If you ever spend any time with real American communists — meaning Americans who actually theorize, think, and believe that Marx, Engels, Mao, etc. were really on to something with the whole end of private property, communal production, simple class-struggle thing, and not those who simply get labeled communists because they believe in a social safety net or government services — you realize pretty quickly that they are in deep denial. Their first and most vociferous defense of communism comes with the simple statement, “Well, it’s never been really tried.” This is the same response received when criticizing or questioning libertarians or free-market advocates on the right. They too seem to be in deep denial. They claim that their ideas or policies have never really been applied — that any previous applications were too weak or because they were half-measures end up creating disasters instead of the promised utopian efficiencies. Of course anyone running around quoting Karl Marx is simply dismissed from the mainstream public discourse as a loony. But, for some reason, those spouting on about the ideas of Ayn Rand or Frederich Hayek are accepted as serious contributors to our policy debates.
In the past week we’ve seen this dynamic play out with several members of the GOP: Senators Kyle (AZ), Coburn (OK), and minority leader Mitch McConnell (KY), all of whom keep intimating that the federal deficit is such a horrific problem that unless we deal with it while we’re in the midst of this recession we will all soon be turning to thunderdome to set our economic policies instead of relying upon their wisdom, have come out and said that huge Bush tax cuts of 2003, set to expire this year, have no effect upon the deficit. McConnell went even a step further in defending Kyle’s suggestion that tax cuts should never need to be offset and said:
“That there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually
diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of
these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was
expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”
This is the kind of denial which libertarians and conservatives constantly deride their opponents for. But in the so-serious, accepted, world of free-market, small government, ideology some of the most powerful men in our country feel free to spout this nonsense. Business Insider recently illustrated effect of these tax cuts and their relationship to the deficit:
With this data we have to ask the same old question that we always have to ask of the Republican leadership in recent memory: are they disingenuous or stupid? It’s not often an easy question to answer. This same group of men were unconcerned and complicit as the deficit tripled under President Bush. Were they being disingenuous then? Believing that the deficit was a problem, but that our military conquests would reap economic rewards to offset their spending or were they simply stupid and have recently found new insight? Are they being disingenuous today, believing that hyping the deficit feeds into uneducated fears over unemployment and can be used to exploit class and racial rifts in our country for political gain? Or are they simply stupid and truly believe that by reducing government spending at a time when consumer and business spending is very low will positively effect employment or people’s lives? As I said, it’s often difficult to tell. In this particular instance it may be that these men were so blinded by ideology that they actually believed, beyond any reason or evidence (ie. stupid), that that tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration would actually increase revenues; yet, after six years of cuts and no increase in revenues and a sinking job market what rationale can they sight? This same naive ideology?
Thus we arrive where we began. Why are radical free-market conservatives and some libertarians (who really should be referred to as anarcho-capitalists) taken as serious economic authorities while communists are dismissed as crazed loons? In reality there is little difference between these groups. They both have a utopian vision: one finds it in a equal society of communal order, the other finds it in economic efficiency created by an unfettered marketplace. In both instances human beings are perceived as rationally good actors: a good communist would never take advantage of another individual because it would ultimately violate the communal contract and the commune would punish him; likewise a free-marketer would never take advantage of an individual because market forces would punish them in the long term. Both systems seem to argue that great inequality is necessary at first before utopianism is achieved: enormous economic gaps between rich and poor for the free-marketers and the dictatorship of the proletariat for the communists. Of course there are essential differences in the classical definitions of these systems. Communism, for instance, was envisioned as a holistic system encompassing history, economics, and political rule. Capitalism (the root of the free-market ideology), on the other hand, was not considered a political philosophy until very recently, when it was presented as an alternative to the holistic system of communism.
In one of my seminars on political theory, my professor used to draw a circle on the blackboard to illustrate how opposing political ideologies could generate similar policies or beliefs. He would note a policy and two ideological beliefs, and then we would travel the circle clockwise or counter-clockwise to arrive from the belief to the policy. What became illustrated was that the more radical or extreme the ideology the shorter the distance it had to travel to an extreme policy, regardless if the ideology started on the left or the right. This circle of radicalism used to be accepted as simple fact, but in today’s world the circle is broken. Radical free-marketers are allowed to express patently erroneous theories and policies, proven by experience to be false, and never are held to account in the mainstream debate. Instead we are expected to simply accept their arguments and ideas as the well reasoned result of an intriguing ideology which has simply never been tried.
