Reading Marx and Engels through a modern foreword is a reminder that you don’t need falsehoods to distort history.
I was re-reading The Communist Manifesto the other day – as one does – when I found myself being more interested in the foreword than in Marx and Engels. It was written by Andrew Austin, an American sociologist who was commissioned to introduce this particular edition of one of the most influential political texts ever written. That is important, because a foreword inevitably frames what follows. Austin is plainly sympathetic to Marxism, which is not in itself a problem. A foreword is allowed to have a point of view.
What bothered me was the way some of the argument worked. Austin uses claims that are true, or at least defensible, and then stretches them into conclusions that are much stronger than the evidence really allows. Many of his arguments immediately failed the ‘smell test’ – something about the framing felt off, even before I had worked out exactly why.
The clearest example is his discussion of living standards under socialism. Austin writes that people living in socialist societies governed by communist regimes were ‘generally better off’ than their counterparts in the ‘capitalist periphery’, pointing to things such as infant mortality, life expectancy and literacy. There is something to this.
Some communist governments really did achieve impressive gains in basic education, public health and literacy, particularly in poor societies starting from a very low base. But notice the comparison Austin has chosen. He is not comparing socialist societies with capitalist societies generally, but with the ‘capitalist periphery’ – in other words, some of the poorer and less developed parts of the capitalist world. That may be a useful comparison for some purposes, but it also does a great deal of work for the argument.
‘Generally better off’
But better literacy and lower infant mortality are not the same thing as being ‘generally better off’. That phrase smuggles in a whole conclusion. If I live in a country where most people can read and healthcare is reasonably accessible, but where I cannot freely vote the government out, criticise it, leave the country, choose between competing political parties, buy many ordinary consumer goods, or decide freely where I want to work, am I ‘generally better off’?
Then there is the awkward matter of where people actually tried to go. East Germans fled west in such numbers that the East German government eventually built a wall to stop them. Cubans fled – and still do – to the United States. Across the Soviet bloc, people repeatedly tried to get to Western Europe. North Koreans still take extraordinary risks trying to reach South Korea. There were people who moved in the opposite direction, and people have obviously also fled authoritarian capitalist states, poverty and war. Migration is not a laboratory experiment comparing economic systems.
The imbalance is hard to miss. Communist governments repeatedly faced the problem of stopping people from leaving; richer capitalist democracies repeatedly faced the problem of deciding how many people to let in.
It doesn’t settle the argument, but it does tell us something about how people judged their chances. If Austin wants to say that people living under communist governments were ‘generally better off’, this enormous historical pattern at least requires some explanation.
A similar problem appears when Austin praises the Manifesto for its ‘predictive power’. Marx and Engels did anticipate important developments: the global expansion of markets, recurring economic crises, greater concentration of capital and the spread of wage labour. Some of that was genuinely perceptive and deserves to be recognised.
More forgiving
But then Austin asks what Marx and Engels got wrong, and the standard becomes much more forgiving. The obvious difficulty is proletarian revolution. Marx expected the contradictions of developed capitalism to produce revolutionary political consequences among an increasingly proletarian working class. Yet the most advanced capitalist societies did not proceed along anything like the revolutionary path Marxists expected. Instead, many developed parliamentary democracy, welfare states, increasingly prosperous working classes and political institutions capable of absorbing much of the conflict Marx regarded as fundamentally revolutionary.
There are possible explanations for that. Perhaps capitalism adapted. Perhaps democracy, trade unions and welfare provision altered class politics in ways Marx could not reasonably have anticipated. Perhaps parts of the theory were right while its revolutionary implications were wrong. Whatever explanation one prefers, the failure must count for something.
Austin replies that revolutions did happen and socialist states endured, and he dismisses complaints about Marx’s timing as nitpicking. But this sets up a strangely favourable scoring system. Broad historical developments resembling Marx’s analysis count as evidence of impressive predictive power, while a major expected development failing to occur where the theory most strongly suggested it would carries relatively little cost. A prediction does not need to come with a date and postcode to be capable of being wrong.
Normal features
Austin does something similar with policies listed in the Manifesto. Progressive taxation, public education, central banking and restrictions on child labour later became normal features of many capitalist societies. Take central banking: the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 created an institution Marx would have recognised, but for reasons entirely internal to American financial politics rather than any nod to socialist theory. He suggests that their adoption amounts to at least ‘tacit approval’ of parts of the socialist programme.
That is an extraordinary stretch. If a communist country allows private enterprise, has it tacitly approved capitalism? Policies don’t belong permanently to the ideology that first proposed them; they get borrowed, repurposed, and sometimes emptied of their original meaning. Liberal democracies can adopt progressive taxation or public schooling without conceding Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Communist states can introduce market mechanisms without thereby accepting liberal capitalism. Again, the underlying facts are perfectly real. It is the interpretation being placed on them that bothers me.
And this, I think, is the more interesting point. The easiest kind of intellectual dishonesty to spot is fabrication: inventing a statistic, misquoting a source or simply making something up. The more sophisticated version needs none of that. Every individual fact may be true. The distortion lies in the selection – which facts are highlighted, which comparisons feel ‘natural’, and which failures are waved away as quirks. One side gets blamed for its failures and credited for its successes; the other gets its successes explained away and its failures treated as proof of the system itself.
From the inside
My first reaction to Austin was irritation. Surely someone this intelligent can see what he is doing. Perhaps he can. But the possibility that interests (and scares) me more is that he genuinely thinks the argument is fair. Ideology never feels like ideology from the inside; it feels like common sense. It probably feels like knowing which facts matter, which comparisons are sensible and which inconvenient examples are really just distractions.
That is where the problem becomes uncomfortable, because I write arguments too. I choose examples. I decide which comparisons are fair. I decide whether a counterexample damages my position or is merely an exception. I decide when a failure reveals something fundamental and when circumstances provide a reasonable explanation.
None of this means all arguments are equally distorted, or that Austin gets a free pass because everybody has biases. Quite the opposite. If selective reasoning is a normal human temptation, then anyone making an argument has an obligation to look actively for the evidence that makes his own case more difficult.
It is easy for me to see the selective arrangement when somebody else is defending Marxism. The harder question is whether I recognise it when the thing being protected is something I already believe. You can build an entire argument out of things that happened and numbers that check out, and still end up miles from the truth simply because of how you arranged them.
[Image: Alexandre Valdivia on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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