Marx’s Weirdest Idea: “The Unity of Subject and Object”
Notes on “Main Currents of Marxism,” Part 2
You may recall that when I switched over the focus of this newsletter to accommodate my run for office, I started a series of articles sharing some of what I learned from reading Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kołakowski. As I explained, it’s not exactly a page-turner, and this huge three-volume work helped me get to sleep at the end of a busy day for about a year. But it offers some fascinating insights into Marxism, and what went wrong with it.
This has taken longer to get back to than I expected. I now understand why politics tends to—how shall I put this?—it tends to select against deep thinkers. It’s a job that doesn’t leave as much time as I would like for just sitting down and doing prolonged thinking. For precisely that reason, I’ve decided to be extra stubborn about making sure I still do it. So even though I probably ought to be planning some campaign events right now, I’m going to take a half a day to return to that series for another installment. I also want to clear the decks of this project so that by July 4, I can switch over to my next planned series on what I learned from reading Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution—a good topic for the 250th anniversary of that revolution.
But first, back to the ideological origins of a revolution that had less happy consequences. And The Revolution is precisely where we left off.
I wrote last time about a central debate among late-19th-Century socialists. On the one side were the revolutionaries who insisted the only answer was to sweep away capitalism entirely and create a totally new and different system whose structure they could only guess at, except that they knew it would be perfect. (This is pretty much literally how they put it. It’s hard to see what could possibly go wrong.) On the other side were the reformist “social democrats” who wanted, not to overthrow capitalism, but to introduce welfare-state programs and regulations intended to benefit factory workers and the poor. I noted that this second group, who laid the basis for most Western European governments today, achieved far better results.
Part of the reason The Revolution achieved such terrible results is that in addition to creating a totally dysfunctional economic system, The Revolution also created a brutal and tyrannical political system.
Those two results were closely connected. A system in which the government controls the entire economy provides a powerful enforcement mechanism for tyranny. As Leon Trotsky famously noted, after losing out to Stalin in a power struggle, “In a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.”
By the same token, the guys who are most adept at climbing the greasy pole of insider politics in an oppressive regime do not have the skills to run large, complex industrial operations. Even if they did, the structure of the regime prevents them from doing it. Kołakowski notes that Lenin and Stalin kept complaining about the lack of initiative from lower-level officials, who would do nothing without explicit orders from above—yet if someone did make decisions on his own initiative, he could well find himself shipped off to the gulag as a “saboteur” the first time anything went wrong. No wonder everything got bogged down. The Bolsheviks believed in rule by fear, but fear is a paralytic.
From his own perspective some decades later, writing in the years after the death of Stalin, one of Kołakowski’s main concerns was the extent to which Marx’s theories could be blamed for this result. How did Marx’s own ideology explicitly plant the seeds for the dictatorship created by Lenin and consolidated by Stalin?
