[PEN-L:7570] Re: Re: Re: RE: DeLong Compares Mao to Hitler

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Brad, while I certainly do not endorse the cited ad hominems (I think Jim
>lost his cool and with it, his point) - there is a certain quality of your
>style of analysis that is at least ethically questionable, and very likely
>moot on methodological grounds.
>
>That quality constist in using varying and arbitrary levels of abstraction
>to balance and equate opposites as to make them suit a particular point you
>are trying to make.  As my French friends say, 'with sufficient
>assumptions, you can fit Paris is a bottle.'
>
>Your strategy rests on assuming away or abstracting from relevant
>historical contexts and leaving only general, abstract qualities as th
>enumber of persons that perished, to balance the accounts of the dead and
>then pronounce your moral verdict.

Gee. Other people complain that I do not abstract enough--that I argue too
much from relevant historical contexts  and so,as some put it, wind up
making the same arguments that justify the Nazi New Order.

Let me try to distinguish between two kinds of "relevant historical
context." The first--which I reject completely and utterly--is that there
is a difference between people killed by the Okhrana, shot by Franco's
police, or starved to death because the Czar was uninterested in famine
relief and the landlords were interested in exporting wheat through Odessa
on the one hand; and people killed by the NKVD, or people starved to death
because the soldiers took all their grain (and no one would dare tell Mao
that the harvest was low) on the other hand because people who fall in the
second group are counterrevolutionary scum or enemies of the people. Dead
is dead. To deny the humanity of some of the dead seems to me to simply be
anti-human.

The second--which I think everyone has to admit is valid--is that great
crimes can be... not eliminated or justified or excused but, I think,
accepted as in some sense a regrettable sacrifice demanded by necessity...
if they are necessary steps on the road to Utopia.

Whether the enormous death toll of Maoist China or Stalinist Russia (or
Suhartan Indonesia) could be justified if these projects had wound up
building Utopia is a very hard question to which I don't have
answers--although I do recommend reading Trotsky's "Their Morals and Ours,"
Lukes's "Marxism and Morality," and Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas" as things form which I have profited.

But in this world we don't have to deal with that question. *None* of these
projects constructed anything like Utopia.

You can blame the failure to construct Utopia in Russia and China on the
structure of the Communist Party as a sick and perverse institution, or you
can blame it on renegades in high places--that Mao was in the end defeated
by a conspiracy of his aides (Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaochi, Chou Enlai, Peng
Dehuai, Lin Piao) and that Stalin's good works were blocked by successive
conspiracies of *his* peers and aides (Trotsky, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev,
Kirov, Mikoyan, Beria, Khrushchev, and so forth). But if you go down that
line, you soon conclude that the whole Communist leadership throughout the
twentieth century was dominated by renegades and counterrevolutionaries--in
short, you blame it on the structure of the Communist Party as a sick and
perverse institution (even though your definitions of "sickness" and
"health" are opposed).

And without Utopia at the end of the road, the (valid) questions of means
and ends simply do not arise. "You can't make an omelette without breaking
eggs." But eggs are broken. The habit of breaking them grows. Yet no
omelette appears...


Brad DeLong


-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory of
money] is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading guide to
current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead.  Economists set
themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can
only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."

--J.M. Keynes
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley;
Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones
(510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/
<delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>