Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias are both correct that any introductory discussion of Marx needs to foreground the murderous regimes, such as Stalin's or Pol Pot's, that operated, at the very least, in the name of Marx's ideas. In fact, I would go a step further, and argue that it is even more important to foreground the destructiveness of Lenin and Trotsky, who have stayed relatively fashionable within academic circles over the years, even though they were also mass murderers on a truly epic scale. Failure to recognize this is, at best, highly disturbing.
However, it is nearly as disturbing that introductory discussions of the rise of industrial capitalism almost always fail to mention the massive industrial de-evolution that it caused outside of Europe and the Americas. The rise of industrial capitalism in Western Europe and the United States is concurrent with the dawn of a horrifying dark age in most of the world. For most humans alive during the industrial revolution, per capita industrialization rates actually declined at a scale never witnessed before or since. The following chart from Paul Kennedy's classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, puts this in stark relief:
Per Capita Levels Of Industrialization in Selected Regions, 1750-1900 (UK in 1900 = 100)
It is virtually impossible to look at this chart and not conclude that the industrial revolution within 19th Western Europe and the United States was made possible in large part (though of course not entirely) due to the forced industrial devolution of most of the rest of the world. This chart shows that, in 1750, continental Europe was roughly as industrialized, on a per capita level, as the rest of the world. However, as Europe and the United States began to experience a massive per capita growth in industrialization during the 19th century, most of the rest of the world experienced an enormous drop in per capita level of industrialization. This is not a coincidence, given that Europe was conquering most of Africa and Asia during this time (and the USA was doing quite a job to North America).
For example, during the industrial revolution of the 19th century, China experienced a decline in per capita industrialization of over 60%, and India experienced a decline of over 80%. By contrast, Japan, one of the only areas in the world that was neither conquered nor carved up into "spheres of influence," experienced no decline whatsoever. Further, European states such as Italy and Austria, which had smaller to non-existent overseas empires in the 19th century, experienced much lower levels of per capita industrial growth than the rapidly expanding states of the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the United States. The connection between 19th century industrialization, and the acquisition of a 19th century foreign empire where you could close off markets and force your home-produced goods (and people) into those markets, is difficult to ignore even for the most compartmentalizing of minds. (Of course, Russia's relative failure to industrialize during the 19th century does show that territorial expansion was clearly not the only factor in the 19th century industrial revolution).
My point is that introductory discussions of both Marxism and industrial capitalism need to be cognizant of the horrors conducted in the name of both those ideas. The capitalist industrial revolution would simply have not happened on a scale anywhere approaching the levels it achieved unless the industrializing nations had not conquered huge tracts of land and, through the use of force, either heavily exploited, or entirely cleared out, the native populations. The capitalist industrial revolution, and the worst economic devolution ever experienced by the peoples of Africa and Asia, are two sides of the same coin. Further, even beyond the greatly expanded poverty of this time period, numerous acts of mass murder and genocide were committed to enforce this industrial devolution.
Broadly speaking, my conclusion from all of this is that the pre-1950 world is not a particularly good place to find positive, humanizing political and economic models. It is important to remember that even the New Deal functioned in what was, at the time, basically an apartheid state that relied upon the continued economic exploitation of a large minority ethnic group. Not to mention that the New Deal began to collapse when the pro-New Deal party began to support an end to that apartheid. What pre-1950 history shows us is that humanity has come nowhere close to getting it right in the past, and we instead need to be striving to achieve a level of society well above and beyond anything previously experienced. |
