Why I Miss Communism: The Great Leveler, Inequality, and The Need for Passionate Egalitarians
It seems clear that in discussing economic inequality, what needs explaining is not today’s high and rising levels of inequality, but the opposite: how could we ever expect to see a lengthy period of economic compression. Thomas Piketty is convincing when he argues that the mid-20th century’s 70 or so years of economic leveling, from roughly the end of World War I until the late 1970s, was due primarily to the effects of two unprecedented global wars that destroyed enormous amounts of accumulated wealth and made it politically acceptable to tax the rich. The lengthy period of peace that the major powers have enjoyed since World War II is re-creating the historical norm of large economic disparities.
If you want to get a sense of what any argument in favor of greater equality is up against, I recommend Walter Scheidel’s new book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality. Scheidel is a classical historian who specializes in Ancient Rome and Mediterranean civilizations. The Great Leveler, however, roams across history and the globe to give us a gloomy picture: since the invention of agriculture, in most civilizations a small predatory elite captured society’s wealth, and the vast majority were poor, often living close to the theoretical limits of biological survival. You can look at ancient Egypt, Rome and Sumer; China and Japan; medieval Europe and ancien regime France; Aztecs and Incas, and their Spanish conquerors; the American South and the Russian north. The picture is the same: “early societies tended to be about as unequal as they could possibly be.”
It hardly needs to be said that this economic inequality corresponds to, is in fact the same thing as, similar disparities in power. A tiny set of rulers and supportive elites (priests, merchants) monopolizes the state and the instruments of coercion, using them as the means to seize and keep wealth.
Can this ever change? Yes, according to Scheidel, but only as the result of enormous violence. Mass-mobilization warfare, civilizational collapse, plague, Leninist revolutions—all these can and do produce greater equality. But all manner of change and violence short of these Four Horsemen doesn’t succeed. Economic crises, with the partial exception of the Great Depression, do not reduce inequality—witness the failure of the recent Great Recession to reverse the rise of inequality in the US. And the effects are not lasting. Patterns of inequality reassert themselves.
But, you may say, that was then. In the modern world we have altered this heartless dynamic. Democracy has undermined the political monopoly of the few. Capitalism and technology have created economic abundance and growth, doing away with the zero-sum static agricultural economies of the past. In today’s developed societies we have some very rich people, yes, and some very poor people, but most live somewhere in the middle, nowhere near bare subsistence. Across the globe these forces are raising hundreds of millions in China and India out of abject poverty. Marx predicted that capitalism would replicate old patterns and impoverish the working class, but he was wrong.
Scheidel begs to differ. First, the expansion of the franchise for many democracies is closely tied to the needs of mass-mobilization war. States who needed to enlist all their citizens in war had to give them greater say in choosing their leaders. Second, studies do not show any clear relationship, positive or negative, between greater democracy and inequality. Inequality in many European countries dropped during and after WWI as governments raised taxes on the rich and coped with the disruptions of the war—so the real cause was arguably war and mass mobilization, not democracy per se.
As for economic development, inequality does not seem to be systematically related to rising levels of development: “Conventional measures of nominal inequality do not offer much support to the notion that at certain stages of development, economic advances predict an attenuation of inequality.” Scheidel largely dismisses the arguments of Simon Kuznets, who theorized that developing economies would initially become more unequal, but inequality would decline as the economy matured. Today, countries with very different levels of development all “cluster in an income Gini range of about 0.35 to 0.45.”
All this doesn’t mean, of course, that the standard of living of most people living in developed economies is not dramatically better than before. But the size of the gap between haves and have-lesses has not really changed. What has happened is that limits on the “extraction rate,” which for pre-modern societies averaged 77%, have risen because the extractors can gain by allowing most people to raise their incomes, become consumers, and help generate much greater overall productivity and wealth. The extraction rate for the United States today is around 40%, half of what it was as recently as the 1860s.
But democracy and a high level of development are no guarantee against exploitation. For the past 40 years, a small set of wealthy and super-wealthy individuals in the United States—and to a lesser extent in other developed countries–have captured almost all of the gains in productivity. Their wealth has skyrocketed, while the incomes of much of the middle class and working class have stagnated.
Still, if modern economic development has moved most people away from falling off the cliff of starvation and abject poverty, and given them a decent standard of living and some security against shocks and downturns, what difference does it make what the level of inequality is? Why does it matter if a few people are extremely rich, as long as their being rich no longer requires that I be extremely poor?
Scheidel doesn’t address this—his book is a straight history. But the history suggests part of an answer.
In the long and depressing story of economic exploitation, according to Scheidel, one case stands out as an exception: Ancient Greece, and especially Athens. Beginning with major political reforms in 600 BC that included some cancellation of debts, Athens began to expand the franchise while building up a naval power that depended on popular support and participation (the navy depended on mobilizing thousands of unskilled oarsmen, unlike the army, which relied on wealthier knights who could afford weapons, armor, and horses).
• In the wars with Persia in 480 and 490 BC, Athens mobilized most of its adult population; after victory, Athens used its new power to establish an empire that eventually included most of the Aegean.
• In the 5th century democratic governance expanded to the courts and Assembly. To make it feasible for citizens to take part in public affairs, Athens used its imperial wealth to introduce state pay for jury duty and carried out massive public works projects to provide employment.
• Later, when the Empire was gone, Athens heavily taxed the rich to maintain its navy.
As Scheidel summarizes, “The convergence of military mass mobilization, democracy, progressive taxation, a sizeable state share in GDP, substantial civilian spending, and limited inequality lends fourth-century BCE Athens, in particular, a curiously and precociously ‘modern’ appearance.” What was true of Athens was true, to a lesser degree, of other Greek cities during the same period.
There is no need to belabor the unparalleled achievements of ancient Athens and Greece. It is impossible not to suspect that Athenian equality—political, social, and economic, all intertwined—was inseparable from this burst of creativity.
Limiting the extractive pressure of the rich and powerful and allowing large numbers of people to live at multiples of subsistence has proven to be a tremendous source of energy, innovation, and freedom. It is critical among other things for enabling genuine political engagement that goes beyond a tiny elite. Scheidel and other scholars see an average income around five times subsistence as a critical point—a level achieved in Ancient Athens, in 16th century Holland, in England around 1700, in the US around 1830—and in China in 1985. It is one of the defining characteristics of what we think of as ‘modernity.’
I am not inclined to be as fatalistic as Scheidel. But what I take from his history is that keeping inequality within limits and making space for the many to participate in public life is not easy. It is swimming upstream. It requires very serious, very tough measures, not nibbling around the edges. Not a Leninist revolution, which in any case turned into another version of oligarchy, but a dedicated, powerful political and intellectual movement.
This movement does not exist today, although capitalists are chronically worried that the masses will turn on them and confiscate their wealth. Liberal Silicon Valley moguls and paleo-conservative Texas oil billionaires alike are buying up condos in abandoned missile silos designed to let them ride out the coming uprising.* Part of me hopes their fears are well-founded. Peasants with pitchforks have stormed castles in the past. But today’s resistance has grown feeble. Even in the wake of the Great Recession, we have not seen effective mass demands for real action to break up big banks and monopolies, or reduce corporate pay, or do something about rising income inequality.
The difference now may be the absence of the communist threat. In the 19th century, capitalist ideology quickly generated a potent counter-ideology that mobilized workers and scared capitalists. Eventually it captured state power in Russia and sent capitalists and landowners to the firing squad. To avoid this fate, ruling elites in Europe and the US accepted reforms—the right to form unions, anti-trust laws, income taxes, social safety nets—that would otherwise have been scoffed at.
There is nothing comparable now. Power concedes nothing without a demand. Here in the US, market fundamentalists continue to scare us by loudly shouting that any restrictions on capitalism are the first step to a Marxist dystopia. These arguments have been effective. While workers a hundred years ago went on bitter strikes and risked their lives in violent confrontations with owners, many workers today have succumbed to the belief that the only way to create jobs is to give corporations tax breaks and lighten regulations. In America we have come to accept the right of wealthy individuals and corporations to use their money without limit to determine who gets elected and what laws they pass—in many cases laws designed to let the rich get richer and pass it on to their heirs. A new version of oligarchy has taken shape before our eyes.
Scheidel’s work is another shot in the intellectual war over the distinctiveness of modernity. How different really is the world today? A host of thinkers have argued that the combination of science, economic growth, technology, and liberal democracy represent an arrow of progress that separates today’s world from the past. At the dawn of the post-communist age, the estimable Frank Fukuyama crystallized this thinking in The End of History. But Fukuyama was not Panglossian about the implications. He worried that in this world without fundamental conflicts we would become complacent, morally and spiritually numb: Nietzsche’s Last Men. I think a lack of spirit, of intense concern for freedom and equality, is part of our problem.
Scheidel warns us that swirling around our historically recent and fragile Modern World are very deep currents, rooted in human biology and millennia of culture, that do not comport well with democracy and equality. There will be no democracy without democrats. It will not maintain itself because History makes it so.
No one wants to recreate communism. But we will get nowhere in fighting the growth of entrenched wealth and incipient oligarchy without a sharply defined alternative and people who are committed to it. As Scheidel so clearly tells us, a predatory ruling elite is the historic norm.
*”Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich,” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich