Ignore Human Nature
Back in the nineteen thirties Leon Trotsky, then living in exile in Norway, wrote a book called The Revolution Betrayed. Its thesis was that Stalin had perverted the great Revolution which the Bolsheviks, under Lenin and Trotsky, had set in motion in October of 1917. Trotsky did not quite bring himself to argue that Stalin had revived capitalism, but he did say that bureaucratic privilege had so increased under the control of the Stalin faction that socialism had been dealt a most crippling blow.
Since Stalin was indeed guilty of all the sins imputed to him by Trotsky, one cannot deny the cogency of the surface argument in The Revolution Betrayed. In The Prophet Outcast (Oxford, $9.50), which is the capstone volume in a generally brilliant trilogy about Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher takes only petty issue with certain details in the stream of criticism which Trotsky heaped upon Stalinism from his various domiciles in exile at Prinkipo in Turkey, Barbizon in France, Vexhall in Norway, and, finally, at Coyoacan in Mexico. Mr. Deutscher, who thinks the time will come when Trotsky will be rehabilitated in Russia as the man who anticipated all of Khrushchev’s recent objections to the Stalin cult, regards The Revolution Betrayed as a seminal document in a coming revival of “classical Marxism.” Indeed, The Prophet Outcast is generally devoted to the idea that the author of The Revolution Betrayed is destined to become nothing less than a world savior. Says Mr. Deutscher, in elaborating on Trotsky’s contribution: “The West, in which a Marxism debased by Mother Russia into Stalinism inspired disgust and fear, will surely respond in quite a different manner to a Marxism cleansed of barbarous accretions.”
This, of course, is a statement based on faith. As a matter of fact, every assertion that is made in Mr. Deutscher’s book rests on the faith that Trotsky had a true idea about the nature of man. The Prophet Outcast never once questions the validity of Marxist categories, Marxist assumptions about human nature, and Marxist preoccupation with the idea that the class struggle is what has made the world go round for at least the past thirty centuries.
A Questionable Premise
Well, how is one to review a book that is based on faith when one questions the very validity of the faith itself? If one cannot accept the relevance of Marxian categories, Trotsky’s career, along with the careers of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, seems hardly more commendable than the career of Stalin. They are all variants of a basic error that is killing its thousands everywhere from Viet-Nam to Cuba and Venezuela. You might argue that Trotsky would not have stooped to the brutality of Stalin’s attack on the Russian peasantry during the collectivization crises of the late nineteen twenties and the early nineteen thirties. Yet Trotsky believed in the class theory of politics, and in pursuit of his revolutionary aim of overthrowing the “bourgeoisie” he would have waded through blood on a global scale. If it is human bloodshed that one objects to, what is the difference between killing a kulak for slaughtering his cows in Russia and killing a shopkeeper for defending his right to ownership in Cuba, or Malaysia, or wherever? This is the sort of moral question that Deutscher does not try to answer in The Prophet Outcast.
Eradicating the Property Instinct
To my mind, the history of the past forty years proves that the great social crime of the age was the October 1917 Revolution itself. I say this because I think the property instinct is an ineradicable part of human nature, and that any successful attempt to abolish it can only result in endless suffering. The October Revolution was an attempt to overthrow not only the “bourgeoisie,” or the “White Guards,” but to extirpate the very idea of a natural law that shapes any human being’s natural rights. Since, in my estimation, one cannot try to kill something that is based on an ineradicable urge without imposing a perpetual slavery on people, Stalinism was a fated part of the Russian future under Marxism. If Trotsky had won out in his duel with Stalin, he might have been more considerate of individuals in the process of robbing them of their natural rights to property. But, in the end, he would have had to become a Stalin of sorts in order to remain doctrinally pure in his pursuit of a false god.
Mr. Deutscher’s entire Trotsky trilogy is brilliant biographical writing. Some of the bits in The Prophet Outcast are extremely touching in their humanity toward Trotsky himself. The accounts of the “prophet” suffering because of what his own career in revolutionary politics had done to his daughters and sons and his patient second wife are excruciating. But, to one who disbelieves in the Marxian categories, the accounts strike home in a most peculiar way as constituting the grimmest sort of warning against accepting the “politicalization” of life. When politics becomes Marxist (i.e., total) politics, wives and children are doomed as such. Trotsky brought his own family tragedy down on his own head.
And for what? Every bit of news out of Hungary, Poland, China, Cuba, and Mother Russia herself makes it plain that political ownership of the land cannot feed people. Cities and industries that rest on a collectivized agriculture cannot raise the general standard of life. The reason why Yugoslavia is in better shape than most Marxist countries is that Tito is a heretic when it comes to agriculture: he lets his peasants own their means of production. If Khrushchev ever manages to improve the quality of life in Russia, it will be because he has the good sense to backtrack on the farm collectivization of the nineteen thirties. In other words, the nature of man must be respected if man is to eat.
A False Concept of Man
Simply because Mr. Deutscher bases his Trotsky trilogy on a false view of the human animal’s nature, his brilliance could turn out to be pernicious if it is accepted uncritically. Trotsky derided the Western, or Christian, view of life that was based on the inviolable nature of the human soul. He saw only a capitalist plot in the theorizing of economists who say there can be no good way of allocating resources outside of a market system based on voluntary exchange of goods that are individually owned. He saw only “atomization” and “chaos” and “class contradictions” in the vast fabric of uncoerced cooperation that is the Western free market system. But the world was considerably less bloody when the derided economists’ categories were accepted as basic. It will become less bloody in the future to the extent that the economists come back.
Far from becoming a savior, Trotsky is doomed to go down in history as a prime example of the brilliant theoretician gone wrong. His arguments were keen—but his premises were little short of idiotic.
Trotsky based his ultimate hopes for socialism on the nations of the West. But in Germany, the Social Democrats have given up on the basic Marxist faith in state ownership of the means of production. In Britain, Labor still dallies with the notion that steel should be “nationalized.” But its “Marxism” is far from being complete. My own guess is that even in Russia socialism is in line for a retreat to modified bases—in which case Trotsky will seem less prophetic than ever.
THE GERMAN PHOENIX by William Henry Chamberlin (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1963. 317 pp. $5.95); THE ECONOMICS OF SUCCESS by Ludwig Erhard (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1963. 412 pp. $6.50).
Reviewed by William H. Peterson.
I first met William Henry Chamberlin in September, 1957 at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in St. Moritz, high in the Swiss Alps.
Looking back at the meeting, the location seems an apt place to first tie in with a man and mind on the order of this formidable adversary of Soviet Communism and of economic and philosophical collectivism generally. The Alps have grandeur and strength, permanance and ruggedness—qualities to be found in the writing of Chamberlin.
His philosophy and reports on contemporary history are rooted in history and a solid understanding of human nature. Perhaps more to the point, he has not confined the evidence in his discourse on human affairs to that gleaned from books, papers, monographs, and the other secondhand paraphernalia of some intellectuals: In 1922, for example, he went to the Soviet Union as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, remaining there for twelve years. From 1935 to 1939 he was assigned to the Far East, headquartered in Tokyo, traveling extensively throughout China, the Philippines, Manchuria, Siam, and other parts of Asia.
And now Western Germany. The Chamberlin report, as usual, is based on firsthand observations. His background for the job is thorough. He traveled through and wrote of the old Weimar Republic, witnessed the rise of Hitler, saw the ruins of Germany at the end of World War II. Now, after his tenth postwar trip to Western Germany, he assesses the means and ends of that remarkable achievement, the German Federal Republic.
William Henry Chamberlin brings out the contrast between Hitler and Adenauer. Both leaders arose during the aftermath of abject defeat. Germany had been twice bled and utterly humiliated in World Wars, in each of which the Berlin government had been the principal architect. After Versailles, and especially after his accession to total power in 1933, Hitler cleverly played the part of a modern-day savior, a deliverer. He did it in part by oratory: rapt, passionate, dizzily bombastic, practically hypnotic. He exuded supreme self-confidence at a time when the German people felt hopelessly awash from traditional moorings. He was a showman, a pitchman, a crafty psychologist, skilled in the use of the glib phrase and the big lie and ready to pin the blame for the frustrations of the Germans upon the “November criminals” who established the Weimar Republic, upon the alleged traitors at home who supposedly stabbed the Wehrmacht in the back, upon the Jews for supposedly manipulating the German economy to their own ends.
Compared with Hitler, Adenauer is of altogether another breed of men. Adenauer’s manners are grave, dignified, almost courtly. After a long orgy of emotional propaganda, the German people found in Adenauer a new kind of leader—well nicknamed “Der Alte”—a conservative, a man of fact, of integrity, rather than of fictionalized “image,” a fatherly man, but one rather cool and unsentimental yet always industrious, ever conscientious. In pushing through bills for restitution to Jews and other victims of Nazi Germany, Adenauer led rather than followed German public opinion.
Schacht vs. Erhard
Another contrast can be seen between Hitler’s minister of economics, Hjalmar Schacht, and Adenauer’s minister of economics, Ludwig Erhard. Schacht was an interventionist, an exponent of the controlled economy, a believer in barter arrangements with other countries, in foreign exchange controls, and other economic controls. In 1934 he was appointed by Hitler as minister of the German economy and president of the Reichsbank. Erhard, on the other hand, the author of the German “economic miracle,” is, of course, a believer in a free market economy, an enemy of state planning—of what the European calls “dirigism.” Erhard, notes Chamberlin, was much influenced in his economic thinking by neoclassical economists on the order of the late Rudolf Eucken and the brilliant Wilhelm Roepke, an old-fashioned German liberal who went into exile during the Hitler regime and has since become a naturalized Swiss citizen.
While not a simon pure libertarian (in his position, can he be?), Erhard has shown what even a relatively free economy can do. He freed markets of controls, kept a tight rein on the money and credit supply, balanced the budget, encouraged free enterprise. The West German economy did the rest, as is seen in the case of the world-famed beetle-shaped car, the Volkswagen. Volkswagen is now the third-ranking automobile producer in the world, after General Motors and Ford. It turned out 1.1 million vehicles in 1962, including 200,000 for the American market, at a price in Europe of little more than $1,000. Thus, Heinz Nordhoff, the 63-year-old entrepreneur of Volkswagen, has done for Europe what Henry Ford did for America: he has transformed the automobile from a luxury for the rich into a convenience of the many.
William Henry Chamberlin tells many other stories of the personalities who rebuilt and recast Western Germany into its strategic role in the Western Alliance. In the German Phoenix you may read of Alfred Krupp, the steel tycoon whose sentence of 12 years of imprisonment and confiscation of property was later reviewed and arid quashed by General Clay; of West Berlin’s Mayor Willy Brandt, who to Chamberlin seems to have discarded his old socialist shibboleth of inevitable class warfare and the like and has now pointed the Social Democratic Party toward aims not very dissimilar to those of America’s New Deal and New Frontier; of many others in the colossus on the Rhine.
In The Economics of Success, West Germany’s new chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, selects from his articles, speeches, and broadcasts a compendium of his thoughts on economics, West Germany, the Atlantic Alliance, the communist menace, world trade, and the like. The selections are in chronological sequence from 1945 to 1962, each one annotated by its distinguished author.
In a broadcast to the German people on June 21, 1948, for example, a few days after his famous currency reform and after he had declared that the nation’s economy had virtually collapsed under the tyranny of inflation and controls, then Minister of Economics Erhard said: After several days of mental and spiritual anxiety we have moved into the routine of everyday life. Today the German people went to work calmly and quietly, and I believe that most of them must have felt a sense of relief when it dawned on them that the dreadful threat of mass hysteria had gone and with it the shocking financial swindle of a price-frozen inflation. Only now that this fever has passed do we fully realize how close we came to the edge of the abyss and how urgent it had become to introduce our new currency and so return to the path of honesty and sincerity.
In the United States in 1962 when he received an honorary doctorate he said:
I feel most profoundly that we are called upon either to endure the future or to concentrate all our energies on moulding it. We must set against the spiritual sterility of totalitarianism the dynamic power of our way of life with its traditional values, its religion, its ethics, and its justice. It is imperative that we stand together. We are on trial and may God help us to emerge from it at peace with ourselves and with history.
***
Jungle vs. Market
In the jungle, tigers compete “tooth and claw” for goats. This always decreases the supply of the desired good, food.
In a market economy, producers of shoes compete for your business. The supply of shoes (the desired good) must increase, for no one can compete successfully by decreasing production. As shoes become more plentiful, real prices go down, quality goes up, or both.
“Jungle” competition always means less of the wanted product, and thus higher prices.
Market competition always means more of the wanted product, and thus lower prices.
Sometimes competition is legally destroyed by government-created monopolies. Sometimes competition disappears because our government tolerates private monopolies based on violence. In either case, the free market economy of peaceful competition doesn’t exist, and “jungle type” results can be expected.
DEAN RUSSELL
