Ben: I think I have a decent working definition of Marxism: A commitment to construe {locally and originally economic inequality, globally and convergently adaptive diversity} as conflict¹, with a decorative camouflage of a jargon-laden pseudotheory with which a priestly caste can mark itself, and the lure of posturing in favor of victims and the intention to rectify injustice which helps it recruit well-intentioned people.²³⁴

Michael: Do you think that pattern is specific to Marxism? Intuitively I can't see other examples. But the priestly caste is necessarily unequal and adaptively diverse, so there's an internal problem with the definition I think.

Ben: What's the problem with my definition?

Michael: The inequality and adaptive diversity woven through Marxism itself.

Ben: Esoterically, Marxism correctly construes itself as committed to conflict⁵. The apparent contradiction is only a problem for people who take the posturing in favor of helping victims and rectifying injustice literally as the implied motive. Causing problems for other people is completely consistent with something committed to conflict.

Michael: But Marxism isn't construing lots of differences as conflict, such as the differences between groups within the DEI coalition. Kamala's favorite quote "unburdened by what has been" seems to me to imply a conflict with memory, not with other forms of difference.

Ben: Isn't Marxism actually construing those differences as conflict? It seems to me like Marxism is just engaging in coalition politics with partners that have varying levels of naïveté and time preference. The implied mid-game is something like an Ayn Rand novel⁶, and the endgame is something like the Indian caste system in which the priests control the nominally powerful as ritual scapegoats, and sell the oppressed's hope for regime change back to them as Brahmin-mediated Shiva-worship⁷.

Michael: I agree with those characterizations of Marxism. But that reduces the extent to which Marxism is differentiated from other priestly phenomena. And what about cases like Cuba? Their communism really seems to be what it says on the tin. Maybe Kerala in India too. Possibly some other places.

Ben: Communism seems to refer to something different but coalitionally related to Marxism. I'm a bit confused by your objection, though. I'm giving something like a diachronic functional description of how a local, historically contingent bit of opportunism converges towards a deep attractor basin of a generalized priestly caste.

Communism in the 20th Century sense seems like an attempt at a full stack international relations strategy, which branched off from Marxism. It used Marxism's overt anti-capitalist commitment as a pretext for a coordinated one-time sovereign commitment default to finance the construction of a network of modern industrial states in areas that didn't have them before.

I think the hope was implicitly that a one-time default would allow for better, less ironic central planning than the Anglosphere's commitment to perpetual corruption of accounts. Interesting analogy to Calvinism here: both Calvinism and Communism represented attempts to make a "one-time break” from inefficient and stifling commitments, that would enable a new, more economically efficient arrangement, without forgoing the ability to make some commitments in the new regime. See Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency⁸

And on the more cynical side, the idealistic-seeming anti-capitalist ideology made it less obvious that the construction of new anticapitalist local elites was just gangsterism. Yet Cuba and China seem to have performed relatively strongly on the hope side of the ledger.

I guess I'm saying thank God for Communism because it saved half the world from Marxism? Not a conclusion I would've drawn before this conversation.

If you live in prerevolutionary Russia, China, or the Ottoman Empire, you see a lot of time and resources tied down in locally stable feudal/manorial relations. If you try to escape this by getting colonized by Western Europe or Japan, you expect them to at best extract most of the surplus. You might reasonably decide to instead roll the dice on a modernization project that intends to hold onto the surplus locally. Some plausible-seeming opportunists are organizing around an ideology created by dispossessed western priests for other purposes.

In Latin America, the situation is similar, except they've already been colonized by Western Europeans.

The definition I offered of Marxism makes it pretty clear how to define early capitalism too: a system committed to construing human life as abstract agents that own claims on property, and enforceable formal contracts between those agents that reapportion property claims under well-specified conditions.

Michael: But only the Dutch have ever been all that far in the direction of classical Capitalism as a distinct ideology from Liberalism or Conservatism, as far as I can tell.

Ben: The English got pretty close, as did the Americans for a while under English influence. And that means capitalism governed quite a lot of people for quite a long time to varying degrees. Because capitalism isn't nationalistic the way Communism is, it doesn't need to replicate a bunch of local identities.

Capitalism seems more like a deep attractor basin comparable to Brahminism, than like a historically contingent path to one such as Marxism. Capitalism's an attractor because it's what you're moving towards when you're trying to realize gains from trade at scale, and over distances of space, time, and culture. It's a convergent abstract protocol (like arithmetic or the categorical imperative), while Communism is a tactic for parlaying the popularity of Marxism into a local modernization program. Another way to think about it is that Communism is a hack to make different Nationalisms cooperate better with each other by coopting Marxist ideology.

Lots of starting points make pursuing more gains from trade seem profitable. It seems to me like the Italian merchant cities, the Fuggers, and the Hansa were all practicing something much like capitalism, and the Dutch are mainly distinguished by being a mid-ranked sovereign power largely governed by capitalism.

Michael: Is what you're describing distinct from Islamic style minimal state commercialism?

Ben: The Italians and the Fuggers used credit in an un-Islamic way I think; Islamic finance forbids charging interest on debt, so it strongly favors equity investment, which I think the Italians and Fuggers used credit in a more modern way. I don't know to what extent Islamic merchant families ended up composing something like corporate synthetic persons for the purpose of collective ventures.

Liberalism and conservatism are clusters of thinkers trying to make sense of themselves in a capitalizing system, much as Buddhism emerged from an earlier era where urbanized commerce had recently emerged as the preeminent mode of governance.

I guess the thing that really distinguished the capitalist era from prior proto-capitalist arrangements was the perceived need for an ideology to instruct centralized bureaucracies how to imagine and support the emergent coordination system. In other words, the need to produce something to fill the Roman Catholicism-shaped hole in English governance institutions.⁹

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1. This is rendered more persuasive because, of course, many such differences are due to conflict, and many people deny this in bad faith, so it is easy for Marxists to derive dialectical validation from pointing out cases where the other side in the drama is in fact wrong and the Marxists are in fact right. I describe the general pattern in The Drama of the Hegelian Dialectic. ↩︎
2. Galen's model of circulation was wrong, William Harvey's was right, so Galen's model is no longer taught in schools. There isn't the same sort of error correction in Marxism; rather, while some aspects of the theory are refined and improved on, some core beliefs are better understood as commitments than as conclusions (so any arguments in favor of them are specious). Cf The Bottom Line ↩︎
3. Marxists enact a drama of being on the side of the oppressed, so some people who want to help people who are hurt and wronged think that a good way to do this is to join the Marxists and help with their project. ↩︎
4. Upon formulating this definition it became obvious how to analogously define capitalism: a system of governance committed to construing human relations in terms of abstract agents (legal persons) with canonically registered claims on property (including the bodies that in many cases compute those agents), and formal contracts by which those claims are reassigned under well-specified conditions. ↩︎
5. If you take Marxists literally, rather than trying to follow the instructions implied in their postures, this conclusion follows from their doctrine, though it's generally not stated too explicitly. Cf On Straussian Esoteric Readings ↩︎
6. I'm thinking of The Fountainhead, where the Platonist puppetmaster Ellsworth Monkton Toohey manipulates various morally compromised people into attacking the hero, with disregard for the well-being of his tools, so that if they stop being useful he discards them, and Atlas Shrugged, where the moochers gradually turn on each other & there's an implied process of sorting and selection.
   
   See also this thing I wrote in another context, in response to this prompt:
   
   Like since the agricultural revolution enabled the storage of surplus energy, there has always been the problem of bandit gangs
   Traditional thing to do was pick the least bad one and make their leader your king
   AFAICT that’s where aristocrats come from
   And then you can do commerce and law and rights and such in a bubble where you’re defended from all the other bandit gangs by the one you’ve married/captured/installed as king or whatever
   
   My response:
   Seems in practice more likely to be in an iterated game in which, in response to to foreign bandits, various groups form armies that tax them to varying degrees with varying levels of effective time preference, things with time preference too low for their environment get conquered, and things with too high time preference burn out. And then things with time preference consistent with medium run survival have varying levels of resistance to rot, and ability to adapt to new circumstances. ↩︎
7. Braudel’s A History of Civilizations describes the Indian caste attractor basin in some detail, as well as the quite distinct Mandarin sytem in China. ↩︎
8. Calvinism worked better than Communism, and was better grounded theoretically, since Communism depends on Marxism, which is dishonest, while Calvinism basically seems honest albeit a little confused to me. I think that because Calvinism engaged at all metaphysically with a theory of agency, and the limits of that agency, it unlocked higher-trust coordination for longer, while Communism produced systems that were corrupted faster and produced less surplus along the way, though still quite a lot!
   Dutch style joint stock corporations financing major overseas ventures seem legitimately beyond the capacity of other civilizations, while Communism pretty much replicated industrialization already achieved in many Capitalist societies, rather than creating obviously new capacities. ↩︎
9. Henry VIII confiscated a bunch of Catholic property and repudiated the Church, but didn't have a good substitute, so the system was unstable until it imported Dutch Republican Capitalism, and eventually created a liberal theology for its government. ↩︎