Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Global Political Economy
Lecture 5 & 6

18th October 2016
1-3pm & 4-5pm

Radical Challenges to Classical Political Economy: Marxism and Russian
Agrarian Socialism
Introduction
 Marxism was widely seen as being irrelevant and discredited following the collapse
of the Soviet Union
 Resurgent interest in Marxism as a critique of capitalism in the late 20th and early
21st century
 Marxism has been liberated as it is now no longer associated (to such an extent) with
repressive regimes
o North Korea is not seen seriously
o Cuba is moving closer to the west
o China has embraced more capitalist forms of economy
 Marx was a lawyer and had Jewish ancestry although was baptised as a Lutheran
before eventually becoming an atheist agnostic and was born in Trier in Germany
...

1880s debate between industrialised and agrarian society (focusing on rural/local
developments)
o Portrayed as a debate between Marxists and agrarian socialists  however
these socialists perceived of themselves as disciples of Marx – they were
therefore two rival forms of Marxism arguing with each other
 Proponents of Marxist orthodoxy – which Marx turned away from in
the last decade of his life were:
 Friedrich Engles
 Karl Kautsky
 Paul Lafargue
 Georgi Plekhanov
 Vladimir Lenin
How did Lenin justify seizing power and beginning the proletariat revolution given
his socialist Marxist ideology?
o He argued that capitalism worldwide had entered a phase of
monopoly/finance capitalism in the west – a concept initially put forward by
Rudolph Hilferding in Finance Capital: The Latest Phase of Capitalist
Development
 Lenin saw it this type of capitalism had simplified the system of
centralised control to such an extent that essentially officer clerks and
industrialised workers could run it
o Lenin however grossly overstated the degrees to which Russia’s
predominately peasant population had become ‘proletarianized’ – estimated
it had 55% (whilst many people did work it was a means of supplementing
their agrarian income
 His work The Development of Capitalism in Russia was an attempt to
persuade readers that over half of Russia was already on the way to
becoming an industrial society
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Global Political Economy
Lecture 5 & 6



18th October 2016
1-3pm & 4-5pm

The new economic policy announced in 1921 was a forced retreat on the part of
Lenin

The seminal ‘Soviet Industrialisation Debate (1921-1930)
 Nikolai Bukharin - Priority to the peasantry  could and should only move as fast as
the peasants could
o “riding into socialism on a peasant nag”
 Lev (Leon) Trotsky – revolutionary firebrand
o Believed Russia should take advantage of the weakened western states to
accelerate the modernisation and mechanisation of the Soviet economy
o He has been misrepresented because at the same time he was an advocated
of worldwide revolution – that revolution should not just be limited to the
Soviet Union
 Evgeny Preobrazhensky
 Josef Stalin
o Over half the new industry which were created was in the west – part of the
country which fell to the Nazi’s during the War
o Executed 80% of the officer core during 1937/38 leading army effectively
leaderless
o Poor treatment of peasantry meant that he was reluctant to arm them in
case they rose up against him
Masters of Money (BBC) – Video
 Countries claimed Marx rather than the other way round – they believe they
embodied what he thought when this was not the case
 Marx has come back to the fore not that capitalist countries are in crisis – people are
now looking at Marx to see what he said – i
...
that capitalism was inherently
unstable and that society would become increasingly unequal
o Capitalism would produce bigger and bigger crises before eventually
collapsing
 World divided between bosses and workers  the crisis comes when workers don’t
have enough money to buy what bosses want to sell them
 Profit as what drives the world forward – this is something that Marx did not
recognise which is one of the reasons why he fell out of favour
 What did Marx like about capitalism?
o Viewed it as a productive and dynamic system
o Recognised the impact and influence of globalisation
 Marx believed that capitalism was doomed due to the way it treated the workers
o Life expectancy in the great cities of Europe during the Industrial Revolution
18th/19th century was around 28 years of age – this was as low as it had been
since the time of the Black Death of the 14 th century
o However even at the time of his writing reformers were attempting to
change the system and improve it
 In the past 10 years his claim that wages would be depressed to a
level only high enough to survive on seems to becoming true

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18th October 2016
1-3pm & 4-5pm

Global Political Economy
Lecture 5 & 6

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Real wages of people in the west seems to have improved but
this is only because the poorer low paid ‘dirty’ jobs have been
moved overseas
 USA is experiencing the fall in ‘real’ wages
Can view the recent capitalist crisis as a re-enactment of the strike period of the
1970s where the bosses wanted to maximise profits whilst the workers wanted to
earn more – the 1980s were the fight back in which the capitalists seem to gain the
upper hands
o Earnings at the top are growing whilst earnings at the bottom are being
increasingly squeezed
o Real earnings in Britain have either been flat or falling for over a decade and
in US they have been falling since the 1970s
Increasing mechanisation and technology has decreased the need for manual labour
– meaning there are more people competing for fewer jobs – therefore bosses do
not need to pay as much

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