(no subject)

[symbioidlj]

Let's play "Name that economist"!

"How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values."

Those boorish proles!

Comments

More stick poking and uselessly verbose prose

[flower-on-fire.livejournal.com]

Hmm...

As I understand it, the hostility of his tone aside, he's kinda right. Like everyone else, he's a product of his time and place, and I think the context is rather important; I'm pretty sure he's addressing the more specific implementation of Communism of his time than Marxism in its original form. As it was being put into practice in the USSR during Keynes' life, the government was specifically targeting and executing anyone who excelled at anything (see kulaks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak#Definitions) in particular, for example, though there are plenty of other purges of the specifically proficient and well-educated to choose from), creating an atmosphere where there was essentially more incentive to be mediocre than to do anything particularly well--to be "the best doctor" or "the best farmer" or "the best chemist" or anything else typically meant insane scrutiny, and eventually a show trial and death. The result of all this was that virtually every field suffered a huge brain-drain. It wasn't until full-blown de-Stalinization that the Soviets really began to get back on track in the 'hard' professions, and they arguably never got back on track artistically.

As for the last part, that one must "first [suffer] some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values" in order to buy into Communism, is something Marx would agree with. As Marx has it, in order for an economic system to successfully perpetuate itself, its denizens must be in the correct ideological mindset to work within the system. This would, as Marx argued, eventually happen naturally, through the gradual widening of the income gap and the decline of simple living conditions; the masses would eventually become Communist by default.

It's really Lenin that fucked it up by rushing it; as strange as it is to say, things weren't bad enough in Russia at the time of the revolution for Communism to take hold and succeed. Lenin still bought the idea that the people needed to be in the right ideological mindset, but he was forced to turn to a process of propaganda and indoctrination (or that "strange and horrid process of conversion," if you will) in order to make that happen. Marx (and Engels) both knew this couldn't succeed, and even specifically warned against it, but Lenin ignored that part. (I could dig the specifics up somewhere if you like.)

I still think some form of Marxism or Socialism could work, but it has to arise naturally--either through the slow, incremental process of progressive/Socialist legislation being passed, or through the equally slow process of pure Capitalism growing so intolerable that a Socialist/Communist revolution is supported by a large majority of the people. (Remember--Lenin never had a majority. The one congressional election the Bolsheviks allowed after taking power, they lost.) This more nuanced take is, of course, not the line Communists were adopting at Keynes time--their line was far more violent, impatient and as we saw, ultimately impracticable.

Re: More stick poking and uselessly verbose prose

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

I agree with you 100%.

It was this that I took umbrage with: "the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement?"

More than anything it kinda shocked me, because I didn't really expect Keynes to be like that. Then again, I never followed him. I mostly knew about his theories as a sort of impetus for FDR style programs (though, even that, apparently, was wrong, as he didn't really directly influence FDR, if Wikipedia is right).

Yeah, USSR is 100-ways kind of fucked up. I've got a copy of Rising Up Rising Down (http://www.amazon.com/Rising-Up-Down-Set/dp/1932416021) where the author discusses Kulaks and the Soviet persecution of them. I really should finish that damn set. Ever hear of it? I recommend it.