The Basic Income Debate: how much does it cost to enter Utopia?

My grandfather had a job in the freezing works for most of his adult life. He would usually work a standard forty hour week, occasionally working overtime at a higher rate of pay. One of his favourite stories concerned his co-worker, Steve, who in my grandfather’s words was ‘a bit odd’. Nobody knew exactly what Steve’s position was on the floor. He was a hard worker and was always willing to provide a helping hand. The other workers would guide Steve towards appropriate tasks that he was capable of, and watch out for him in case of any possible dangers. The bosses knew all about Steve but didn’t seem too bothered. He collected his wages at the end of each week just like the other men. Steve was one of the vast majority of male adults who had a job in New Zealand during the post war boom period of the 1950s and 1960s. Unemployment levels were tiny,  fluctuating around 1 – 2%, and most jobs were solid forty hour week positions with a strong union presence.

The point of this anecdote was to contrast Steve with the position of similarly vulnerable people in the much harsher world of the 1980s. Moving ahead another 30 or so years, it is hardly a difficult task to broaden the scope and relevance of such an anecdote. Unemployment levels have increased dramatically and have apparently stabilised somewhere around 5%. The prominent radical economist Yanis Varoufakis predicts that this level will drastically increase in the near future . Because of the incredible power of modern computer technology and the prospects of artificial intelligence, Schumpeter’s famous notion of ‘creative destruction’ will soon become outdated. Whereas technological change in the past both destroyed old jobs and created new ones in roughly equal measure, today we are looking at a future in which the number of jobs destroyed by new technology vastly exceeds the number of new jobs created. Varoufakis’ prediction is backed up by a recent academic study which states that because of computerisation, 47% per cent of US jobs are at risk.

Alongside these ‘rise of the machines’ dystopian projections is the increasingly bleak nature of the jobs that remain to be fought over. Guy Standing has coined a new phrase, the ‘precariat’, to describe the apparent growth of precarious employment. Positions similar to the one held by my grandfather in the freezing works have become increasingly uncommon, and a variety of piecemeal options are the new normal. Jobs are subcontracted out for short term periods, casualised and made more flexible. Unions and the certainties and securities they fought for and often won are increasingly marginalised, and jobs become more insecure.

Both of these bleak forecasts are of course subject to a number of caveats. Science fictional premises such as the idea that artificial intelligence will develop to a point at which robots will pass a ‘Turing Test’ are contentious. Guy Standing’s book has triggered a number of critical and  insightful responses which question the extent of precarious labour and the politics of distinguishing between an old fashioned working class and a 21^st century ‘precariat’. For the purposes of this essay I will put these complexities and doubts to one side, and draw attention instead to two certainties.

The first certainty is the fact that inequality has drastically increased because of changes to the shape of the labour market. At one extreme there is a growth in highly specialised, high income jobs. Outweighing this massively, there has been a growth in low wage jobs. Entry into the sphere of highly skilled and highly rewarded work is more restricted because of technological changes:

 “At the same time, with falling prices of computing, problem-solving skills are becoming relatively productive, explaining the substantial employment growth in occupations involving cognitive tasks where skilled labour has a comparative advantage, as well as the persistent increase in returns to education (Katz and Murphy, 1992; Acemoglu, 2002; Autor and Dorn, 2013). The title “Lousy and Lovely Jobs”, of recent work by Goos and Manning (2007), thus captures the essence of the current trend towards labour market polarization, with growing employment in high-income cognitive jobs and low-income manual occupations, accompanied by a hollowing-out of middle-income routine jobs.” From Frey and Osborne (2013),ibid., emphasis added.

 At the other end of the spectrum wages are so low as to be insufficient. Poverty hits a much bigger proportion of “first world” society than it used to. The unemployed, the under-employed, the precariously employed and those on low incomes generally are becoming more numerous.

The second certainty is that this large pool of poor and insecure people is much more diverse than it was in the past. Vulnerable people like Steve, ethnic minorities and those with low levels of education are joined by white males with university degrees. Taxi drivers have doctorates and supermarket workers are scientists waiting for a lucky break.

For most of these people, wages are hard to come by and frequently need to be supplemented by a variety of different types of state assistance. Even jobs which pay a ‘living wage’ are often insufficient for basic needs. A solo parent working a 40 hour week paying the current New Zealand living wage living wage ($19.80 per hour) would take home $672 each week after tax. If we make the very conservative assumption that she lives somewhere in Auckland and has to pay $500 per week in rent, she would also receive a total of $366 per week from the government (an accommodation supplement plus tax credits). That’s 35% of her income provided by the state and just 65% provided by her wages.

It is in this context of stagnant wages and technological upheaval that the proposal for a universal basic income (UBI) has gained momentum across the globe. The details of UBI schemes and ideas differ from country to country, but they all share the same simple and elegant concept of an unconditional regular payment to every citizen. Everybody would get exactly the same amount of money, rich and poor alike. There would be no readiness to work criteria, and hence no need of an expensive and humiliating bureaucracy to administer the payments. The payment would be modest but enough to survive on. In an era of inequality and work insecurity, the UBI would provide a solid floor of guaranteed income to everybody.

In stark contrast to the increasingly dystopian reality of 21^st century global capitalism, UBI proponents frequently invoke utopian aspirations in their arguments. The Belgian academic Phillipe Van Parijs is an eloquent example. He grounds his philosophical arguments upon the principle of  real freedom’. Whereas the traditional liberal concept of freedom is defined formally in terms of the absence of constraints, ‘real freedom’ requires a solid material basis. An unemployed person who is offered a low paying job with awful conditions is formally free to reject such an offer, but with bills to pay and a harshly judgemental welfare bureaucracy observing her choices, such freedom has little substance. A UBI would provide the real freedom she needs, the freedom to say ‘no’ to job options she would prefer not to pursue.

There are several other worthy arguments for the UBI proposal. The vast and important sphere of domestic labour is like the hidden part of an iceberg. Formally recognised paid labour forms the visible part of the iceberg. Basking in the sun of economic legitimacy, people do all sorts of important jobs which pay proper public dollars. Submerged beneath the ocean in unrecognised darkness, children are looked after, clothes are washed and meals are prepared. Most of this labour is performed by women, and almost none of it is recognised and paid for. A universal basic income would provide a modest level of payment to people who do this sort of work, and hopefully set the stage for a more radical system of recognition.

A green argument goes something like this: contemporary capitalism requires endless economic growth. This growth is the result of ‘work fetishism’, a system in which people are compelled to work long hours producing more and more goods and services. Because we have a fossil fuel based economy, all of this frantic activity puts a strain on our environment. A universal basic income would work like a pressure release valve, allowing people the freedom to work less and therefore relieve some of the impact of our carbon-heavy labour footprint.

Another argument questions the value and centrality of the work that is currently recognised by monetary reward. David Graeber describes the modern reality of ‘bullshit jobs’ in which more and more people feel that their work contributes nothing to the greater good of humanity. Activities which do contribute to the greater good such as volunteer work, looking after children or writing songs are not recognised by our economic system as being valuable. Again, the UBI would free people up to spend less time on bullshit jobs and more time on genuine activities which realise different types of values.

These utopian arguments are a welcome antidote to the limitations of the current political climate. They employ the language of philosophy and ethics, and deny the abysmal economic ‘realism’ and narrow mindedness of mainstream political commentary. Against a background of pessimism and corrosive cynicism, they embrace genuinely progressive aspirations for a better world. Yet they all rely upon the assumption that the UBI is set at an adequate level to satisfy basic needs. There are many problems with this assumption, and to investigate what they are we must leave the lofty realm of philosophy and ethics and return back down to the mundane level of politics and money.

The recent Swiss UBI referendum did not formally specify any amount of money, yet many of the advocates openly discussed a figure of 2500 francs per month. Guy Standing, who is also a prominent UBI advocate, was quite critical of this: ‘The amount being discussed […] is quite high, and it is useful to have a referendum on whether the Swiss approve the policy in concept. Let the details be decided later, and let the unconditional basic income be implemented gradually, so people can see that society doesn’t collapse, as some wilder critics contend it would.’ There are two concerns here: first, if the UBI is set at a high level it will come with a correspondingly massive price tag and proponents will have a difficult job convincing voters of its economic feasibility. Secondly, if the UBI is too generous, then large numbers of people will not bother working at all, and the economy will collapse. Standing, like many other prominent UBI advocates, is in favour of very modest UBI schemes which take into account these concerns. As with any political movement, there are both moderate and radical versions of the proposed reforms. Godfrey Moase's Australian UBI proposal involved a sum of $30,000 per year, clearly at the radical end of the UBI spectrum. Here in New Zealand  Keith Rankin has proposed a UBI of $9,080, Gareth Morgan offers $11,000 and Sue Bradford has suggested $15,000 per year with additional amounts for parents and over 65s. Although without doubt it is the larger sums that are necessary if we want to do justice to the utopian aspirations sketched above, it must also be clear that in today’s political climate the more conservative UBI proposals will much more easily gain legitimacy.

Michael Fletcher, in his recent article on Gareth Morgan’s book The Big Kahuna, disputes the claim that a UBI system will abolish the need for targeted state welfare assistance. He likens the variety of income needs for various types of households to a skyline of city buildings of various heights. Some people are single and able bodied with relatively cheap basic needs, whereas families with only one adult and several dependent children have much more expensive needs. In order to completely abolish the current welfare system,  Fletcher argues that we would need to provide “everyone with a level of assistance that matches the height of the tallest buildings. A UBI set to the height of the tallest buildings would give too much to many, therefore be too expensive, and risk undermining work incentives.”

Phillipe Van Parijs, probably the most eloquent and intellectually formidable advocate of UBI, is very forthright on this issue. In a 2002  interview he insists that “Unemployment benefits must not and will not be replaced even by a generous universal basic income. They must keep operating with amounts adjusted, as job-seeking-conditioned, time-limited and earnings-related top-ups on people’s basic incomes.” Echoing Fletcher’s concerns about the variety of individual and household needs, he predicts that even in the long term “sensible levels of basic income will not enable us to dispense with means-tested top ups for people in specific circumstances.”

Whereas the more radical UBI schemes would clearly have a range of far reaching consequences for those currently living on benefits or scraping by on low incomes, the situation is far less transparent and straightforward for the more moderate versions. In order to evaluate such schemes we need to look very carefully and critically at the details of the UBI policies. Would beneficiaries receive adequate top-ups to their basic income? How would the basic income affect existing state transfers such as tax credits and accommodation supplements? What changes would be made to the income tax regime, and how would these affect those on low wages?

To illustrate these thorny and complex issues, consider the example I made use of above: a sole parent with two children living in Auckland working 40 hours per week at the current living wage rate of $19.80 per hour. Assuming she pays around $500 per week in  rent, the  current system would provide her with a net weekly income of $1038. This consists of her net wage ($672), plus $366 worth of state transfers (tax credits plus accommodation allowance). Suppose that Gareth Morgan’s Big Kahuna version of basic income were to be implemented by a new government. This would involve an $11,000 annual net basic income, which translates into just over $211 per week. Morgan’s UBI policy also involves a flat tax rate of 30%. To work out exactly what she would receive under this new system, we would need to know how the existing system of tax credits and accommodation supplements would be affected by the basic income. At the left extreme we might imagine a UBI policy which did not disturb existing transfers at all. Our solo parent would be better off in this case, receiving $1132 net income each week (about $90 more than the status quo). At the right extreme we might imagine a UBI policy which reduced her current state transfers by an amount exactly equal to the new basic income of $211. Instead of $366, she will now only receive $155. Her net weekly income (taking into account the higher flat tax rate of 30%) will be $920, meaning that she is now $118 worse off than she is under the status quo.

Now suppose that our hard working solo mother wants to change direction in life. She might want to further her studies, write poetry or leave her job in order to have more time and energy for her growing children. According to the utopian arguments I sketched above, a basic income would provide the means for her to exercise ‘real freedom’ and make such a choice without fear of dire material consequences. Again, the crucial consideration would have to do with the level of the ‘top-ups’ rather than the basic income payment of $211, an amount which would not even pay for half the weekly rent. Even if we assume that she can easily access additional top-ups which would bring her income up to the current status quo entitlements, her prospects look fairly grim. The current sole parent benefit plus tax credits and accommodation supplement totals just under $708 net per week. Let’s assume that she can access this under the new regime, and somehow figures out how to budget for three people on the $208 she has each week after rent is paid. If you find that assumption a bit hard to swallow, then try imagining her writing poetry at the same time. Of course, back in the real world thousands of Aucklanders have found a solution to similarly impossible budgeting scenarios: they live in their cars.

Gareth Morgan’s UBI scheme is certainly not the only version, and it is surely conceivable that an appropriately tweaked system of a modest basic income with targeted top-ups would be more progressive than the clumsy and unjust system we live under today. Yet there are clearly many reasons to be wary of the supposed benefits such schemes propose.

The elephant in the room is the problem of low wages. People such as my grandfather and Steve were able to accomplish modest tasks such as paying for food, clothing and shelter on the basis of their wages alone. In Marxist terminology this is a fundamental part of capitalistic ‘reproduction’: in order to keep the wheels of industry turning, workers must have their basic needs met so that they can continue to provide their labour. It is an obvious and yet fundamental observation, with an increasingly complex and obtuse relation to the neo-liberal structures of contemporary capitalism I sketched at the beginning of this essay.

In a book apparently aimed at a conservative American audience, Phillipe Van Parijs likens the UBI to a subsidy paid from the state. Instead of paying the subsidy to the employer, Van Parijs argues that it should be paid to the employee: “At the other extreme [from employer subsidies] we find the UBI, which can also be thought of as a subsidy, but one paid to the employee (or potential employee), thereby giving her the option of accepting a job with a lower hourly wage or with shorter hours than she otherwise could.” Much as we might like to endorse the values of the utopian arguments for UBI, we must acknowledge and critically engage with these other, potentially more sinister forms of reformist logic.

Isaac Deutscher’s ‘Stalin: A Political Biography’

Isaac Deutscher is most famous for his biographical trilogy about Leon Trotsky. After reading the first volume (‘The Prophet Armed’), I searched in vain for the sequel but noticed instead his earlier 1949 biography of Stalin. Both books are extremely readable and engaging, it is impossible not to be impressed by Deutscher’s elegant and clear prose style. If you are like me and also sympathetic to the ideals of socialism which motivated people like Lenin and Trotsky, Deutscher provides an insightful alternative to the typical narratives of the Russian revolution. There are of course many narratives which have crossed their swords over various interpretations of the Russian revolution and the nature of Stalinism, providing us with an historical battlefield littered with a variety of ideological corpses. Deutscher’s place within this battlefield is itself a subject with its own idiosyncratic story. He is remembered principally as the author who made Trotsky famous again in the late 1950s, and who had a massive impact on the ‘New Left’ of the 1960s. But although he was sympathetic to Trotsky he was never a “Trotskyist”, and while he told truths about Stalinism which helped to disillusion and educate many misguided Stalinists in the west, he also placed hopes on the future of Stalinist Russia which appear quite deluded from our position of hindsight.

Isaac Deutscher was never a member of any academic institution. He made a living as a journalist, and wrote books aimed at an educated western audience. Although he is a very good writer, and avoids many of the stylistic pitfalls of academic historical writing, there are a few drawbacks. The most obvious is the almost complete lack of references. There are a handful of footnotes sparsely scattered throughout the text, but for the most part you just have to maintain faith in Deutscher’s scholarship, because it is simply not visible in the text. I’m not a specialist in this particular area of history, but I would still appreciate some pointers towards a larger literature. As an interested but casual reader I’m not too bothered about primary sources, but it seems weird that such an eloquent and frequently insightful text is something of an island, unconnected to a wider tradition of secondary sources.

I found the book hard to put down, and compared to the only other Stalin biography I have read – Martin Amis’ “Koba the Dread” – Deutscher’s is the best by a very large margin. All I can remember of Amis’ book to be honest is a massive litany of Stalin’s crimes, together with a petulant and barbed attack on his father (how could he have embraced socialism if Stalin was so evil) and Christopher Hitchens (how could he have embraced Trotsky if Stalin was so evil). I don’t remember any kind of analysis of why Stalin did the incredibly awful deeds laid out by Amis beyond a recourse to the most obvious moral psychology: Stalin was simply insane and evil. Neal Ascherson, in his 2002 review of Amis’ book, pretty much backs up my memory of this almost complete lack of analysis:

Surprisingly, the weakest element in the book is its handling of Stalin. A brilliant novelist reaches into the dark for this creature but fails to reconstruct a character out of the slimy bits he can feel. Amis falls back on the weak idea that he was mad, an envious loner driven into homicidal lunacy by the taste of power, and argues that when he did sensible things, like defeating Hitler, he stopped being mad. "... The invasion [of 1941] pressed Stalin into a semblance of mental health. Certainly, in August 1945, remission ended and the patient's sanity once again fell apart". Unhappily, Stalin was not mad. He was sane, but callous and cruel on a scale so staggering that hopeful views of human nature crumple.

To be fair to Martin Amis, putting aside his questionable political motives, it is surely impossible to deny that Stalin committed monstrous crimes, and that any decent biography should grapple with the enormity and hideousness of his actions. Deutscher also has political motives, but these (as I will attempt to outline below) are far more complex than those of Amis, and result in a much more interesting - if head-scratchingly contentious - book. His tone throughout is the complete opposite of Amis, rather than sustained moral outrage Deutscher is cool and consistently dispassionate. His explanation for this approach deserves to be quoted:

Some critics have remarked on my ‘cool and impersonal’ approach to Stalin. Yet the work on this book was to me a deeply personal experience, the occasion for much silent heart-searching and for a critical review of my own political record. I had belonged to those whom Stalin had cruelly defeated; and one of the questions I had to ask myself was why he had succeeded. To answer this question the partisan had to turn into an historian, to examine dispassionately causes and effects, to view open-mindedly the adversary’s motives, and to see and admit the adversary’s strength where strength there was. (from 1961 Introduction)

Here is an example of Deutscher’s analysis, in which he explains Stalin’s motives for the 1936 purges:

‘His charges against them were, of course, shameless inventions. But they were based on a perverted ‘psychological truth’, on a grotesquely brutalised and distorting anticipation of possible developments. His reasoning probably developed along the following lines: they may want to overthrow me in a crisis – I shall charge them with having already made the attempt. They certainly believe themselves to be better fitted for the conduct of war, which is absurd. A change of government may weaken Russia’s fighting capacity; and if they succeed, they may be compelled to sign a truce with Hitler, and perhaps even agree to a cession of territory as we once did at Brest Litovsk. I shall accuse them of having entered already into a treacherous alliance with Germany (and Japan) and ceded Soviet territory to those states.

No milder pretext for the slaughter of the old guard would have sufficed. Had they been executed merely as men opposed to Stalin or even as conspirators who had tried to remove him from power, many might still have regarded them as martyrs for a good cause. They had to die as traitors, as perpetrators of crimes beyond the reach of reason, as leaders of a monstrous fifth column. Only then could Stalin be sure that their execution would provoke no dangerous revulsion; and that, on the contrary, he himself would be looked upon, especially by the young and uninformed generation, as the saviour of the country. It is not necessary to assume that he acted from sheer cruelty or lust for power. He may be given the dubious credit of the sincere conviction that what he did served the interests of the revolution and that he alone interpreted those interests aright. (p.377 – 378)

I have highlighted the last two sentences because they represent one of the moments of ‘head scratching’ I mentioned above. Even if Deutscher’s description of Stalin’s motives is correct, isn’t it at least logically possible that these motives were accompanied by a sadistic and cruel psychology? Is Deutscher trying too hard to be objective, and are we involving ourselves in apologetics for the hideous crimes committed in the name of the revolution if we accept the attribution of “dubious credit”? It is worth noting the reaction of George Breitman, a Trotskyist contemporary, who in a 1949 review focused his outrage on those same sentences:

He also has the irritating habit, after detailing one of Stalin’s crimes against the revolution, of engaging in entirely uncalled for speculation about possible justifications for his acts which Stalin may have had in his mind. Thus, after reporting the Moscow Trials and showing them to be monstrous frameups, he adds: “It is not necessary to assume that he [Stalin] acted from sheer cruelty or lust for power. He may be given the dubious credit of the sincere conviction that what he did served the interests of the revolution and that he alone interpreted those interests aright.”

We must remember and recognise the fact here that Stalin was still very much alive in 1949, so Deutscher’s cool objectivity was understandably offensive to many – including Trotskyists. There is also the fact that Deutscher had restricted access to relevant sources, and may have changed his mind had he known the full extent of Stalin’s murderous tyranny. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Deutscher had access to more sources, including the testimony of Nikita Khruschev. He updated the 1949 version with a ‘postscript’ written in 1966, which includes the following passage:

‘Khrushchev points out that Stalin had become especially wilful and tyrannical since the liquidation of the Trotskyists and Bukharinists (in which Khrushchev and his like had eagerly assisted him). “Stalin thought that henceforth he could decide all things alone; he now needed only extras; he treated all in such a way that they could only listen and praise him”. In fact, after he had destroyed the anti-Stalinist opposition, Stalin proceeded to suppress his own faction, the Stalinists. Khrushchev’s revelations bear precisely upon this, the last stage of the great purges, when Stalin suspected his own adherents of crypto-Trotskyism or crypto-Bukharinism. Consequently, he ordered the arrest and execution of the great majority – 1,108 out of 1,966 – of the members of the Central Committee elected at that Congress. These were all Stalinists – the textbooks referred to the Seventeenth Congress as the “Victor’s Congress”, because at it the Stalinists had celebrated their final triumph over all inner-party oppositions. After the annihilation of over two thirds of the leading Stalinist cadres, the survivors trembled for their lives. ‘In the situation which then prevailed,’ Khrushchev relates, ‘I often talked with Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin; once when we two were travelling in a car, he said: “It happens sometimes that a man goes to Stalin, invited as a friend; and when he sits with Stalin he does not know where he will be sent next, home or to jail.”’ ‘Stalin was a very distrustful man, diseased with suspicion … He could look at you and say: “Why are your eyes so shifty today?” or “Why are you turning so much today and trying to avoid looking me directly in the eyes?”’ ‘He indulged in great wilfulness and choked one morally and physically.’ After the war ‘Stalin became even more capricious, irritable, and brutal. …. His persecution mania reached unbelievable dimensions.’

Since Khrushchev made these statements it has become common to refer to Stalin’s paranoia. Yet it is not necessary to assume that he became insane in the strict sense. His quasi-paranoiac behaviour followed from his situation; it was inherent in the logic of the great purges and in their consequences. The suspicion with which he treated even his own adherents was not groundless. They had been with him and had abetted him during the persecution of the Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and Bukharinists; but as the persecution turned into the great massacre of 1936-8, many of the most faithful Stalinists were shocked and became remorseful. They had accepted the premises of Stalin’s action, but not the consequences. They had agreed to the suppression of the opposition, but not to physical annihilation. Postyshev, Rudzutak, Kossior, and others dared to express their remorse or doubts and to question Vyshinsky’s procedures. In doing so they at once incurred Stalin’s suspicion of disloyalty; and, in truth, they were becoming ‘disloyal’ to him. Questioning the need for the extermination of the Trotskyists and Bukharinists, they were not disputing any of Stalin’s ordinary political decisions; they were impugning his moral character and suggesting that he was guilty of an unpardonable enormity. If they were to behave consistently, they were bound to work henceforth for his overthrow. In that case, they could become more dangerous to him than the Bukharinists or the Trotskyists, for they could use against him the influence and power they still exercised as the leading men of his own faction. He had to assume that their actions would be consistent with their words. He could not afford to wait and see whether they were actually going to use their power against him. For the sake of self-preservation he had to forestall them. And he could forestall them only by destroying them. (p. 610 – 611)

This is a compelling analysis: Stalin creates a social reality in which paranoia is a perfectly logical and rational response to the political conditions. Sitting at the apex of this political system, Stalin is like a spider which is caught inside its own web. Like a murderous snowball, the terror of the purges creates its own hideous reality, and Stalin must keep on killing to ensure that he too does not become a victim. Is Deutscher involved in apologetics? Surely not – how could anybody even begin to think that such a political system could include anything worth defending? I don’t think Deutscher is involved in apologetics in these passages, even if they provoke debate about the nature of insanity and totalitarianism. Which is not to say that Deutscher is innocent of apologetics. The most outstanding example is the concluding paragraph of the 1949 edition:

Hitler was the leader of a sterile counterrevolution, while Stalin has been the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory but creative revolution. Like Cromwell, Robespierre, and Napoleon he started as the servant of an insurgent people and made himself its master. Like Cromwell he embodies the continuity of the revolution through all its phases and metamorphoses, although his role was less prominent in the first phase. Like Robespierre he has bled white his own party; and like Napoleon he has built his half-conservative and half-revolutionary empire and carried revolution beyond the frontiers of his country. The better part of Stalin’s work is as certain to outlast Stalin himself as the better parts of the work of Cromwell and Napoleon have outlasted them. But in order to save it for the future and to give to it its full value, history may yet have to cleanse and reshape Stalin’s work as sternly as it once cleansed and reshaped the work of the English revolution after Cromwell and of the French after Napoleon. (p. 569 – 570)

How can we understand this strange synthesis of insightful critique and dated apologetics? The best explanation for the apologetics I could find is contained in an article by Neil Davidson, writing for the International Socialism journal:

……orthodox Trotskyists continued to hold fast to a position which had been proved inadequate by events, and even extended it to Eastern Europe and China. Like them, Deutscher accepted that Russia, its satellites and imitators were all ‘workers’ states’ because they were based on nationalised property. Yet his description of how The Revolution Betrayed (1937) became ‘the Bible of latter-day Trotskyist sects and chapels whose members piously mumbled its verses long after Trotsky’s death’ conveys his impatience with the religious veneration they accorded Trotsky’s last writings. Why? Not because they clung to its definition of a ‘workers’ state’, but because they refused to abandon their formal commitment to political revolution. Even the dominant tendency within the Fourth International, associated with Michael Pablo, which had successfully argued that the Stalinist states in Eastern Europe and China were ‘workers’ states’, assumed that future revolutions would be led by Stalinist parties under ‘exceptional circumstances’, ‘pressure from the masses’, and the like. Deutscher described himself as ‘free from loyalties to any cult’, by which he meant Trotskyism as much as Stalinism. He was therefore able go much further than orthodox Trotskyists could (without rendering their existence completely redundant) and claim that Stalinist Russia was not only capable of internal self-reform, but that, even unreformed, it was the major force for world revolution. At one level this is, of course, merely the logic of orthodox Trotskyism taken to its conclusion. For many Trotskyists, therefore, their rage at Deutscher was that of Caliban at seeing his face in the mirror.

So to what extent does this dubious political orientation undermine or distort Deutscher’s analysis of Stalin? Again, my response is a mixture of admiration and wariness. One of the most fascinating aspects of Deutscher’s narrative is his treatment of Stalin’s relationship with Lenin. When Stalin meets Lenin for the first time in 1905, he is already an avid and committed disciple. Deutscher quotes Stalin’s own words to describe the impact Lenin had on the 26 year old Stalin:

I had hoped to see the mountain eagle of our party, the great man, great physically as well as politically. I had fancied Lenin as a giant, stately and imposing. How great was my disappointment to see a most ordinary-looking man, below average height, in no way, literally in no way, distinguishable from ordinary mortals …. Usually, a great man comes late to a meeting so that his appearance may be awaited with baited breath. Then, just before the great man enters, the warning goes round: ‘Hush … silence … he is coming.’ The rite did not seem to me superfluous, because it created an impression and inspired respect. How great was my disappointment to see that Lenin had arrived at the conference before the other delegates were there and had settled himself somewhere in a corner and was unassumingly carrying on a conversation, with the most ordinary delegates. I will not conceal from you that at that time this seemed to me to be rather a violation of certain essential rules. (p.78, quoted from J. Stalin, Sochinenya, vol. vi, p.54)

Stalin wants to see Lenin as a Great Man and has a strong attachment to traditional protocols around hierarchy, masculinity and leadership. Duetscher provides a convincing picture of the young Stalin which explains the character of this hero-worship. Unlike the majority of Bolshevik leaders, Stalin’s parents were serfs. His early years are shaped by the incredibly strict and harsh conditions of the Theological Seminary of Tiflis, a town in the southern part of Russia close to the modern day state of Armenia. He rebels against the stifling authoritarian discipline of the Jesuits, and joins Messame Dassy, a social democratic organisation which is ‘tinged with Georgian patriotism[i]’. Stalin learns from a young age the art of secrecy and undercover maneuvers, taking on various pseudonyms to evade the watchful eyes of the monks. The implications Deutscher draws out of this background of cultural “backwardness” involve a series of inter-related descriptions of Stalin which neatly stack up against the exact opposite characteristics of his arch nemesis, Leon Trotsky. Stalin remains psychologically attached to the traditional mentality associated with orthodox religious practices, whereas Trotsky is a true atheist (in spite of his Jewish background). Trotsky is brilliant and highly educated, Stalin is mediocre and relatively uneducated. Trotsky finds his spiritual home in the metropolitan and cosmopolitan atmosphere of big European cities, Stalin rarely leaves Russia and retains the rural and ‘Asiatic’ influence of his native Georgia. It isn’t hard to join the dots and contrast the internationalist politics of Trotsky with Stalin’s later doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’.

Deutscher describes how Stalin cleverly out-maneuvers Trotsky in the period after Lenin’s death by helping to create a ‘Lenin cult’ which prevents the Bolsheviks from revoking or changing any decision made by Lenin in the previous years of the revolution. Stalin succeeds in codifying Lenin’s political doctrines into an ossified system of dogma, not at all unlike the authoritarian belief system of the Jesuits. Deutscher’s description of Lenin’s funeral brings all these elements together:

The elaborate ceremony was altogether out of keeping with the outlook and style of Lenin, whose sobriety and dislike of pomp were almost proverbial. The ceremony was calculated to stir the mind of a primitive, semi-oriental people into a mood of exaltation for the new Leninist cult. So was the Mausoleum in the Red Square, in which Lenin’s embalmed body was deposited, in spite of his widow’s protest and the indignation of many Bolshevik intellectuals. To myriads of peasants, whose religious instincts were repressed under the revolution, the Mausoleum soon became a place of pilgrimage, the queer Mecca of an atheistic creed, which needed a prophet and saints, a holy sepulchre and icons. Just as original Christianity, as it was spreading into pagan countries, absorbed elements of pagan beliefs and rites and blended them with its own ideas, so now Marxism, the product of western European thought, was absorbing elements of the Byzantine tradition, so deeply ingrained in Russia, and of the Greek Orthodox style. The process was inevitable. The abstract tenets of Marxism could exist, in their purity, in the brains of intellectual revolutionaries, especially those who had lived as exiles in western Europe. Now, after the doctrine had really been transplanted to Russia and come to dominate the outlook of a great nation, it could not but, in its turn, assimilate itself to that nation’s spiritual climate, to its traditions, customs, and habits. Imperceptibly, the process had been going on for some time. Nobody had had a deeper insight into it and felt more embarrassed by it than Lenin. His own death was the catharsis, which relieved many of his disciples from the inhibitions of pure Marxism. It revealed the degree of the mutual assimilation of doctrine and environment that had taken place so far. (p. 269)

The only references Deutscher provides in this entire section are to Stalin’s autobiography, plus a couple of Lenin quotes. The idea that Stalin took Lenin’s ideas and codified them into rigid and mechanical set of dogmas, infused with  an authoritarian religious aura, is to me unproblematic. The problem I have with Deutscher’s Stalinism-as-religion narrative is the hinted at, yet not quite explicit idea, that Stalin’s message was received by a credulous and fully ‘backward’ Byzantinian peasantry. Deutscher is not alone in referring to the cultural ‘backwardness’ of Russia, and there is surely a great deal of truth in the consensus that the vast majority of Russian peasants were uneducated and religious. But the idea that Stalin could easily sell them a cultified Lenin does not follow from this fact in an a priori fashion: where is the evidence? We might easily point to the ‘cult of personality’ which grew up around Stalin, but this was a much later development. What did everyday workers and peasants think of Lenin’s embalmment, how did they respond to Stalin’s crudely manipulative ‘oath to Lenin’, including lines such as “In leaving us, Comrade Lenin ordained us to hold high and keep pure the great title of member of the party. We vow to thee, Comrade Lenin, that we shall honourably fulfil this thy commandment”? It isn’t hard to speculate about a range of distinct reactions, from credulous emotional acceptance to suspicious distrust of Stalin’s motives. Deutscher seems far too content to rely uncritically on the familiar tropes about the backward, superstitious Byzantinian masses.

My mental alarm bells sounded off again when I came to Deutscher’s description of Stalin’s role in the early 1920s as the ‘Commisariat of Nationalities’:

Apart from the Ukraine, ruled by an independent-minded government under Christian Rakovsky, the Commissariat of Nationalities faced primarily Russia’s vast, inert, oriental fringe. None of the leaders who had spent most of their adult life in western Europe was as fit to head that Commissariat as Stalin. His first-hand knowledge of the customs and habits of clients was unsurpassed. So was his capacity to deal with the intricacies of their ‘politics’, in which blood feuds and oriental intrigue mixed with a genuine urge towards modern civilization. His attitude was just that mixture of patience, patriarchal firmness, and slyness that was needed. The Politbureau relied on this and refrained from interfering.

The Asiatic and semi-Asiatic periphery thus became his first undisputed domain. Immediately after the revolution, when the leadership of the nation belonged to the turbulent and radical cities of European Russia, in the first place to Petersburg and Moscow, the weight of that periphery was not much felt. With the ebb of revolution, the primitive provinces took their revenge. They reasserted themselves in a thousand ways, economic, political, and cultural. Their spiritual climate became, in a sense, decisive for the country’s outlook. The fact that so much of that climate was oriental was of great significance. Stalin, who was so well suited to speak on behalf of Russian communism to the peoples of the oriental fringe, was also well suited to orientalise his party. During his years at the Commissariat he made and widened his contacts with the Bolshevik leaders of the borderlands, on whose devoted support he could count, and of whom so many were to be found in his entourage at the Kremlin later on. (p.229 – 230)

Those wily and cunning Orientals! The only way to deal with them is to send out our hard man Stalin, he knows how they think and plot! This crude example of Orientalism only crops up a few times in the 600 odd pages of Deutscher’s book, but unfortunately it does play a role in answering the original question he poses about the reasons for Stalin’s success. According to Deutscher Stalin succeeds not just because of his murderous bureaucratic talents, but because he knows how to play to his audience. Uneducated, psychologically predisposed towards tyranny by hundreds of years of Tsarist rule, religious, Oriental, Byzantinian, superstitious, nationalistic – all of these aspects of ‘backwardness’ match up comfortably with Stalin’s totalitarian endeavours. Deutscher is never fully explicit about this claim, although it is a fairly clear subtext running throughout his narrative. It has a very peculiar and awkward corollary: if it is true, then the Stalinist state is not completely undemocratic. To the extent that Stalin succeeds by ‘playing to his audience’ (rather than killing people, for example), his power is gained through consent rather than force. From a western, educated and liberal perspective, Stalin’s rule appears cruel and tyrannical. But if you know the ‘truth’ about the natives, you will see that it is what they want, what suits their culture and undeniable ‘backwardness’.

Having made these critical remarks, mention needs to be made of the numerous threads in Deutscher’s biography which are compelling and insightful. The standout sections for me were his portrait of Stalin’s early years, his description of the devastation wrought by forced collectivisation, and the complex web of political strategy surrounding Hitler and ‘Third Period’ Stalinism. Deutscher’s biography has the virtue of opening up a window revealing the contours of both Stalin’s life and the political history of the first half of the twentieth century. Read critically, Duetscher’s text helps to make sense of the weird and chilling impact of Stalinism.

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[i] P.19