POLITICAL ECONOMY GONE TO WASTE

The term “political economy” is no longer in use, exchanged for the shorter and crisper term “economics.” I miss the old term, however, with its unmistakable social and ethical dimension contained in the word “political.” The new term is barren in that respect, and soulless, if I may say so.

…In fact, I can say so, and I do have the right to lament the demise of the older, nicer term, because in my time in the USSR, when Marxist political economy was the only game in town, I resented it as a pet science of power, and tended to overlook its markedly positive sides. Now, in retrospect, having thought a great deal about it, I may indeed have much better things to say in its behalf, even if it earns me the dismissive epithet “old-fashioned.”

Why am I talking about it at all under this retrospective angle? It is easier of course to say old things under the guise of a novelty, especially when these old things are associated with something so terribly unpopular as the now explicitly defunct Soviet ideology. But it is exactly for this reason that I am adamantly opposed to breaking the connection. A lot of excellent ideas have been unfairly dismissed not on their own merit, or demerit, but merely on their political association with certain compromised and discredited regimes, and it is one of the basic demands of political correctness not to discuss, or to discuss in mockingly negative terms, such concepts as have fallen victims of unflattering associations.

Marxist political economy was a component of the tripartite Soviet-era science of Marxism, which included Marxist philosophy and Scientific Communism as well. Having previously called the science of economics “soulless,” I might refer to Marxist political economy, as it was studied in the USSR, as “lifeless.” It was an impersonal, scholastic discipline, full of drab gobbledygook, as if deliberately defying the coexistent maxim “Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action,” originally phrased by Engels, as criticism of contemporary trends in Marxism (“For them it is a dogma, and not a guide to action!”), but later rephrased by Lenin into its now best-known cliché.

It was the lifeless gobbledygook of Marxist political economy, as it was taught mandatorily in every school and university of the USSR, which had repelled me most, and, out of sheer opposition to it, had effectively closed my mind to its commendable aspects. This is perhaps the time (better late than never!) to restore the balance of fairness. I do not deny the many negative sides of this rigid and reader-unfriendly doctrine, but, at least, from a junk pile of nonsense, let us salvage a few things of value.

Marxist political economy, as studied and, more importantly, practiced in the USSR, was historically based on two pillars. One was the labor theory of value, professed by the great British economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and supplemented by the surplus theory of value, courtesy of Karl Marx. The second pillar was the ‘ethics of economics,’ unfailingly present in every economic theory since the times of yore to our modern times, but never put in focus as sharply and as honestly (although with a gigantic, albeit honest, bias) as in Marxist political economy. Ever since the birth of the classical political economy, the ethically charged factor has been present, with the economists of both persuasion, capitalist and anti-capitalist, taking sides, often as shameless promoters of their own agendas. Promoters of free-market capitalism have so far been the most reprehensible perverters of humanist morality, but the Soviet Marxist bunch, even having ethics on their side, managed to turn their argument unabashedly into an exercise in agitation and propaganda, that famous “agitprop,” which was treated as one of the most respectable terms in the Soviet lexicon.

A splendidly formulated capsule of Marxist political economy, in its condemnation of the capitalist aspect, can be found, in my opinion, in Lenin’s book Economic Content of Narodnichestvo and its Critique in Mr. Struve’s Book:

"The product [of production] assumes the form of merchandise in very different socio-productive organisms but only in capitalist production such a form of labor is all-embracing, and not an exception, not singular, not accidental. The second characteristic of capitalism is that the assumption of the commodity form is not limited to the product of labor, but includes labor itself, that is, human workforce."

In other words, under capitalism, man himself is turned into a piece of merchandise. Everything is for sale!

Ironically, a certain ethical improvement in the capitalist production process, since Marx’s times, manifesting itself in the re-humanization of labor, has suffered a devastating setback with the arrival of the Globalist ideology. On the one hand, the outsourcing of production away from the developed Western countries, with America taking the lead in this development, resurrects the dehumanizing tendencies of early capitalism, in lumping together the product and the labor outside the domain of the ‘civilized’ consumer, thus neutralizing the ethical component of labor exploitation in the minds of the well-to-do users of “foreign” labor. (By the same token, the predominant utilization of “alien” labor force for the performance of undesirable domestic jobs, desensitizes American society in that respect, just as a similar process of “alienation” of the general population from the all-volunteer Army fighting far away from American shores with virtually no effect on the civilian consciousness at home, desensitizes American society to the extent of making unnecessary wars of choice acceptable to the public at large as “business as usual.”) On the other hand, the selfish exploits of parasitic financial capitalism reduce the human element to patsies exploited by clever manipulators, and in this respect, too, the regression from a “capitalism with a human face” toward the most immoral, predatory forms of “robbing the poor to feed the rich” are clearly increasingly in evidence.

…I confess that there is a certain nostalgia for socialism and a great disappointment in capitalism, degenerating into a non-productive, money-centered obsession, speaking in me now. But to a very large extent I am blaming the wizards of Soviet Agitprop for their abject failure to deliver the winner, that is, the humanistic message of socialism, to all those skeptics, like me, who had resented that miserable delivery so much that in so doing they had missed the message itself… Ironically, the well-known saying “blame the messenger” is now assuming a very different meaning, which in this case is literally justified.

…Political economy gone to waste? Perhaps not. The good thing about it is that the message is still there, waiting for a competent and dedicated messenger. Considering everything which is going on today, their breed can no longer be in short supply.