Marxist Moments

HA-JOON CHANG: Caveat Emptor!

 

          Known through his Guardian contributions but also for his bestseller 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang is a lecturer in economics at Cambridge University. In terms of theory he would appear to be something of a Left Keynesian, believing that capitalism should be tempered by enlightened state intervention and brought towards a more equitable society. Meanwhile, he is an engaging writer well-suited to the task of providing Economics: The User’s Guide, a Pelican Introduction, for the layperson (2014).

Up to a point.

          Amongst those he thanks in his Acknowledgements are Leftwing and sometime fellow Guardian columnists Seumas Milne (now working to get Corbyn’s Labour elected) and Aditya Chakrabortty, as well as eminent Marxist economist and Leftwing Greek politician Costas Lapavitsas, author of Profiting Without Producing (2013).

          For all that, Ha-Joon Chang is surprisingly ill-informed about Marx and Marxism, one of his thumbnail sketches of all the various economic schools from Classic Political Economy to the Austrian School, Keynesianism and Neo-Classicism, etc. For each, he weighs up their various pros and cons. His verdict on Marxism: ‘Fatally flawed, but still useful: theories of the firm, work, and technological progress.’

          The worst flaw: ‘Above all, its prediction that capitalism will collapse under its own weight has not come true.’

          Marx was not in the habit of ‘predicting’ anything, and certainly not that any capitalist ‘collapse’ is inevitable. Capital will end with its expropriation from its owners by the proletariat, capital’s ‘gravediggers’, but this is more of a threat and rallying-cry than a prediction.  Otherwise capital as a system might linger over a long period of time, but the proletariat is the only class or factor that can destroy it. Marx was not a revolutionary activist for nothing. He saw history as class struggle, and in our time the only means by which socialism would come about. Marx did not predict when and where socialist revolution would come about. (In later life he became interested in the revolutionary potential of the Russian peasantry and even learned Russian from scratch to follow the literature more closely.) Meanwhile, the idea that capitalism can destroy itself without class intervention is contrary to Marx’s entire outlook. And such intervention is to be fought for, not ‘predicted’. His critique of the capital system was to enable workers to understand its workings in its entirety: to fight your enemy, you must know it.

          Chang: ‘The collapse of the socialist bloc has revealed that the Marxian theory of how the alternative to capitalism should be organised was highly inadequate. The list goes on.’ Not in this book. (All citations from 131-132.) Marx spurned utopians with their theories of how a future society should be created, keeping well away from such prognostications himself. It was up to the workers to self-organize a new society on the basis of ‘from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs’. Marx’s ‘theory’ here is indeed highly inadequate because it doesn’t exist and never did. Marx did not do fanciful system-building. 

          In any case the ‘socialist bloc’ was state capitalist, not socialist. That is, it was an exploitative system. Workers in Soviet Russia, like everywhere else, produced surplus value from unpaid labour-time which accrued to state enterprise as opposed to private. After the fall, in 1991, the transfer of state ownership to private was both swift and corrupt.

          Neither Lenin nor Trotsky had any illusions that they were creating socialism in Russia after 1917. They looked to impending Western socialist revolutions to give their own a kick start. When these failed to attain ascendancy, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to improvise in a desperately isolated situation, the alternative being the anarchy of a power vacuum. It was Stalin who drove through industrialisation, at a furious pace, on the non-Marxist slogan of ‘socialism in one country’. At huge and tragic human cost it worked: Russia was modernised to the point where it would defeat Germany in World War II (and indeed send the first unmanned space vehicle, Sputnik I, into orbit in 1957 – not the first ‘manned’ one, as Chang writes on p. 95). But industrialisation was initially achieved on the basis of mass forced labour, whether ‘free’ or enslaved. It was never socialism, let alone Marxian socialism, whatever the ideology put forward.

          Chang is reasonably informative on some aspects of Marx’s contribution to ‘economics’ (though Marx's study remained within ‘political economy’, not the truncated form known to us as ‘economics’). But, just as the word ‘critique’ appears in the title of his major political economic writings, Marx was a forensic tearer-down of a system, not the builder of a new one. For him socialism would be what the triumph of a non-exploitative proletariat made it. And, to be frank, Chang’s conclusion on Marx’s ‘flaws’ is shoddy thinking: raising an old canard that is easily disposed of.