The pre-requisites of communism: Trotsky, Marx, and superabundance

by Yarrow

yarr0w.net

“The present Soviet Union does not stand above the world level of economy, but is only trying to catch up to the capitalist countries. If Marx called that society which was to be formed upon the basis of a socialization of the productive forces of the most advanced capitalism of its epoch, the lowest stage of communism, then this designation obviously does not apply to the Soviet Union, which is still today considerably poorer in technique, culture and the good things of life than the capitalist countries.”

–Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

“Marxism sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress, and constructs the communist program upon the dynamic of the productive forces. If you conceive that some cosmic catastrophe is going to destroy our planet in the fairly near future, then you must, of course, reject the communist perspective along with much else. Except for this as yet problematic danger, however, there is not the slightest scientific ground for setting any limit in advance to our technical productive and cultural possibilities. Marxism is saturated with the optimism of progress, and that alone, by the way, makes it irreconcilably opposed to religion.

The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic powers of man that productive labor, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life’s goods, existing in continual abundance, will not demand – as it does not now in any well-off family or “decent” boarding-house – any control except that of education, habit and social opinion.”

–Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

I am looking into Leon Trotsky’s beliefs because I've heard some people (including my best friend) drop Trotsky's name as the cool, chill Soviet communist 😎 as opposed to the sinister Lenin (and the genocidal Stalin).

I looked into what Trotsky actually believed because I didn't know anything about him beyond that he was assassinated with an ice pick.

On one hand, what he wrote about the militarization of labour is blatantly totalitarian (or, as the kids like to say these days, "fascist") and pure evil:

“The foundations of the militarization of labor are those forms of State compulsion without which the replacement of capitalist economy by the Socialist will for ever remain an empty sound. Why do we speak of militarization? Of course, this is only an analogy – but an analogy very rich in content. No social organization except the army has ever considered itself justified in subordinating citizens to itself in such a measure, and to control them by its will on all sides to such a degree, as the State of the proletarian dictatorship considers itself justified in doing, and does. Only the army – just because in its way it used to decide questions of the life or death of nations, States, and ruling classes – was endowed with powers of demanding from each and all complete submission to its problems, aims, regulations, and orders. And it achieved this to the greater degree, the more the problems of military organization coincided with the requirements of social development.

The question of the life or death of Soviet Russia is at present being settled on the labor front; our economic, and together with them our professional and productive organizations, have the right to demand from their members all that devotion, discipline, and executive thoroughness, which hitherto only the army required.”

–Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (1920)

So, I don't see him as the cool, chill communist 😎 at all. His views on the individual person's absolute subordination to the state were not so different from Hitler's. (That's not an exaggeration.)

I also think "proletarian dictatorship" is an insidious oxymoron that tries to get people to swallow something unpalatable (dictatorship) by attaching a word to it that doesn't, in reality, apply. It makes as little sense as "populist hierarchy" or "democratic monarchy".

You can't just put two words that mean the opposite together and pretend that makes sense.

(I know “democratic monarchy” is a term used as a synonym for “constitutional monarchies”, but so-called “democratic monarchies” like the UK are just parliamentary liberal democracies. Monarchs don’t play a meaningful role in setting policy or the executive administration of the government.)

But I was intrigued to see that Trotsky had a savvy and perspicacious take on "the society of abundance" or the post-scarcity society. This is something I find gets glossed over or brushed aside 95%+ of the time by people who advocate socialism or communism.

Why communism requires abundance

In my undergrad studies, I took a full course on Das Kapital and nothing else. So, I got a really good exposure to Marx's original writings, which were a lot different from what I had expected after 150 years of playing telephone and getting an impression of what Marx said filtered through generations of other thinkers.

There is a lot of weird stuff in that book that caught me off guard.

One thing that's really important: unlike subsequent thinkers like Trotsky or Lenin, Marx said very, very, very little in the book about what, practically, a socialist or communist revolution or a transition to a socialist or communist mode of production would or should look like.

As I recall, the instructor said there was basically one sentence in the book, which simply said that the workers should seize the means of production from the capitalists.

There are also pages-long digressions into the price of corn in England in the mid-1800s. One big difference between Marx and the writers who call themselves Marxists today, who are like mostly trendy literary theorists and existentialist philosophers, is that Marx was completely devoted to the science of economics and pushing forward the cutting-edge of economic science such as it existed during his time.

The point being: I think whether you rely on Marx as a source or contemporary economics as a source, or both, either way you get to the same conclusion as Leon Trotsky as regards the necessity of material superabundance or a post-scarcity economy as the prelude to socialism or communism.

Accelerationism

This leads into an obscure and confusing term in far leftist economic theory: accelerationism. Annoyingly, accelerationism is used to mean two completely different and almost opposite things, and it's rarely defined anywhere in a clear and succinct way.

If you Google "accelerationism", you're going to find a bunch of impenetrable, edgelord-y essays written by people doing their best impression of a Parisian existentialist philosopher in the 1950s.

I'm going to coin two new terms to make this more clear. (The philosopher’s motto: when in doubt, make a distinction!)

Destructive economic accelerationism, or just destructive accelerationism:

The economy is like a car speeding towards a concrete wall. It's inevitably going to crash into the wall, and once it does, something good will ultimately come from the crash.

We should speed up the crash because the sooner we get it over with, the sooner we'll get to that "something good".

Creative economic accelerationism, or just creative accelerationism:

The economy is like a car speeding on an endless, straight road. The car is going faster and faster. Eventually, it will go so fast that the wheels break contact with the asphalt and the car begins to fly.

We should speed up the economy/the car to get to that point, since that will be a lot better than the status quo.

Destructive accelerationists think capitalism is inevitably headed for collapse, so we might as well give it that extra push and make it collapse sooner.

Creative accelerationists think, like Trotsky wrote, socialism/communism can only be achieved once capitalism reaches a certain point of development it hasn't reached yet. So, we should speed it up to get to socialism/communism sooner.

Creative accelerationists come from a very different intellectual background, but their views are more or less aligned with fairly mainstream economists like John Maynard Keynes, who wrote a famous essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in 1930, which imagined a time, roughly a century hence, when everyone in developed economies could enjoy a comfortable lifestyle with lots of leisure time and very little working hours.

Growth

In practical terms, gross world product per capita is about $11,000 U.S. (nominal) or $18,000 U.S. adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), i.e. the lower cost of goods in nations with lower incomes.

From 1900 to 2000, gross world product increased about 15x.

That's total, not per capita. Couldn't immediately find per capita stats, although you could calculate them if you just divided gross world product (GWP) by population in 1900 and in 2000. (The world population trebled during the 20th century. Today, birth rates and population growth in most developed countries has dramatically slowed to the point that population decline is a serious prospect in some nations.)

A creative accelerationist might say (just making this up hypothetically, to illustrate the idea) that once gross world product per capita increases 15x to $165,000 nominal or $270,000 PPP, then the material conditions for socialism/communism will exist.

And not only will the material conditions exist, but material superabundance will by itself exert a political pressure on societies to re-organize themselves along socialist/communist lines.

(Some people might even take a historical determinist perspective on this, i.e. they might think it's inevitable, but I always like to keep in mind there could always be another Hitler who wins the world war, or other world historical disruptions could happen that knock off the expected course of things.)

Whether you're a creative accelerationist communist, an adherent of Keynesian economics, or an advocate of Thomas Piketty's participatory socialism for the 21st century (outlined in his book Capital and Ideology), the question is the same:

How to rapidly, sustainably, humanely,  and equitably increase per capita GWP by something like 5x, 10x, or more?

A lot of contemporary radical leftists either completely overlook the topic of per capita GWP or they embrace anti-growth ideology, which is incompatible with both Marxism and global humanitarianism.

I find it so helpful to quote Trotsky, the not-actually-but-allegedly cool, chill communist 😎, pointedly asking the same question in the 1920s and 1930s and insisting radical GWP growth was a necessary material pre-requisite for socialism or communism.

Modern Marxism

If you take most mainstream leftist economists (which today is more or less mainstream academic economics in most of the developed world) believe and you take what many contemporary leftist activists who call themselves socialist, communist, or Marxist believe, there is a surface-level chasm in conceptual vocabulary and lexical vocabulary, but there is also this massive bridge between the two to be found in the writings of Marx and Trotsky and in the contemporary theory of creative accelerationism.

Among people who fall under the leftist umbrella, let's say social democrats and leftward, I find the capitalism vs. socialism or capitalism vs. communism debate to be basically fruitless. Because it's a debate grounded in, and largely caused by, a lack of shared concepts and terminology.

If Karl Marx were alive today, I suspect because of his devotion to the science of economics, he would align most closely with contemporary leftist economists like Thomas Piketty. More than any other group.

I think he would not have much patience for leftist activists with an unhealthy skepticism of academic economics and an unhealthy skepticism of economic growth. Those were two of the things he valourized the most when he was alive.

Fin