History and the Meaning of Communism

Two people might differ on the definition of ‘cat’, in that one might espouse the definition “quadripedal mammalian carnivore with a highly flexible spine and a shortened face”, while the other prefers “stealth-hunting mammal with retractable claws and a tapetum in the eye”.

But the difference would be more profound, and more conceptual, if one person suggested the first of these definitions, and the other suggested “descendent of the common ancestor of all living cats” (followed by pointing to some examples). Here the difference is not between two definitions, but between two ideas about what sort of definition is appropriate to this word – different sorts of rope for connecting letters with meaning.

And this gives rise to an interesting possibility – that one word might be defined in two ways (e.g. ‘cat’ might have both a phenetic definition, by its characteristics, and a cladistic definition, by its ancestry). But then what if the two don’t match up? Then fun and excitement! For those interested in concepts, at least…

What about political ‘isms’ – what about, in particular, the word ‘communism’? It seems to me that there are at least three different ways people have of approaching this definition, and  I’m interested in the possibility that these three might not all coincide.

The word ‘communism’ might be defined:

A) By ‘historical quotation’  – you see all those people and texts and parties loudly using words like ‘Kommunismus’ or ‘Comunismo’? Whatever it is they’re talking about, that’s what ‘communism’ means. For instance, if arguing over whether communism includes idea X, it would not be irrelevant to say “look here, idea X is explicitly endorsed in The Communist Manifesto.”

B) Theoretically – specify a certain principle and identify ‘communism’ as meaning that and everything that follows from it. For instance, one might specify the principle ‘collective ownership of all social wealth’; you might deduce that pervasive democracy is a logical precondition of this, and that freedom of expression is a logical precondition of democracy.

C) Most interestingly, in terms of ‘class role’. It seems to me that many writers (Marxists especially) use the idea that ‘communism’ is the ideology appropriate to the mature revolutionary movement of the proletariat almost as what fixes the meaning of ‘communism’. Or (to use the word to designate a possible state of society, rather than an ideology) there’s a habit of defining ‘communism’ as a classless society (and, at times, ‘socialism’ as a society in which the proletariat is the dominant class).

Now if these three approaches to definition were entirely unrelated, we would just have an ambiguous word, or rather three words spelt and pronounced the same (like with ‘stick’, a bit of a wood, ‘stick’, what glue does, and ‘stick’ it to the man).

But they’re meant to all define the same concept; hence they’re supposed to match up with each other. A certain historical collection of people and groups (A) are united (setting aside whichever ones you want to exclude from the club) by their espousal of certain ideas (B) and by their role as representative of a certain class movement (C).

Some opponents of communism would no doubt make a point of denying these connections – in particular, denying that either A or B link to C, denying that the wage-earning population have any natural connection to or interest in the ideas (B) that a certain tradition of people (A) have espoused. Alternatively, it might simply be denied that those ideas, as espoused by those people, have any prospect of revolutionising anything.

I disagree, as you might expect. I could go into why but I won’t.

Rather, I’m interested in the following possibility: that there might be a valid connection between A and B, and between B and C, but not between A and C.

That is, might it be that while ‘the communist tradition’ is indeed a good representative of ‘communist ideas’ (if we’re selective in the right way – excluding people like Stalin who are too obviously at odds with those ideas), and while these ideas are indeed those that naturally emerge out of and guide a ‘mature revolutionary proletariat’, no other connection exists between the communist tradition up ’til now, and that ‘mature revolutionary proletariat’ – because the latter has never actually appeared? (that’s not a diss or anything, ‘maturity’ here is meant in the sense of ‘historically undeveloped’)

This to me looks like a consistent position. I don’t know that it’s true, but it’s not obviously less plausible than the more traditional idea that all three of the definitions are tightly linked. Of course, it demands an explanation of what ‘the communist tradition’ was all about, why it existed the way it did and did what it did. And I can imagine some possible answers.

But for now I’ll leave it here: it seems to be consistent to accept both that (some significant core of) the historical communist movement was right in its ideas, and moreover that those ideas are, as it claimed, appropriate to a mature revolutionary proletariat, while also disputing the idea that proletarian revolution had anything to do with the successes and failures of that same movement.

Logical Positivism is the Soviet Union of Philosophy

Moritz Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle, murdered by a Nazi

I was discussing logical positivism with a group recently, and it occurred to me: logical positivism is the philosophical equivalent of the Soviet Union. This claim is not entirely facetious, though also not entirely non-facetious. This post, like many on this blog, is shockingly under-researched and no doubt quite plainly wrong.

(I should clarify that in both cases there should be an ‘etc.’ – the Soviet Union [mainly later but looking also at early figures like Lenin] along with the Stalinist states in China, Europe, Cuba, etc., and logical positivism/logical empiricism and the more general philosophical project emerging therefrom, including many people who would not have called themselves positivists – e.g. Quine, Wittgenstein both late and early, Ryle, the scientific behaviourists, etc.)

So why do I draw this parallel? There are a number of reasons.

Firstly, of course, while one is philosophical and the other political, the latter’s philosophy and the former’s politics align them quite closely. In essence, they largely share a belief in the desirability and feasibility of a socialist future, and a philosophical commitment to science and to naturalism. This is reflected in them having often similar enemies – notably, fascism and organised religion.

Secondly, just as obviously, they both offered bold and hugely ambitious projects for the total reconstitution of society or thought. They both, to be frank, failed in these projects, though their deaths were slow and drawn out, lingering on beyond the effective demise of their original animating enthusiasm.

Why Do We Have Property Rights? Why Has Capitalism Been So Successful?

Via. Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling I came across a series of interlinked posts discussing property rights and their justifications or lack thereof (which I think were sparked by Chris’ posts about copyright).

Now I won’t rehearse everything I’ve argued on this subject, but I will offer a few observations.

Ian B., a commenter at Tim Worstall’s blog, claims the following:

“Animals (indluding humans) tend towards asserting property rights. My cat believes she owns the garden, and forcibly ejects other cats from it. It’s just something animals do…You’re free to choose which sort of society you want but, like my cat, I will personally prefer the property rights one.”

What’s interesting about this is it’s actually pretty much my view – and in sharp conflict with the way that both right-libertarians and many socialists talk.

For the latter, the key issue for understanding property is work, creation of goods. There are then different arguments about whether entrepreneurs or inheritors or capitalists ‘have the right’ to their wealth, or whether in fact the workers who collectively produce that wealth ‘have the right’ to it.

But what both myself and Ian suggest is that while these reflections may be true or false, they have nothing to do with the reality of property rights. That reality is instead a descendent of the territorial instinct – that is, of animals competing for power.

Modalities of Oppression, Part 3 – Beyond Marxism

I’ve written a couple of posts recently about my own attempts to comprehend (in very abstract terms) the relations among different forms of oppression, and how quite different sorts of processes form a single whole. I finished the second with some inconclusive comments about Marxism, which remains the paradigmatic reference point for a historical theory of how communism will triumph. I also posted recently about socialist feminism, liberal feminism, and radical feminism, though again somewhat inconclusively.

What I to do now is become fractionally more conclusive, by directly considering the key claims of ‘Marxism’ and offering the beginnings of a broader theory that would seek to expand it while remaining materialist, in particular in the direction of radical feminism as opposed to socialist feminism.

This will involve my own understanding of Marxism and of materialism; I’ve studied the subject a little, but many others have studied it more. Marxism is often caricatured (and also often affirmed without much in the way of argument) so bear this in mind.

Three Modalities of Oppression, Part 2: history and prehistory

Yesterday I tried to draw together a lot of different sorts of oppression through distinguishing the oppression involved in enforcing identities (and repressing the abnormal and deviant), the oppression involved in those identities themselves (whereby some people are marked as by nature needing to be dominated, and others as by nature fit for domination), and the oppression involved in multiple people expressing the ‘dominator’ identity (and hence having to fight and grind each down).

What I’d like to try and do now in the follow-up is make this a bit more relevant to history and politics. That last post showed the three modalities in their conceptual or symbolic connections, as an abstracted process happening in human minds. What I want to do now is show them as a causal system of interactions in the real world. A great deal of abstraction is still involved in trying to be suitably general, of course.

So, to take the longest possible perspective, I’d note that many animal species show us behaviour-patterns that seem like the germs of human oppression.

In Defense of Hegel’s Idealism

It is conventional for Marxists to present Marx’s conception of history as superior to Hegel‘s (which is I think true), and to present this superiority as being essentially a matter of replacing ‘idealism’ with ‘materialism’ (which I think is ambiguous). I want to argue that there are two separate oppositions that could be called ‘idealism vs. materialism’ and applied to Hegel vs. Marx, and that while one gives Marx and ‘materialism’ the advantage, the other does not.

(Obviously this isn’t about materialism in the sense of greed and desire for material things, or idealism in the sense of having high ideals)

Hegel’s philosophy can be called idealism in two ways. The more conventional philosophical way is as a metaphysical description: in Hegel’s view, everything that exists is some form or manifestation of ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, or ‘spirit’.

That’s not the sort of idealism associated with Bishop Berkely, for whom this ‘spirituality’ of all things means that, for example, the mug I drink out exists only as my idea, an image in my mind, that only exists as long as I can see or feel it. For Hegel, the mug is perfectly real and independent of me – but its nature is basically the same as mine, since we are both (in a vague sense I won’t try to pin down) ‘manifestations of spirit’.

Hegel’s view of history is thus that it is ‘a process of spirit becoming aware of itself’ – so at first spirit manifests only as rocks and space dust, then as bacteria, which are alive, then living and conscious things (higher animals), and then finally living, conscious, and self-conscious things (humans). Humans then in turn progress through various stages of illusion and ignorance, progressing, through science, art, religion, and philosophy, towards greater and greater ‘self-consciousness’.

Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution

I’ve recently been reading some of the work of Eric Hobsbawm, focusing on the Industrial Revolution in Britain and its causes.

Now, there’s an idea which is widespread both among ardent defenders of capitalism and among many of its Marxist and Marxist-inspired critics, that the industrial revolution, and the worldwide technological transformation which it initiated, is intimately involved with capitalism – we have capitalism ‘to thank’ for it. Mostly this is presented as a good thing, and I would overall concur with that analysis, although the environmental consequences have not been brilliant.

What Hobsbawm argues, though, is that while the industrial revolution emerged along with the growth and strengthening of British capitalism, and while the two were certainly connected, capitalism was not actually a very ‘fertile’ ground for industrial revolution, because profit-oriented production tends to be actually quite conservative. He writes:

“It is often assumed that an economy of private enterprise has an automatic bias towards innovation, but this is not so. It has a bias only towards profit. It will revolutionise manufactures only if greater profits are to be made in this way than otherwise. But in pre-industrial societies this is hardly ever the case.

“Socialists” as a Central Component of Capitalism

To some people (libertarian socialists) this post will simply re-iterate an obvious truth. To others (mainly Trotskyists) it will be evidence of an infantile disorder. To those who are signed up to no faction, it may just be interesting.

Traditionally, Marxists have tended, as I understand it, to say something like this:

“In the typical ‘bourgeois’ revolution, to bring in rational, market-driven, technological, capitalism, such as those in France of the US, the bourgeoisie itself and its supporters (the economists and philosophers of free markets, individual liberty, free enterprise, etc.) was able to lead and organise the revolution.

But in many other, less developed countries, the national bourgeoisie was too weak or cowardly to do this itself, preferring a comfortable compromise with imperial capitalists and local pre-capitalist rulers. As a result, some other coalition of classes, such as the intelligentsia and the peasantry, have had to perform its tasks (the inauguration of capitalism) instead.”

Now there’s clearly a certain degree of cogency to this. Chinese capitalism, for example, is clearly the result of the Communist Party, not of local free marketeers. But it raises a question.

If that ‘substitute’ pattern has generated functioning capitalism for far more people across the world than the classically-liberal bourgeoisie-led pattern, then is it really fair to still see it as an aberration?

Doesn’t it actually make just as much sense to say that capitalism is typically, and characteristically, brought in by a mass movement of the peasantry animated by state-socialist ideology?