Harry Marks wrote: I basically agree
Hi Harry. Our agreement here is that the economic theory of communism contains some basic flaws. While it may be wise to avoid florid language in expanding upon this observation, it is a source of considerable frustration to me that the quality of discussion on communism is so poor, allowing neo-communists and their fellow travellers to maintain the impression that the critique of communism lacks any relevance or ethical compass. Criticisms of communism are widely ignored as serving sectional economic interests. Who is truly sectional, and therefore consumed by deluded fantasy, and who is objective and scientific in this debate is a profound philosophical conundrum. I would just like to see more humility in this debate, with ability to see merit in opposing perspectives.
Harry Marks wrote: a society functioning as it truly should would give "to each according to need" and benefit "from each according to ability." (Marx' terminology).
Yes, the Marxist utopia is an apt imagination of life in the golden age. After centuries of universal abundance, culture would evolve to enable spiritual incentives to lead people to want to contribute to the common good. But the political problem of communism is that the worker’s united front uses this communist dream as an incentive to short circuit the process of working out how to generate abundance, which is the precondition of a functional sharing economy.
Harry Marks wrote:Large sectors of the mixed market economy operate on people's interest in doing good work. Every researcher in motivation theory and management knows that motivation is about setting internal (i.e. personal) goals, not about how much your pay depends on the results. I would go so far as to say that a person who works hard only if their pay depends on it suffers from a kind of disability.
Your comment makes me think of people who go to medical school in order to become wealthy, and how that motivation leads to bad medicine. Motivation for internal goals arises from envisioning success, which in turn is a primarily spiritual practice, using ideas to transform behaviour.
This priority of volition and spirit for motivation illustrates that both capitalism and communism have degraded materialist concept of human identity, capitalism for seeing money as the only motive for action, and communism for rejecting the personal spiritual qualities of will and faith and liberty.
Going back to my comment about historical dialectics in the
thread on the Frankfurt School, social trust involves a balance of motives between competition and cooperation, with coherent policy involving a synthesis of antithetical motivations.
Harry Marks wrote:
monetary incentives do a good job of focusing people's minds on the things that are valued. There was a time when industrialists were a class of people focused on gathering funds and applying them to create factories and other production, for the purpose of getting rich. That phenomenon has hardly disappeared from the earth, but the idea that the ones running things are doing a hugely better job than the ones left behind in the competition for executive positions is hardly tenable anymore.
Communism is gaining new political traction in response to the perception of gross corruption among the rich. The
Panama Papersare a case in point. As you note, similar grand corruption provided the traction for the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
Harry Marks wrote:
What we have is more like what the financial services industry creates, in which some people really are a bit better than the pack (in mutual funds it was Peter Lynch, in management of conglomerates it was Jack Welch, in acquisitions and participating investments, Warren Buffett) but most are useless appendages. The value is not created by hard work and inspiration, it is leeched off of by the industry.
This seems to reference the
Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule of the vital few, that about 80% of effects often come from 20% of causes.
Harry Marks wrote:
Outside the innovative tech industry, I would argue the entire economy is run by useless appendages (well, okay, they do work hard and the result is somewhat better than if they didn't) in a discouragingly self-serving manner. To be fair, this is largely due to the growing difficulty of actually creating value. There just aren't as many golden pharma finds to be dug up, or killer aps, or revolutionary inventions. In the heyday of capitalism, from 1860 to 2005, life really got better. It remains to be seen whether capitalism's advantages in exploiting innovation have much more value to contribute to the world.
Frontier industries have to be meritocratic as a function of economic competition, but behind the frontier people lapse into nepotism and protection and the whole scene gets sluggish. Most people just can’t cope with pioneering life on the frontier. I have no doubt that any perceived lull in innovation will be replaced by waves of change, especially since I have a bunch of pioneering inventions which should make a lot of money if anyone ever helps me with them.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:Chapter Eight begins with Ivan in the psych ward, remaining in denial about how his behaviour is perceived by others. That syndrome of denial is used here by Bulgakov as a parable for the wounded vanity of the Bolshevik rank and file who were purged by the so-called 'democratic centralists' who established the totalitarian tyranny. … these communist true believers are like Ivan in the wild sense of their own rational coherence, and in their fury at the inability of the world to see things their way.
I think that is a fair reading of the intent, although it leaves me feeling that his themes are distressingly disconnected. Maybe later chapters will bring the threads together.
I don’t get the same sense of disconnect in Bulgakov that you mention here. The overall message of the book is a satire on the situation in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s. A key element, which inspires Bulgakov’s use of magic realism, is the perception among conservative Tsarists that the whole Bolshevik Revolution is a surreal nightmare, an unbelievable monstrous destruction of all they know and value. I find that sense of the nightmare of confrontation with communist barbarity is a unifying theme in
The Master and Margarita. Here in this psych ward chapter, that theme emerges in the inability of a Bolshevik to cope with people who don’t believe his story. That is a syndrome Bulgakov would have rightly perceived among both supporters and opponents of the frightening new dispensation under Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:To get a sense of the extremism of the Russian civil war, consider
Lenin’s Hanging Telegram’,... "Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: "they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks". Find some truly hard people.”
It would be helpful if you had some understanding of how the leading farmers in an area often oppress the peasants. They ally with nobility, if there are any, and use usury to reduce workers and tenants to penury, the better to extract value from the labor and misery of others. Most of the kulaks were not that, but many were. These were distinguished more for their ruthlessness than for their effective farming.
Sure. The whole Chinese attack on landlords and the
Four Olds in the Cultural Revolution, to mention a similar context, illustrates the furious resentment of the poor towards feudal social relations. And the old slavers’ ability to regard the poor as subhuman comes from a historic era now seen as repugnant.
The oppression of the Slavs as a whole
gave rise to the word slave. In Russia, the concept of
kulak extended down to anyone owning a few cows. And that is why Ivan’s musing about a person being “a kulak masquerading as a proletarian” is so acutely disturbing. It raises the horrible spectre of the lumpen-proletariat of rural Russia nursing old personal grievances and making secret accusations which then lead to the death and imprisonment of capable honest people, destroying the social and economic infrastructure of the culture like a blow to the head with a lump of wood.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:We can readily appreciate that people describing such mind-boggling brutality from Lenin might not be believed. In similar fashion, Ivan is explaining something he personally knows to be true, but is treated as a madman. Bulgakov is saying communism is beyond belief in its venal insanity.
On the contrary, people knew of the Cossack pogroms of the Jews, they knew of the ruthless oppression of peasants by nobility, they knew of the abuses of serfdom. Why would they be shocked that communism was acting in the same way toward people it portrayed as "bloodsuckers"? I think the surprise is meant to represent the reaction of ordinary functionaries and party idealists (writers, even) at how ruthlessness had begun to attack their ranks. It was for enemies. What was it doing here?
The systematic industrial organisation of oppression under communism, for example in the collectivisation of agriculture, was far worse than any Tsarist atrocity. Use of machine guns and barbed wire and trains and telephones and radio makes it far easier to organise from the centre. So Stalin’s purges of the Party were like a headline that would have received more attention among elites than the mass destruction of the old society, a catastrophe which so utterly bewildered and attacked the peasantry. But that does not at all mean the peasants accepted this new madness with stoic fortitude. Indeed,
peasant uprisings were suppressed by the communist regime with ruthless efficiency on mass scale.