Making History and the Myth of Progress
Aug 12th, 2009 | By Addison Wiggin | Category: Featured, Politics
No history recalls what the 5,000 or so Normans must have felt when they saw the English coastline in 1066, nor what they had for breakfast, or how their wives and daughters missed them at home on that day. Nor does it tell us how the peasants in Toncarville coaxed out a calf whose head was turned the wrong way, or the kind words spoken by a priest to an old woman in the churchyard. Nor does it even record how a merchant noticed that his trade had suddenly diminished when the knights were gone, and how he resolved to make up the difference by moving to Paris and selling fabrics imported from Holland.
Instead, history turns its attention uniquely to the events on English soil, where the small band of warriors debarked to go into battle. Theirs seemed to be a hopeless enterprise. How could such a small army hope to avoid annihilation, let alone conquer a whole nation? But that is history…a story of such remarkable campaigns, battles, revolutions, uprisings, popular movements—all presumably marching toward the progress of mankind, all, presumably, “good things.” For without them, where would we be? No one knows. What if the Normans had stayed home? What if they had tended their fields, sought better ways to increase crop yields, put up more beautiful buildings, and given another kiss to their wives and children? Would the world be a worse place? We cannot tell.
However, in markets as well as politics, history is not made by the tailor, the baker, or the capitalist going about his work. It is made by mobs of tailors, bakers, and capitalists embarked on some enterprise, which is far beyond what any of them can know or understand, and which is usually absurd and often fatal.
Events in the twentieth century had been kinder to the United States than to their European cousins. Americans had taken part in the major wars, but had suffered far fewer casualties than other combatants. France lost nearly 6 million men in World War I, the United States 116,516. In World War II, the United States had 405,399 casualties, but the Soviet Union had more than 21 million (civilian deaths included). No U.S. cities were leveled.
Nor were there any civilian casualties to speak of. And U.S. industries, instead of being destroyed like those of Germany and Japan, ended the wars in a stronger position than when they had begun them.
It was not, then, reason that had shaped Americans’ belief in progress…but experience. After such a long spell of apparent progress (interrupted only by a few quarters of negative economic growth in the Great Depression), Americans at the end of the twentieth century had begun to think that progress was the nature of things, and that the level of technological and organizational perfection they had achieved had brought on the blessings of progress at a faster rate than ever before. What’s more, many of them thought that the temporary lulls and brief periods of backsliding experienced by the country since the end of World War II had now been eliminated. Thinking Americans attributed this giant leap forward neither to the grace of God nor the beneficence of nature, but to their own genius.
By the time the oldest members of the postwar baby boom generation had reached maturity (late 1990s), progress had begun to look easy, logical, even inevitable. Americans believed themselves to be masters of the business cycle, of technology, of the planet.
Myths of Progress
In what might have been an equivalent of the four-minute mile, Iaroslav Tchij, on a collective farm in the Lvov region of the Soviet Union in 1959, reduced a hog to 100 kilos of meat in just 5.6 hours. This might seem like a leisurely pace, but it took an hour less than foran American to do the job.
The Communist era began after the invention of the telegraph and was still going strong after radio, telephone, and television had become ubiquitous. But as we will see, information provided no defense against exaggeration and myth. Mr. Tchij, for example, was not alone in believing he could increase productivity in such a remarkable way. In fact, one of the myths of Communism was the idea that productivity would increase without interruption and at spectacular rates. This was not based on any observation. It was derived from theory.
The founding fathers of Communism, like Internet investors, believed that a new era had arrived. It was founded neither on observation nor on hope, but on what they thought were the laws of history. In his funeral oration for Marx, on March 17, 1883, held in Highgate Cemetery, Engels honored Marx as “the Darwin” of economic history. Just as Darwin had discovered the key laws that governed the evolution of natural history, Engels said, Marx had discovered those that governed economic and political history. These laws, such as the concept of “surplus value,” which supported Marx’s critique of capitalism, were not laws at all, just pretentious obiter dicta, as Paul Johnson described them. Yet they formed the basis for the many myths that inhabited the fantasy world of Communist society.
The myth of determinism, for example, meant that everything had already been worked out according to the principles Marx described. The myth of progress, whereby conditions improved year in year out, was a myth disproved by Communism itself. The myth of the Marxist New Era held that the entire world would be re-created, not by God or nature, but by man, following the scientific and rational concepts of historical determinism. Finally, there was the myth of the New Man. This new Marxist man, not having the same hard wiring as other men, would be an entirely new being. He would not need a profit motive, for example. Nor would he wish to accumulate wealth or worry about his own family, as all his material and service-based needs would be supplied by the collective.
As irrational as these notions were, they were nevertheless taken up and endorsed enthusiastically throughout the twentieth century by various despots and crackpots. Not only were they argued over endlessly in the cafés of Paris, but they provided the foundation of an entirely imaginary world.
Soviet policy makers for example (again, like Internet investors) saw no reason why they should be constrained by the growth rates observed in the past. Without private property and private business, they thought that there would no longer be a business cycle to worry about. Communist growth projections became the measure of reported (though imaginary) growth: The Soviet Union’s economy was thought to have multiplied itself 36 times between 1913 and 1959. The economy of the United States, by contrast, only increased by a factor of four. Soviet leaders predicted that the size of their economy would surpass that of the United States in a dozen years.
But even this rate was sluggish to the North Korean dictator, Kim Il Sung. If you could determine economic growth by decree, he reasoned in 1969, why be satisfied with 15 percent? In his text titled On Some Theoretical Problems of Socialist Economies , he declared that there was no reason for communist economies ever to slow down, and that growth rates of 30 percent to 40 percent per year could be maintained. Three decades later in his “socialist economy,” millions of people were starving.
Kim should have paid attention when his fellow delusionary, Ceaucescu of Romania, addressed the agricultural issue. Ceaucescu decided to put his country in “the forefront of world agriculture.” This he accomplished in the most straightforward and expedient fashion: He simply multiplied per acre production figures by four. Marxist myth held that collective farms would be vastly more productive than old – fashioned independent farms. Thus, Ceaucescu merely brought the myth to life, realizing it in the spirit it deserved — mythically.
Even the Communist leaders themselves were myths: Mr. Djugashvili, a rather untalented former seminarian and New Era aficionado, became “man of steel,” Josef Stalin. Meanwhile, Kim Il Sung turned himself into a virtual deity, a mythical god, who became an object of worship for his impoverished people.
The astounding thing was how ready people were to believe such myths. American economists calculated that the Soviet economy must be 50 percent or 60 percent the size of the U.S. economy, and gaining ground. For decades, the Soviet Union was listed as the world’s second biggest economic power. But it was not true. The Soviet Union and North Korea were not getting richer, but poorer. Their people were not becoming more productive, but less productive.
Regards,
Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin
August 12, 2009
“This new Marxist man, not having the same hard wiring as other men, would be an entirely new being. He would not need a profit motive, for example. Nor would he wish to accumulate wealth or worry about his own family, as all his material and service-based needs would be supplied by the collective.”
This ludicrous theory survives in many forms, such as the “Great” Society. “Surely,” Lyndon might have mused, “If we free the poor from the necessity of laboring to provide their daily bread, the roofs over their heads, the necessity to educate their numerous children, and provide medical care, then we will free them to become great producers and the country will make a giant leap forward.” Well, that’s a pretty tale, but it is far more likely that he and the boys saw the benefits of paying others to vote for them.
The net results included simplified communism: no need to ask “from each, according to his means,” require nothing of them except stuffing ballot boxes. The most deleterious result, aside from the political consequences, was destroying the family unit and any urge to be self-supporting, far less to rise in the world.
In the Nineteen Fifties the white illiteracy rate was five per cent. and that of blacks was only a couple of points higher. The white illegitimacy rate was five per cent. and that of blacks twenty-five per cent. Deliberate “dumbing down” of curricula and flinging away unfathomable sums of money on the premise that literacy could be improved thusly has lead to a nation where illiteracy is horrifyingly wide-spread. A study done in Seattle about fifteen years ago disclosed that over 90% of all juveniles coming before the courts were totally or functionally illiterate. Does not being able to read cause crime? It is certainly a contributing factor.
When black males had no obligation even to attempt to support the fathered casually, and black females welcomed a new cash crop, the result was as anyone could have foreseen. The same principle held true for other ethnic groups, so this is not an issue of skin color but one of culture.
By the time a “family” has been on welfare for eight generations, surrounded by adults who do not marry and have never worked more than the one day a year to qualify for an “earned income credit,” it is not rational to anticipate that the newest crop of children will break out of the mould.
They haven’t even given up the desire for Nike tennis shoes and bigger television sets.
In 1976 as a Senior at Amherst College and a history major concentrating on Russia from 1870 – 1970, I was surprised to find that, when analyzed objectively, the Soviet economy – publicly claimed to be around 500 billion rubles to our 1000 billion dollars (the ruble claimed to be equal to the dollar) – was, based on reliable data from before the Bolshevik revolution and conservative econometric modeling, at most 250 billion “rubles” and that with the most rosy projections. In actual fact a reasonable calculation lead to only 100 billion rubles. I then estimated what their probable defense spending was during the 1950 – 1970 period by matching what they fielded against what we fielded and what ours cost. I ended up predicting that if they continued on the same path their economy would collapse by 2005 – 2015. I presented this conclusion at the beginning of my comprehensives just before graduating in the spring of 1976. The two history professors administering the evaluation almost went into shock and cancelled the rest of the presentation forthwith. Luckily, they allowed me to graduate anyway.
Communism is proven a total failure yet when the Soviet Union failed 15 years earlier than my predictions it sent many sympathizers in this country off the deep end instead of leading them to a more reasonable understanding of this matter. Since then these people have waged a desperate effort to recreate their failed fantasy land here in America. I am afraid they might succeed.
Ultimately the problem with communism is that it is based on three premises that are most easily proven wrong. These are that everyone values everything the same, is interchangeable with any other person, and can be functional in a society where personal effort is not rewarded:
1. VALUE: Each person values everything the same as every other person. FALSE: I have friends who love to smoke and value cigarettes highly. I don’t and wouldn’t give you a cent for a pack; and so on. Gosh, just look at the number of different brands and models of cars people buy!
2. TALENT: Any one person is just as good at any particular job as another and so people are interchangeable in society and so individuality is subordinated to the collective. FALSE: In every case where just anyone was assigned to do something during the Bolshevik take over there was usually failure requiring that individuals with experience and talent be recruited in to do the job. Just look at the number of Czarist officers who were brought into the Red Army during the Civil War…and then purged and killed off by Stalin right before WWII and then rehabilitated and placed at the head of the Red Army a second time to beat back the Nazi’s.
3. GREED: This is forbidden: That is, each person is to work to their utmost for the same pay no matter whether the person sitting next to them can or is willing to do the same. FALSE: The corrupt leaders of the Soviet Union proved that wrong with their limousines and Dacha’s on the Black Sea. And party operatives running the poorly constructed factories would meet centrally planned targets by any crooked means they could think up because their workers were not productive enough to do the job.
All these false premises allows the government to justify and impose central planning on the nation leading to severe economic and agricultural dislocations, local uprisings and resistance, leading to justification for governmental spying purging, and physical coercion all hallmarks of communist countries without exception.
On the other hand, Capitalism, when properly underpinned by rule of law and private property rights to prevent wealth from being turned into legislative, judicial, and police power by the rich works just the opposite; with and not against human behavior:
1. VALUE: We all value things differently. TRUE: This has lead naturally to different people producing different products based on the specific demands of others thereby serving a purpose while personally benefiting through profit without any need for government to intervene or plan.
2. TALENT: We may all be equal under God and Law but we are definitely not all the same in terms of capabilities. Who could jump like Air Jordan, Sing like Kate Smith, Think like Einstein? Each has something to contribute, either small or large but just the same necessary for the entire society to function properly as it does when Capitalism is allowed to flourish by allowing each to find their own place in their own way.
3. GREED: We all want more for ourselves. TRUE: This as lead to those GREEDY people with the TALENT to create VALUE to be come rich and thereby enrich our society in a manner never before experienced by mankind.
In the end COMMUNISM = DEATH while CAPITALISM = LIFE
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