Saturday, May 15, 2010

1848 and the Last Temptation of Marx

I thought I'd cruise through the book 1848: Year of Revolution now that my class is over, but of course I haven't (maybe it's because I blog too much). Starting Röpke's Crises and Cycles while reading it doesn't help, either. I did want to write about something I found very intriguing, though. The Habsburgs, after their initial shock at events in Paris, Milan, Vienna, and Berlin, began to respond to the assorted revolutionaries, liberals, leftists, and nationalists with considerably more craftiness than Metternich was able to muster before being ousted. As revolutionary fervor broke out in Galicia, the Austrians deftly played the Ukranian peasants against the Polish nobles and nationalists that demanded greater liberties from the empire. The Ukranians sided with the Austrians because the depredations of the Poles were more immediate than the arguably far greater imperial claims of the authorities in Vienna. This sort of sentiment was not uncommon during the American revolution either, where the refrain was often heard that "I would rather be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away than three thousand tyrants one mile away". Thus, the 1848 revolution in the Austro-Hungarian provinces especially took on a decidedly bourgeois (if not noble) tone, rather than a populist one. Paradoxically, the emperor became the "man of the people" rather than the democrats.

Another thing I found interesting was how damned sympathetic the leftists and the socialists come across in Paris and Berlin! I don't think it's the author's secret ideological sympathies, I think it's simply the fact that relative to monarchs and autocrats, a socialist that isn't saying that much about a workers' paradise, but is emphasizing constitutional reform and democracy doesn't seem all that bad. These are two somewhat surprising elements of the book, which upon further reflection of course aren't all that surprising at all.

Without knowing that much about the history of communism, I have to suspect that these two observations decisively shaped the future of the movement. Marx (an active participant in the Berlin revolution) certainly digested the monarchical alliance with the peasantry against the nobility, and he remarked on this process again a decade later when Tsar Alexander II emancipated Russia's serfs against the wishes of the Russian nobility:

"If the Russian nobility do not think that the “4th of August” (1789) has yet arrived, and that so far there is no necessity of sacrificing their privileges on the altar of their country, the Russian Government is going a great deal faster; it has already arrived at the “declaration of the rights of man.” What, indeed, do you think of Alexander II, proclaiming “rights which belong to the peasantry by nature, and of which they ought never to have been deprived"? Verily, these are strange times! In 1846, a Pope initiating a liberal movement; in 1858, a Russian Autocrat, a true samoderjetz vserossiiski, proclaiming the rights of man! And we shall see that the Czar’s proclamation will have as world-wide an echo, and an ultimate effect of far greater magnitude than the Pope’s liberalism."

What lessons could he have learned from this? I'll submit a few:

1. That autocratic authority can be brought to bear to serve the interests of the collective, and that the lower classes will embrace the autocrat for this.

2. That socialists are the good guys. It's easy to write-off the down-side of socialism when (1.) you've never seen the downside yet, and (2.) your formative years were spent battling emperors, kings, autocrats, and nobles. I'm sympathetic to the socialists as I read this book, and I know how the story ends! It's understandable how the revolutionaries could get so confident in their beliefs. It's comparable to Jefferson's support for the French Revolution, even as it started to descend into macabre chaos.

3. That a conflict of power is not the same as a conflict of class. For Marx, the dialectics of class were absolutely paramount. Today, in America especially, we have an inherent libertarianism. For us, exploitation is a function of the exercise of different power relationships. It's a perspective that is shared by French philosophers, particularly after Foucault, but it is also derived from a contractarian approach. But this is not a foundational assumption of many socialists and even many liberals in the 19th century who did not have a contractarian understanding of the world. For them, power was a tool to be used by either side - the oppressor or the oppressed. Simply exercising power over someone did not make you an oppressor. The primary source of oppression was class. To borrow from my recent series on calculation problems vs. incentive problems, the primary source of oppression was not a capricious violation of contract, but an institutional arrangement that stacked the deck in favor of one class over another. If autocratic power could rectify this, then so be it.

If you put these three together, the dictatorship of the proletariat follows naturally. It may be naive. It's a view that could greatly benefit from an infusion of contractarian thinking. But for a man that cut his teeth on the 1848 revolutions, it's understandable. If the imperial authorities had sided more vigorously with the nobility, and given Marx a greater distaste for autocratic power, I wonder if communism would have turned out differently.

11 comments:

  1. "...Anonymity of it all..."

    0) I found you via my daily search for the term "hans hoppe" because I prowl the web defending him from those who fail to understand him. You seem to understand him perfectly.

    1) I've added your site to the Roundtable as Libertarian, Rational, Alliance with three of five stars. the site is at www.roundtable.captalismv3.com.

    2) Your site would be better off if you'd pick a standard 'clean' template and left it that way. The site appears disorganized simply because of your modifications. Leave that to people who know what they're doing and stick to content production, which you're apparently good at. For example, leaving a comment is a pain because the css for the comment block and the column width conflict. Search for 'minimalist' and put one of them together.

    3) from your site it is far too difficult to find the 'comments' option, and comments are what attract traffic. It is also impossible to find a way to contact you via the web site.

    4) you are almost apologetic in your postings, which is a submissive posture that is usually the result of working in an educational institution. It is a fact of the entertainment business that controversy creates interest.

    5) read these postings on how to promote your blog. http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/03/11/how-id-promote-my-blog-if-i-were-starting-out-again/ But 'if we build it they will come' is a false assumption.

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  2. :)

    Thanks for the advice!

    I think Evan and I both take somewhat tentative stances on things that may come across as apologetic for a very good reason - we have tentative positions on many things. There doesn't seem to be any point in changing that for the sake of attracting readers if one of the primary points we want to share with readers is that some issues need to be approached with a degree of caution, speculation, uncertainty, and humility.

    I'll check out the other stuff. We don't have time to mess around too much with the format of the blog, and we don't have the resources to outsource that work - but we'll see what we can do about some of your suggestions.

    Thanks for adding us to the roundtable.

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  3. I just looked through your site - very cool thing you've got going. I think you're eventually going to reconsider my "Libertarian (Hayekian)" label, although I suppose I have some sympathies with them. I'm not sure what of your labels I would fall under, though.

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  4. "It's easy to write-off the down-side of socialism when (1.) you've never seen the downside yet..."

    Never? Various "leveller" movements and the like have existed throughout human history and were within the historical memory of at least educated socialists in 1848. Anyway, by no means were all the critics of the European monarchies socialists; many were classical liberals and was the case with the French Revolution it was their concerns which initially drove the reform demands.

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  5. Anonymous -

    1. Sure, but socialism is more than simply egalitarianism. I imagine that Marx would not have recognized what he was looking for anywhere in prior history. In that sense, Marx was probably like a lot of libertarians and Austrians - so doctrinaire that he doesn't even see a shade of himself in anyone that's come before him, and therefore is absolutely unwilling to learn lessons from the past.

    2. Of course socialists weren't the only ones. I made a point of stating in my post that it was a collection of liberals, nationalists, socialists, leftists, and "assorted revolutionaries". I was particularly interested in the case of Marx at this point, because Marx didn't have the suspicion of the use of power and force to coerce that a lot of the liberals of 1848 had.

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  6. "I imagine that Marx would not have recognized what he was looking for anywhere in prior history."

    Marx was a utopian casting back in time for some past moment of human perfection which he hoped to propagate in the present. So yes, Marx was intensely interested in the past (despite the disparaging remarks he made about St. Simon, etc.).

    "In that sense, Marx was probably like a lot of libertarians and Austrians..."

    How about you lay off the libertarians and say something like this about democratic fundamentalists?

    "...so doctrinaire that he doesn't even see a shade of himself in anyone that's come before him..."

    Marx praises in his own way all the dialectical periods which came before, with particular praise being given to capitalism in fact; so yeah, he tries to draw distinctions but his dialectical materialism also has continuities.

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  7. You know, given that the vast majority of the population (especially in the "educated classes") is made up of democratic fundamentalists and all.

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  8. 1. Yes, he was concerned about the past. No, he did not want to recreate the past. Statements like that show an extremely poor grasp of Marx's understanding of history. He was a utopian. He was a milleniarian. And that was a fault of his. But it was a fault that should at least make clear that he did not honor or embrace the past.

    2. "How about you lay off the libertarians and say something like this about democratic fundamentalists?" - democratic fundamentalists make up an almost non-existent community in the debate right now. Any that do exist are activists and whiners, not thinkers. Democratic fundamentalism has been debunked for centuries - it's not worth engaging. Libertarianism is much more sophisticated, and therefore is worth engaging. So no, I'm not going to "lay off the libertarians".

    3. "Marx praises in his own way all the dialectical periods which came before, with particular praise being given to capitalism in fact" - How could you write this sentence and still write that point you started with?

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  9. "You know, given that the vast majority of the population (especially in the "educated classes") is made up of democratic fundamentalists and all."

    Hmmm... perhaps we are misunderstanding each other's definitions of "democratic fundamentalist". I MIGHT agree that the majority of the population thinks this. I'm not quite sure the majority of the group of people who have given any thought to the question are democratic fundamentalists.

    And even insofar as the majority of the population are "democratic fundamentalists", I think that's just shorthand. The public isn't clamoring for a plebiscite after all. So vague statements about "democracy" is really more of an imprecise embrace of democratic republicanism than it is an informed embrace of democratic fundamentalism.

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  10. I happen to agree with Lowy on Marx's preference for pre-capitalist social organization, etc.

    "...democratic fundamentalists make up an almost non-existent community in the debate right now."

    We are literally surrounded by them; indeed, they are the sort of people who are regularly elected and/or praised on television.

    "How could you write this sentence and still write that point you started with?"

    Easily - Marx wanted pre-capitalist social relations with the fruits of capitalism that he liked - you find this sort of contradiction throughout the various romantics.

    "The public isn't clamoring for a plebiscite after all."

    Not living in California I see.

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  11. "We are literally surrounded by them; indeed, they are the sort of people who are regularly elected and/or praised on television."

    As I said, I think we're defining this differently. I think throw-away sentimentality about democracy is quite common, but I don't see many democratic fundamentalists. CERTAINLY no one we elect to office.

    "Not living in California I see."

    Again, I think we're not using the same terms. Even California is democratic republic that does a lot through referenda. It's certainly closer to democratic fundamentalism than just about anywhere else in this country, but (1.) it's hardly an example of democratic fundamentalism, despite the fact that it is closer, and (2.) California is REGULARLY lifted up as an example of the failure of democratic fundamentalism. It is a failure, and even Californians know that - they just don't have the political will to do anything about it.

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All anonymous comments will be deleted. Consistent pseudonyms are fine.