A lot of modern Western communists that I’m familiar with aren’t really Maoists. Many of them argue for bottom up communism, meaning collectively owned businesses and workers having a say in the management of firms. This isn’t really unheard of, there are already worker cooperatives in the West, and in some European countries works councils do have a say in the management of the firm.
A point I often see raised is that the current capitalist dominated political/legal system in the west actually creates lots of structural benefits for organizing as a joint stock company, but makes it very hard to run a company as a worker co-op, and makes financing difficult to acquire and etc, which limits worker co-ops ability to grow. I’m fairly dubious of most leftist nonsense, so I’ve never delved deeply into these claims, but I do think their argument deserves a fair shake. I have occasion to debate with some “real” Workers of the World type Communists fairly regularly. Most of them today are focused more on community and small business reforms than they are a political reform where an unaccountable party structure takes over democratic government.
A case in point that I’m reminded of every tax season was the demutualization of insurance companies, most prominently MetLife as it seems like every other person has dividends from them. At one point in time, insurance companies were generally mutual companies, like credit unions, owned by the people who had bought insurance from them. As time went on, the value of the company increased as they did higher and higher amounts of business, and the people who originally staked the company got nothing for their equity growth when they no longer held a policy. I don’t know what the impetus of the movement was, but people realized that the current policy-holders would no doubt approve a demutualization, because they would get to take all the equity that had been developed by the company over the years and sell it on the stock market. And thus a very large number of people ended up holding a few shares of the previous mutual insurance company, and the company was run just like any other for-profit business instead of for its original purpose as a mutual insurance company.
What you describe as “bottom up communism” is actually more akin to economic communitarianism. It bears a superficial similarity to communism insofar as “workers owning the means of production”, et cetera, but is really more of an emphasis on communal responsibility rather than societal revolution or any kind of grandiose macroeconomic theorizing. As you note, the lack of a central funding or market investment makes it more difficult to obtain financing for expansion and growth. Regardless, it isn’t really a political philosophy but rather a pragmatist one.
I haven’t heard anyone refer to themselves as a “Maoist” in…well, ever. The airbrushed legacy of Mao the great hero of China is still officially promoted even though the current Communist Party of China has abandoned Mao’s principles wholesale, and I think the rest of the world pretty much acknowledges the horrific failure of the Great Leap Forward and the savage reprisals of the Cultural Revolution. I see a lot of people branding themselves as “Marxists” historians and macroeconomists, although the interpretation of exactly what that means seems to vary widely which is unsurprising because Marx was basically creating political strawmen and using a vocabulary of fungible terms in order to concoct socioeconomic ‘theories’ with little basis in evidence, backed up by little more than long-standing anger over the malign and unjust exploitation of the rising capitalist class that was taking over the role from the waning aristocracy.
This criticism is hardly limited to Marx, of course; I think you can lump pretty much the whole of macroeconomics in the same basket, but few have been as persistently influential as Marx. I mentioned the Laffer Curve to someone reasonably as a joke, and they’d never heard of it despite the fact that it drove American economic policy for nearly a decade with no more basis than a literal napkin sketch.
Right, so you’re speaking as an “arbiter” of what Communism means. Communism has not had a singular, fixed meaning in over 150 years, let alone one that adheres exclusively to what you are saying here. The sort of thing you’re calling “communitarian” would be considered analogous to several different schools of Communist thought.
The internet is a big place, finding pro-Mao people isn’t actually that hard. There are Discord servers where you can talk with ardent advocates of Juche for example.
For one I wouldn’t say the Great Leap forward was entirely a failure. China was a borderline medieval country at the turn of the 20th century and is coming up on being the world’s largest economy today. At least part of the groundwork for that did start under Mao.
As for Marx, Marx wrote a lot of shit. “Marxist” is a squishy word that can mean lots of things. Other than some very broad brush definitions I think almost every discussion I’ve ever had about Socialism/Marxism/Communism has collapsed into “definitional” quagmire. I generally view Marxism’s core belief is in “a critique of the 19th century class system and the control of most of the economy by the owners of capital.” I think the core tenet of socialism would be the concept of “social ownership”, and the core tenet of communism would be an aspirational goal of a classless society, in which the bourgeoisie who exploit the work of the proletariat are removed from any sort of power.
The problem is Marx and Engels and even Lenin didn’t write the last (or first) words on these ideas. The evolution of thought didn’t die with them either. It’s hard to clearly say that “X” anti-capitalist, pro-worker, pro-social ownership ideology today “isn’t really communism”, when communism itself never had a very widely agreed upon definition. Even within Russia there was disagreement in the early days between different schools of Communist thought for example.
I think Laffer is kind of blamed for something he really didn’t do. There was a strong desire to cut taxes no matter the rationale, and the Laffer curve was just the veneer of justification found. If Arthur Laffer had been run over by a bus in 1975 I have zero doubt Reagan’s economic policies would have been identical to what they were in the real timeline. Laffer was an explanation for a decision that was already made.
I have to admit I hadn’t thought of Lenin as somebody who liked to kick back and relax, which is how Ransome seems to be portraying him. I’ve always thought of him as being very focused and driven.
The fact that Lenin sincerely believed in communism meant that he would go to greater lengths in support of it. Later Soviet leaders like Khrushchev or Brezhnev might have taken a more casual attitude. They would have essentially said, “Sure, communism is nice and all. But who knows when we’ll achieve the stateless communist utopia? It might not happen in my lifetime. So I’ll focus on the more immediate goal of advancing my career.”
Lenin was more “We’re right on the verge of achieving a full communist state. So now we need to devote all our energies to pushing things over the finish line.”
I think a good comparison is among Christian evangelicals. Some of them, while acknowledging the second coming will happen someday, feel the focus should be on living a good Christian life. But others believe the second coming is going to happen now - and they should sell their house and give away all their possessions so they’ll be ready when God raptures them away.
The modern approach, which has received a huge amount of attention recently, especially in Europe, is to attempt to attempt to bring computational and cybernetic, and especially data analysis methods from the hard sciences to bear to understand complex economic systems. Certainly some macroeconomists, ‘Marxist’ and otherwise, still hide behind some classical toy models. Ideally— in the 21st century such napkin sketches will no longer cut it, but when politics is injected into the mix who can say?
There is no link between capitalist/socialist, and right/left wings. Either can coexist with either. Some of the worst right-wing autocracies (Park, Sukarno, Mobuto , Marcos), Pinochet were created, supported, funded with capitalist dollars for the sole purpose of fending off socialism.
