Talking about Keynes (see my previous posting Si Non E Vero...), here is another delightful curiosity coming from the great Englishman’s legacy, only this time no longer spurious, but fully attributable to him, and thus invested with his personal authority. The biggest irony to me here is that Keynes is wrong on the two most important details of his comment, yet dead on with regard to the bigger picture.
If “Leninism” is at all definable to everybody’s satisfaction, and can some day be so defined, the following quote from the little-known booklet A Short View of Russia by John Maynard Keynes will never qualify as a definition. Yet there is a certain captivating attraction in its grasp of the seemingly contradictory correlation, which is the main subject of my Capitalism And Christianity, which makes it impossible to ignore. Business and religion appearing rather amicably in a single short paragraph. Here it is:
“Leninism is a combination of two things, which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul--- religion and business. We are shocked, because the religion is new, and contemptuous, because the business, being subordinated to the religion, instead of the other way round, is highly inefficient.” (A Short View of Russia, 1925.)
Should I start nitpicking, everything is wrong here. In my own definition, Leninism was a transitional period of Russian history, whose purpose was to break down the old Tsarist order, paving the way for the next type of socio-economic order, which I identify as Stalin’s totalitarian militarized socialism.
On the economic front, Leninism produced two purely temporary quick-fix “orders”: War Communism and NEP (acronym for New Economic Policy). The former was an unspeakably brutal attempt to rob the peasant to feed the Red soldier and pro-Bolshevik industrial worker. It was exactly what the word “war” implied: an emergency wartime arrangement that could not be sustained beyond the end of the bloody Civil War, which raged on from the Bolshevik power takeover, at the end of 1917, until the full-blown hostilities subsided by 1921.
The year 1921 was the year of the NEP, a reasonable thing on paper, but a travesty in practice. What can be wrong with the idea of allowing small business to thrive, while nationalizing big business and international trade, you may ask? The incredible level of excess is the answer. The NEP was by no means your “normal,” institutional economic policy. Like War Communism before it, it was an emergency measure to resuscitate the collapsed economy by placating the rebellious starving peasant and by indulging the petty merchant, the “nepman,” a fatally endangered species all along. The nepman knew this latter part, of course, and indulged himself, like, literally, there was no tomorrow… And, as we know, there was no tomorrow for the nepman.
…I am discussing all these matters in other places, of course, but this entry belongs to Keynes, and I intend to stay with him. The preceding foray into early Soviet history was meant to demonstrate that Keynes made a terminological mistake by describing as Leninism what was in fact the emerging Soviet phenomenon that could by no means be limited to Leninism. But considering that this comment was originally written several years before the publication of the 1925 booklet, that is, during Lenin’s lifetime, it was quite understandable for Keynes to draw an equivalency between Leninism and the new Soviet order in Russia.
Now getting to the question of religion in our thematic Keynesian passage above, Keynes is understandably wrong again in not realizing that the religion in his formula is in fact old, being nothing else but Christianity in disguise, but who can blame him for this mistake in the first years of the Bolshevik power in Russia, when even today, nearly a century later, only very few people realize that such was the case. I of course have been writing about it extensively in several sections of this book, as one of my most prominent leitmotifs.
In fact, I have written a special entry on the Soviet “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism,” where I am showing how that document is essentially derived from the Bible, and that, on the whole, Soviet morality as such was a natural extension of Russian Orthodox Christian morality with its innate conception of Christian socialism, promoting the rules of Christian communal living and of conducting “business,” to use Keynesian terminology. (See my entry The Twelve Commandments Of Soviet Communism in the cluster of entries La Forza Del Destino, posted on January 26th, 2011.)
Thus, the new Soviet religion, observed by Keynes, was by no means new, but it was certainly easy to make this mistake, and certainly virtually impossible to make the daring conclusion that the religious persecution in Soviet Russia was in fact a conscientious effort on the part of the Russian Orthodox Christianity to purify itself in a horrific baptism of fire, in order to be born again.
But otherwise Keynes is to be highly commended for highlighting the partnership of religion and economics in the basic setup of the Soviet anti-capitalist social organization, with the obvious supremacy of religion in this partnership as a truly salient factor.
And lastly, with regard to Soviet business being “highly inefficient, being subordinated to religion, instead of the other way around,” there is no question that Soviet “religion” dramatically undermined the value of money in domestic consumption and effectively stifled progress in every single branch of consumer-friendly economy. Of course, it compensated this inefficiency by the miracle of industrialization and electrification, by the rapid development of Soviet military might, in record time turning the USSR into a military, nuclear and space superpower. But in the early years of Soviet power, when Keynes was writing his comment, this other side of the glaring Soviet business inefficiency had not yet made itself manifest, and Keynes certainly gets a pass in this respect, on his partial failure as a prognosticator.
If “Leninism” is at all definable to everybody’s satisfaction, and can some day be so defined, the following quote from the little-known booklet A Short View of Russia by John Maynard Keynes will never qualify as a definition. Yet there is a certain captivating attraction in its grasp of the seemingly contradictory correlation, which is the main subject of my Capitalism And Christianity, which makes it impossible to ignore. Business and religion appearing rather amicably in a single short paragraph. Here it is:
“Leninism is a combination of two things, which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul--- religion and business. We are shocked, because the religion is new, and contemptuous, because the business, being subordinated to the religion, instead of the other way round, is highly inefficient.” (A Short View of Russia, 1925.)
Should I start nitpicking, everything is wrong here. In my own definition, Leninism was a transitional period of Russian history, whose purpose was to break down the old Tsarist order, paving the way for the next type of socio-economic order, which I identify as Stalin’s totalitarian militarized socialism.
On the economic front, Leninism produced two purely temporary quick-fix “orders”: War Communism and NEP (acronym for New Economic Policy). The former was an unspeakably brutal attempt to rob the peasant to feed the Red soldier and pro-Bolshevik industrial worker. It was exactly what the word “war” implied: an emergency wartime arrangement that could not be sustained beyond the end of the bloody Civil War, which raged on from the Bolshevik power takeover, at the end of 1917, until the full-blown hostilities subsided by 1921.
The year 1921 was the year of the NEP, a reasonable thing on paper, but a travesty in practice. What can be wrong with the idea of allowing small business to thrive, while nationalizing big business and international trade, you may ask? The incredible level of excess is the answer. The NEP was by no means your “normal,” institutional economic policy. Like War Communism before it, it was an emergency measure to resuscitate the collapsed economy by placating the rebellious starving peasant and by indulging the petty merchant, the “nepman,” a fatally endangered species all along. The nepman knew this latter part, of course, and indulged himself, like, literally, there was no tomorrow… And, as we know, there was no tomorrow for the nepman.
…I am discussing all these matters in other places, of course, but this entry belongs to Keynes, and I intend to stay with him. The preceding foray into early Soviet history was meant to demonstrate that Keynes made a terminological mistake by describing as Leninism what was in fact the emerging Soviet phenomenon that could by no means be limited to Leninism. But considering that this comment was originally written several years before the publication of the 1925 booklet, that is, during Lenin’s lifetime, it was quite understandable for Keynes to draw an equivalency between Leninism and the new Soviet order in Russia.
Now getting to the question of religion in our thematic Keynesian passage above, Keynes is understandably wrong again in not realizing that the religion in his formula is in fact old, being nothing else but Christianity in disguise, but who can blame him for this mistake in the first years of the Bolshevik power in Russia, when even today, nearly a century later, only very few people realize that such was the case. I of course have been writing about it extensively in several sections of this book, as one of my most prominent leitmotifs.
In fact, I have written a special entry on the Soviet “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism,” where I am showing how that document is essentially derived from the Bible, and that, on the whole, Soviet morality as such was a natural extension of Russian Orthodox Christian morality with its innate conception of Christian socialism, promoting the rules of Christian communal living and of conducting “business,” to use Keynesian terminology. (See my entry The Twelve Commandments Of Soviet Communism in the cluster of entries La Forza Del Destino, posted on January 26th, 2011.)
Thus, the new Soviet religion, observed by Keynes, was by no means new, but it was certainly easy to make this mistake, and certainly virtually impossible to make the daring conclusion that the religious persecution in Soviet Russia was in fact a conscientious effort on the part of the Russian Orthodox Christianity to purify itself in a horrific baptism of fire, in order to be born again.
But otherwise Keynes is to be highly commended for highlighting the partnership of religion and economics in the basic setup of the Soviet anti-capitalist social organization, with the obvious supremacy of religion in this partnership as a truly salient factor.
And lastly, with regard to Soviet business being “highly inefficient, being subordinated to religion, instead of the other way around,” there is no question that Soviet “religion” dramatically undermined the value of money in domestic consumption and effectively stifled progress in every single branch of consumer-friendly economy. Of course, it compensated this inefficiency by the miracle of industrialization and electrification, by the rapid development of Soviet military might, in record time turning the USSR into a military, nuclear and space superpower. But in the early years of Soviet power, when Keynes was writing his comment, this other side of the glaring Soviet business inefficiency had not yet made itself manifest, and Keynes certainly gets a pass in this respect, on his partial failure as a prognosticator.
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