Happy 200th Birthday, Karl Marx!

Most Marxists and anti-Marxists alike probably fail to realise that the highest praise for capitalism is to be found in Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), that readily recognised that the capitalist system promoted urbanisation, industrialisation, technical progress, economic growth and prosperity on an unprecedented scale:  

“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment (of) such productive forces . . . The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.”

At the same time Marx viewed capitalism as a form of systematic labour exploitation. Primitive societies were not exploitative because they exchanged goods roughly embodying the same amount of labour. Slavery was less exploitative than it seemed, for slaves’ consumption allowed them to recover some of their own labour that looked entirely unpaid. Feudalism was openly exploitative, for the amount of work performed by labourers for themselves and for their feudal masters was clearly stipulated and visible; whereas capitalism does not look exploitative at all, since all labour is paid for, but workers perform more work than is embodied in their means of consumption and a surplus of unpaid labour is appropriated by capitalists.

 

Marx neglects altogether entrepreneurship, uncertainty and risk and their rewards: on that basis a positive share of profits is sufficient to infer exploitation, without the unnecessary detour of his labour theory of value.

The replacement and growth of fixed capital would be necessary in any mode of production (including socialism, Pareto 1890): exploitation should be restricted at most to capitalists’ consumption. But Marx regarded all profits, consumed or re-invested, as equally exploitative as originating in “primitive accumulation” ultimately rooted in theft, robbery, war, conquest and other forms of violence.

Inequality of wealth and incomes was recognised as a defining feature of capitalism. Its redeeming feature was the financing of investment and growth: “Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets” (Capital, Vol,I, ch.24).

Marx modelled intersectoral flows and equilibrium conditions for a stationary and a growing economy in his schemes of simple and enlarged reproduction (with two vertically integrated sectors producing consumption and investment goods respectively). However he exaggerated the instability of a capitalist system by assuming that profits necessarily would have to be reinvested in the same sector in which they originated, while in any capitalist economy re-investment is never subject to such an arbitrary restriction (Lange 1970 amplified unreasonably this presumed instability of the system maintaining this undue sectoral restriction in a multi-sector model).

Marx regarded capitalism as a totally chaotic and anarchic system, naturally generating unemployed labour and under-utilisation of other resources, as well as costly fluctuations and economic crises. However he neglected automatic processes of economic adjustment, operating imperfectly, often either too fast or too slowly, but typical of the operation of markets in a capitalist system.

These automatic processes are: in the short-term, for a given level of production, the Walrasian adjustment of prices to any positive or negative excess demand; in the medium-term, when production levels can vary, the Marshallian adjustment of enterprise output to price relatively to its marginal cost; as well as the transmission to other sectors of the inputs requirements corresponding to their output change (activating what Goodwin 1949 calls “the multiplier as matrix”). In the longer term, when productive capacity can vary, there is a gradual adjustment of the actual capital stock to the level desired by enterprises in consideration of the demand level they experience - an upwards adjustment via investment in new capital or downwards through the non-replacement of excess capital. These adjustment processes are rooted in the maximisation of profit on the part of enterprises operating in a system of markets, whose owners appropriate profit to their own advantage. And we need to stress that these adjustment mechanisms auto-regulate production, prices, intersectoral transactions and productive capacity but naturally they do not regulate themselves as institutions (in a process that would amount to “autopoiesis”); thus their creation, regulation and guarantee remain fundamental functions of the state even in a fully de-centralised market economy.

Goodwin (1947, 1951a and 1953) likens the adjustment mechanisms operated by markets to homeostatic mechanisms, such as for instance a thermostat, that records the actual temperature, compares it to a pre-fixed desired temperature and automatically activates heating or cooling systems in order to reduce the difference between actual and desired temperatures (see also Leijonhuvfud 1970).

This kind of logic is less cogent and much more controversial in the case of financial markets. Financial intermediation creates value by modifying the size, time horizon and riskiness of assets demand and supply, but their continuous operation is associated to phenomena of both euphoria and panic. Financial markets contribute to economic growth at the cost of a greater vulnerability and potential instability. Keynes believed that financial investment should be indissoluble like marriage (or better, we should say that investment divorce should be equally costly and traumatic). Derivative products, whose value depends on the value of underlying assets, which they amplify and multiply, can contribute to the increase of total risk instead of its distribution among a large number of agents. This is why Buiter (2009) proposed to reserve derivatives transactions to agents who could justify them on the basis of an underlying insurable interest.

The alternative to markets seen as automatic thermostats is the manual regulation of temperature or of equivalent processes; manual control – in economic terms – corresponds to central planning. The desirability of self-regulating market mechanisms with respect to central planning depends on the speed of reaction of the system, on its tendency to reduce or to amplify the possible divergence between objectives and reality, from the stability or otherwise of such processes. There can be circumstances in which manual control (planning) is preferable to the automatic control (markets). My favourite example, which I used to inflict on my students, is taken from Star Wars: when Luke Skywalker is trying to strike at the heart of the Empire with a single shot, he disactivates the automatic aiming mechanism and choses to do it manually. But he is justified by exceptional circumstances: there is only one target, which he can either hit or miss without intermediate degrees of success, and ... the Force is with him.

The automatic adjustment processes discussed here, built into a market system, in spite of their imperfections have made the capitalist system more flexible, at the same time exposing it to the risk of possible episodes of much greater unemployment, instability and stagnation than would have been the case otherwise.

One of Marx’s main contributions to political economy is an evolutionary theory (“Darwinist”, according to Engels in his Speech on Karl Marx’s Tomb) of modes of production, understood in the modern sense of economic systems, as institutional setups that regulate the production and exchange of economic goods.

For Marx labour acting over nature leads to the development of production forces (natural resources, accumulation of physical and human capital, the state of technical knowledge). This development leads to the emergence of contradictions between the productive potential of society and the prevailing production relations (e.g. rules about ownership, production organisation, etcetera). Production relations then are modified as a result, in such a way as to eliminate such contradictions, realising the “law of the necessary correspondence of production relations to the character of productive forces” (Lange, 1963, ch. 2).

Further contradictions arise between the economic basis (or production relations) and the superstructure of society, understood as the social relations and social consciousness (religion, ideology, culture, etc.; Lange gives the example of the support to capitalism implicit in the protestant ethic), which contribute to the legitimation of the existing mode of production. Conflicts and contradictions between the various elements of the system and their resolution guide its evolution, according to the “Law of the necessary correspondence of the superstructure with the economic basis”. Productive forces and production relations define a mode of production, though at any time a mode of production coexists with residuals of former modes and embrios of the superstructure of future societies (Lange, 1963).

In his original approach to the evolution of economic systems, in any case, Marx made three major errors: he believed that: 1) there would be a final point of arrival for such an evolutionary course, i.e. full communism (with prevailing free goods, distribution according to needs, no state, and abundance of economic goods) without classes and therefore non-antagonistic, under which there would no longer be conflicts and contradictions; 2) there would be a linear progression of economic systems, from primitive societies to slavery to feudalism to capitalism (with a possible diversion represented by the Asiatic mode of production), followed by socialism and full communism; 3) that system evolution would be dominated by an extreme form of dialectical materialism, or economic determinism, with an exclusive role for economic factors. On the contrary we know today that full communism has always remained an objective never realised; that in the 1990s socialism was re-transformed back into capitalism, and moreover into an extreme form of hyper-liberal capitalism; and that economic factors are only a part, though important, of the multiple causes of system transformations.

One prediction that Marx did get right was the progressive relative immiserisation of the proletariat: while in absolute terms economic progress has raised living standards immensely and reduced poverty beyond the most optimistic expectations, in relative terms especially in this century the share of income and wealth of the rich has been increasing at unprecedented rates to record levels. According to Oxfam (2016) in 2015 the 62 richest individuals had increased their wealth by 44% with respect to 2010, matching the same total wealth of the poorest 50% of the world population, which on the contrary impoverished itself by 41% in the same period (in 2010 it took the 388 richest individuals to match the wealth of the poorest  50%).  Since 2008, the wealth of the richest 1% has been growing at an average of 6% a year – much faster than the 3% growth in the wealth of the remaining 99% of global population: should that trend continue, by 2030 the top 1% would hold two/thirds of world wealth, $305tn – up from $140tn today (The Guardian, 13/4/2018).

Reports of the death of both Marx and God have been grossly exaggerated.

Kornai: Shortage versus Surplus Economies

The eminent Hungarian economist Janos Kornai successfully characterized the Soviet-type, centrally planned socialist economy as The Shortage Economy (2 Vols, 1980). Whether money prices were stable, rising or falling, those economies were characterized by large-scale, endemic excess demand at prices below the market-clearing level, with associated re-trading (whenever feasible) at higher black market prices.

 

Kornai attributed shortages primarily to soft budget constraints, i.e. the ability of state enterprises to replenish their liquid resources through budget subsidies or credit (by banks or suppliers) whenever money prices were raised in order to reduce shortages. However, soft budgets can explain open inflation but are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain repressed inflation, which requires simply administered prices consistently lower than market-clearing: socialist planners could not eliminate inflation, so they simply pretended they had, and repressed it.  

But Kornai is certainly right in emphasizing the negative implications of shortages: labour over-full employment was associated with consumers’ frustration at their inability to secure goods and services at official prices, and with production inefficiencies, and vanified any attempt to establish forms of market socialism. 

In his latest book, Dynamism, Rivalry and the Surplus Economy (OUP 2013), Janos Kornai characterizes capitalism on the contrary as the economy of surplus, of excess supply and labour unemployment – not cyclical a’ la Keynes but endemic. 

The novel aspect of this characterization is its positive assessment as an environment favourable to dynamism, entrepreneurship and technical progress, innovation and structural change, while central planning, together with the failure to allow experimentation, reward the successful inventor and innovator, and to make available resources outside a rigid central plan, was ultimately responsible for systemic stagnation. Both systems have merits and drawbacks that Kornai regards as inseparable and genetically implanted in the two systems. His personal preference goes to the surplus economy, although he recognizes the evil of unemployment associated with it.

Kornai supports these provocative propositions with a mass of data on technical inventions and their diffusion in the two systems. Nevertheless, some reservations are in order.

First, the contribution of the state to technical progress is under-estimated by the acknowledged exclusion of military and space expenditure and generally the non-profit sector, without which we would not have had most IT progress including Internet. Conversely, the negative implications of capitalist protection of intellectual property have been overlooked.

Second, is shortage a necessary feature of socialism, i.e. is China a shortage economy?

Finally, the glorification of the surplus economy seems to have been somewhat mis-timed, considering both the large-scale costs of the “transformation recession” (Kornai’s label) of transition economies in the 1990s, and the persistence and severity of the current global crisis that began in 2007 and is still rampaging. Austerity has raised the surplus features of capitalism far beyond what may be regarded as necessary to enhance entrepreneurship and technical dynamism. 

(A session on Kornai' s latest book will be held at WINIR - World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research - Conference on “Institutions that change the World”, Greenwich, London, 11-14 September 2014).

The Fall and the Original Sin of Socialism

The Fall of the Berlin Wall, whose twentieth anniversary is celebrated today, signified not just the Fall of the Iron Curtain and of the whole system developed behind its shelter, but also the “Fall” in a biblical sense: Man was driven away from what many hoped, though wrongly, might be a Garden of Eden. In this vein, then what has been the “original sin of socialism”, the sin leading to the Fall.

The Original Sinners

Without doubt the original sin of socialism was committed by Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888-1938) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919). They are guilty of asserting, with unforgivable arrogance, that “socialism marks the end of political economy as a science”. They were followed, as is the way with original sin, by all of socialist mankind; by Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941), as well as by the majority of Bolshevik economists (as we are reminded by, among others, Brus 1973; see the Appendix below for citations and sources). This sin is the origin of the decisionism and the voluntarism typical of economic management in the Soviet Union and in the countries that adopted its system, that eventually led to the Fall.

The uneconomic system

Remember? In the 1920s the “genetic” school of planning, that aimed at facilitating natural economic trends, was defeated by the so-called “teleological” (or “purposeful”) school, seeing the plan as an act of war, of aggression on the economy (for a survey see Charemza and Kiraly, 1990). Priority was given to investment over consumption, to investment in heavy industry over light industry, so as to produce steel that would produce more steel and ever more steel, regardless of the needs of the population. Many other targets were given priority, and as a result nothing at all had effective priority; the actual or opportunity costs of alternative targets were ignored or neglected. “There is no fortress that a Bolshevik cannot conquer”, Joseph Stalin loved to say. “2 + 2 = 5” was the planners’ arithmetic, and in fact the first five-year plan of 1929-32 was implemented in four years – and never mind the cost. When reality could not be forced to comply, change was faked: fake genetic miracles were claimed; just as economic plans were frequently the object of fake realizations.

The ratchet principle applied: if today we produce 100 it is imperative that tomorrow we should produce 110 - an effective incentive to conceal productive potential rather than mobilize it. There was a programme of innumerable campaigns, each centered on a single objective to be promoted regardless of cost. Stakhanovism concentrated on the exceptional performance of shock workers (with the assistance of countless, nameless helpers). Tight or taught planning had an essential role: it was believed that by aiming at impossible targets one would obtain more than by lowering the sights. This strategy occasionally might actually work, but it soon reaches the point where it defies the laws of physics and becomes a losing strategy: aiming at the Moon misses all desirable targets within closer reach. By the 1970s realised socialism in Poland was boasting that “Polak wszystko potrafi” (A Pole is capable of anything). We have seen and admired the results achieved by the Polish people: it was true, but certainly not in the sense meant at the time by Edward Gierek.

In its most spectacular and damaging form, the violation of economic laws in the socialist system consists in the adoption of the impossible target of maintaining low and stable prices, while goods are available in quantities lower than those necessary to validate such prices given their demand. Hence the inevitability of shortages, queues, black markets – as well as the absolute impossibility of introducing market elements into the traditional planning system: this is why all the numerous projects of economic reform in the direction of market socialism, in the 1960s-1980s throughout the socialist bloc, failed one after another, in one country after another.

All these are the implications of the pretense that socialism should not be subject to economic laws, both in general and in the specific Soviet-type model. In general, input-output type technical relations, and the optimization of production methods, must necessarily continue to hold in any economic system, no more no less than the laws of thermodynamics. And a fortiori economic laws of market equilibrium must hold in the specific Soviet-type system in which money was still used to pay wages and distribute consumption goods, even though prices were administered and supply was not affected by consumer sovereignty, so that Bukharin et al. could legitimately claim that the “law of value” no longer held.

Gorbachev’s responsibilities

For the persistence of this economic regime of shortages, queues and repressed inflation, Mikhail Sergieyevich Gorbachev bears a major responsibility. A great statesman, a generous, courageous and charismatic leader, Gorbachev was a lawyer: in economics he was an illiterate, surrounded by economically illiterate advisors. He believed that it was possible to maintain low prices and at the same time contain demand within the narrow, inadequate limits of production and imports. He believed that market imbalance was a necessary feature of his revolution, and bought expensive time by getting into debt with foreign lenders. Which is how the Soviet Union reached bankruptcy, economic collapse, literally famine conditions (agreed the famine was due more to the inefficient distribution system than to the lack of food, but the distribution system is also an integral part of any economic system).

What if...?

Suppose Gorbachev had recognized the continued validity of economic laws under socialism, would he have managed to modernize the Soviet system instead of sinking it? He would have had to give priority to economics over politics, and at best he could have followed the examples of those other economies that managed to combine public ownership and Communist Party political control with the mobilization of market forces domestically and internationally, like China, Vietnam, Belarus, Uzbekistan ( see Nuti, 2009). An authoritarian system is a very high price to pay for economic success, but this was still a possibility – except that once such an alternative is implemented it is extremely difficult to change course, because of its inertia and resistance to change.

Admittedly, in suffering the consequences of the original sin of socialism, Gorbachev was doubly unlucky in the very bad, if accidental, timing of his coming to power: his perestroika happened at a time of world recession and a low price of his oil, and coincided with the global victory of the hyper-liberalism of Ronald Reagan and Margareth Thatcher. Ten years earlier (in 1975) perestroika would have benefited from a higher oil price that would have provided the resources necessary to stabilize the economy and avoid Russia’s default. Twenty years later – i.e. today – the crisis of the hyper-liberal model and the global crisis of 2008-2009 would have allowed the Soviet Union or its component republics to implement a different economic model. A model, that is, with a greater role for the state and public ownership, the provision of larger amounts of resources by international economic institutions, subjected to lesser conditionality constraints – as it is happening today at the global level, with the IMF e the G-20 having taken on new and surprising functions approaching those of a Global Lender of Last Resort.

What about social-democracy?

At this point, what can we say about the failure that recently struck - with the exception of Greece that confirms the general rule - the whole of European social democracy, in spite of the financial and real tsunami of 2008-2009 (probably extended to 2010 at least in terms of labour unemployment). What are the causes of the defeat of the European “Left”, at a time when they should have benefited from the crisis and harvested anti-cyclical electoral consensus? This question deserves a post of its own but, in a nutshell: Social-democracy was also tainted by the original sin of Socialism, at least until the late 1990s and the Third Way of New Labour and the Neue Mitte that, unfortunately, overshot on the rebound.


Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (9 October 1888 – 15 March 1938)

and Róża Luksemburg (5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919)


APPENDIX: THE CLAIM OF THE END OF POLITICAL ECONOMY UNDER SOCIALISM

Brus (1973) notes that “In the course of the development of Marxist economics it was sometimes reckoned that political economy would come to an end at the same time as the capitalist system. Among those holding such views were those whose names are an integral part of the history of Marxism – Hilferding, Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg”. Of political economy there would remain “… only technical problems, technical balance laws of production, a science of the rational organization of productive forces “.


Cohen (1980) talks of Bukharin’s conviction that “political economy and its traditional categories were not applicable to a post-capitalist society”. “As soon as we take an organized social economy, all the basic “problems” of political economy disappear: the problem of value, price, profit, and the like. Here “relations between people” are not expressed in “relations between things,” and social economy is regulated not by the blind forces of the market and competition, but consciously by a ... plan. Therefore here there can be a certain descriptive system on the one hand, a system of norms on the other. But there can be no place for a science studying “the blind laws of the market” since there will be no market. Thus the end of the capitalist commodity society will be the end of political economy”(from Bukharin 1979, cited by Cohen 1980, p. 93).


Rosa Luxemburg writes: “If political economy is a science that deals with the particular laws of the capitalist mode of production, then the reasons for its existence and its function are confined to the period of life of the latter, and the political economy will lose its basis as soon as that mode of production will have ceased to exist” (Luxemburg 1925, in Waters 1970 p. 244). “Consequently, the end of political economy as a science represents a historical world task“ (Luxemburg 1925, in Waters 1970, p. 248).

Rudolf Hilferding forcefully expressed the idea that “Centralized control of the economy on a national and eventually an international scale would allow for conscious social regulation of both production and distribution and create the objective conditions for a planned economy no longer subject to regulation by the law of value” (Mattick, 1983; see also Howard and King 2003).


Hilferding appears to believe that economic laws can be suspended even in the political struggle for socialism. According to Breit and Lange (1934) he “invented a theory of so-called political wages, arguing that, using its political strength in the democratic state, the working-class movement imposes on capitalism higher wages than those resulting from the capitalist laws of supply and demand. It turns out that this took no account of the nature of capitalist ownership. It is not possible to impose in a capitalist economy a distribution of income that is different from that determined by the automatic operation of the laws governing the capitalist economy, the laws of supply and demand and competition.”

Magdoff (1985) asks whether there exist economic laws under socialism. “The idea that objective economic laws are not present in a socialist economy was, in fact, orthodox doctrine in the Soviet Union up to the early 1950s.” It was Stalin, of all people, who maintained in his 1952 “Economic Problems in the USSR” that planning must respect economic laws. But these for him were not, say, the law of the Walrasian adjustment of price to excess demand, or the law of the Marshallian adjustment of production to the difference between price and marginal cost. Stalin’s “laws” were no more than slogans such as the "Economic law of planned proportional development” or the “Economic law of distribution according to labour”. Not to speak of the so-called “Economic Law of the ever fuller satisfaction of the constantly growing material and cultural requirements of all people through continued development and improvement of social production based on the highest technology”. In other words, pure propaganda/junk, on which even an orthodox communist like Harry Magdoff maintains evident reservations.

However Stalin recognizes that the so-called “Law of value”, otherwise known as the market, continues to hold under socialism to the extent that commodities continue to exist: this, heavily disguised, is the true and belated innovation of Stalin’s text, however contradicted and nullified by the endemic and permanent repressed inflation that blocked all market-oriented reforms attempted after his death, and therefore eventually led to The Fall.

REFERENCES


Brus Wlodzimierz (1973), Economics and Politics of Socialism: Collected Essays, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Bukharin Nikolaj Ivanovich (1979), The Economics of the Transition Period, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Breit Marek and Oskar Lange (1934), “The Way to the Socialist Planned Economy”, Translated by Jan Toporowski, History of Economics Review, http://hetsa.fec.anu.edu.au/review/ejournal/pdf/37-A-2.pdf
Charemza Wojciech and Julia Kiraly (1990), Plans and Exogeneity: The Genetic-Teleological Dispute Revisited, Oxford Economic paper, vol. 42, issue 3, 562-73.
Cohen Stephen F. (1980), Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: a political biography 1888-1938, Oxford University Press.
Howard M.C. and J.E. King (2003), “Rudolf Hilferding”, in Warren J. Samuels (Ed.), “European Economists of the early 20th century”, vol. 2, Elgar, Cheltenham.
Magdoff Harry (1985), “Are there economic laws of socialism?”, Monthly Review, July-August.
Mattick Paul (1983), “Capitalism and Socialism”, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? http://us.geocities.com/collectiveact/pm_cas.htm
Nuti D.M., "A counter-factual alternative for Russia's post-socialist transition", in Grzegorz W. Kolodko and Jacek Tomkiewicz (Eds), 20 Lat Transformacji, Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne, Warsaw 2009.
Waters Mary-Alice, Ed., (1970), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, New York.