Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Das Kapital is intended to be the origin of species of its realm of economic thought and represents years and years of work of Marx laboring in the British Museum Library, Working through statistics, working on little bits and pieces of a larger answer to big historical questions that he believes that he's arrived at.
Its tone is different from that of the Communist Manifesto, which is a call to arms. It announces with great confidence what the scheme of history will be. But rather than urging that the answer might be passivity and just waiting for history to play out in its preordained way, it's also a clarion call to make the revolution happen and is intended to be a pragmatic, practical statement of
of how this is to play out. And, you know, starts in part with those ringing words about a ghost or a specter haunting Europe, the specter of communism, which wasn't true at the time, but decades later, most definitely is the case.
So I think that Marx would probably have responded that, in fact, those things are indivisible. The analysis as sort of purely theoretical certainly can be performed on any economic reality that you care to mention, but the imperatives that grow out of that economic analysis are political. Marx and Engels emphasize the unity of theory and practice. So it's not enough to dispassionately analyze.
It's a call to action as well, because if you've delivered the answer to how history evolves and changes, it obligates you, right? It demands certain action.
You sometimes hear from undergraduates that they've heard from their high school history teachers that Marxism was just a theoretical construct and the idle production of a philosopher who was not connected to the world and was never meant to be tried in practice.
Marx would have been furious to hear this, and it's almost heroically wrong as a historical statement, because Marx insisted that all previous philosophers have theorized about reality. What now is really necessary is to change it.
So you could say that in the abstract, a Marxist economist can certainly use Marx's theoretical framework to compare to a given economic reality, but Marx would have seen that as incomplete and as deeply unsatisfactory. And there's kind of a footnote to all of this, which is that even though
Marxist dialectical materialism grounds itself in these economic realities, and the political prescription is supposed to flow from the economic realities and be inevitably growing out of them. in the real history of communist regimes, you've actually seen periods where the economics becomes detached from the politics.
And I'm thinking in particular of the new economic period, early in the history of the Soviet Union, when Lenin realizes that The economy is so far gone that you need to reintroduce or allow in a limited way some elements of private enterprise just to start getting Russia back on course in order to have the accumulation of surplus that will be necessary to build the project at all.
There are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic policy as a terrible compromise and a betrayal of their ideas, but it's seen as necessary for a short while, and then Stalin will wreck it entirely, or consider, for that matter, China today.
where you have a dominant political class, the Communist Party of China, which is allowing economic development and private enterprise as long as it retains political control. Some of these elements already represent divergences from what Marx would have expected. And this points to a really key problem or question for all of the history of communism.
It has to do with it being a tradition in spite of itself. And that could be expressed in the following way. An original set of ideas is going to evolve. It's going to change because circumstances change. What elaborations of any doctrine, whether it's communism or a religious doctrine or any political ideology, what elaborations are natural stages in the evolution of any living set of ideas?
Or when do you reach the point where some shift or some adaptation is so radically different that it actually breaks with the tradition? And that's an insoluble problem. You probably have to take it on a case-by-case basis. It speaks to issues like the question that gets raised today. Is China, in a meaningful sense, a communist country anymore? And there's a diversity of opinion on this score.
Or if you're looking at the history of communism and you look at North Korea – which now is on its third installment of a dynastic leader from the same family who rules like a god-king over a regime that calls itself communist, is that still a form of communism? Is it an evolution of? Is it a complete reversal of?
I tend to want to take an anthropological perspective in the history of communism and to take very seriously Those people who avow that they are communists and this is the project that they have underway. And then after hearing that avowal, I think as a historian, you have to say, well, let's look at the details.
Let's see what changes have been made, what continuities might still exist, whether there's a larger pattern to be discerned here. So it's a very, very complicated history that we're talking about.
Well, clearly it was a compelling case for millions of people. And part of this story has to do with, overall has to do with the faith, conviction, stories of people sacrificing themselves as well as their countrymen in a cause that they believed was not just legitimate, but demanded their total obedience.
I think that throughout the early part of the 20th century, late 19th century, early part of the 20th century, So much of the compelling case for communism came from the confidence that people in the West more generally placed in science. The notion that science is answering problems. Science is giving us solutions to how the world around us works, how the world around us can be improved.
some varieties of that, and watch the quotation marks, science, were crazy, right? Like phrenology, so-called scientific racism that tried to divide humanity up into discrete blocks and to manipulate them in ways that were allegedly scientific or rational. So there were horrors that followed from Those invocations of science, but its prestige was enormous.
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