Was There A Communist State In Paraguay In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Century?

People have been organized in diverse ways in many societies across time and space. A communist state existed for a century and a half in Paraguay in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. I doubt many socialists today want this degree of regimentation. This state extended into Argentia and Brazil.

The Jesuits, formally named the Society of Jesus, is a religious order in the Catholic church. The Guarani are an indigenous people in South America.

The Jesuits agreed with the Spanish king, in 1609, to found communities along the Parani River. These communities, called 'reductions', were each organized around a mission. Each was ruled by a cacique, that is, a Guarani chief, under the direction of the Jesuits. Collectively, these missions were eventually called the Rio de Plata missions. They reached a population of almost 150,000 in 30 missions in 1732.

Life in these reductions was regimented under the 1689 General Rules of the Missions. Land was farmed communally, with crops and cattle introduced by the Jesuits. There were also individual fields, albeit with inefficient farming. As with life in a monastery, mornings began with hymns and mass, and many feast days were celebrated. Meals were communal. The Jesuits provided education to the children, as you might expect.

I note above that the population under Jesuit guidance grew to a large extent. Original contact between Europeans and the indigenous people resulted in the spread of deadly, contagious diseases. The Jesuits moved a good portion of the population in the missions twice. The Jesuits armed the population to fend off neighbors who tried to kidnap people to force into slavery. The Guarani thereby had militias. Eventually, the Jesuits moved some communities to more remote areas. Portugal gained territory in Brazil in the Treaty of Madrid in 1750. The Jesuits moved some communities out of Portuguese territory.

This experiment in a theocratic communism came to an end in 1767. Spain expelled the Jesuits from the Americas. This expulsion had more to do with European politics than anything going on in these missions.

Naturally, Jesuits put this history in a good light.

References

• Massimo Livi-Bacci and Ernesto J. Maeder 2004. The missions of Paraguay: the demography of an experiment. Journal of Interdisciplinary History xxxv(2): 185–224.
• Philip Caraman. 1976. The Lost Paradise: The Jesuit Republic in South America. [I have not read this. The title is evocative.]
• Paraguay: The Noble Ruins of Paradise.

Socialism Succeeding In Emilia-Romagna

Emilia-Romagna is a region in Italy, north of Tuscany. I have written about its capital, Bologna, before.

About a third of the gross domestic product of Emilia-Romagna is produced by co-operatives. About two thirds of those who reside in Emilia-Romagna participate in co-ops in some ways. (See this article from John Duda.) Apparently, co-ops in Italy go back to the nineteenth century, surviving through the fascists in the twentieth century.

Article 45 of the 1947 Italian constitution promotes co-ops. It states:

The Republic recognises the social function of co-operation of a mutually supportive, non-speculative nature. The law promotes and encourages co- operation through appropriate means and ensures its character and purposes through appropriate checks.

The law safeguards and promotes the handicrafts.

A capability for a worker to take unemployment benefits at once to set up a co-op is one of the provisions of the 1985 Macora law.

A society with a large co-operative segment will have related institutions. Co-ops will market to each other. Scholars, such as Vera Zamagni at the University of Bologna, will study them. Competition among co-ops might be less cut-throat. The study of management and administration at academic institutions will have curriculum supporting co-ops. Mutual banks might be set up to loan to co-ops, and other financial institutions will have more practice in making such loans. Co-ops might set up institutes to perform research into processes and products improving their technology.

The 1986 book, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity, by Michael J. Priore and Charles Sabel, is supposed to be of interest on this topic.

The History Of The Soviet Union Is Inconsistent With Marxism

1.0 Introduction

You can tell a history of the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics in which events are inconsistent with Marx's theory of history.

2.0 Bolshevik Revolution

Marx, like Adam Smith and Walt Rostow, had a stages theory of history. Feudalism was succeeded by capitalism, and capitalism is to be succeeded by socialism. Socialism is to arise first in the most advanced capitalist countries. (The theory of history is not my favorite part of Marxist theory.) Russia, in 1917, was a semi-feudal country with peasants as the largest class. I guess China was the same, before Mao. A Marxist would not expect socialism to start successful in either country.

I have some caveats. Marx's 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich speculates on the possibility of socialism in Russia. I am aware that Lenin had an argument about how socialism can start with the weakest link in the age of imperialism. But he still expected his revolution to be supported by revolutions in advanced capitalist countries. And, for a moment he seemed to be right, what with the Spartacist revolution in Germany, the Bavarian Socialist Republic, and Hungary.

3.0 Socialism In One Country

Stalin came up with the idea of socialism in one country. That country was still quite backward, not an advanced capitalist country. Is the championing of the Soviet Union by communists in advanced capitlist countries what Marxists would wnat? The Soviet Union presented an alternative. But shouldn't their priority be building socialism at home? And their cause was weakened when the Soviet Union behaved like other great powers in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

4.0 Khrushchev's Secret Speech

Khrushchev denounced Stalin in his 'secret' speech of 25 February 1956. He came up with the concept of the cult of personality. What is that from a Marxist perspective? History is supposed to be determined, ultimately, by contradictions in material conditions. How can the mistakes of one leader be so important?

5.0 Gorbachev's Voluntarism

I do not understand the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

As I understand it, Gorbachev and other members of the Politburo acquiesced in the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Poor performance pointed out the need for reforms. Nevertheless, I find it strange that political leaders can decide that the system they preside over has no legitimacy like that.

Steve Paxton provides an account of how the fall of the Soviet Union was a triumph for Marx's theory of history.

Socialism Works In Growing Organic Rice In Latin America

The largest producer of organic rice in Latin America, over the last decade, is the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Rural Workers Movement, in Brazil. They have 1.5 million members, in 23 of 26 Brazilian states.

Article 5, Section XXIII of Brazil's constitution mandates that land serve a social function. I gather that MST was formed by peasants occupying unused land. They have a radical democratic organization, with some practices that remind me of the 1871 Paris commune. Their base consists of many small settlements working together.

They grow more than rice. Their goals include self-sustaining, self-managed agriculture. They avoid pesticides and use bio-fertilizers. (I guess this is a nice way of talking about manure.) This is a model opposed to a few large business owning huge tracts of land dedicated to production for the export market.

Since I have a vestigial interest in software, I'll mention work by Prof. Celso Alexandre Souza de Alvear and others to develop Sementes, a plugin for web sites designed especially with marketing products from the solidarity economy. There is also Ciranda. If you are going to market organic food, you want the customer to be able to easily access information about ingredients and organizations that grow it. The Arvoredo app (I have not read that paper) "facilitates documentation, monitoring, and evaluation of grassroots environmental governance activities, including tree planting, agroforestry practices, tree nursery construction, and seed collection efforts". Recently, MST has launched Iaraa, an AI tool. The software must be in service of the collective's larger goals.

A corresponding urban organization exists, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto (MTST) or Movement of Homeless Workers. And MST seems to be networked with other organizations providing models for a post-capitalist society.

As usual, I disclaim much knowledge of these organizations. You can check out an article in Jacobin by Joao Paulo Rodrigues, the write up for the 1991 Right Livelihood Award, or a write up from Grassroots International.

On A Transition To Socialism

I have just started David Schweickart's After Capitalism. I have yet to get to his exposition of how transition to economic democracy might be achieved.

To my mind, a transition to Schweickart's preferred system could start with a government fund acquiring enough equity in corporates to prescribe certain organization decisions. As I recall, the United States government bailed out General Motors during the 2008 worldwide depression. These were loans; they could have taken equity. The Norwegian government accumulates a Sovereign Wealth Fund from North Sea oil. The Australian government has superanuation funds.

Once a government has enough ownership of some corporations, they are not required to maintain them as hierarchical, authoritarian institutions. They could, say, get rid of the board of directors. An elected workers' council could appoint management.

The government fund can still own the capital. The firm pays a fee for renting the capital. I once worked for a wholl owned subsidiary, a capitalist firm owned by another capitalist firm. We had to pay such a fee to the owning company.

Schweickart has the revenue obtained by such fees used to create an investment fund. Investment will be directed not solely by profitability. He has the investment fund being paid out on a per capita basis, as a first approximation. Some of the investments are national in scope. The remainder goes to regions on a per capita basis, as a first approximation. This works well with a federal system, like Australia, Canada, and the USA. Public needs would have some influence. For example, some investment might be deliberately directed to less developed regions of the country or to update old technology with more green, ecological technology. New worker-directed firms can be created, and current firms can invest in new processes and new products.

I can see how some of these fees might also pay for, say, head start, pension funds, and so on. Not everybody is in the work force. Schweickart recommends a job guarantee program. He imagines current social programs would continue with funding, I guess, by current tax systems. This is in parallel with new investment fund.

The workers, however, would be the residual claimant under economic democracy. They might not even be paid wages. Profit calculations would differ. Maybe profits are broken down and distributed every week, every two weeks, or every month.

Under Schweickart's economic democracy, the means of production are not privately owned but rented from the public. Workers do not sell their labor power for a wage. Products are produced for buying and selling on markets. As now, large islands exist where the maket is replaced by internal planning. Now those are privately owned corporations. Under this new structure, these firms would be governed by the workers themselves.

We could start transitioning to such a system today.

But I do not see where the political will comes from to do this. On the other hand, I have seen changes in my lifetime that I did not think possible: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the fall of fascism in Chile, a genuine democracy created for a while in the Philippines.

Socialism Worked In Bologna, Italy, For Decades

Socialists and communists have been elected in many places, for significant periods of time. Often they introduced policies that improved the lives of most citizens and increased their freedoms. If I were a member of some of those polities, I would almost certainly have disagreements with details of some policy or other. This post is about a place that I do not know much about.

After the end of World War II, Europeans who had resisted fascism in the underground had a certain prestige. That included the Italian Communist Party (PCI). The PCI became the governing party in Bologna and Florence in much of the time after WW II. You can also look to the government of Emilia-Romagna, a region of Italy that includes Bologna.

The PCI did not enter the national government partly as a consequence of Italian foreign policy. They needed to be in alliance with the USA. Perhaps the CIA was involved in interventions to Italian domestic politics.

The PCI introduced a host of reforms including free busing, better health care, better education, housing cooperatives, and generally good government. I have never been to Bologna. Did the PCI have something to do with the maintenance of the Renaissance character of downtown Florence? The Reggio Emilia Approach approach to childcare is still used elsewhere.

I gather that the PCI never was officially part of a national governing coalition, even after Enrico Berlinguer's historic compromise and championing of Eurocommunism. During the years of lead, the PCI found themselves to the right of those, many young, inspired by Operaismo (workerism). This part of my fragments of a story is uninspiring for those who want to pursue an electoral path.

Eurocommunism and Communist Parties In Coalition Governments In Europe

Eurocommunism was a tendency in communist parties in Europe during the 1970s. The Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring cast communist parties in Western Europe in a bad light. How could they follow Moscow's ead after that? So they started articulating their own path and asserted their independence from the Soviet Union.

This tendency was a moderating tendency. Ernest Mandel, a follower of Trotsky and therefore a critic of Stalin, decried this tendency. He called Eurocommunism "the bitter fruits of socialism in one country."

Anyways, two instances of these "bitter fruits" stand out to me. One is the historic compromise, led by Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). This involved support for the Christian Democrats (DC). I guess that the PCI did not enter the government in the elections of 1976, but refused to vote against the DC on no-confidence votes in parliament. In some sense, the communists were to the right of the socialists, let alone the workerists outside of the parties.

Another case is Francois Mitterand, a socialist, who was elected president of France in 1981. He took the French Communist Party (PCF) into his governing coalition. The communists did not do well, being sort of domesticated.

That was a while ago. But take a look at Portugal. Antonio Costa, a socialist, was elected Prime Minister in 2015 and served to 2024. This was a coalition government, called the Left Bloc. The Portuguese Communist Party and the Greens were also coalition members. Costa is now President of the European Council. Since 2024, Portugal's Prime Minister is Luís Montenegro, head of a more right-leaning coalition. To confuse me, his party is the Social Democratic Party. I think the names of the parties suggests, to an American, that they are more left-wing than they are now. As of February, the Portuguese president is Jose Seguro, a socialist. I gather that his election was a matter of staving off the far right, in some sense.

So the history of socialism and communism includes typical parliamentary machinations, compromises, coalitions, and so on. To understand Portugal, I should know more about Salazar and the Carnation Revolution.

Socialism Works in Kerala, India

Socialists and communists have been elected in many places, for significant periods of time. And those places did not necessarily turn into dysopian tyrannies. Often, they did not get further than social democratic policies, improving the lives of most citizens. If I were a member of some of those polities, I would almost certainly have disagreements with details of some policy or other. This post is about one of those places that I do not know much about.

Kerala is a state in India. Currently, the governing party in Kerala is a coalition, the Left Democratic Front (LDF). The Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) is the dominant party. Communists have traded off governing with another coalition, the United Democratic Front, since Kerala's founding, in 1957. They have democratic elections.

The UDF is dominated by the Congress party, which governed India for a long time. I recollect Indira Gandhi, for example. I have no idea how the current national government, headed by Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), impacts Kerala. My impression is that the BJP raises the question of what is fascism? (By the way, I do not necessarily understand the political positions of some of these newspapers I link to.)

Compared to the rest of India, Kerala has a high Human Development Index (HDI), high literacy, high life expectancy, low poverty rates. For some reason, I have the impression that it has a well-established Information Technology industry.

Socialism Works As Participatory Budgeting

Socialists are not waiting for the revolution. They have started building socialism here and now.

Participatory budgeting is one process for providing most people in a city or municipality with more power to decide on city budgets. I do not fully understand it, but it includes more direct democracy. I suppose this process is close to how syndicates and soviets were supposed to work.

I think of a budget as an expression of values. Participatory budgeting is an attempt to allow all of a community to express their values, not just an elite few.

Participatory budgeting was first implemented in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989. More about it is here and here. I see that they do it in Saratoga Springs, not too far away from where I am. As I understand it, New York City limits the part of their budget that follows the participatory budgeting process. But they do have some.

Anyways, participatory budgeting can be seen as a forerunner of what may come. Many know more than me on this topic.

Neither Socialist Nor Pro-Capitalist In The Underworld

This post briefly describes some advocates of some strange ideas near the start of the twentieth century. I am avoiding socialists and Marxists in what Keynes called an "underworld" and an "army of heretics".

• Major C. H. Douglas: British engineer who inspired the Canadian social credit movement. I have not read enough to understand his A + B theorem, but I gather he explained depressions and recessions by an underconsumptionist theory.
• William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings: American writers and underconsumptionists. Hayek wrote some criticisms of them.
• Silvio Gesell: A german living in Argentina and later in the Soviet cabinet in Bavaria after World War I. Had a worldwide following. Advocated stamped money, in which money needed to be stamped each month to remain capable purchasing commodities. Money would no longer be as liquid. Savings would be more likely to be channeled into physical investments.
• J. A. Hobson: Birtish journalist and prolific popular writer. Developed a theory of underconsumption, rejecting Say's law. His theory of imperialism influenced later Marxists.
• Henry George: American journalist and writer. His book Progress and Poverty started a worldwide movement, with followers today. Most well-known for the idea of a land value tax (LVT).
• Frederick Soddy: English chemist, 1921 Nobel laureate. Had ideas about how thermodynamics applied to economics. Advocated the abolishment of the gold standard. Claimed that debts must grow exponentially with compound interest, which cannot be supported by the real economy.

I am sure that some of these were associated with some political ideas I would reject. Wikipedia has Major Douglas and Frederick Soddy as anti-semites.

Arguments And Debates Among Early Socialists

1. Introduction

Early socialists did not always agree. I provide an account of an idiosyncratic selection of a couple of Ricardian socialists, including a later dispute about priority and a debate with philosophical radicals, that is, liberals. I have been reading John Cassidy's new book. He has a chapter on William Thompson.

2. William Thompson, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Anton Menger

I start with William Thompson, the author in 1824 of An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness. Thompson built upon the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin, and David Ricardo. Apparently, Thompson was to first to argue for equality of distribution on the basis of utilitarianism. An extra $100 has a lot more utility to a poor man than a rich one. He coined the term "surplus value", and his political economy had a structure much like Karl Marx's later system, with some differences. Thompson advocated, along with Robert Owen, for mutual co-operation, as in intentional communities.

"it was Ricardo's crude generalisations which gave modern socialism its fancied scientific basis, and provoked, if they did not justify, its revolutionary form… Ricardo ... did more than any intentionally socialist writer to sap the foundations of that form of society which he was trying to explain, and which he believed to be the typical and natural, if not, indeed, the ideal social state...

Thompson was only one of a series of socialist writers, culminating in Marx and Lassalle, who take the Ricardian position as the very basis of their argument. His first section has the familiar Ricardian ring. 'Wealth is produced by labor: no other ingredient but labor makes any object of desire an object of wealth. Labor is the sole universal measure, as well as the characteristic distinction of wealth.' Give the word 'labour' its popular meaning, and it is merely an affair of logic to deduce a large part of modern socialism from this position. Whatever qualifications Ricardo may have made upon it in his own mind, ninety-nine readers out of a hundred took him literally, and the main impression left by his book was that while wealth was almost exclusively due to labour, it was mainly absorbed by rent and other payments to the unproductive classes. This was the text which Thompson and the English socialists proceeded to elaborate." -- H. S. Foxwell

Anton Menger says that Marx basically copied Thompson and other Ricardian socialists:

"Marx is completely under the influence of the earlier English socialists, and more particularly of William Thompson. Leaving out of account the mathematical formulae by which Marx rather obscures than elucidates his argument, the whole theory of surplus value, its conception, its name, and the estimates of its amount are borrowed in all essentials from Thompson's writings. Only Marx, in accordance with the aim of his work, pays special attention to the one form of unearned income (interest on capital), and fails to give either that juridical criticism of private property in instruments of production and useful commodities which is the necessary supplement of the theory of surplus value, or a rigorous exposition of the right to the whole produce of labour. In all these respects Marx is far inferior to Thompson." -- Anton Menger

Engels would have none of it:

"In order, to drag Marx down, his achievements are attributed to other socialists in whom no one is interested, who have vanished from the scene and who have no political or scientific importance any longer. In this way they hope to dispose of the founder of the proletarian world view, and indeed the world view itself. Mr. Menger undertook the task. People are not professors for nothing. They want to make their mark, too...

The present social order gives landowners and capitalists a 'right' to part - the bulk - of the product produced by the worker… So whoever first said that the present right of those who own the soil and the other means of production to part of the proceeds of labour is a wrong is the great man, the founder of 'scientific' socialism. And these men were Godwin, Hall and Thompson. Leaving out all the interminable economic fripperies and getting to the legal residue, Menger finds nothing but the same assertion in Marx. Consequently Marx simply copied these old Englishmen, particularly Thompson, and took care to keep quiet about his source. The proof has been adduced.

We give up any attempt to make this hidebound lawyer understand that nowhere does Marx demand the 'right to the full proceeds of labour', that he makes no legal demands of any kind at all in his theoretical works. Even our lawyer seems to have a faint inkling of this when he reproaches Marx for nowhere giving 'a thorough presentation of the right to the full proceeds of labour'.

In Marx's theoretical studies legal right, which always merely reflects the economic conditions prevalent in a specific society, is only considered as a matter of purely secondary importance; his main concern is the historical justification for certain conditions, modes of appropriation and social classes in specific ages, the investigation of which is of prime importance to anyone who sees in history a coherent, though often disrupted, course of development rather than, as the eighteenth century did, a mere muddle of folly and brutality. Marx views the historical inevitability of, and hence the justification for, the slave-owners of classical times, the feudal lords of the Middle Ages, etc., as the lever of human development for a limited historical period. He thereby also recognises the temporary historical justification for exploitation, for the appropriation of the product of labour by others. Yet at the same time he demonstrates that not only has this historical justification disappeared, but that the continued existence of exploitation in any form, far from furthering social development, is daily impeding it more and more and involving it in increasingly violent collisions. Menger's attempt to force these epoch-making historical investigations into his narrow, legalistic Procrustean bed only goes to show his total inability to understand things that go beyond the narrowest legal horizon." – Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky (1887).

Both Menger and Engels and Kautsky have a lot more to say.

3. William Thompson and J. S. Mill

William Thompson and others had a public debate with John Stuart Mill in 1825. Mill was then a teenager, a liberal, a philosophical radical, and an utilitarian.

"There was for some time in existence a society of Owenites. called the Cooperative Society, which met for weekly public discussions in Chancery Lane. In the early part of 1825, accident brought Roebuck in contact with several of its members, and led to his attending one or two of the meetings and taking part in the debate in opposition to Owenism.

Some one of us started the notion of going there in a body and having a general battle: and Charles Austin and some of his friends who did not usually take part in our joint exercises, entered into the project. It was carried out by concert with the principal members of the Society, themselves nothing loth, as they naturally preferred a controversy with opponents to a tame discussion among their own body. The question of population was proposed as the subject of debate: Charles Austin led the case on our side with a brilliant speech. and the fight was kept up by adjournment through five or six weekly meetings before crowded auditories, including along with the members of the Society and their friends, many hearers and some speakers from the Inns of Court.

When this debate was ended, another was commenced on the general merits of Owen's system: and the contest altogether lasted about three months. It was a lutte corps-@agrave;-corps between Owenites and political economists, whom the Owenites regarded as their most inveterate opponents: but it was a perfectly friendly dispute. We who represented political economy had the same objects in view as they had, and took pains to shew it; and the principal champion on their side was a very estimable man, with whom I was well acquainted, Mr. William Thompson. Of Cork, author of a book on the Distribution of Wealth, and of an Appeal in behalf of women against the passage relating to them in my father's Essay on Government.

Ellis, Roebuck, and I, took an active part in the debate, and among those from the Inns of Court who joined in it I remember Charles Villers. The other side obtained also, on the population question, very efficient support from without. The well known Gale Jones, then an elderly man. made one of his florid speeches; but the speaker with whom I was most struck, though I dissented from nearly every word he said, was Thirlwall, the historian, since Bishop of St. David's, then a Chancery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union before the era of Austin and Macaulay. His speech was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered ten sentences. I set him down as the best speaker I had ever heard, and I have never since heard any one whom I placed above him." – J. S. Mill, Autobiography

In his autobiography, Mill makes clear that those on his side are his friends from university.

3. William Thompson and Thomas Hodgskin

Thompson had a disagreement with Thomas Hodgskin who published in 1825, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital. Hodgskin's explanation for profits is a matter of selling commodities over their value, with force and monopoly power.

"But if [Hodgskin] is in favour of competition as the principle by which to determine the division of labour's share between the various ranks of labourers, he is for combination against capital in order to make labour's share as large as possible. By combining, the journeymen 'may reduce or destroy altogether the profit of the idle capitalist ... but they will augment the wages and rewards of industry, and will give to genius and skill their due share of the national produce.'" – H. S. Foxwell This is the sort of explanation and remedy that Thompson rejected. His 1827 book Labour Rewarded is an answer.

"Thompson urges that 'individual competition is incompatible with equal remuneration, as it is also with securing to labor the entire products of its exertions'. 'The author of Labour Defended stands alone, as far as. I know, amongst the advocates of Individual competition, in even wishing that labor should possess the whole of the products of its exertions. All other advocates of individual competition look on the notion as visionary, under the Competitive System'. We know Thompson's solution of the difficulty. Labourers must become capitalists, and unite in communities to regulate their own labour. To ascertain for each the exact product of his own labour is impracticable. If this could be done, then justice would give each individual a property in that product. But moral considerations would force him to share that product with others. The human race could not otherwise be preserved. This voluntary distribution is best carried out under the equitable arrangements of co-operative communities, with their regulated exchanges. 'It is on the regulation of exchanges', he concludes, 'that the industrious classes must depend for realising the general proposition that "the whole produce of labour should belong to the labourer."'" – H. S. Foxwell

We see here the distinction between each individual worker obtaining his product and the working class as a whole obtaining and deciding on the use of their product. Thompson advocates the latter.

4. William Thompson and Robert Owen

Thompson had a later disagreement with Robert Owen. This disagreement, at the 1832 Co-operative Congress in London, arose after Owen's experiences in the USA, at New Harmony, Indiana. Owen thought co-operatives needed much larger initial investments than Thompson.

Selected References

• John Cassidy. 2025. Capitalism and Its Critics: A History from the Industrial Revolution to AI. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
• Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky. 1887. Lawyer's Socialism. Die Neue Zeit.
• Anton Menger. 1899. The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour. With an introduction by H. S. Foxwell.

John Stuart Mill, Avowed Socialist

I have been reading some secondary literature on John Stuart Mill. He was explicitly against meritocracy, although that term was not available until Young's satirical novel. Here is Mill:

"If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? Is it not, on the contrary, an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection against suffering?" – J. S. Mill

The above is not necessarily an argument for socialism. It is consistent with Mill's investigation of what a society organized around private property might be.

In his autobiography, Mill explicitly says that he became a socialist:

"Our [Mill and Harriet Taylor] ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve. we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert, on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be. or be thought to be. impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to." -- J. S. Mill

Mill is the canonical example of a classical liberal. His short book On Liberty is still read. How can he also be a socialist?

Reference

• Helen McCabe. 2021. John Stuart Mill, Socialist. McGill-Queen's University Press.
• Matthew McManus. 2024. The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. Routledge.
• Michael Young. 1958. The Rise Of The Meritocracy: 1870-2033.. Pelican.

Otto Neurath And Happiness

I think of Otto Neurath primarily as a member of the Vienna circle. Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick were two ther prominent members. They developed the philosophy of logical empiricalism or logical positivism. No woolly dialectics or cultural criticism for them.

It was a custom, when they were meeting at their preferred coffee-house in 1920s Vienna, to interrupt any speaker who had strayed into much-despised metaphysics. Neurath did this so often that they told him to hold up his hand whenever the speaker said something that was not metaphysics.

When Neurath fled the Nazis, he took his wife and his mistress with him. They got along well.

A number of revolutions, inspired by the Bolsheviks, convulsed central Europe after World War I. I think of Hungary and the Spartacists, in particular. Neurath began implementing his ideas for central planning under the Bavarian Soviet Republic. He advocated planning in kind, without monetary prices.

This was long before the definition of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But Neurath would not be interested in optimizing GDP in his planning. He did not want to duplicate capitalism. Rather he looked at a broader array of measures:

"Neurath ... pioneered a measure of living standard. He took variables that are now familiar to economists, such as nutrition, health, life expectancy, housing, clothing, incidence of crime. He was also concerned to build these up in a single measure, and its level, as well as its distribution, were to be the concern of the socialist planner." – Meghnad Desai. 2002. Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism.

This measure is like the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), Bhutan's Gross National Happiness (GNP), or, say, metrics promoted by Joseph Stiglitz.

I suppose I ought to mention ISOTYPE, Neurath's pictorial language or symbols.

A century has shown that an unregulated, unrestrained capitalism does not deliver a broad-based prosperity for all, in which most can fully develop their capabilities. Suppose you care about the majority of your fellow citizens, not just a few at the top. Empirically, you should vote for socialists.

Revolutionary And Reformist Socialists Splitting Around 1900

The second international was the major organization for socialist parties around 1900. The first international had collapsed with struggles for leadership between Marx and anarchists. The German Social Democratic Party, headed by Karl Kautsky, seemed to be the most successful socialist party in the second international. After Engels, Kautsky became the literary executor for Marx. He edited and put out volume 4 of Capital, that is, Theories of Surplus Value.

Eduard Bernstein was Engels' literary executor and therefore a prominent member of the German Social Democratic Party. He had been the editor of Der Sozialdemokrat, the party's newspaper. Perhaps Bernstein was influenced by his acquaintance with members of the Fabian society when he was in exile in London. He looked at the growing wealth of the German workers; the apparent strength of working-class organizations, such as unions; and the SDP representation in the Reichstag. Economic development was not concentrating wealth in a smaller and smaller capitalist class. These trends did not seem to him consistent with the revolution that Marx foresaw. And he said so.

The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus) is the major statement of Bernstein's views, and was published in 1899. It started as articles in Die Neue Ziet, the SDP paper for more theoretical work. Bernstein was called a revisionist, which has ever after been a pejorative among more radical socialists. His theses were argued about at the SDPss Stuttgart Conference, held in October 1898.

Bernstein argued for legislation and peaceful reform in favor of the workers. Socialists should be a parliamentary party. They should agitate for universal suffrage. They should leave businesses, for the most part, in private hands. Socialists should support the development of civil society.

Rosa Luxemburg saw an opportunity to raise her stature in the German SDP. She had already participated in the Stuttgart conference. Others, including Kautsky, also argued against Bernstein. Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution is a classic statement of the radical, anti-revisionist view. She argued against idealism, against petty bourgeois moralism, and against opportunism. Idealism, in this sense, means basing political views purely on intellectual arguments. Emphasizing universal citizenship loses a working-class standpoint. According to Luxemburg, capitalism will inevitably break down. Socialism is a scientific standpoint, given its historical necessity. I do not know that this is in this pamphlet, but Luxemburg famously said that our choice is socialism or barbarianism.

This controversy was echoed in other countries. In France, Jean Jaurès led the reformists. I think of Georges Sorel as an intellectual leader of the revolutionaries. His 1908 book, Reflections On Violence does not strike me as particularly Marxist. You maybe should read 'violence' in the title as what is today called direct action. Sorel, at the time, was an advocate of syndicalism. He was kind of mystical in his emphasis on non-rational motives for mass movements. Hence, his myth of the general strike.

In Italy, Filippo Turati, a founder of the Italian socialist party (PSI), was a reformist. The radicals were called maximalists. They seem to me more positivist than Marx would ever be. They saw the revolution as inevitable, not something to be brought about by political action in the here-and-now. Socialists should organize and educate, holding themselves back until the revolution comes.

In Russia, the split was between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Apparently, these names mean 'the minority' and 'the majority'. Bolsheviks were only the majority because some supporters of the Mensheviks had walked out of the Second Congress of the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Labor Party), at which the split occurred. Julius Martov was an important leader of the moderates, while Lenin headed the Bolsheviks. Lenin's pamphlets, What is to be done? (1902) and Two steps forward, one step back (1904) are essential primary sources here.

Lenin argued for agitation on all fronts, not just for economic improvements for the workers. He wanted an organization of professional revolutionaries, and developed the idea of democratic centralism. The Bolsheviks should have the freest discussion in deciding on policy and tactics. But once a vote has decided the issue, the comrades follow the party line. The establishment of an all-Russian newspaper, Iskra, is the immediate implementation called for in What is to be done?

I ought to say something about Austria.

I have said nothing about Sweden, Denmark, Norway, or Finland. Bernstein provided the intellectual structure for what became democratic socialism and social democracy. I do not know historical details about Scandinavia. He said, "The final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything."

Sewer Socialism Worked In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, In The First Half Of The 20th Century

America's Socialist Experiment

Socialists have been elected mayor, to city councils, and to county commissions in the USA. Emil Seidel was the first socialist mayor in the USA. He was elected mayor of Milwaukee in 1910. Other socialists were elected to the city council. Another socialist, Victor Berger, was elected to the House of Representatives, to represent Milwaukee in Washington, DC.

By concentrating on Milwaukee, I am downplaying the extent to which socialists were elected mayor in cities in the USA. Wikipedia has a list, and so does the University of Washington. More than 130 mayors were socialists. Maybe I want to read David R. Berman's 2022 book, Socialist Mayors in the United States: Governing in an Era of Municipal Reform, 1900-1920.

Wisconsin is a democracy. Up until 1960, the mayor was mostly a socialist. Daniel Hoan, the second socialist mayor, was elected in 1916. Frank Zeider, the third socialist mayor, was elected in 1948.

The socialists focused on cleaning up Milwaukee, both figuratively and literally. For the former, they fought corruption and graft. They obtained their name, Sewer Socialists, from the latter. Introducing sanitation, electric, and power systems was an importance advance in their day.

The name, I guess, was coined by Morris Hillquit, a prominent member of the Socialist Party of America (1901 – 1972). He was tired of the boasting from Milwaukee socialists. But they had good cause to boast.

As I understand it, German immigrants, who fled to the US after participating in the failed 1848 revolutions, were an important current for the development of the sewer socialists. Nicholas Howland, in the link, makes an explicit link to Eduard Bernstein's reformism. Bernie Sanders, the former mayor of Burlington, Vermont, can be said to be in this tradition. Ruth Messinger, a former city council member in New York City, borough president of Manhattan, and co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America is maybe another example.

Howard Fast Leaves The Communist Party Of The USA After Khrushchev's Secret Speech

This post is another instance of me stumbling over anti-communist literature, in a sense.

I read Howard Fast's novel, Citizen Tom Paine, many years ago. I have never read Spartacus or seen the movie. I think I read April Morning in high school. I think I read Freedom Road at some point. At any rate, I have the impression that reconstruction was actually a moment when it seemed America was coming closer to living up to its promise to provide liberty for all. I also read The Last Frontier at some point.

I believe I knew he was blacklisted. I hadn't known that he actually was a member of the CPUSA. Nor had I known about Peekskill or his time in prison.

Nikita Khrushchev gave his secret speech in February 1956. In it, he denounces the cult of personality around Stalin. I believe this is where the phrase comes from. It looked like that the Soviet Union might fulfill its promise. But by the end of that year, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to put down their revolution.

The secret speech caused Fast all sorts of struggle. When he left the communist party, he wrote a book explaining his reasons.

"I had a god who walked naked, but nobody among those I loved said so; for even as the innocent wisdom of Hans Christian Andersen held that those who could not see the king's clothes were persons of small intellect and unfit for the positions they held, so in my world, it was the conviction of millions of good and wise folk that only those who had lost all honor, dignity, decency and courage would dare to point out that this god whom we worshiped for his noble raiment was indeed naked and ugly in his nakedness.

Who would be without honor, dignity, decency and courage?

In the little town where I live, there is a little store, unimportant and of no consequence, and out of this store an old man ekes a living. This is an old man who mourns a hurt which will not heal, the kind of hurt many who read this will know intimately, for twenty years ago the young son of this man fell in Spain, fighting in the Lincoln Battalion for the Spanish Republic and the freedom of men. His son lies buried in the distant Spanish soil, and for twenty years the hurt in this old man was as if it had happened yesterday.

He had a little salve to rub on the terrible sore. This was the salve, that his son had died in the best of causes, the fight for the liberation of mankind. But in 1956, a man called Khrushchev delivered a certain 'secret report' - telling a story of Russia and the Communist movement that I and my friends had heard before but had never believed before. Now Khrushchev made proof of twenty'five years of 'slander,' and we believed. And among those who believed because they had to believe was this old man whose son had laid down his life in Spain.

I came into his store one day in that month of June and he was weeping. He asked me,

'Why did my son die?'

For had I not held, all of my thinking life and in all that I wrote, that one son of man was all the sons of man? He then said to me, but not in words - for a broken heart does not make a gentle person cruel or vindictive - not in words but with the look in his eyes -

'That I, a plain man did not comprehend this is no wonder; but you, Howard Fast, spoke and wrote and pleaded this cause - and why? Can you tell me why?'" -- Howard Fast, The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party, 1957.

None of this means Fast did not keep the same values:

"I am neither disillusioned nor depressed, and I have lived through grim times, but times when mankind made gigantic strides forward. Though the Communist Party is disciplined and often splendid in military action, I do not think it can claim credit for the events we have seen. Socialism, justice and the brotherhood of man are mighty and irresistible forces; they will grow to fruition in spite of the Communist Party - and Soviet socialism will not forever lie supine under the heel of the commissar."-- Howard Fast, chapter 15.

Socialism Worked In A Village In China In 1979

By socialism, I mean 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'. An emphasis on developing and liberating the forces of production is one aspect of socialism. Trying to seek truth from facts is one way that you might phrase one of those Chinese characteristics. Another characteristic is a matter of seeking democratic initiatives from below, especially from rural areas. The principle of household responsibility is in tension with the principle of collectively 'eating from one big pot'. But Mao's 'On contradiction' shows that such tensions will continue in socialism. Household responsibility is not in tension with a community collectively owning the land.

This inadequate preamble suggests why socialists could embrace these events:

"On the 24th of November, 1978, representatives from the 18 families of Xiaogang Village, of Fengyang County in Anhui Province, met and signed what was then a secret document. In 79 characters, the document stated that each family would subdivide their collective land, work their allocated plots to meet government quotas, and then sell any surplus for their own benefit. The reason: back in 1958 the village population was 120, but 67 died from hunger during 1958–1960 (in the midst of the 'Great Leap Forward'). Starvation had haunted them once again in 1978 and they feared for the future. The result of the secret agreement: in the following year, the farmers of Xiaogang village produced six times the amount of grain compared to the previous year, and the per capita income of the farmers increased from 22 to 400 RMB. Why was the document a secret? With the fully collectivised system in force, any form of buying and selling was regarded as a 'capitalist' exercise and thus punishable. The farmers knew they were taking a risk, but they were fortunate that the local and provincial CPC officials were sympathetic to their endeavour. So also was the new leadership of the country, with Deng Xiaoping at the head. By the next spring, the word of Xiaogang's move was out. While some accused them of undermining socialism, the country's leadership saw it very differently: this would be the beginning of the household responsibility system and thus of the rural reform that drove the first period of the Reform and Opening-Up. By 1984, the household responsibility system had been implemented across the country." – Roland Boer. 2021. Socialism with Chinese Charateristics: A Guide for Foreigners. Springer. p. 85

I certainly do not think of socialism as a blueprint to be fashioned beforehand and imposed from above. Any feasible development of socialism will include the development and modification of institutions and policies at different times and places. The Reform and Opening-Up initiative seems to have been a good idea at the time, although maybe, like the French Revolution, it is too soon to tell. Later developments showed the need for a tack more towards port.

Boer's book is in definite contrast with David Harvey's 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Harvey is one of those foreigners who Boer says do not understand China. I think of the events recounted above as not too far from how I understand the German mark community or Russian mir village assembly worked. After these events, the land remained collectively owned. Neither absentee owners nor wage laborers existed. The existence of markets is not sufficient for capitalism, as can be seen by millennia of pre-capitalist experience with simple commodity production.

Boer depicts the cultural revolution, starting in 1966, and the gang of four, as deviations from Mao Zedong Thought. He depicts the inequality growing in the 'wild 90s' as a deviation, as well. Boer ties some ideas in the Confucian tradition to some Marxist ideas. The time of xiaokang (moderate or acceptable time of well-being) precedes datong (great unity). Likewise socialism precedes Communism. Boer writes about the four moderizations, in agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology, which China has been bringing about in the last few decades. According to Boer on Mao, contradictions will still exist in socialism, but they will not necessarily be antangonistic. Boer has a schematic approach to contradiction analysis. You should identify the principal contradiction and pay attention to the particularity of the contradiction.

When Boer writes about two systems in one one country, he writes about the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (SAR), the Macau SAR, and Taiwan, as if Taiwan was not a different country. He says nothing about 1989 events in Tienanmen Square. In writing about human rights, he emphasizes that China is an example of anti-colonialism, while claims that human rights are individual and innate is a claim that came from the western peninsula of Europe. I had not thought of China in this context. I am more likely to think of Stephen Biko and Frantz Fanon like this. I know very little about China.

Boer, in his discussion of Xi Jiping thought, emphasizes this 2018 speech on Marx. It is confusing to think how a country can be run by communists who introduce institutions that are widely perceived as capitalist, and yet the ruling party still perceives themselves as building communism.

The History Of No-Longer-Existing Socialism Validates Marx

Marx, like Adam Smith and Walt Rostow, had a stages theory of history. Feudalism was succeeded by capitalism, and capitalism is to be succeeded by socialism. Socialism is to arise first in the most advanced capitalist countries. (The theory of history is not my favorite part of Marxist theory.)

Russia, in 1917, was a semi-feudal country with peasants as the largest class. I guess China was the same, before Mao. A Marxist would not expect socialism to be successful in either country.

I think Lenin and the Bolsheviks agreed with this thesis when they first came to power. They expected their revolution to kick off revolutions elsewhere in Europe. And their expectations seemed to be initially met, what with the Spartacist uprising in Germany, Hungary, and so on.

Lenin, knowing that Russia was not ripe for socialism, talked about state capitalism even before the October revolution. Stalin invented the doctrine of socialism in one country. Economic development in the USSR and, I guess, in China, was amazing, albeit with much brutality. But eventually, further development required some semblance of capitalism

Is this not just what a Marxist would expect?

References

• Steve Paxton. 2021. Unlearning Marx [I have barely started this].
• Terry Eagleton. 2011. Why Marx was Right.

Books After Marx

Here is a list of books by Marxists that have stood the test of time. I am being impressionistic and probably idiosyncratic. I am more interested in analysis of what is than political organizing. What should be added? Removed?

• Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1877. I think German comrades learned Marxism during the second international more from this thick tome. I recommend other works for introductions these days.
• Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done?, 1902. Lenin lays out a strategy and defines a vanguard party. And the Bolsheviks are in power at the end of 1917.
• Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 1913. Luxemburg argues that capitalism needs a less advanced sector (or maybe military purchases from the state) to provide demand. Growth paths can be defined by Marx's scheme for expanded reproduction, but why would capitalists make these invevestments?
• Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital, 1910. I have not read this one. Hilferding recognizes that joint stock companies and financial institutions have changed capitalism from the era of small business.
• Nikolai Bukharin, Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, 1919. Extends the approach of Marx's Theories of Surplus Value to analyze works of the marginal revolution. Where does Bukharin have the time for scholarly work?
• Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1971. Originally written in Mussolini's prisons. Argues that in advanced societies, communists must first change civil society before obtaining state power.
• Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 1966. How should Marx's analysis be updated for the world of modern corporations? The editors of Monthly Review have ideas.
• Piero Sraffa, The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, 1960. Minimalist, as in modern art. I think many have still not absorbed this.
• Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967. This is more Marxist than I expected. Builds on the idea of commodity fetishism. I could learn more about the situationists in Paris in May 1968.

But I do not want to get into current events.

Alexander Harrington Corrects Professor On Hegel's Dialectic

Michael Harrington was a great socialist in the United States. This is not to say that he did not make some political missteps, at least at Port Huron. Isserman's biography seems to have Michael making political missteps throughout the 1950s and 1960s. His son Alexander had exposure to some hard-to-understand ideas before he got to college:

My older son, Alexander, began to read Dostoevsky on his own when he was about fifteen and once told a college professor who was explaining Hegel's dialectic in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis that Hegel didn't use those terms and that he should read the section on Master and Servant in the Phenomenology of Spirit for the real theory. -- Michael Harrington. 1988. The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography. New York: Henry Holt and Company: p. 125.

The part on the master and bondsman is the same part of Hegel that Richard Wolff recommends to 'Destiny'. I do not like Hegel. The Phenomenology seems to be about the evolution of consciousness from a purely sensuous beginning. That bit about the master and slave is about how the self-consciousness of the master is reflected within the consciousness of the servant. The master wants his consciousness recognized by the servant, but also wants to dominate the servant. (I go by the Baillie translation.) I was surprised that it ends with something like the alienation of the worker.

References

• Robert A. Gorman. 1995. Michael Harrington: Speaking American. New York: Routledge.
• Michael Harrington. 1988. The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography. New York: Henry Holt and Company: p. 125.
• Maurice Isserman. 2000. The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrinton. New York: Public Affairs.