Professor of history and social sciences Jan Doxrud considers works such as “The Black Book of Capitalism” to be completely useless, “The mistake is made from the outset by wanting to equate a broad worldview (communism) with a specific economic system” (capitalism).
Capitalism is a broad worldview as much as the communism is. The ideology of classical capitalism was expressed in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), by the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith, which recommended leaving economic decisions to the free play of self-regulating market forces. “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters,” says A. Smith. “The spirit of the laws is property,” says Linguet. Kristen Ghodsee, Vivek Chibber and Bryan Caplan debate how an economic system became а sort of ideology, this all-encompassing force that rules our lives and our minds. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class”. This quote is attributed to Karl Marx and is from his book “The Communist Manifesto”. According to Marx, the “ruling ideas” of a given epoch are those of the ruling class. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
Jan Doxrud continues: “The authors attribute practices, such as the slave trade, to the capitalist system, when this has been a phenomenon that existed long before the capitalist system.” He further adds that capitalism, far from desiring the perpetuation of slavery, promoted another form of labor relationship, wage labor.
Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.
Until European involvement in the trade, however, slavery was a private and domestic institution. Beginning in the 16th century, a more public and “racially” based type of slavery was established when Europeans began importing slaves from Africa to the New World. This slaveowner capitalism was a particular form of capitalism, resulting from a “second type” of colonialism in the form of the slave-plantation economy. As Marx put it in his Theories of Surplus Value:
“In the second type of colonies—plantations—where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage-labour, which is the basis of capitalist production [as a whole]. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on it. In this case, the same person is capitalist and landowner.”
New World plantation slavery, Marx specified, was capitalist in form and carried out by capitalists connected to the world economy, but it was not the primary form of capitalism, which was necessarily based on the expropriation of wage labor, on which the entire value structure of capitalism was erected. “Slavery,” he wrote in the Grundrisse, “is possible at individual points within the bourgeois system of production…only because it does not exist at other points; and appears as an anomaly opposite the bourgeois system itself.… The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour.”
Official policy notwithstanding, slavery continues to exist in many parts of the world. Many contemporary slaves are women and children forced into prostitution or working at hard labour or in sweatshops. Debt bondage is common, affecting millions of people, and slaves are often traded for material goods.
Moreover, that book tries to explain a variety of phenomena by reducing them all to “one main cause”, that is, capitalism, so that, in the long run, it fails to explain anything at all. In such a book the authors address issues such as the First and Second World Wars, the slave trade, aboriginal genocide, arms race, the situation in Palestine and “neoliberal totalitarianism”, all explained monocausally under the “logic” that the ultimate cause of these phenomena is capitalism. – Jan Doxrud
Capitalists wanted a world war because it would generate profits for businesses and governments. Military weapons and supplies—for the war effort—also happen to be highly profitable. The Marxist critics had a point, because the businesses that produced these items for the war made a fortune.
There is another argument for capitalists wanting a war, and that has to do with the effects of imperialism. At this time, Western nations had just been through a chaotic, violent scramble to take control of other areas of the world, specifically Africa and parts of Asia. Factories in Western nations could also produce whatever was needed in a short amount of time. So why not weapons and equipment? Preparing for war was right in their wheelhouse. There was also stiff competition between these Western nations, with each trying to become the largest and most influential empire. All of this played out in the start of World War I.
Even before the entry of the German army into France, the president of the German bank Arthur von Gwinner told Admiral Eduard von Capelle what the terms of peace would be: “Three billion dollars and the French colonies”. In addition to this imperialist passion of German finance capital towards France, there are other requests: 1. to compensate the ruined state and private German property abroad and 2. for England to hand over to Germany the mining concessions in Russia. Their Germanism was consumed in predatory lusts beyond the idea of “Central Europe”, which became the “faith” of the entire German capitalist class. Even the warring Entente wanted to maintain and consolidate the capitalist slavery: England and France had a hypocritical motivation regarding the freedom of Belgium. They were actually preparing the war because they wanted to rob Germany, to take away its colonies!
Marshal Foch, French military leader in the First World War wrote in 1918 of the commercial nature of the forces leading to war: ‘What do we all seek? New outlets for an ever-increasing commerce and for industries which, producing far more than they can consume or sell, are constantly hampered by an increasing competition. And then? Why! New areas for trade are cleared by cannon shot. Even the Stock Exchange, for reasons of interest, can cause armies to enter into campaign’ (United Service Magazine, December 1918). Even Keynes in 1936 identified that ‘competitive struggle for markets’ is the predominant factor in ‘the economic causes of war’ (The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936). Capitalists who have money invested in some foreign territory will do their utmost to secure protection for their property through the activities – including in the last resort war – of their government. So it is capitalism itself which produces these conflicts over markets, trade routes, raw material which cause war. In 1914, the capitalists of Europe have quarrelled over the question of the control of trade routes and the world’s markets.
Trade is the starting point of every conflict. The alienations that result from the trade are in conflict with the values of reality, of real humanism and human existence. The historical fact still pierces the membranes of the conscientious man: on November 4, 1939, the United States passed a law allowing trade and military cooperation with both warring parties. The principle of cash and carry is the only strong asset of capitalist democracy, which derives from the base of commodity production. That neoliberal principle alienates the republic of minds into a republic of malignant metastases from profits and their personifications in Caligula lunatics.
The author of the article “Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'”, Nick Holdsworth did not ask the real question, why the British and French did not accept Stalin’s proposal to send more than a million Soviet soldiers on the German border to repel Hitler’s aggression two weeks before war broke out in 1939? The answer is simply that they hoped that the Nazis would overthrow “communism” in the Soviet Union and thereby destroy the “communist plague” – of course, at the cost of millions of innocent human lives and unprecedented material damage.
The reason for the First world war was Germany’s effort to redistribute the world in which she would have a “fairer” share. The second world war – the efforts of Germany to impose its dominance, which it almost succeeded in if it were not for the Soviet Union that “broke the backbone of German fascism”. It must not be forgotten that all of Europe was conquered by Germany and part of Africa and Asia, and the production facilities that made this possible were branches of Western capital, which is why during the war the Western Allies did not attack the industrial facilities that worked for waging war.
Without Standard Oil selling 500,000,000 tons of tetraethyl to the German Nazis to produce synthetic oil, the invasion of Poland would have been uncertain. And General Motors produced trucks for the army of Nazi Germany. Truman’s attempts to punish these corporations were unsuccessful. Furthermore, the Western countries looked quite favorably on the interference of fascist Italy and Germany in the Spanish Civil War, because it prevented the creation of another “communist” country in Europe. The consequences of such a capitalist policy were almost 100 million human casualties.
Another reaction provoked by the “Black Book of Communism” took the form of a classic strategy that consists simply in pointing out that all those regimes, i.e. the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, the German “Democratic” Republic, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Egypt, Cuba, were not really communist, since they were “deviations” from the “true communist ideal”. – Jan Doxrud
In the mixed economies that have existed until today, the socialist elements have remained subordinate to the capitalist elements. That is, commodity and wage forms remained the primary forms of organization of production and payment of labor. It turns out that the USSR, Yugoslavia, all other countries from Eastern Europe, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, North Korea were/are “mixed economies”, i.e. social democratic, not socialist, because the fact is that commodity production in these countries was/is the economic basis.
„Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?“ (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme)
Convinced communists still live in a world where historical materialism is real, where the world evolves dialectically through a class struggle, where Lenin is a role model, where society is divided into exploiters and exploited, and where Marx’s ideas are universally and eternally true. – Jan Doxrud
Marx claimed to be uncovering the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalist society. This phrase is not accidental. It is a direct borrowing from Newtonian mechanics, the queen of the sciences. It implies an ambitious goal, to be able to detect in economic development, processes with a law governed regularity comparable to the laws Newton discovered to underly planetary motion. The Marxian law of value is as central to the argument of Marx as the third law was to Newton. Newtons laws gained their immense theoretical status because they were both elegant and supremely accurate at predicting reality. Marx’s law of value is certainly elegant, but to be accorded the status of a ‘law of motion’ it must make testable predictions about reality. In fact one can test it and it passes its tests very well. If his laws of motion are correct he can take his place alongside Newton and Darwin as one of the greatest scientists of history. Take away testable laws of motion and he becomes just another political philosopher or moralist.
Yet the tests must be appropriate to the theories. If I produce a set of numbers showing that water boils at a mean temperature close to 100 degrees, with a very small standard deviation, it doesn’t imply that the law of the falling rate of profit is false, for instance. You can’t just go around twisting the implications of theories at will and then testing them. You must test the actual implications or the whole thing is nonsense.
„In order to be a picture a fact must have something in common with what it pictures.“
„Reality is compared with the proposition.“
„The picture contains the possibility of the state of affairs which it represents.“
„The existence and non-existence of atomic facts is the reality. (The existence of atomic facts we also call a positive fact, their non-existence a negative fact.)“ (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
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