Econ-Atrocity Bulletins

By Alejandro Reuss

Mention the name of Leon Trotsky and you might be asked, “Didn’t he have an affair with Frida Kahlo?” (He did.) Or, “Wasn’t he murdered with an ice pick?” (He was.)

He was also, however, known to dabble in revolutionary politics.

The triumph of Stalin and his falsification of history have obscured Trotsky’s importance, writing him out of the Russian Revolution and airbrushing him from photos of the era (especially those showing him with Lenin). Trotsky was a principal leader of the workers’ council, or soviet, movement in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the main strategist of the October 1917 insurrection and the principal architect of the Red Army, Lenin’s most prominent lieutenant until the latter’s death in 1924, and a leading opponent of Stalin’s rise to dictatorial power. In short, he was one of the major figures of the 20th century.

Trotsky is mainly known for his thought on two key issues: the possibility of socialist revolution in “backward” Russia, and the rise of the bureaucratic dictatorship led by Stalin. Trotsky did not just apply Marxist theory by rote, but added new and “heretical” ideas needed to explain new phenomena. His balance sheet on the 1905 revolution, Results and Prospects (1906), argued that Russia’s leaps-and-bounds industrialization had set the stage for a revolution in which the proletariat - rather than the bourgeoisie - would be the protagonist. He would be vindicated by the October Revolution of 1917.

His masterpiece, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), presented a withering critique of the Soviet bureaucracy. In the long run, Trotsky argued, either the working class would overthrow the bureaucracy and clear the way for renewed progress toward socialism or the bureaucracy would formalize its privileges by reinstituting private property and restoring capitalism outright. Trotsky did not imagine that the system of bureaucratic rule would last another half century, but of course, he was eventually vindicated on this point as well.

Exiled from Russia in 1929, Trotsky lost the power and prestige of high position in a revolutionary government, and his efforts to build a new world party of socialist revolution (the “Fourth International”) could offer little to rival the rising tide of reaction worldwide. Nonetheless,
he considered this “the most important work of my life - more important than 1917, more important than the Civil War.”

In the founding program of the Fourth International, known as the Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (1938), Trotsky emphasized that while mass struggles continued to rage, they were not imbued with the perspective of overturning capitalism and creating a new society. He argued, therefore, that the central task for revolutionaries was to build “bridges” from current consciousness to revolutionary politics. This did not mean, in Trotsky’s view, repeating radical-sounding slogans from the past, postponing revolutionary aims in favor of immediately “winnable” struggles, or pining for a reformed version of capitalism. Rather, it meant that revolutionaries must frame their positions on the burning issues of the day in a way that connected these issues to the aim of revolution.

Trotsky’s life and politics ought to be viewed critically, especially in light of his role (with Lenin and the Bolsheviks in general) in building a state machine that would grow into a totalitarian juggernaut. Ideas like those in the Transitional Program, however, should be put to work in the
present whatever we conclude about the author’s past. Trotsky was not the only, or even the first, theorist to insist on drawing the connections from every immediate issue to the fundamental problems of capitalist society. I learned this lesson from the writings of Trotsky and from his disciples. Today’s revolutionaries need not learn this from Trotsky as well - but those who do not learn it from him should make sure to learn it from someone else.

Further reading by and about Trotsky:

Two good short introductions to Trotsky’s life and thought are:
Phil Evans and Tariq Ali, Introducing Trotsky and Marxism, Icon Books, 2000.
Ernest Mandel, Trotsky as Alternative, New Left Books, 1995.

The following are Trotsky’s most important books (all published by Pathfinder Press):
The History of the Russian Revolution.
My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography.
The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects.
The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?
The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution.
For an excellent collection of these and other writings online, see The Leon Trotsky Internet Archive.

Isaac Deutcher’s monumental three-volume biography of Trotsky (Oxford University Press, 1970) is the definitive work on the subject:
The Prophet Armed - Trotsky: 1879-1921
The Prophet Unarmed - Trotsky: 1921-1929
The Prophet Outcast - Trotsky: 1929-1940

(c) 2004 Center for Popular Economics

Econ-Atrocities are a periodic publication of the Center for Popular Economics. They are the work of their authors and reflect their author’s opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.

By Zhaochang Peng

Y.C. James Yen (1893-1990), a Chinese educator and social activist, developed a fourfold “rural reconstruction” approach to rural development in China during the 1920s. A resurgence of interest in his approach to development is currently underway in China, while his work has been continuously promoted by the institute he established in the Philippines in 1960.

James Yen’s Rural Reconstruction Movement promotes an integrated program of education, livelihood, public health and self-governance, which targets the interlocking problems of illiteracy, poverty, disease and civic inertia found among peasants in developing countries. While the four aspects of the program could be designed to address the problems in a one-for-one way, James Yen intended them to be an organic whole, to be carried out in close cooperation with one another.

Yen’s first experimental project, which began in 1926, was in rural Ding Xian (in China’s Hebei Province). With the help of external funds and volunteers, the reconstruction unfolded over a ten-year span. In the first three years, illiteracy was eliminated; for the next three years, more productive farming methods were disseminated and the local public health system was established; and finally, on the basis of the cultural, economic and social improvements already achieved, peasants were able to set up a local system of self-governance. The results of this experiment were positive and encouraging, and had begun to impact other parts of China.

From 1950 till his death in 1990, James Yen devoted his life to adaptation of this approach to peasant communities in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. His lifetime pursuit of the betterment of the life of peasants in developing countries won him world reputation and numerous awards, including the Copernican Citation as one of ten outstanding “modern revolutionaries” of the world together with Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, John Dewey and others in 1943, and the U.S. Presidential End Hunger Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1987.

However, there is one major limitation inherent in James Yen’s Rural Reconstruction method: its local approach relies on the prevailing political, economic and social relationships that already exist, rather than transforming them. For example, it provides aids to peasants, and to
some extent even organizes local peasants into cooperatives in order to make them more competitive in the market, but it does not attempt to abolish market forces, thus keeping rural economy in a structurally disadvantageous position to be subject to unfavorable market vicissitudes. Another example is that the “experiment sites” of James Yen’s approach are restricted to peasant communities dominated by self-employed households. Thus, in rural localities where feudal landlords and capitalists exploit poor peasants, problems of underdevelopment for those poor peasants persist.

In contrast to James Yen’s “rural reconstruction” approach, Mao Zedong’s “rural revolution” approach provides a better solution to rural development issues in developing countries. Under Mao’s leadership, feudal and capitalist forms of peasant exploitation were abolished through land reform, peasants were organized into cooperatives through guided and voluntary rural collectivization, and the rural economy got extensive aids from the state in a planned economy context where market forces were limited or completely eliminated.

In the past quarter century, the return of the market economy to China, the degeneration of the state into a predator on peasants, and the increasing integration of China with the capitalist world economy have subjected Chinese peasants to higher market risks and exploitation rates. In this context, an increasing number of Chinese social activists and expert volunteers are getting involved in reviving James Yen’s approach, with the hope that organized peasants will be less vulnerable to market risk and state coercion. Although it may still be some years before we can assess the influence of the revival of James Yen’s approach on Chinese peasants, we know from historical experience that there is a better solution to problems of rural development.

Sources and Resources:

The International Institute of Rural Reconstruction

James Yen’s biography by the Magsaysay Award

The Hunger Project’s brief comments on James Yen

“James Yen-inspired new Rural Reconstruction Movement in China” (in Chinese)

(c) 2004 Center for Popular Economics

Econ-Atrocities are a periodic publication of the Center for Popular Economics. They are the work of their authors and reflect their author’s opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.

By Suresh Naidu, CPE Staff Economist

Piotr Kropotkin is famous within two groups that one never sees at the same party. The biologists and evolutionary anthropologists who derive inspiration from Kropotkin’s research into the evolution of human sociality rarely intersect with the anarchists and political theorists who respect Kropotkin’s views on revolutionary change and the abolition of the state and private property. However, there was no disparity for Kropotkin, who derived many of his political beliefs from his studies of human and animal evolution.

Kropotkin had a long and interesting life. Born in 1842 to Russian nobility, he began his career as an exemplar of his class, serving in the military during the Crimean War, but eventually wound up working with the revolutionary Jura Federation. His politicization followed lengthy and difficult travels, during which he developed a deep affinity for the Russian peasants and workers he encountered. Later cut off from any political influence by Lenin, Kropotkin’s last writings were notable predictions of the tyranny that would result from the Bolshevik retention of wage labor and reliance on state coercion.

A large portion of contemporary social and biological science follows in the footsteps of Kropotkin’s academic work. Responding to the social Darwinism of his day, he wrote his primary scientific work, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, arguing that a major factor in the evolutionary success of humans was a predisposition to cooperate and share, without the need for institutions such as the market or the state.

Modern day research has provided overwhelming evidence to corroborate Kropotkin’s thesis. Anthropologists and archaeologists have found widespread decentralized cooperation within many non-industrial societies. Experimental economists have definitively shown that people are not classically selfish, with people often giving away substantial amounts of money and actively cooperating in laboratory settings, even against their narrow self-interest. This is not merely “enlightened self-interest,” rather a deeply seated desire for fairness as an end in itself (this desire may or may not have roots in biology). Biologists have acknowledged that competition among early human groups could have contributed to the evolution of cooperative behavior on the part of individuals.

Much of this literature has paralleled Kropotkin in refuting a naive socio-biological theory of human behavior. Rather than concocting stories that rationalize the current order in terms of fitness, it points to potential ways of organizing human interactions that can replace the dominant institutions of our day with something more democratic and egalitarian. Kropotkin built his belief in anarchism on the knowledge that people can organize their lives without self-interest or governmental coercion as prerequisites for large-scale cooperation.

There are many current examples of such cooperation. Elinor Ostrom and colleagues are documenting community management of scarce resources and public goods provision without the aid of governments or market pricing systems. Steve Lansing examines how Balinese rice farmers coordinate their complex ecological interactions with a few simple rules. Yochai Benkler identifies Open-Source Software as an example of large-scale non-market, non-state coordination. Erik Olin Wright and others study how participatory directly democratic institutions function to solve practical problems from Kerala to Chicago. Human institutions that harness the natural propensity to cooperate (and sometimes punish those who do not) are quite pervasive.

The political implications Kropotkin drew from his work are not the ravings of a lunatic egghead. Anarchism is commonly caricatured as naive, or worse, a haven for would-be terrorists. Instead, the politics advocated by Kropotkin are best interpreted as general principles. First is an ethical imperative, that there is no policy substitute for social norms and ideals of behavior - a belief that one’s personal behavior can either reinforce or undermine the status quo. The second is a deep suspicion of facile state or market fixes to social problems. Together, these imply respecting and considering people’s abilities to develop community solutions and autonomously self-organize before suggesting “policy” or “market” solutions. Kropotkin’s mix of science and politics are not vestiges of a bygone age, but very relevant ideas deserving greater intellectual and political engagement.

References:

Stephen Jay Gould, “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot,” Natural History, July 1997.

For experimental fairness, see Ernst Fehr et. al., “Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000.

For group selection giving rise to cooperation, see Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others, Harvard University Press, 1998.

For egalitarian cooperation in hunter-gatherers, see Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, Harvard University Press, 1999.

The remarkable case of Balinese rice farming is found in Steven Lansing and John Miller, “Cooperation in Balinese Rice Farming.”

For community solutions to public goods problems, see Elinor Ostrom’s classic Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, 1990 and Trust and Reciprocity, Russell Sage Foundation, 2003.

For Open-Source Software, see Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” 112 Yale Law Journal 369 (2002).

For the efficacy of direct democracy, see Erik Olin Wright and Archon Fung, Deepening Democracy, Verso, 2003.

(c) 2004 Center for Popular Economics

Econ-Atrocities are a periodic publication of the Center for Popular Economics. They are the work of their authors and reflect their author’s opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.

By Gerald Friedman, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The strength of conservative economics comes from methodological individualism. By treating economic outcomes as the product of individual choice subject to constraint, conservatives treat all social interference, either by government or by concentrations of private power, as illegitimate interference with individuals’ choices. Any reformist economics must begin by challenging this individualist premise.

Beginning in the 1880s, Richard Ely (1854-1943) articulated a different vision for a reformist economics built on Aristotle’s dicta that man “was formed for society.” Ely led a group of younger economists who founded the American Economic Association in 1885 to promote economics as a social science, uniting labor, scholarship, and the church to advance social reform. Ely declared that the “younger political economy no longer permits the science to be used as a tool in the hands of the greedy and the avaricious for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes. It does not acknowledge laissez faire as an excuse for doing nothing while people starve.” Read more »