Did Kropotkin, Marx, & co. get it wrong?
The problem is not necessarily capitalism, in itself, but that voluntary socialism has failed the world and its nations. Commentators speculate as to whether it was this dilemma that caused Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto.
Since my teenage years, I have been an avid reader of Kropotkin and Tolstoy. Kropotkin (1842–1921) was a polymath and philosopher who renounced his aristocratic background to align himself with the peasantry by conviction. The titles of his three major works—The Conquest of Bread,26 Fields, Factories and Workshops,27 and Of Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution28 (all on my shelves since I was a teenager) tell of his desire for and advocacy of an egalitarian society, free from centralized government control and organized by local voluntary associations of workers and their families. He was critical of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution’s violence, having already warned in The Conquest of Bread that any such communistic state, predicated upon violence, had already sown the seeds of its downfall, including an almost logical return to capitalism. Subsequent events in the USSR and China have proved him to be correct in this.
Tolstoy (1828–1910) also renounced his aristocratic background, undergoing a profound Christian conversion in the 1870s to become a fervent anarchist, pacifist, and coworker with his former estate servants (much to the chagrin of his domineering wife). His pacifism influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., just as his writings have alerted millions to the plight of the common man or woman when forced to live within the hierarchy and economic system of prevailing Russian society.
It is clear that Marx knew the thought and writings of Kropotkin and Tolstoy (as well as similarly minded others) and, as the notes for his economic work reveal,29 was profoundly affected by the inability of ordinary people to have control of their economic and social destiny. Obviously that sits in diametric opposition to those who believe in self-seeking and capitalist hierarchical societies. But, to the radical Christian, Marx’s economic reflections are clearly on the same page as the egalitarian “reign of God” teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, revealed in the Christian Gospels.
It becomes more than a Greek tragedy when the contest between common humanity and the ruling economic system becomes overwhelming—as our next section reveals.
Agony30
The creation of a common currency—the euro—across the majority of nations of the European Union in 1999 was fraught with many potential and ongoing problems. The participating countries became known as the Eurozone and, without formal political and federal union (such as in the USA or former USSR), relied on each participant nation’s government acting within the defined rules and economic treaties. The latter tied all those nations together with demanded monetary policies, requiring all—whether at the top or bottom of the financial “elastic”—to behave and act similarly. Before joining the Eurozone, EU member countries must spend two years within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, to help create this compliance.
The EU required its constituent national governments to be strong enough to put their “own house in order.” No longer could individual nations simply decide to lower taxes or increase pension levels without ensuring they could “balance their own books” and not exceed agreed borrowing levels. I was living in France when this really began to bite and noted how the French government had to resist the calls for a statutory “working week” of fewer hours, or for lowering the pensionable age for state workers, or raising pensions but not taxes. This took cross-party strength and philosophical resolve. Other countries such as Ireland, Portugal, and Spain found their economies faltering, requiring strong fiscal remedies upon their own peoples, in order to meet the demands of the European Central Bank and their partner nations within the Eurozone. The fear of domino economic downfall brought forward the word contagion in our economic vocabularies. The nation that fell hardest was Greece.
Following the ending of the Greek military junta in 1974, many restrictions were lifted—including letting long-haired backpackers (like me) travel relatively freely and bring in the so-called tourist dollar, which was traded for a sackful of drachmas. But Greek government policies were at best somewhat erratic. The über-rich could choose whether to join in or how much state taxation they would pay. There was political expedience and laxity in policy, increasing pensions, guarantees of state employment, etc. Some tell me there were allegations of political corruption . . . while those same politicians had to comply with the conditions for becoming part of the Eurozone. Many of the island or rural poor lived in subsistence poverty, hardly earning enough to pay any tax. In any household (Greek: oikos) or nation, the bills have to be paid and Greece’s were not.
I found I was a natural supporter of PASOK, the PanHellenic Socialist Movement, using my visits and increasing Greek fluency to chat with islanders, ferrymen, and small farmers about why this social democratic movement commanded so much popular support. One major reason was that Greeks are proud of the civic understanding of being a polis—a democratic people with a 2,500-year history. Even the illiterate had a stronger understanding of “the people’s decision” than I encountered in Britain, northern Europe, or North America. PASOK only lost their political dominance when the Eurozone’s imposed austerity measures hit the Greek populace in the successive 2010 and 2012 bailouts. It was little surprise to me when the harder-left Syriza coalition was elected in January 2015 on an even tougher anti-austerity platform. An inevitable collision was set up—as Greece defaulted again on its international loans (against its background of political inabilities to comply with financial needs/policies)—between Syriza’s own hard-line stance and the European Central Bank’s demands for immediate compliance, which would mean accepting further austerity.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the understandable decision of the Greek Referendum in July 2015 to reject the imposition of further austerity measures, one casualty was Yanis Varoufakis, the internationally respected economist and then Greek Finance Minister. He resigned the morning after the referendum’s results was known, saying that Greek Prime Minister Tsipras had agreed with him that other Eurozone finance ministers would find it easier to try finding a different “bailout package” for the Greeks without Varoufakis in the room. Across Europe, media reports stated that Varoufakis tweeted to his international followers: “I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride.”
To many outside Europe, it was hard to immediately understand the reasons why the Greeks should reject the bailout package offered by the Eurozone countries. However, tracking both societal and financial restrictions during the period from the 2010 crisis through the 2012 bailout to 2015 reveals many human reasons for this. In that five-year period:
• Many salaries had been gradually halved to a level of €600/US$675/£450 per calendar month.
• Nearly 60 percent of all pensioner families’ incomes had become less than €500/US$560/£375 per calendar month.
• Over 50 percent of workers aged under twenty-five were unemployed. For workers aged over twenty-five, that figure was approximately 25 to 30 percent, depending upon location (e.g., city, tourist resort, island). Many city and government workers went to their offices daily, simply to retain their jobs despite not being paid.
• The provision of universal healthcare had undergone a 25 percent cut in both provision and delivery.
For many of those already living in isolated—mountain, rural, or island—poverty as well as the middle classes, who were possibly supporting their adult, college-educated children on a single, halved salary, further austerity could not be contemplated. They had to vote “Oxi”—“No”—and reject the Eurozone’s further bailout because of the increasing austerity measures and higher taxation demanded.
Greece was the first modernized postwar country to default on its loan from the World Bank. This put the Greeks in the same dubious defaulter’s “bucket” as the Taliban’s Afghanistan or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Summer 2015 wore tortuously onward, as the Tsipras government was humiliatingly forced to accept an IMG and ECB package that was even more austere than that rejected by the July 2015 referendum. France tried to help Greece draft domestic measures to receive that bailout. Nations