In Theory…

Back in the mid-1990s at one point I spent a fair amount of time at Revolution Books which, at the time, was located near my house by Union Square. Heavily featured in the store was a book by Bob Avakian called Phony Communism is Dead . . . Long Live Real Communism. Avakian, you see, is chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. The mid-1990s were a problematic period for Communists, of course, because of the whole fall of the Soviet Union thing. But fortunately for Avakian, RCP-USA was (and is) a Maoist party. Consequently, he was able to lean on this to indicate that the Soviet Union’s failure merely demonstrated the failure of the wrong kind (i.e., non-Maoist) of Communism. Its failure for good news for Maoism because it would open up space on the left for the real deal.

This kind of thing was quite common in far-left circles at the time. My grandfather told me about how the Soviet Union wasn’t real Marxism, and real Marxist governance had never been tried, and my uncle explained to me about how Stalin had betrayed Lenin’s original vision.

There’s some truth to all this. Consequently, I have some sympathy with Cato’s David Boaz feebly protesting that the current economic crisis can’t discredit laissez faire because real laissez faire has never been tried:

[I]f this crisis leads us to question “American-style capitalism” — the kind in which a central monetary authority manipulates money and credit, the central government taxes and redistributes $3 trillion a year, huge government-sponsored enterprises create a taxpayer-backed duopoly in the mortgage business, tax laws encourage excessive use of debt financing, and government pressures banks to make bad loans — well, it might be a good thing to reconsider that “American-style capitalism.”

I sympathize, but there’s something vaguely ridiculous about this. It amounts to saying that we can’t make any judgments about libertarian policy ideas unless and until we empirically test what would happen if we adopting sweeping and unrealistic changes to American government and economic policy — abolition of the federal reserve, etc. (and, NB, there was no “duopoly” in the mortgage business and I’d be surprised if Cato even believes in “duopoly” as a precept of anti-trust policy). You can take that view if you want, but it means accepting total Avakian-style marginalization on the other hand. You can’t just opportunistically retreat to this view when convenient, and then wade into real-world policy disputes.