Parellels Between the Great Transformations?

Two of the greatest transitions in human history were the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The Neolithic Revolution was the move from hunting and gathering naturally-occurring crops to agriculture, and paved the way for numerous other changes to society. For example, once one was committed to a particular area of land, it became worthwhile to build dwellings, and so we advanced from nomadic tribes to settled villages.

One curious feature of the Neolithic Revolution, however, is that despite paving the way for great human advancements it was probably a severely negative experience for the people who lived through it. Compared to hunter-gatherers, farmers were shorter, weaker, more-disease-prone, harder-worked, and shorter-lived. This raises something of a puzzle: given that becoming a farmer would make your life worse, and in a one-on-one fight any hunter-gatherer would have a large advantage over a farmer, why would anyone become a farmer?

The answer is that while the Neolithic transition was awful at the individual level, it was enormously powerful at the group level. An agricultural society could extract vastly more food from any given area of land than could a tribe of hunter-gatherers, allowing it to support a substantially larger population. Furthermore, a sedentary group could increase its population towards capacity much faster than a nomadic group, since mothers were now able to concurrently raise multiple young children in a way that was impossible when reliant only upon human milk and when young children had to be carried everywhere.


The Industrial Revolution of the late-18th and 19th centuries is better documented than the Neolithic Revolution, but still we know rather less than we would like. One ongoing debate among historians is why precisely it happened in England in the late 18th century, and why it didn't happen in previous civilisations to approach similar levels of technology (such as China and the Netherlands). I wish to very tentatively suggest that dynamics similar to those of the Neolithic Revolution were in play.

Did people's lives improve or get worse during the English Industrial Revolution? It's hard to say, and it's very easy to underestimate how poor living conditions were for most of agricultural history. But our best estimates are that while they did in time improve, the early decades of the industrial revolution involved little to no improvement in wages. It is true that overall life expectancy was improving, but expectancy appears to have been rather higher in the countryside than in the new urban centres, where not only was disease able to spread like never before but there were introduced a host of new unhealthy occupations (factory work, coal mining). Moreover, there was a trend of increasing life expectancy prior to the industrial revolution, so credit for greater longevity is more probably due to the agricultural revolution than the industrial revolution.

So why did people go along with this? My suggestion is that in most cases, they didn't. This is why previous civilisations which could have industrialised did not: no-one wanted the work it involved, and few people were desperate enough to take it on. England was the first society to be in a position to industrialise and to have social circumstances - presumably the Enclosures - which compelled people to take on industrial work.

I don't think the group-selection mechanic which helped explain the spread of the Neolithic Revolution will do much work here, however. More plausibly, other countries came to industrialise after England had already gone through the horrendous early decades and industrial productivity had begun to skyrocket. If one was living on the proverbial $1 per day as an agricultural labourer, one might quite reasonably refuse industrial work that paid $400/year (the average British wage in 1860) but leap at the chance to do similar work for $800/year (the average British wage a century later).

How Successful Have Communists Been?

Towards the end of the second chapter of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels set out ten policies which they see as necessary to the establishment of communist societies. This post is a brief look at how far these policies have been implemented in what we generally think of as capitalist countries.

(This post is intended partly as an exposition of the limited extent to which Western societies can be called "capitalist", but also as a response to hyperbolic claims by libertarians - including my past self - who like to suggest that these have been completely enacted).

1: Abolition of Private Property in Land, and Application of Rent to Public Purposes
This is the case in a limited and perhaps misleading sense. It is true that the biggest landowner in the US is the Federal Government, but the areas which it owns are not for the most part areas where people actually live - rather, they are vast and inhospitable deserts which are used for testing nuclear arms and such.

What about the second part, of taxing away rents? This does not happen, and so far as I can tell the main people advocating for it to happen are in fact the Marxists of the Adam Smith Institute.

2: A heavy progressive income tax
What counts as heavy? The highest rate of income tax in the UK is 45%, although there are of course other taxes which reduce people's take-home pay; National Insurance and Corporation Tax are the biggest, although for anyone my age or younger who went to university (which will include the vast majority of future higher-rate taxpayers), there's also a 9% tax to repay your tuition fees. I'm a bit hazy on how it all interacts, but I'd guess that we're close to if not past the topmost point of the Laffer Curve. (And the fact that maximising government revenue is seen as an acceptable aim for policy is itself pretty indicative). Let's say that this one has been achieved.

3: Abolition of all rights of inheritance
There are taxes on inheritance, it is true, but this was true for centuries before Marx was writing. Back in 2010, I remember Labour's intention to raise inheritance tax ("the Death Tax") being a major campaigning point for the Tories. To the extent that this has been achieved, I don't think one can honestly credit/blame Marxists.

4: Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels
The US taxes the wealth of those who renounce citizenship, but at a relatively low rate. Certainly it's far short of full confiscation. More normal practice is for taxation to be continued upon emigrants regardless upon where they are earning, but such a policy would have been utterly unenforcible in 1848. I think it's best to regard this proposal as obselete.

And rebels? I guess that occurs to an extent - if you leave the UK to fight for ISIS, you won't be allowed back in and your assets will likely be frozen - but again this hardly seems like a specifically Marxist policy, and more a policy of any government which wants to disincentivise rebellion.

5: Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly
This is the one that gets Austrian economists all excited, but I think that claiming the Bank of England to be fulfilment of this policy is a somewhat dubious interpretation of Marx. The state intervenes in investment markets, but it does little to decide where private capital actually goes. Influence is not at all the same thing as deliberate determination of who receives investments.

6: Centralisation of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state
This used to be the case, certainly. Then along came successive Tory governments, which have gradually privatised railways and the Royal Mail. I guess that a lot of public transport is still state-owned or controlled (the difference on the quality of bus services in Birmingham, where every route is a council-granted monopoly, and Manchester, where there are four different competing bus companies, has to be seen to be believed), and in places other than the UK (including my current abode of Budapest) there is still literal nationalisation. So let's count that as achieved.

With the means of communication, though, you again can't really attribute nationalisation to communism. The US constitution, of all documents, grants a federal monopoly on postage. Indeed, the maintenance of such a monopoly has been a key priority of governments for centuries, since controlling communication makes censorship and surveillance possible.

7: Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan
Honestly, this reads like "Do good stuff, don't do bad stuff"-type rhetoric. Ultimately, Marx is just saying that there ought to be economic growth, which is hardly a uniquely Marxist policy.

8: Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially in agriculture
I'm not certain what exactly he has in mind here. The bringing of women into the workforce occurred, but this hardly due to Marxism. In general the effect of left-wing governments - which are not the same as Marxists, it is true, but are surely the medium through which Marxist policies have been implemented - has been to take people out of work, both deliberately (through the expansion of pensions, lengthening of education) and as a side effect (due to minimum wages, for example). The workforce has also been reduced by increasing the number of people classed as disabled, but this happened mainly under Thatcher.

9: Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country
Well, that hasn't happened. The Green Belts remain firmly in place, and once again it is the Marxists of the Adam Smith Institute who are pushing for their loosening or abolition.

10: Free education for all in public schools. Abolition of children's labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production
Okay, this has happened. 93% of the population is educated in state-run schools, and when you ask people why this is they'll tend to justify it on grounds of equality and such considerations. Again it's hard to establish that there's a causal link between Marxists pushing this and it happening - the fact that the principle of state education is so universally accepted could be a reflection of Marxian success, or a reason to doubt that the Marxists have any role in this becoming policy. Given that one of the sacred cows of the modern left is the abolition of the few remaining private schools, I'll grant this one.

Summary
Of the nine policies which are meaningful and still relevant, I am willing to say that Marxists achieved three, that a further four have occurred but aren't really attributable to Marxists, and two haven't really happened. (Can we still count something as a step towards Marxism if it wasn't implemented as a result of Marxists? I don't think so, since many of these policies are aimed less at achieving social justice and more at achieving security for the state apparatus - i.e. to maintain non-Marxist government).

I do think that this shows how silly it is for Marxists to label the system we have as "capitalism"; however, it's not really fair to label the system as "socialism" either. Perhaps one might describe it as a mongrel hybrid, since we have all the worst parts of socialism without either of the two key Marxist policies which are actually worth having.

Woo watch

This paper sounds good pic.twitter.com/C3El3czV7T
— Ben Southwood (@bswud) April 2, 2015

I had a bit of a further look into this. The paper itself is for the most part rather dull - the highlight comes as early as the first page:

I now want to have a look at this paper in which the author apparently shows Marxist economics to be on sounder foundations than neoclassical economics!

The author herself is a bit of a character. She seems to almost be a parody of the stereotypical far-left political activist. Quoting from her profile at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she is a professor of economics:

"I... enjoy cooking and eating healthy, organic food; walking and biking; communing with nature... I am inspired by and involved with the Occupy movement."

She participates in the Cambridge Time Trade Circle, which is interesting enough to merit its own discussion independent of this person.

Among her many papers, 90% of whose titles include at least one of the words "Marxist" and "feminist" if not both, are such gems as "Spirituality and Economic Transformation" and "Why feminist, Marxist and anti-racist economists should be feminist-Marxist-anti-racist economists".

Her classes must be something of an unusual experience. She begins each lecture with a short meditation, her introductory economics course requires students to watch the film "Affluenza" and to read about "Buddhist economics".

Where do they find these people? And why on earth do these people get tenure in economics departments?

Dialectic Materialism

The writing of the famous psuedo-philosopher Hegel is remarkably difficult to understand. This is partly because the translation from German is difficult to render without losing shades of meaning. It is partly because what he said was itself not that clear, being the kind of system one typically expects to hear from stoned students. And it is partly because he was deliberately unclear, so as to conceal his atheism and thus be able to get a job at a university.

One way in which he went about achieving this stunning lack of clarity was through the use of what are known as Dialectical Triads. This was a rhetorical device which might be used in one of two ways.

The first way was for him to present an idea (e.g. master), then to present its opposite (e.g. slave) and then to present the two as the same idea (e.g. master = slave).

The second way was for him to present a pair of ideas (e.g. poverty and unconciousness), then to present a second pair consisting of the opposites to the first pair (e.g. riches and unconciousness); finally, he would choose one idea he liked from each pair and present them together (e.g. riches and conciousness).

Hegel had some wacky ideas, most obviously his disputing the Law of the Excluded Middle. (The law of the excluded middle roughly states that for two propositions P and not-P, exactly one of them is true). However, so far as I am aware he never saw the Dialectical Triads as anything more than rhetorical devices. Certainly, he didn't see them as powerful metaphysical forces which determined the course of history. It took Karl Marx for that particular idiocy to arise.

Marx believed that the driving force of history was a triad of:
Common Ownership & Poverty
Private Ownership & Wealth
leading to
Common Ownershio & Wealth

Based on this, he argued that prehistoric humans had lived under primitive communism in order to survive; there were then the stages of tyranny, feudalism and capitalism; and finally, the great capitalist economies would see workers' revolutions, leading to true communism - the third stage of the triad.

This was Dialectic Materialism; it was also, of course, compkete and utter tosh.