Are YOU Interested in Revolution?
Ellerman's work is a must-read for progressives.
On reform, Dean Baker’s work is a must-read for progressives. You can read Baker’s book Rigged for free.
On revolution, David Ellerman’s work is a must-read for progressives. You can read Ellerman’s book Neo-Abolitionism for free.
Like Baker, Ellerman puts his stuff online for the public to read for free. You can read Ellerman’s articles for free. You can read Ellerman’s book Property & Contract for free.
This 2018 Ellerman article argues that the same reasons we abolished three fraudulent contracts in the past also require us to abolish a fourth fraudulent contract—the employment contract. I think about this interesting argument when I’m at my job.
Ellerman’s work is dangerous for power because it’s radical and rock-solid at the same time. Radical people are often goofy—easy targets for the powerful to attack. But Ellerman’s work is rock-solid.
I interviewed Ellerman below. I added hyperlinks to his answers.
1) What are the most exciting projects that you’re currently working on?
I am working on a number of book projects on the theoretical side as well as helping a group of young Slovenes (former-Yugoslavs) to set up some worker-ownership models that can be used elsewhere in Europe as well.
2) What are the most exciting projects in the world that you know of?
The issue of worker-ownership is just on the cusp of public awareness now. If only Bernie and Liz Warren and others could use their access to public debate to raise the issue.
3) What are the biggest blindspots that progressives have?
Progressives want to stay in “the public discourse”, which means keeping ideas within the bounds of “acceptable” discourse. Many will say they are in favor of democratic firms as a “nice thing”, but will not discuss abolishing the renting of people. That is clearly beyond the pale. They have to keep their credentials as a “thought leader”. Acceptable topics are using wealth taxes and UBI to redistribute income—topics of that sort.
4) What are your thoughts on my piece on “theory”?
Great piece. But “theory” (in the context of posturing) and theory (in general) should not be confused. For instance, my previous book Helping People Help Themselves tries to outline some educational theory and apply it to development as “social learning”. Chomsky’s blurb for the book came too late to be included:
“This deeply informed and wide-ranging study addresses a fundamental conundrum in human relations: How can one help others in ways that are enabling rather than controlling? The focus is on development assistance and the World Bank, but the broader goal—impressively achieved—is to provide theoretical foundations for policies that respect the autonomy of those who must then proceed ‘through the fruits of their own labors,’ whether for social and economic development or acquisition of understanding and genuine knowledge as free and creative persons.” —Noam Chomsky
5) When is it ever useful or helpful to quote Marx?
I quote Marx all the time to show some of his colossal blunders, such as the analysis of private property (see my work on the “fundamental myth”) and the weak attempt to bring a value-theoretic knife to a property-theoretic gun fight.
6) If Marx and Adam Smith both make point X, then shouldn’t one quote Smith?
I rarely quote either one positively, but I negatively quote the founders of “conventional” classical liberalism—Locke, Blackstone, and Montesquieu.
7) If Smith articulates the point more clearly than Marx, then you should definitely quote Smith, right? Chomsky once said that Chomsky’s views on foreign policy are commonly described as “Marxist”, but that that’s “kind of ironic because the clearest articulations” of Chomsky’s views on foreign policy are “people like Adam Smith and Winston Churchill and so on”.
Yep.
8) Even if Marx articulates the point just as clearly as Smith does (or maybe even more clearly), shouldn’t you only quote Marx if you have a great reason to do so, since Marx is often regarded as spooky, scary, radical, silly, comical, discredited? You have to always weigh the downsides of quoting someone who people dislike, right?
In my Property & Contract book, I tried to give some positive quotes from Marx, but I saw later that it is of no use. Marxists will stick to the sacred texts and enemies will just take you as apologizing for everything up to and including Stalin and the gulags.
9) Can you elaborate on why it’s “of no use” to quote Marx? If there’s insight in there, why not quote it? You mention that Marxists are dogmatic and that people will hammer-and-sickle you, but these two points are separate from the issue of insight.
I would quote Marx in a scholarly paper about Marx exegesis. But that’s “of no use” in dealing with Marxists. Roughly speaking: “religion = cult + state power”. Marxism was a religion during the days of the Soviet Union. And when all that collapsed, Marxism degenerated back into a cult of little or no importance intellectually—but of significant importance in the human-rental system to represent “The Alternative”. I now consider Marxists to function as capitalist tools by allowing the priests in the Church of Human Rentals to perpetuate the false dichotomy of private vs. public human rentals. Since Marxists of my generation are dying off, I suspect the Church of Human Rentals will soon have to sponsor Marxist positions in universities to “foster diversity”.
10) What are your thoughts on the tendency of some left-wingers to think that the USSR wasn’t a dungeon and that it was somehow a system that one would ever want to remotely associate oneself with?
Nonsense. In my travels to Russia and the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, I never saw anything to remotely identify with.
11) What are your thoughts on Chomsky’s comments about the USSR?
I agree with his analysis of the USSR. I would not try to resurrect the word “socialism” to have some pre–Russian Revolution meaning. Those who say they seek a new world should at least be able to find a new word.
12) What are your thoughts on China’s striking investments in Latin America and other regions, as discussed in this interview? In the interview, Vijay Prashad said this: “Very little capital has come into these countries from the World Bank, from the International Monetary Fund that’s enabled infrastructural projects. So what the Chinese have done with the Belt and Road Initiative is provide vast amounts of finance, as you mentioned, to develop some of this infrastructure, to bridge the electricity gap, to bridge the transportation gap.”
In my work as a development economist, I welcomed the “rise of China” as a great success story in terms of economic development and poverty alleviation. The Belt and Road projects will have their own form of “strings attached”—like the WB and IMF projects—but they will help build a multipolar world. One of the biggest challenges for the US is to make the transition to a multipolar world without going full-fascist—about the only good thing I can see out of the Trump episode is that his nihilism and fascism-lite might serve as a vaccine to awaken and strengthen the antibodies against full-fascism.
13) How did you end up in Europe?
After teaching in four economics departments in the ’70s and ’80s, none would even put me up for tenure, since I was neither a neoclassical nor a Marxist, and one had to be one or the other in those days. Hence I tried teaching computer science for a few years and they put me up for tenure, but it was denied, since I was too interdisciplinary and they wanted someone working full time in CS. When you are still an assistant professor or assistant lecturer in your mid-40s, then you might want to take other opportunities outside of academia. I decided to join the emerging changes where communism was collapsing, either in China or in Eastern Europe, and ended up in Yugoslavia (soon to become Slovenia). Our efforts to get self-managed firms to privatize to worker-owned firms was sabotaged by Jeff Sachs and the World Bank. In addition to meeting my second wife, I eventually got a job through a back door in the World Bank and tried to fight it from the inside. When Stiglitz came to the Bank, I became his speechwriter and Senior Advisor and we agreed on criticizing the neoliberal shock-therapy favored by Sachs, Summers, and others. But it was closing the barn door after the horses had left.
14) Regarding the World Bank, could anything have been done to close the barn door before the horses left? It’s too bad that you didn’t arrive in time to close the barn door in time.
I arrived in time, but was nobody until I was speechwriter for Stiglitz in 1997. And then it was too late. A lot of that story is told in my next-to-last book, The Uses of Diversity.
15) What are the advantages and disadvantages of being located in Europe, as opposed to in the US?
My wife and I both wanted to live in Slovenia after spending 13 years of retirement in California. Our decision was made during the Trump dumpster-fire.
16) Why exactly did you and your wife want to go to Slovenia, of all the European countries?
My wife is Croatian, but came to live in Slovenia as a student, learned the language, and loved it here. I do too. It is a very livable small city in a small country where it is easier to change things. See the work of Leopold Kohr on the topic of small countries.
17) Was it wrong for you to quit on the US in the middle of the “dumpster fire”?
My hope for America is that it will make the transition—from being the hegemon to being one power among others—without going full-fascist. I feel change in the economic system is more likely to come in Europe, where the ultrarich and Wall Street are not in such control of the future.
18) Some left-wingers call people “comrade”. Is this useful or helpful? In my view, every action should be subjected to a cost/benefit analysis. I don’t know what the benefits are of calling people “comrade”. The costs are that people think that you’re radical, weird, totalitarian. Are there any benefits to calling people “comrade”? Isn’t the word “comrade” associated with USSR tyranny?
I and friends would only use “comrade” as a joke, since it is reminiscent of communism. Which is dead in both the West and East.
19) What advice would you give to public intellectuals? What are the key blunders and key successes that you’ve had, regarding all the different activities, ideas, strategies that you’ve tried? I asked Dean Baker these questions.
I have never aspired to be a public intellectual—I think it demands too much constraint to “stay in the conversation”. For decades, Chomsky was ignored and could hardly get mentioned in the NYT until his influence just became too overwhelming to ignore further.
20) What is “revolution”? The only clear line in the sand that I can imagine that would constitute “revolution” would be some big government action that changes everything by abolishing the employment contract or imposing ESOPs or something. If more and more firms become democratic, then there’s no clear line in the sand to call a “revolution”, right? Unless you just say that once 75% of firms are democratic then we’re going to draw the line at that point and call that “revolution”.
I don’t think much about “revolution”, since any real change will involve what Rudi Dutschke called the “long march through the institutions of society”.
21) What does that “long march” comment mean?
The “long march” statement dismisses juvenile notions of revolution-in-the-streets that many people entertained after the 1968 demonstrations.
22) This piece makes an interesting point: “Critical to understanding Chomsky and the syndicalists is the fact that their favored mode of production—worker-owned cooperatives—can lawfully exist in a free market system.” If what you want is already legal, then what does “revolution” mean?
The Mises Institute piece is a hatchet job that makes seemingly all the usual libertarian mistakes about capitalism (including the “fundamental myth”) and about alternatives.
23) Which “usual libertarian mistakes” do you mean?
The whole narrative about “ownership of the means of production” legally determining who owns the product of production—and who controls it—is not true in the so-called “capitalist” system. But it’s one thing that Marxists and human-rental apologists agree on.
24) How does “reform” relate to “revolution”?
André Gorz had a concept of “non-reformist reforms”, which referred to “reforms” that undercut the system rather than decrease pressure for change.
25) How do you respond to people who have no interest in “reform” and are only interested in “revolution”?
Many radicals seemed to be 99% involved in posturing about revolution—posturing that counts as their “badge of Red courage”. It is the telephone-sex theory of radicalism: talking the deal is the deal.
26) Chomsky has said that “revolution” will only come once the vast majority of the population recognizes that “reform” has reached its limits. Your thoughts on that?
Sounds fine to me.
27) Chomsky also talks about how the seeds of the future are being planted right now. Chomsky cites Gar Alperovitz’s book America Beyond Capitalism to make this point about the seeds. But isn’t Chomsky contradicting himself? Either institutional change requires reforms to be exhausted first, or else it doesn’t. You can’t have it both ways.
It is rarely a matter of either/or at this level of generality.
28) Does “reform” or “revolution” come first? And can you say that “reform” comes first if institutional change is already happening?
These questions are at too high a level of generality to be usefully commented on.