I spent a week reading contemporary communists on Twitter. Not academics, just people who are communists doing something that resembles politics. The consistent argument I observed was imperialism: the West is holding down poor countries via institutions like the IMF; countries like Cuba are the real democracies being thwarted by the US; Chinese loans are good because they are socialist loans; Western prosperity relies on exploiting poor countries; etc.
If you are a Marxist or had a Marxist phase (I had one!), you might recognize this argument from Lenin’s 1917 Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In this book, among other things, Lenin argues that Western imperialism generated huge amounts of money which was used to pay politicians and labor leaders. This came at the expense of those in the exploited countries. The exploitation money both stopped the revolution and kept poor countries poor.
I was shocked to see so much focus on imperialism among contemporary communists because, well, we live in a very different world than in 1917 and we know a lot more about how growth works. In particular, the idea that prosperity in advanced countries (which aren’t only in the West these days!) crucially depends on exploitation of poor countries is just wrong. Many formerly poor countries have developed over the last hundred years, and if you take Lenin seriously that should mean a shrinking of the economic pie in rich countries. Instead, we just live in a more prosperous world. Number go up everywhere.
But there’s a whole narrative out there, being continuously developed by Lenin devotees, that imperialism (or neoimperialism) is ongoing and just as strong as it ever was. That the methods have changed but the underlying structure is the same. This argument is well-justified by Marxist texts, internally consistent, and wrong. If you point out that it’s clearly wrong, you will get long, internally consistent responses by smart people which are also wrong.
In fact, you may not know how to rebut their arguments. They may win an argument *with you* despite being completely wrong. Such is the art of rhetoric.
And this brings me to what I really want to talk about: the difference between how we construct arguments about politics and how we develop correct ideas about politics.
why are the Leninists wrong?
We could say that Lenin’s argument is wrong economically, or wrong on the facts of the world, or wrong today because the world has changed. I don’t think that’s actually that important. Why are the Leninists today wrong, though? That’s a much better and much more important question.
I think they are wrong because they are looking for political truth in an old text they have deemed sacred. And I think this phenomenon is widespread in politics and not limited to the left. You can see similar reasoning among libertarians (which I also used to be! I’ve tried all the ideologies on) and effective altruists. I don’t mean to pick on the communists, tbh.
The old-text approach is nice, in a sense. Let’s say you are a smart 20-something that clearly recognizes the large problems the US has: an insurgent far-right, a broken healthcare system, disempowered workers, and so on. Well, there are some old texts you can read which are dense and propose an internally consistent explanation of why the world is like this. The density is actually a virtue, because you need to struggle to understand them, which provides satisfaction and the feeling of having a breakthrough.
It also provides closed-form explanations for the problems you see: there is exploitation by capitalists, the capitalist system is fundamentally broken and designed to disempower workers, and so on. You can repeat back some dense explanations, for instance some stuff like this about housing.
And voilà, you’ve got highly intellectual explanations for things in the world, you’ve got a community of likeminded people, you’ve got internal certainty, and you are in fact completely wrong.
being a fox
It’s a deeply unsatisfying realization for me that I cannot develop correct political opinions by formulating internally consistent arguments from classic political texts. This is a good strategy for winning arguments, but it is a bad strategy for having political opinions that are aligned with reality and conducive to productive political action.
Instead, the process I’ve found to work is a lot more local and a lot more messy. First off, think of all of your opinions as provisional and subject to change. Second, think of all of your opinions as local: your foreign policy opinions go in the foreign policy bucket, and your welfare state opinions go in the welfare state bucket, and so on. Then, challenge yourself regularly on the things you really want to understand.
For example, if you want to understand housing policy, you’ve got to accept that your general notions of economics might not work exactly as you think in this particular domain. So you’ve got to learn about how basic economic concepts like supply and demand work in this space. You’ve got to learn about what different interest groups want to do in the space. You’ve got to think about the people affected and figure out how you view the demands of different groups: what does justice look like to you? Ideally, you’d talk to smart people and read smart people and incorporate their ideas into your own conception of the space.
And after you do this legwork, challenge yourself, revise your beliefs over and over, you’ll have a view which is yours and applies to this particular space. It won’t sound exactly like Karl Marx or Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill. It will sound like you.
Then, you can think about the political bucket: who are your political allies? What would a legislatively-plausible bill to advance your goals look like? What groups can you plug into? And you can get involved in housing politics.
And, extremely importantly, all of this legwork on an issue like housing does not mean you will understand labor policy, foreign affairs, or other issues. Other issues might rhyme, but they might not. And it’s hard to figure out the difference without some more legwork.
If you’re familiar with the difference between foxes and hedgehogs, you should strive to be a fox. If you’re familiar with Seeing Like A State, you should strive to be a Japanese dam engineer, who takes one step, surveys and thinks critically, and then takes another step.
a closing tweet
I think going through this process ends up with a politics that looks more or less like this.
I don’t mean looks like these specific policies, but I mean looks sort of ideologically eclectic by traditional standards. Some deregulation, some additional regulation, some government investment, some government stepping back, some technical tweaks.
Think about it: is it really plausible that the government is *just too big* in every single area? Or that the state is universally too weak? Given the complexity of modern government, it’s actually pretty difficult to argue either of these positions on the merits!
Anyway, that’s my view right now. It is, of course, subject to change.
:)