford it, and a moral one, that it leads to personal decadence. The two critiques are different: the first is an instrumental critique: it is not a critique of the activity as such but of its social consequences.  It critiques a symptom of an economic system that allows for such behavior, but does not deal with the appropriateness or justice of the system itself. The second critique is concerned with the effects of wealth on the people themselves who enjoy it, and perhaps secondarily on a society where the upper class becomes increasingly decadent, and separate from the rest.

Both are, in some ways, superficial critiques. They are critiques of consumption, but they do not go deeper, into the origin of wealth, that is into the production process. They critique the use of wealth, not its origin. Consider the moral effect on the wealthy individuals first. The vice that concerns John Adams is very different from the vice “diagnosed” by Mandeville. The latter is the vice of greed; it is “in-built” in the acquisition of wealth, in activities that people engage in order to become rich. It has nothing to do with how money is spent. Mandeville’s is therefore a much more fundamental critique: the vice remains regardless of the use to which one’s wealth is put. One can live a very modest life, use all of his money to invest or make charitable contributions but the vice of acquisition remains.

A Marxist would also be indifferent to excessive wealth and its use by arguing that the problem does not lie in a person who has become rich, but in the system that has allowed for such wealth to be made through exploitation. Leszek Kolakowski in Main Currents of Marxism summarizes it very nicely: ‘Bourgeois consumption in the face of workers’ poverty is a moral issue, not an economic one; the distribution, once and for all, of rich men’s wealth among the poor world not solve anything or bring about any real change.” This is very different from Keynes’s view where apparent social equality is achieved through an act of concealment: becoming rich is acceptable, but not the use of riches for luxury.

For Marx (as for Mandeville—even if for different reason), the way wealth is used is irrelevant. It might even be thought that, from the purely political point of view, extravagant ostentatious consumption is desirable because it highlights the social divide and undermines the system that creates it. Marie Antoinette by her famous (if probably apocryphal) comment on how the poor should deal with their lack of bread has probably contributed to undermining the position of the monarchy. The estrangement of the elite from the majority of the people as shown in similar comments and outlandish spending patterns may be seen as desirable by those in favor of systemic change. “Spend, spend as much as possible and with as much visibility as possible, so that your reign can be as short as possible” may be the motto of partisans of change.

What should today’s position with respect to luxury consumption be? Confiscatory taxation of excessive wealth is one possibility. Some people have argued for the wealth tax of 100% on all wealth above a billion of US dollars. It is technically quite easy to do, but political feasibility of such a proposal is close to zero.

Another possibility is the moral suasion, or ideological pressure that Keynes had in mind: the rich would feel uncomfortable, and would be looked at unfavorably by the other rich, if they spent too lavishly. That seems the most unlikely way to limit luxury consumption today, at the time when the media (and the public that reads such media) crave to read reports on extravagance. There are no moral or religious constraints that are likely to work. 

Finally, should consumption taxes on extra luxury goods be increased? That seems to me a very attractive option. The pattern of consumption of the very rich is quite well known. If private jets used by Epstein, or enormous brownstone purchased by him in New York, were taxed at exorbitant rates, even Jeffrey Epstein or similar billionaires would at some point be able to purchase fewer of them. The approach is consistent with differentiation of retail taxes (VAT tax rates) according to the type commodity: food is often not taxed at all, hotel or restaurant consumption is taxed high. Cars, for example, at the time when they were considered much more of a luxury item than today, used to be taxed quite heavily. Exorbitant taxes on luxury items will not bring much money to the Treasury. But their objective is not that they should—their objective is either to soak up as many resources from the super wealthy as possible, or to make them refrain from luxury consumption. That, I think, they can achieve.

Unless of course you wish is for the whole system to come crashing down, in which case you should cheer up Bezos and Musk and Kardashians to spend even more extravagantly. And document it on the social media for all to see.

 

 

 

Towards global progressiveness

 Is it possible to define a series of approaches to global problems for the group of people who may be called “global progressives” (GPs)? Before I try to answer this question, I need to define the terms. “Progressive”  is meant to include all those who identify with broad left-wing movements, from Marxists to social democrats and even to the fringes of liberals (in the American sense of the term). “Global” is supposed to cover issues that can, at least in principle, be either acted upon or actively pursued on a global, as opposed to national, level. “Approach” is supposed to mean activities that are between policies (since global policies are extremely rare, and most policy-making is made at the national or local level), and the rather vague “values” or “opinions.”  “Approach” therefore stands between “policies” and “values” and has an activist component attached to it, which moves individuals and groups beyond mere expressions of what they believe or hold dear. But it is less than policy simply because the world has currently very few such tools at the global level.

What are the areas were such global approaches can be defined? The seven areas listed here move from the final objective which is higher income (and the attendant greater “happiness”) to the means to realize it, which concern capital, labor, technology, and taxes.

Economic growth. It is true by definition that economic growth is an indispensable condition for the reduction of global poverty. Reduction and ultimately elimination of global poverty (at whatever modest poverty line one can envisage today), is probably the most important task in the 21^st century. Nobody in the world should live in misery. In order for this to become reality, GPs must be in favor of economic growth, and especially so in poor and middle-income countries. Higher economic growth in poor and middle-income countries would also reduce global inequality which may be considered as the global goal No. 2 for this century. Reduction of material inequality between individuals in the world is a requirement for the existence of a global (however weak) community of interests and values because such community cannot be based on vastly different levels of material welfare.

Climate change. The focus on global poverty elimination and global inequality reduction must be considered within the framework where climate change is an important challenge to many people. While some trade-off between global growth and the means to combat climate change may be allowed that trade-off must acknowledge that economic growth is the most important global objective. Global growth and control of climate change are not lexicographically ordered (with growth coming first) because that would exclude any trade-off between the two. But the trade-off must be such as to prioritize growth-compatible methods of control of climate change: “green growth” brought about by suitable (and subsidized) technological progress, and change in consumption patterns brought about by subsidies and taxes. All of these tools however are national, and GPs cannot affect them much at the global level. However, since the issue of climate change has acquired worldwide importance and is subject of international cooperation at the level of nation-states, a unified approach by GPs may make a difference.

It is obvious from the above that GPs should not be in favor of degrowth because it would negatively affect elimination of global poverty and reduction of global inequality.  

International aid. GPs should be in favor of rich countries finally achieving their pledge (made more than half-century ago) of transferring 0.7% of their GDPs in the form of aid to poor countries. This objective, however modest, has recently receded in importance and public concern because of sluggish growth in rich countries and the rise of Asian middle-income countries. But the objective is still crucial given vast inequalities that exist between countries and peoples.

Global aid should not be confused with purely commercial transaction (like foreign direct investments) and loans by national or international development agencies that are only in part aid (to the extent that the interest rate charged on loans is below the market rate).  

Migration. GPs must be in favor of free movement of people. This derives from the first principles of equal opportunity which, for those who think globally, must be equal opportunity at any point in the world, and not solely within one’s own country. It derives also from the support of globalization which includes free movement of capital, goods, services and technology. There is no reason why labor should be  treated differently. But that principle must be, within each individual country, moderated (and in some cases modified) to be compatible with what is politically feasible. While various compromises and temporary solutions are possible, one should not forget that it must be done with the principle of free movement of people always in the background and not being forgotten.  

Technology. GPs must in favor of facilitating transfer of technology from rich to poor countries. It is one of the principal ways in which growth of poor countries can be accelerated.  Recent exaggerated concerns about the protection of intellectual property rights are not only antithetical to the achievement of global poverty eradication but are at variance with rich countries’ own stated objectives, repeated over many years, of being in favor of easing transfer of technology to poorer countries.

Taxation. International taxation (such as tax on financial transactions,  or more ambitiously, global tax on the most polluting activities) should lead to the creation of a global tax authority. It is unrealistic that such global tax authority will, within foreseeable future, come close to national tax authorities’ power, but any move in that direction is welcome. The global tax authority with its own source of funds, derived from global taxes, could be used for green energy subsidies across countries, help to migrants, and financial support under extraordinary conditions such as pandemics.

Equality between countries. This is an important principle that, like in federal countries’ constitutions, must be balanced with the approach mentioned above regarding global poverty elimination which treats all persons in the world (not countries) as equal. But treatment of all countries equally implies non-interference in their internal affairs so long as they do not have implications beyond their borders, and preference for the organizations like the United Nations that are, at least in principle, built on the assumption of equality of nations. It also means that international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund which are built on the principle of richer countries having greater rights should be forced to move toward greater country-equality. (The same applies to the World Trade Organization which is in fact biased in favor of rich countries.)  

What cannot be dealt with globally? The issues that can be addressed only at the national level are those that belong to inequalities of opportunity and outcome. It is already mentioned that global equality of opportunity can be helped by being pro-growth, pro-migration, pro-technology transfer, and pro-aid. But most of inequality of opportunity is nationally-based and can only be dealt with at that level. This includes inequalities linked to one’s background (wealth of parents), gender, race, caste, or sexual orientation. Inequalities of outcome (in income and wealth) can also be remedied mostly nationally through higher taxation of inheritance, more accessible education, higher income taxes for the rich, deconcentration of financial wealth (through worker shareholding) etc. But these objectives, however laudable, cannot be currently addressed at the global level.

While the just discussed group of objectives cannot be dealt globally because the means to do so are national, another group of objectives cannot be included because a global consensus on them, even among the global progressives, is impossible to reach. They are philosophical and political issues such as alienation of labor, hyper-commodification of life, and political systems of different countries. Thus they have to be left aside.   

NEP after Deng

 In the first chapter of Volume 3 of Main Currents of Marxism Leszek Kolakowski discusses practical and theoretical disagreements regarding the development of the USSR after the October Revolution and the Civil War. Although Kolakowski’s main focus is, as implied by the title of his work, on ideology, economics –at least in that period—played an important role. Kolakowski goes over the well-trodden ground of War Communism (1918-21), NEP (1921-28), and collectivization and planning (1928--…).  There is not much new in his discussion of the conflict between Preobrazhensky and Trotsky on the one side (arguing for collectivization of land and fast industrialization) and, on the other side, Stalin (for a while) and Bukharin and Rykov, favoring  continuation of NEP. What is original is, in my opinion, Kolakowski’s excessive determinism: he thinks that the differences between the two camps, however seemingly great, eventually had to converge to the same point (totalitarian party control) and that fact made collectivization and integral planning the only realistic option: “even the famous debate on industrialization…does not deserve to be presented as a clash between two opposite principles” (Kolakowski, p. 25).

Kolakowski’s somewhat overly deterministic view that the battle was bound to end with the victory of the “collectivizers”  is based on the assumption that NEP can never be seriously pursued by a communist party as it would thereby cede some of its economic, and possibly political, power to peasants. NEP was, according to Kolakowski, against both Marxist and Bolshevik principles because it meant the restoration of capitalism in the countryside, replacement of a proletarian government by the one supportive of peasantry, which was in the purest Marxist tradition always regarded (especially when possessing some land) with a fair dose of skepticism if not sheer hostility. “How the ‘proletariat’, i.e. the Bolshevik party, could maintain its dominant position if the state economy was at the mercy of the peasants; as the market developed, their position would become stronger, and they might in the end threaten the ‘proletarian dictatorship’” (Kolakowski, p.30). Or "the winding-up of NEP and the enforcement of collectivization were....dictated by the system and the interests of its only active element [the bureaucracy]" (ibid, p. 149).

There were, Kolakowski acknowledges, some –few-- political elements  favoring NEP: Lenin’s view of the need for a “worker-peasant government” and his insistence on keeping firmly in the camp of the revolution poor and middle-income peasants. The argument of the pro-NEP fraction was that industrialization could be achieved, not as Preobrazhensky and Trotsky believed, by “internal colonization” of peasants, but by expanding food production, releasing, thanks to higher agricultural productivity, rural labor, and then by the use that labor in industry (while having the wherewithal to pay for it thanks to cheaper and more abundant food).  The NEP model is Ricardian in its simplicity: reduction in the cost of food reduces the labor share in the industrial sector (in Ricardo, it was the labor share in capitalist production), increases the surplus, and that surplus can be used by the state to invest and accelerate development (in Ricardo,  the surplus is used by capitalists to do the same thing).

NEP need not necessarily produce lower growth rates and slower industrialization (at least over the medium-term) than collectivization and forced requisition of grain from peasants. The latter, as indeed happened, may rather reduce food production (this is why millions perished of famine) and thus make maintenance of large number of industrial workers more difficult than under the NEP.

            As I mentioned, this type of argument is basically dismissed by Kolakowski because of his view that ideologically and in terms of political power, Stalinist industrialization was the only course of action compatible with what Bolsheviks stood for. Kolakowski’s view though is less compelling now than it was in 1975-76 when he wrote Main currents…. The reasons is that we lacked then an example of a NEP in practice: the Soviet NEP was short-lived and one could only speculate what might have happened had it been prosecuted for several decades. (It is true that Kolakowski could have also used the example of his native Poland to observe that privately-owned agriculture did not spell the doom of communism—but perhaps he thought that the maintenance of Polish communism depended on foreign forces, namely the Soviet Union, and that this example therefore could not be carried over to the USSR.)

But with China’s “household responsibility system”, we have a strong empirical counterfactual. China’s “responsibility system” involved breaking up communal land ownership and transferring it to individual families in an egalitarian fashion. This was also the starting point of NEP: the land ownership in the Soviet Union after spontaneous peasant occupations, flight of landlords, and formal nationalization in 1918 was widespread. While the land was not as equally distributed as in China in 1978-80, the percentage of large land-owners was small. Even according to Stalin, middle and poor peasants produced ¾ of marketable grain surplus. It is true that the share of their production that was for sale was less than among state farms, and among the kulaks (which was one of Stalin’s justifications for the collectivization), but surely that share was not cast in stone and would have increased with better incentives and modernized agriculture. * And this indeed happened in China.

Agricultural production in China increased, on average, by 6% in the first decade after the responsibility system was introduced. Between 1981 and 1996, mean rural per capita income increased from 683 (inflation-adjusted) yuans to 2101, that is, it grew by an average annual rate of almost 8 percent. The increases, as the graph below shows, continued afterwards. Chinese rural growth released between 50 and 100 million workers who found jobs in TVEs (Township and Village Enterprises) that mushroomed in the 1980 and 1990s, and led to the increase in industrial production. Finally, the increased output and savings enabled, as is now too well  known, a spectacular increase in Chinese industrial production.

 

Real per capita income in rural areas: China 1981-2012

            All of these positive effects continued in China for more than four decades. But if we limit our attention to just the first fifteen years (given that, this was –as we know now—the period which USSR had to create an industrial base  before being attacked by the Nazis), Chinese results are no less spectacular. There is no reason to think they would not have been replicated in the USSR, where indeed the short NEP period revived agriculture, commerce  and light industry. According to Maddison’s most recent data, real Soviet GDP per capita increased from $838 in 1921 to $2184 in 1928. While it would be wrong to ascribe all that growth to NEP (since a lot of it had simply to do with the end of the Civil War and reintroduction of some peacetime normalcy) there is little doubt that the effects of NEP were significant.

The Chinese experience shows not only that the economic effects of agricultural liberalization combined with a more restricted role of the state elsewhere would have been positive: after all, this was clear even from the limited experience of NEP in the USSR. They question one of the key assumptions made by Kolakowski, namely that NEP was incompatible with the continued one-party rule by the Communist party. The conclusions made by Kolakowski in 1976 regarding the fundamental incompatibility between NEP and one-party rule, and consequently, regarding an almost preordained abandonment of NEP in favor of a fully planned system and socialized agriculture, need to be revised. 

“Seek truth from facts”.

 

Note: * Stalin believed in a form of technological determinism: increasing returns to scale in agriculture principally because of ability to apply better technology.