This week everyone is marking the centenary of the Bolshevik October Revolution in 1917. So I think it is a good idea to spend a week on this blog reviewing Communism and its sister Socialism. And the place to start, in my view, is Europe in the 1840s.
I propose that it was natural for young heads full of mush, chaps like Karl Marx, son of the leading lawyer in Trier, in Germany just a few kilometers east of the border with Luxembourg, and Friedrich Engels, son of a cotton manufacturer, to think that things were going to hell and needed a complete makeover.
First of all, the end result of the French Revolution, a breakout of the emerging bourgeoisie, was that the kings returned to France, and in the Treaty of Vienna the kings of Europe reorganized things to make life difficult for a post-monarchical world to be born. In Germany, in particular, the spirit of German Liberation of 1806, in which the Kings of Prussia used chaps like Alexander von Humboldt to reorganize education and son-of-a-sergeant Gerhard von Scharnhorst to reorganize the army, died with the reassertion of monarchical power after the defeat of France. Remember, we were supposed to be in a Age of Reason. How come all the reasoning ended up in a return of kings and bishops? If you were a son of the bourgeoisie it looked like all that Enlightenment had been for nothing. Stronger measures were needed.
Then there was the emerging market economy and factory production. It's easy for us to look back at the Great Enrichment, that raised real per-capita income from $1-3 per day in 1800 to $100 per day today, and realize that all the turmoil had a happy ending. But in the early to mid 19th century, it looked chaotic and brutal, and you had ordinary people fighting against it. You had Luddites breaking machines; you had the Scottish Insurrection of 1820; you had Tolpuddle Martyrs being convicted in 1834 of organizing a union and getting transported to Australia. It is not hard to imagine a social and economic disaster coming out of the cotton textile factories and then the railway revolution. Where would it all end?
We now know that the in the first half of the 19th century a new world was aborning, transforming utterly the economy, religion, government, culture. But when you are living through a transformation you do not know the outcome, and all around you people are insisting that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you tend to think that Something Must Be Done to make us safe. But how?
The new age philosopher Ken Wilber built his system on the work of the developmental psychologists, people like Piaget and Kohlberg and Beck and Cowan. The developmental idea is that humans ascend through different psychological stages both in individual lives and in society as a whole. But when things go wrong, then people instinctively go back down the development ladder to "what worked." That is the best explanation I have heard for fascism. When the mechanistic market economy seemed to fail after World War I, Hitler led the Germans back to blood and soil; the racism of Aryans and the conquest of the East. And the Jews, who exemplified the market economy, were to blame.
So naturally, chaps like Marx and Engels, marinating in all the ideological frenzies of 19th century universities, actually looked back to the good old days of village communitarianism in order to solve the problems of the emerging industrial era. They knew that feudalism was wrong; they prophesied that the market economy would make the bourgeoisie into the new feudal lords. So they wanted to go back a couple of stages to the good old village community of equality. That is what humans do when things seem to be going wrong. They go back to the past.
It is a particular irony that the political-religious movement that saw itself as the acme of the future was actually "reactionary," looking for solutions in the past. Hey, that's the way the world works.
And you could say that Trumpism is a response to the failures of globalism, saying "let's go back to the good old ways of the nation state and Make America Great Again."
Of course Communism and Socialism have been horrible disasters, economically, religiously, culturally, and politically, with 100 million dead over the last century, and billions more subjected to poverty and misery. You could say that it has failed, every time it has been tried. So in the next few days, we shall look at what went wrong, and why:
Marx's Economic Errors
Marx's War on the Bourgeoisie
The Problem with Political Power
The Real Revolution of the Modern Age
My Perfect Plan to solve all our problems.
I propose that it was natural for young heads full of mush, chaps like Karl Marx, son of the leading lawyer in Trier, in Germany just a few kilometers east of the border with Luxembourg, and Friedrich Engels, son of a cotton manufacturer, to think that things were going to hell and needed a complete makeover.
First of all, the end result of the French Revolution, a breakout of the emerging bourgeoisie, was that the kings returned to France, and in the Treaty of Vienna the kings of Europe reorganized things to make life difficult for a post-monarchical world to be born. In Germany, in particular, the spirit of German Liberation of 1806, in which the Kings of Prussia used chaps like Alexander von Humboldt to reorganize education and son-of-a-sergeant Gerhard von Scharnhorst to reorganize the army, died with the reassertion of monarchical power after the defeat of France. Remember, we were supposed to be in a Age of Reason. How come all the reasoning ended up in a return of kings and bishops? If you were a son of the bourgeoisie it looked like all that Enlightenment had been for nothing. Stronger measures were needed.
Then there was the emerging market economy and factory production. It's easy for us to look back at the Great Enrichment, that raised real per-capita income from $1-3 per day in 1800 to $100 per day today, and realize that all the turmoil had a happy ending. But in the early to mid 19th century, it looked chaotic and brutal, and you had ordinary people fighting against it. You had Luddites breaking machines; you had the Scottish Insurrection of 1820; you had Tolpuddle Martyrs being convicted in 1834 of organizing a union and getting transported to Australia. It is not hard to imagine a social and economic disaster coming out of the cotton textile factories and then the railway revolution. Where would it all end?
We now know that the in the first half of the 19th century a new world was aborning, transforming utterly the economy, religion, government, culture. But when you are living through a transformation you do not know the outcome, and all around you people are insisting that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you tend to think that Something Must Be Done to make us safe. But how?
The new age philosopher Ken Wilber built his system on the work of the developmental psychologists, people like Piaget and Kohlberg and Beck and Cowan. The developmental idea is that humans ascend through different psychological stages both in individual lives and in society as a whole. But when things go wrong, then people instinctively go back down the development ladder to "what worked." That is the best explanation I have heard for fascism. When the mechanistic market economy seemed to fail after World War I, Hitler led the Germans back to blood and soil; the racism of Aryans and the conquest of the East. And the Jews, who exemplified the market economy, were to blame.
So naturally, chaps like Marx and Engels, marinating in all the ideological frenzies of 19th century universities, actually looked back to the good old days of village communitarianism in order to solve the problems of the emerging industrial era. They knew that feudalism was wrong; they prophesied that the market economy would make the bourgeoisie into the new feudal lords. So they wanted to go back a couple of stages to the good old village community of equality. That is what humans do when things seem to be going wrong. They go back to the past.
It is a particular irony that the political-religious movement that saw itself as the acme of the future was actually "reactionary," looking for solutions in the past. Hey, that's the way the world works.
And you could say that Trumpism is a response to the failures of globalism, saying "let's go back to the good old ways of the nation state and Make America Great Again."
Of course Communism and Socialism have been horrible disasters, economically, religiously, culturally, and politically, with 100 million dead over the last century, and billions more subjected to poverty and misery. You could say that it has failed, every time it has been tried. So in the next few days, we shall look at what went wrong, and why:
Marx's Economic Errors
Marx's War on the Bourgeoisie
The Problem with Political Power
The Real Revolution of the Modern Age
My Perfect Plan to solve all our problems.
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