Vejas Liulevicius: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is there something we could say about the difference between Marxian economics and Marx’s political ideology, so the political side of things and the economics side of things? So I think that Marx would probably have responded that in fact, those things are indivisible. The analysis as purely theoretical certainly can be performed on any economic reality that you care to mention, but the imperatives that grow out of that economic analysis are political. Marx and Engels emphasize the unity of theory and practice. So it’s not enough to dispassionately analyze. It’s a call to action as well, because if you’ve delivered the answer to how history evolves and changes, it obligates you, right? It demands certain action. You sometimes hear from undergraduates that they’ve heard from their high school history teachers that Marxism was just a theoretical construct that was the idle production of a philosopher who was not connected to the world and was never meant to be tried in practice. Marx would have been furious to hear this and it’s almost heroically wrong as a historical statement, because Marx insisted that all previous philosophers have theorized about reality. What now is really necessary is to change it. So you could say that in the abstract, a Marxist economist can certainly use Marx’s theoretical framework to compare to a given economic reality, but Marx would have seen that as incomplete and as deeply unsatisfactory. There’s a kind of a footnote to all of this, which is that even though Marxist dialectical materialism grounds itself in these economic realities and the political prescription is supposed to flow from the economic realities and be inevitably growing out of them, in the real history of communist regimes, you’ve actually seen periods where the economics becomes detached from the politics. And I’m thinking in particular of the new economic period early in the history of the Soviet Union when Lenin realizes that the economy is so far gone that you need to reintroduce or allow, in a limited way, some elements of private enterprise, just to start getting Russia back on course in order to have the accumulation of surplus that will be necessary to build the project at all. And there are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic policy as a terrible compromise and a betrayal of their ideas, but it’s seen as necessary for a short while, and then Stalin will wreck it entirely. there are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic policy as a terrible compromise and a betrayal of their ideas, but it’s seen as necessary for a short while, and then Stalin will wreck it entirely. Or consider for that matter China today, where you have a dominant political class, the Communist Party of China, which is allowing economic development and private enterprise, as long as it retains political control. So some of these elements already represent divergences from what Marx would’ve expected, and this points to a really key problem or question for all of the history of communism. It has to do with it being a tradition in spite of itself, and that could be expressed in the following way. An original set of ideas is going to evolve, it’s going to change, because circumstances change. What elaborations of any doctrine, whether it’s communism or a religious doctrine or any political ideology, what elaborations are natural stages in the evolution of any living set of ideas, or when do you reach the point where some shift or some adaptation is so radically different that it actually breaks with the tradition, and that’s an insoluble problem. You probably have to take it on a case-by-case basis. It speaks to issues like the question that gets raised today. Is China in a meaningful sense a communist country anymore? And there’s a diversity of opinion on this score. Or if you’re looking at the history of communism and you look at North Korea, which now is on its third installment of a dynastic leader from the same family who rules like a God king over a regime that calls itself communist, is that still a form of communism? Is it an evolution of? Is it a complete reversal of? I tend to want to take an anthropological perspective in the history of communism and to take very seriously those people who avow that they are communists and this is the project that they have underway. And then after hearing that avowal, I think as a historian, you have to say, well, let’s look at the details. Let’s see what changes have been made, what continuities might still exist, whether there’s a larger pattern to be discerned here. So it’s a very, very complicated history that we’re talking about.…

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