Famously, George Bernard Shaw was credited with the words:
“If you’re not a communist at twenty, you have no heart; if you still are one at thirty, you have no brain”.
When I first heard this in my early 20’s, quoted by then-prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, I—the young communist—was deeply offended. Of course I’d always be a communist, I told myself. How could I ever embrace capitalism, one of the deadliest economic systems in human history?
My view aligned with one side in the “war of Black Books” that came around in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 1999, Stéphane Courtois’s edited collection The Black Book of Communism was published in English. The same year, and as a reaction to it, the title The Black Book of Capitalism (Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus) was chosen for Marxist historian Robert Kurz’s damning recounting of the horrors of industrialization and capitalist modernization. I defended Kurz and condemned Courtois to whoever wanted to hear me out. Not many people did: communism was not cool in the early 2000s.
The question whether really existing communism or really existing capitalism has “killed” more people was a sign of the times after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. There was no talk show or public debate without the blame-game, the accusers of capitalism (and therefore defenders of communism) clearly disadvantaged.
As I was born, educated, and socialized in Western Germany, one would think I would have supported the West, but my family has rather different DNA. It is not Russian, but—perhaps even worse—Russophile. So much so that my father’s decades-long subscription to the print magazine of the USSR’s Central Committee, The Soviet Union Today, was renewed after 1991 (when it had shamefully renamed itself as Eastern Europe), with the words: “Now more than ever!”.
Yet, though I once visited St Petersburg and enjoyed it, and endured a Muscovite viola teacher for 5 years, my interest in Russian, never mind Soviet culture was and remained zero.
American-influenced, on the other hand, I was. Pop music, movies, clothes, art, even literature: being American—or at least British— and openly celebratory of the capitalist spirit was an indicator of being fun, entertaining, quirky. Not much of that in Tarkovsky.
As a child of the Back to the Future-franchise and Spielberg’s inimitable cinematic world, Yo! MTV Raps, and, in my teenage years, pale-faced indie bands from Manchester, there was never a question where my heart belonged. And yet, my somewhat communist-inflected upbringing clashed with my clear cultural preferences as a child and teenager.
In 1989, the year really existing socialism died, I turned 13.
The political/cultural divide wasn’t made easier by a mother who still declared herself a communist after 1989, and who would choose to live in “Moscow one hundred times over New York City” because in Moscow “no one goes without a job” (the idea that being without a job is the worst thing that could happen to a human being has always fascinated me).
The idea that being without a job is the worst thing that could happen to a human being has always fascinated me.
Next to my mother’s fiery re-narrations of “Lenin’s vision”, the tomes of Wolfgang Leonhard and my monthly devouring of German political magazine konkret and its authors emulating Adorno and Karl Kraus were my biggest intellectual influences as a schoolgirl. Then there was Sartre. I tried not to enjoy the “traitor” Camus, whom I only read because The Stranger was John Squire’s (of the Stone Roses) favourite novel. I was impressed, but only secretly.
So strong was my conviction that I thought I was destined to remain a lifelong believer in Marxism, all through my musical as well as my academic career, which was most ironically brought to a complete end by “literal communists” four years ago.
As anyone in a university research position knows, in writing a book—a habilitation thesis about a particular author, no less—one can easily lose oneself to the scripture. There is not a single sentence in Capital—after all a three-volume work in its go-to version—that has not been scrutinized somewhere by Marx’s commentators. Sentences have be turned around, dissected, even grammatically analyzed, until sometimes their meaning becomes incomprehensible. I happily jumped on that interpretative bandwagon. What mattered was that you had the correct, the right, the sanctioned interpretation, not only because Marx was holy writ, but because you needed to secure your seat at the table of academic funding, which was surprisingly rewarding towards anti-capitalist research projects, or at least a seat at the conference panel of surprisingly influential international Marx scholars.
The Marx Trap
Among colleagues, even within the small “value-form analysis-centric” circle of the Critique of Political Economy that I belonged to, criticisms of Marx were viewed suspiciously. Heretics were unapologetically persecuted, and—though the term was not yet used at the time—cancelled. There were brands of interpretation, behind which were people defending their own reading with bared teeth. I remember Marx scholar Andrew Kliman making a harmless statement on Twitter about Asian diet including dogs, unrelated to any Marx content. And because he was seen as an opponent of Michael Heinrich, whose specific interpretation of Marx was somewhat influential at the time, he was immediately branded a “racist” (that worked well already), and shunned and excluded from the congregation by followers of Heinrich. What mattered was that there could not be a question about Marx being “wrong”. “Unfinished”, perhaps. “Unclear”, at most. But never wrong.
For Marx scholars, Marx could never be “wrong”. “Unfinished”, perhaps. But never “wrong.”
However Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production, as he called it, is of course full of flaws. But none of them have anything to do with the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. This is aside from the fact that he had not the slightest idea how exactly communism would work, as we shall see.
This is also aside from the fact that Marx nowhere called himself a “socialist”, but on the contrary, he mocked the socialists of his time—Robert Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and his daughter’s later husband, Paul Lafargue—for their stupid romanticism and utopianism. Marx was smart enough to sense that something about the state ownership of the means of production directly contradicted his passion for individual freedom, which, though diminished as a topic in his later writings, never ceased being one of his political ambitions. One may still view the chapter “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret” in Capital volume 1 (which has nothing to do with a critique of consumerism), his most acute expression of a social critique according to which “the process of production has mastery over men, and man still does not have mastery over the process of production”, as a critique of forces that held the individual in contempt.
The flaws of Marx’s analysis are two-fold. One is theoretical and concerns one of the most debated theorems in his oeuvre, which was later called the “transformation problem”. Marx himself acknowledged the existence of such a problem—but only in David Ricardo’s value theory, and, better still, he thought he had solved it. He really had not.
Marx believed he had solved the “tranformation problem”. He really hadn’t.
What was later identified as Marx’s own transformation problem concerns the question of the coherence of the theory of labor values, as analyzed in the first volume of Capital, with the theory of actual prices of production, as analyzed in volume three. Marx argued that the latter was based on the former, and was intent on showing the overall coherence of his theoretical framework.
Critics, notably Eugen von Böhm Bawerk (1851-1914) in his Karl Marx and the Close of his System (1896), however contended that the theory of value of the first volume and the theory of value (now as “prices of production”) of the third volume were not only incommensurable; they were contradictory. Let me quote from Paul Sweezy’s Introduction in his English-language 1949 edition of Böhm-Bawerk’s volume, as it’s probably the most comprehensive summary of the problem:
“According to the theory of Volume I, commodities exchange in proportion to the quantity of labor (stored-up and living) embodied in them. Surplus value (or profit), however, is a function of the quantity of living labor alone. Hence, of two commodities of equal value, one with relatively more living labor will contain more surplus value than one with relatively more stored-up labor; and this implies that equal investments of capital will yield different rates of profit depending on whether more or less is put into wages (living labor) on the one hand or material accessories (stored-up labor) on the other. But this theory contradicts the obvious fact that under capitalism equal investments, regardless of their composition, tend to yield equal profits.
In the first two volumes, Marx ignores differences in the composition of different capitals; in effect, he assumes that such differences do not exist. But in Volume III he drops this assumption and, recognizing the tendency to general equality in the rates of profit, inquires how the resulting ‘prices of production’ are related to the values of Volume I.
Marx works this relation out by starting from a value scheme in which the composition of capitals varies, with a consequent multiplicity of profit rates. He now takes the average of these profit rates and calculates prices of production by the following formula:
c+v+(c+v)p = price of production
where c represents the investment in plant and materials [which Marx calls “constant capital”], v [which Marx calls “variable capital”] the investment in wages, and p the average rate of profit.
Now there is undoubtedly a flaw in this method. The two items c and v are taken over from the value scheme and remain unchanged in the price of production scheme. In other words, input is measured in values while output is measured in prices of production. Obviously this is not right. A large part of today’s output becomes tomorrow’s input, and it is clear that, to be consistent, they must be measured in the same terms. Marx himself was aware of the difficulty, and it is not unlikely that he would have dealt with it if he had lived to complete the third volume. But, as it stands, the treatment of the relation between the values and prices of production is not logically satisfactory”.
I have met Marx scholars who claim that this accusation is beyond the pale. I myself have also believed it to be so, so when my turn came to address the issue in my book, as well as talks and lectures, I lost myself in sophistic claims about “conceptual transitions” and “different levels of abstraction between the volumes of Capital”, trying to fit this obvious problem into the Procrustean bed of Marx’s implicitly faulty theoretical framework. I was ignoring Marx’s own claim to have thoroughly and satisfactorily “proven” the deduction of real-life market prices (based on prices of production) from labor values.
I have met Marx scholars who claim that the transformation problem is beyond the pale.
My old colleague Fred Moseley has even written a big book about how we were all wrong in the assumption that values had to be transformed at all. But while he claimed his interpretation was in full accordance with Marx’s own views, and delivered meticulously researched evidence, Fred also lost sight of Marx’s most basic, perhaps even banal statement: the claim that he had successfully performed the transformation in Chapter 9 of Capital vol. 3, “owning Ricardo”—which was the cause for all the trouble in the first place.
Moreover, Marx said his claims were not only theoretical but claims about the real economy—claims about reality. But as he failed to show that real-life prices are in fact directly based on labor values—and not on market dynamics, supply and demand (although, to make things even more complicated, Marx admits to supply and demand as a price-forming factor in Capital volume 3!), Marx’s central and foundational theorem, the labor theory of value, and with it, the theory of surplus value, and with it, the theory of capitalist exploitation have feet of clay, to say the least. Indeed, if the labor theory of value just does not add up, then the theory of the “exploitation” of living labor, Marx’s crucial claim, is toast.
As the saying goes: the problem does not simply go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.
How I Was No Longer A Communist
The other flaw in Marx’s theory is more general, and therefore more stupefyingly obvious: while in his whole adult life, Marx had occupied himself with the analysis of the “laws of movement of the capitalist mode of production”, he never cared much about what, concretely, a communist society would look like. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, we find him incoherently rambling about a prospective communist society in which money is replaced by labor certificates or labor vouchers. These certificates allegedly attest to the amount of work performed and allow the holder to obtain consumer goods of equivalent labor value, without money functioning as a medium of exchange.
Marx never cared much about what a concretely communist society could look like.
It’s quite as though Marx had forgotten his own critique. Had he not, in the very first chapter of Capital volume 1, shown precisely that money itself already fulfils the function of exchanging labor values (albeit in “hidden form”)? Had he not, for pages on end, mocked and exposed to ridicule Owen’s and Proudhon’s plea for the “abolition of money” and its replacement with “labor certificates”—only to come forward with the same idea as a novelty two decades later?
Mostly, the very late Marx wrote as though this “critique of the circulation sphere”, which he had previously denounced as a theoretical truncation, could somehow serve as a stand-in for the principles of a complex social system, in which “consumer goods” do not fully cover what living, breathing, nursing, thirsty for knowledge, prone to sickness and aging human beings really need—something that arguably every historical human society had to have a system for. Capitalism solves this in its own way, by money as a means of exchange. But imagine bringing your labor vouchers when you get a thorax surgery. Or fetching those labor certificates to pay for your elderly dad’s home assistance. As though it wasn’t ridiculous enough to imagine showing up with labor certificates to your Lotus car dealership or to your new landlord to rent out that 4-piece you eyed from the park across the street (a problem that would admittedly vanish in communism, as we cannot have nice cars or nice apartments).
In short, nobody—and I really mean nobody, Bodigan collectives from the US West Coast as little as the editorial board of Socialist Worker—knows what communism could look like, never mind how it could work. Nobody has the slightest idea what communism really is. Today’s communists are like Harry Potter fans who can never explain how the magical world could absorb all the students from Hogwarts—with an education based on “potions” and “defense against the dark arts”—into paying jobs and still have social reproduction on a higher scale.
Today’s communists are like Harry Potter fans who can never explain how the magical world could absorb all the students from Hogwarts into paying jobs.
And this is probably the most benign interpretation of its failures.
That in the name of communism, millions have been murdered, persecuted, denounced, thrown into gulags or sent to wonderful Siberia—where indeed “no one goes without a job”—is widely known, even by those who still try to resuscitate the “this wasn’t real communism/real communism has never been tried”-line. But where was the idea of the socialist collective more thoroughly exercised than in Mao’s “land reforms”, which really meant “firing squads”, and Pol Pot’s agricultural revolution, which really meant “mass executions” on the notorious killing fields?
My experience is that today’s communists and their “deathly pit they call a heart” (Kay Sokolowsky) do not mind these historical facts. In fact, they endorse murder, torture, denunciation or dehumanization if their political enemy is the object of these practices.
I have not seen a single communist denounce violence as a means to get to one’s end— to the contrary: modern Stalinists like Slavoj Žižek write whole tomes elaborating on the “beauty” of and “fascination” with violence.
Communists, with their “deathly pit they call a heart”, do not mind their own violent history.
I need not reiterate my accounts of what I have seen the left—among them, “literal communists”—do during Covid or during “Palestine solidarity”, and with what enthusiasm it pursued its depraved practice. What remains fascinating to me after all these years is the readiness to dehumanize a certain individual when a leftist detects an aberration from the belief canon. A belief canon in which the collective is everything, and the individual is thrown to the dogs. Or, as a musician from my home town of Hamburg—where I was myself active as a recording and live artist—said in a TV documentary: “I ultimately think that the collective is more important than the individual”. This was said without flinching, and without any fear that the audience for whom this statement was intended would flinch, even for a second. “When fascism returns, it will be in the guise of anti-fascism” has never been so apt.
“When fascism returns, it will be in the guise of anti-fascism” has never been so apt.
While some of my former bandmates have become intellectual and artistic zombies, calling themselves “socialist” —what other life form is so hostile to free artistic expression? — capitalism remains the only social form that allows even for degenerates to become pop stars, or at least get a few likes on Instagram. And that phenomenon is worth exploring.
You Owe It All To Capitalism
This takes us back to my cultural inclinations that began as a teenager and have lasted to this day. As a Gen Xer, I profited from perhaps the culturally most elaborate time in modernity, the heyday of US capitalism, which, in contrast to the “wild sixties”, was already armed against the more nihilistic tendencies of tendential leftism, and likewise against its naivety. We had seen the Berlin Wall come down as teenagers, and it was all right. Capitalism won over socialism, deservedly. End of story.
Indeed, a wage labor, free market, competitive, private property-based economy was the sine qua non of our generation’s cultural richness. Nirvana’s “here we are now/entertain us” was included in the equation: being sick of so much “fun” was part of the game, and the (self-)irony and sarcasm which, say, the punks and the slackers brought in, was a synecdoche of capitalism’s playfulness, its not-taking-itself-so-seriously. The fact that capitalism was always able to absorb its own self-deprecation, acts of active resistance even, was its biggest strength. Only in capitalism could university teachers, the media, entrepreneurs even, openly be anti-capitalist. Try becoming successful on an anti-socialist ticket in the GDR.
Yes, there is the hard day’s work, the risk of poverty, the bleak world described in proletarian literature classics such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but then also in any Western capitalist country since 1945, the probability of tanks rolling through your hometown has been extremely low.
Everyday life for a consumption society man is generally detached from war and fights over survival. While in 1970s Sofia, people queued for butter, in East Berlin, for coffee, and the female population of Yugoslavia yearned for nylon tights, people under capitalism used the time to go to Thin Lizzy concerts, a band that could have never emerged from Kiev. Socialist fun is a bath of steel.
Then again, capitalism produces a lot of crap, but mostly fun crap, crap that nobody needs, like the artisanal briefcase-shaped on-the-go bottle that isn’t even a thermos. Clearly a design failure. Capitalism and usefulness do not necessarily go together. The entrepreneurial free spirit sometimes produces absurdities. But how much more would I opt for this than for an economy built on foresight and planning, a joyless and frugal sphere of consumption that would make a Swiss peasant in the 1900s look like Liberace?
In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Friedrich von Hayek was one of the first to realize that a planned socialist economy seen as an antidote to the threat of poverty would structurally be anti-democratic. The reason is simple. In the planned economy of a society of millions—say, a nation state—the majority is bound never to come to an agreement over what society “really needs”, which “use values” are more “useful” than others, what should and should not be produced for its extended reproduction. This must by necessity by left to the experts. Experts—the committee—will decide what people get to consume. A minority decides on behalf of the vast majority, because conscious control can only exist where true agreement exists:
“In a society which for its functioning depends on central planning, this [conscious] control cannot be made dependent on a majority being able to agree; it will often be necessary that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people, because this group will be the largest group able to agree among themselves on the question at issue … It is the great merit of the liberal creed that it reduced the range of subjects on which agreement was necessary to one [the free market] on which it was likely to exist in a society of free men. It is now often said that democracy will not tolerate ‘capitalism’. If ‘capitalism’ means here a competitive system based on free disposal over private property, it is far more important that only within this system is democracy possible [my emphasis]“.
What Marx saw as one of capitalism’s greatest faults—the “anarchy” of its style of production, the “law of blind average” which constitutes socially necessary labor time as value as a “natural law that asserts itself behind the back of its producers”—may in fact be its single greatest merit. “Consciously planned” economies perished: not because man is inherently “selfish”, but because—to quote the earlier Marx— “freedom is so much the essence of man that even its opponents realize it by fighting its reality; they want to appropriate as their most precious ornament what they had rejected as an ornament of human nature”. The tension between freedom and control, then, cannot be solved positively on the side of control, or even “conscious” control. It is almost a tautology that conscious planning and control, impossible in a free capitalist market economy mediated by money, directly negates individual autonomy. Freedom is not something magically achieved by processes just because they are “conscious”.
“Consciously planned” economies perished: not because man is inherently “selfish”, but because he inherently wants to be free.
Of course, capitalism as I knew it growing up, capitalism as it brought us rock’n’roll, Andy Warhol, and pin ball machines, is coming, or has perhaps already, come to an end.
The push towards collectivism during Covid’s regime and its more recent iteration in Zohran Mamdani’s New York seems to be unstoppable. The Chinese model which blends a political top-down planning technocracy with a mode of production based on nothing but efficiency— “literally” Leninist communism! —is this new collectivism’s economic form. It is not communist in the sense of old Marx: production for mass consumption does not care about “use value”. It is not capitalist either: its monopoly has killed free market competition, and with it, the spirit of entrepreneurship, a sense of experimentation, the willingness to provide good quality products to those who can pay for them. Yes, yachts, modernist art, and Loro Piana suede slippers are not for everyone, but they make life a little more beautiful even for those who cannot afford them.
But let us not despair. The “warmth” of collectivism is beginning to reek. While the pursuit of freedom and happiness again seems like a distant goal, let us remember that it has repeatedly managed to find its way through history—somehow or other.
