Stock ownership as system-wide exploitation?

 

A prior post made an effort to gain greater analytical clarity concerning the unfairness involved in the separation between the “one percent” economy and the rest of us. In what ways is the wealth owned by the super-billionaires an “unfair” extraction from the rest of US society? How can we account for the very rapid accumulation of wealth in the hands of the richest 1 percent of US wealth holders since 1980? The answer seems to largely turn on the rapid expansion in wealth represented by the US stock market over that period, and the fact that a very small number of wealth holders captured the lion’s share of these gains. The following graph shows a five-fold increase in the value of the US equity market in part of that time, from about $12 trillion in 1998 to $52 trillion in 2024. The wealth owned by the top 1% of households increased at about the same rate, which implies that this class rode the wave to wealth right along with the stock market in those years. “Corporate equities and mutual fund shares” are the largest component by far of the wealth portfolios of the top .1% and 1%, as reflected in the second chart below, produced by the Federal Reserve.

Screenshot

It was shown in the earlier post that the growth of the super-billionaires’ share of the nation’s wealth cannot be explained in normal “business profit” terms. (For reference, the top twenty billionaires in the US own 2.8 trillion dollars of wealth; link.) Rather, the bulk of the wealth now held by individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos represents the rapid appreciation of value in capital markets of the companies in which they have large ownership stakes. The companies themselves do not generate billions of dollars in dividends; rather, their total stock value has witnessed billions of dollars in gains over very short periods of time.

So why should we think this is in any way unfair? How is it exploitative? Is it not more like the fortunate visitor to “Antiques Road Show” who finds that the forgotten painting in the closet is in fact an early Picasso and is worth millions on the art market? This is good fortune for the owners of the canvas, but surely these facts don’t suggest “exploitation” of anyone else. Perhaps not in the case of the Antiques Road Show guest; but the majority owner of Amazon, Tesla, or Meta is in a different set of circumstances. Rather, the existence and continuing success of these companies depends on background conditions to which all sectors and components of the US economy contribute: a stable system of law and regulation, a robust education and research sector, a skilled workforce, an infrastructure of roads, ports, rail lines, fiber optic cables, and electricity providers. The value of US companies is at least in part a system effect: it is facilitated and constituted by a vast network of private and public stakeholders, all of whom contribute ultimately to the success of the company and the value it finds within the equity market. So the value of the US company is inseparable from the large and heterogeneous economic and political system in which it operates, and the increase in value over time of the US company reflects the continuing contribution expected by the investing public from the functioning of that system.

It will be said, of course, that the companies and their executives themselves contribute to the value that investors attribute to them: innovative products, good management systems, efficient decision-making, appropriate personnel practices, “entrepreneurship” and risk-taking. This is true. But it is also true that these contributions represent only a portion of the increase in value that the company experiences over time. The system effects described here represent an independent and important component of that substantial increase in value. So we might say that “system-created increase in value” is the uncompensated part of wealth creation in today’s economy. Companies pay little or nothing to cover the cost of these system-level inputs on which they depend; these are the inverse of “externalities”, in that they are benefits taken without compensation from the public (rather than harms imposed without compensation on the public). And these system-created increments in value constitute a very important part of the increase in value that they experience over time.

We might therefore look at “system-created increase in value” as the counterpart to “unpaid labor time” in the classic theory of exploitation. It is the source of wealth (profit) that the owners of wealth derive simply in virtue of their position in the property system and in their opportunity to benefit from the economic system upon which they depend. But now it does not derive from the “surplus value” contributed to profits by each worker, but rather from the synergies created by the socio-economic system as a whole.

It should also be noted that the ability of private companies to “extract” value from system-level inputs without compensation depends on their ability collectively to influence government policy. Therefore owners of private companies and stock wealth have strong incentives to shape the decision-making of elected officials, government policy makers, the fiscal system, and the regulatory process. This reinforces the arguments made by Thomas Volscho and Nathan Kelly in “The Rise of the Super-Rich: Power Resources, Taxes, Financial Markets, and the Dynamics of the Top 1 Percent, 1949 to 2008” (link). It follows, then, that achieving powerful influence on public policy and economic rule-making is not just a hobby for the oligarchy; it is an existential necessity.

This analysis of “system-input exploitation” has important consequences for distributive justice. If the whole of society contributes to the creation of the system-level properties that generate a significant fraction of the new wealth created in the past forty years, then surely fairness requires that all participants should receive some part of the gains. It would seem logical for the non-wealth-holding stakeholders — workers, farmers, and uncompensated contributors to social reproduction — to demand economic reforms that direct a fair share of that new wealth to the benefit of the whole population.

The previous post suggested one possible mechanism that would do this. The post discusses a hypothetical “public investment fund” that “would be automatically vested with ownership shares of businesses and corporations as they are created and grow, and that would function as a ‘wealth reserve’ for all citizens”. This would constitute a large and growing asset to be used for the benefit of the whole of society. In that discussion a distribution of gains resulting in public ownership of 1/3 of all capital was considered. Such a division would reduce (though not eliminate) the most extreme inequalities of wealth that currently exist, and would provide a financial basis for a more genuine “free community of equals” through the secure establishment of a high level of the resources most needed — healthcare, education and training, environmental protection, and provisioning of basic human needs for children, the disabled, the elderly, and the unemployed.

This idea of a public investment fund corresponding to the “systemic value creation” of the economy might go a long way towards the securing political values embodied in John Rawls’s concept of a “property-owning democracy” (link). Rawls argues that “the equal worth of liberty” is incompatible with a society in which political influence is proportional to wealth and where wealth is extremely unequally distributed. Wealth inequality of this magnitude means that the oligarch’s liberty and worth are magnified many times relative to the ordinary citizen’s situation. The creation of a substantial public investment fund representing the value created by our social, economic, and political system of cooperation would reduce the total proportion of the total value of the economy that the multi-billionaire class is able to expropriate. It would create real property entitlements for the great majority of society, and it would redress the current horrendous inequality of political influence that exists between the super-rich and the ordinary citizen.

A new form of exploitation

 

Much thinking about economic justice for working people has been framed by the nineteenth-century concept of “capitalism”: owners of enterprises constitute a minority of the population; they hire workers who represent the majority of the population; wages and profits define the distribution of income throughout the whole population. This picture still works well enough for a range of economic activities in the advanced capitalist economies when it comes to manufacturing, agriculture, and service industries. According to recent tabulations by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (link), there were 158 million workers in wage and salary employment in 2023. Manufacturing represented 8.2%, retail and wholesale trade 13.7%, information 1.9%, financial services 5.8%, leisure and hospitality 10.5%, and federal and state government 14.4%. This adds up to 54.5% of the US labor force, and these workers and firms can be thought of in roughly the framework offered by the traditional idea of “capitalism”. Many of these workplaces are amenable to union representation (though relatively few are in fact unionized). But improving access to union rights and workplace consultation would significantly improve the conditions of life for this segment of the US population.

Marx’s view of the unfairness of capitalism, then, comes down to workplace exploitation — the capture of “surplus value” by the firm’s owner from the workers whom he or she employs. Profits derive solely from surplus value, so wealth accumulation is fundamentally limited by the size of an enterprise.

However, current realities seem to suggest that this classical Marxist account is no longer sufficient. To see this point it is crucial to look at the details of the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. Consider the graph of median US income by quintile above in constant 2018 dollars. Since 1989 only the top quintile of household income has demonstrated significant growth (in a timeframe of more than thirty years); and the top 5% of households shows the greatest increase of any group. 80% of US households are barely better off today than they were in 1967; whereas the top 5% of households have increased their incomes by almost 250% in real terms. The bottom 80% range in household income from “poor”, the bottom 20% at an average household income of about $14,000, to the second quintile (60%-80%) of about $102,000. But virtually all of these households — 80% of all households — earn their livings through wage and salary income, in “capitalist” workplaces.

Further, only a very small fraction of these households are in a position to accumulate significant savings or investments. As the second graph shows, the bottom 50% of households have only 2.6% of all U.S. wealth, and the 50%-90% segment owns only another 30.8%. The top 0.1% owns 13.9% of all wealth, and the remainder of the top 1% owns 16.6%. That amounts to 30.5% of all wealth, held by 1% of households — and almost incomprehensible figure.

These two graphs have a very clear, unmistakable implication: that working people, including service workers, industrial workers, and most professionals have received a declining share of the economic product of the nation over the past 40 years. (Amazon warehouse workers fall in the 2nd-lowest quintile (poorest 21-40%).) Further, the vast majority of U.S. residents have only a tiny share of all property in the U.S. According to the Federal Reserve 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, median household net worth in 2022 was $192,700, including private savings, retirement savings, and personal property and home value (link). And, of course, this implies that the median household net worth of the bottom 80% of the U.S. population is significantly lower.

It seems apparent, then, that capitalist exploitation is no longer the primary mechanism through which wealth is accumulated by the top 10%, 1%, and .1% of wealth holders. The top group gains income at a rapid rate and increases its share of the national wealth comparably; whereas the bottom 80% have almost stagnant incomes and negligible wealth. And this accumulation occurs almost entirely through rising value of the stock issued on behalf of private companies. The national economy generates all of this wealth; but the vast preponderance of the fruits of this production flow to the top 10% and 1% of wealth holders. This is a different kind of exploitation: not exploitation of a specific group of workers (employees of General Motors, for example); but exploitation of the whole of the U.S. economy for the benefit of a tiny minority of wealth holders.

Essentially it seems fair to say that the contemporary U.S. system involves two economies — one that includes 60%-80% of all people, and who depend on wages and salaried income to earn their livings; and a second economy that is itself steeply stratified, involving only the top 10%-20% of households. This second economy includes highly paid professionals, executives, and individuals who derive a substantial income from investments, financial assets, and other capital assets. The distribution of income and wealth in this second economy depends on ownership of capital (including human capital) of increasing value in a “knowledge” economy.

It appears, then, that the gross advancement of wealth inequalities in the past three decades has little to do with traditional “exploitation” – an unfavorable wage relationship between owners and workers. Instead, the sudden explosion of tech-oligarchy in the US seems to have to do with financial markets, the stock value of private companies, and the environment of business and tax policy in which they operate. The super-wealthy class in the US came into multi-billionaire status through the rapid acceleration of market value of companies like Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook/Meta. And this process reflected a macro-level mechanism that we might describe as “exploitation of the US economy as a whole” rather than “exploitation of a specified group of workers employed by these companies.

Thomas Volscho and Nathan Kelly provide a careful analysis of the dynamics of income inequality in the US economy over time in “The Rise of the Super-Rich: Power Resources, Taxes, Financial Markets, and the Dynamics of the Top 1 Percent, 1949 to 2008” (link). They note that there was considerable variation in the share of income flowing to the top one percent between 1900 and 2020, with a rapid rise beginning in about 1980. And they attribute much of this variation to facts about political power, public policy, and fiscal legislation. (This bundle of hypotheses is referred to as “Power Resources Theory”.) And a key finding in this literature is that the relative levels of political power and influence held by economic elites versus working people have a very large effect on the degree and direction of change in inequality at the top.

Consider the short history of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth increased from 2008 from $1.5 billion to $236 billion in 2025. The employee count of Facebook/Meta increased comparably during that period, from 85 employees in 2008 to 76,800 employees in 2025. But Zuckerberg’s wealth does not reflect the “surplus value” created by these workers, but rather the perceived value of the company in the eyes of private and institutional investors. And critically, it is difficult to imagine institutional changes within Facebook/Meta that would lead to greater overall societal equity simply by providing the company’s workers more input into the management of the company. The median income for a Facebook/Meta worker is $257K – hardly an exploitative wage. It is the rest of society that is disadvantaged by Zuckerberg’s $236 billion, not the direct employees. The same seems to be true for Tesla and the wealth accumulated by Elon Musk and for Amazon and the wealth of Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s business operations have many of the same features of domination and exploitation identified by Engels in Manchester; but these operations do not constitute the fundament of Bezos’s wealth except perhaps for the “performative” of a company single-mindedly devoted to efficiency and speed of operations.

The experience of the reforms of the welfare state after WWII shows that capitalist exploitation can be reformed through measures that improve the public provision of some crucial services (education, healthcare, retirement income, unemployment insurance); improve the ability of workers to represent themselves effectively in the workplace (legislation ensuring unionization rights); and improve conditions of health and safety in the workplace (OSHA protection). These reforms are “redistributive” in the sense that they depend on taxation of income and profits of private individuals and corporations to fund public provisioning. But can reforms like these address the inequalities — economic and political — created by the two economies described here? Can the oligarchy economy be reined in? It would seem that the answer is “no”.

So we are forced to ask, what kinds of fiscal and tax reforms could effectively rein in the wealth inequalities created at the very top of the wealth distribution? The annual wealth taxes proposed by progressive Democrats extend to taxes in the range of 1%. But this would represent a negligible reduction in the oligarch’s portfolio, and does essentially nothing to reduce the steepness of the distribution of wealth in America. A “confiscatory” tax of 33% would have a measurable effect by increasing available public funds for expenditure; but even reducing Elon Musk’s wealth from $368 billion to $245 billion – still results in a staggering inequality relative to 99% of US workers. And this still leaves the wealth-holder with a million-fold advantage in his/her political and media influence relative to almost all other US persons. (As mentioned above, the median net worth of all Americans is currently about $192,000. It is of course striking that three of America’s largest tech-oligarchs privately own a media company: Zuckerberg (Facebook), Musk (X/Twitter), and Bezos (the Washington Post).)

It appears, then, that standard “New Deal” or “welfarist” approaches to greater economic equality have no prospect for success whatsoever when it comes to reducing the overwhelming inequalities of wealth that exist between the two US economies described here. A graduated income tax works to moderate income inequalities (when it works at all); but the rapid accumulation of wealth represented by the emergence of the “tech-oligarchy” and the graph of wealth distribution above do not derive from income inequalities. The richest 1% did not primarily gain their wealth through annual savings from their high salaries; rather, they gained their wealth through stock ownership in companies whose value appreciated exponentially during the time of their ownership. And taxing the holders of wealth on the income generated by their holdings does not materially affect the distribution of wealth across the population and across generations.

Suppose we viewed a national economy as an interconnected and highly complex form of “joint production”, in which the efforts of all parties are instrumental in the creation of the new wealth and prosperity of the economy. And suppose we believe that this system should be organized as a “fair system of cooperation” in which all parties benefit in a fair way. Can the workings of capital markets and financial systems be incorporated into our institutions in ways that would give the working public (the 80%) a fair share of the products of cooperation? Could we imagine a fiscal mechanism that would provide the public with a “fair share” of the U.S. economy as a whole, including the growth of the value of private companies (Caterpillar, General Motors, Krogers, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, …)?

For example, would it be possible to imagine a public investment agency along the lines of CalPERS that would be automatically vested with ownership shares of businesses and corporations as they are created and grow, and that would function as a “wealth reserve” for all citizens? Suppose the hypothetical “public investment corporation” eventually possessed assets worth about 1/3 of the total value of the US stock market. (The value of stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange is currently $28.3 trillion, so we are imagining a public wealth fund of about $10 trillion.) On this model, private owners and shareholders would own 2/3 of the capitalized economy, and the public would own 1/3. Would such a system be feasible? Could such a system redress the insupportable economic and material inequalities that exist in our country? Could it redress the gross inequalities of influence and power that exist between a tiny class of oligarchs and the vast majority of democratic citizens? Could the shareholder voting rights that correspond to the public shares created in this way serve to alter corporate priorities?

It seems clear that the photo below taken from Donald Trump’s inauguration represents a horrendous flaw in contemporary democracy. The “tech oligarchs” turned out in force for the new administration, and a group of wholly committed political partisans stand behind them to enact policies in the United States that serve their interests. If this is the best that our democracy can currently offer working people, then we need to work much harder at finding political and economic solutions that can elicit broad support from ordinary citizens, workers, farmers, and Uber drivers to push forward a better agenda for democratic equity.

Limitations of Hobsbawm's historical writing

A defining component of Eric Hobsbawm’s historical writings is the quartet of “Age” books: Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire, and Age of Extremes. These are synthetic works, offering a narrative of the long nineteenth century and the short twentieth century. They give primary attention to developments pertaining to economic, political, and social change in Britain, Europe, and North America, with occasional commentary on the rest of the world (Asia, Africa, and South America). Perhaps the most interesting of these is the first of them, Age of Revolution. Hobsbawm’s central interest – the central story he tries to tell – is the unfolding of the “dual revolutions” – the industrial revolution and the French Revolution – and the consequences these revolutions had for the lives, political identities, and historical agency and activism of working people. These revolutions formed “modernity”, whether in technology, in political forms, or in conditions of material life. And they gave rise to the central social formations (“great classes”) and political ideologies (nationalism, socialism, fascism) that continue to orient our world today.

These books are highly detailed. But we should observe that they are almost entirely grounded in secondary scholarship – Hobsbawm seems to have read almost everything written on this two-century period, and has undertaken to crystallize the main currents of research and interpretation into a reasonably coherent and connected narrative. But very little of the Age of Revolution depends upon Hobsbawm’s own primary research as a social historian. And though the tone of the narrative is even-handed and calm, the impression emerges over the 350-plus pages of the book that it is very deeply informed by the narrative of the Communist ManifestoConditions of the Working Class in England. This is a coherent narrative; but there are other stories that might be told of the nineteenth century, and other organizing themes that might be the hinges of the story.

Hobsbawm’s own primary scholarship focused on “indigenous” class movements and uprising, largely in England. He was a labor historian, and he was interested in uncovering documents and narratives that shed light on the ways that ordinary working people in the 18th and 19th centuries lived, how they conceived of the social relations around them, and how they rebelled. Key works here include Labour’s Turning Point 1880-1900 (1948), Primitive Rebels: Studies in archaic forms of social movements in the 19th and 20th centuries (1959), Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (1964), and Captain Swing (1969; co-authored with George Rudé). The recurring theme of these earlier works was the topic of resistance and popular identities among “working people”. In “Captain Swing: A Retrospect” (link) Adrian Randall describes Hobsbawm’s orientation in these terms:

Hobsbawm’s earlier work, mainly concentrated on the labour history of later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was steeped in the well- established Marxist interpretation of economic and social history which saw the years from the later eighteenth century as marking an industrial revolution which had transformed economic, and thence social and political, relations into a more clearly class-divided form. The displacement of a peasantry and the degradation of agricultural labourers formed part of that narrative. (Randall 2009: 421)

But even here Hobsbawm’s role seems to be synthetic rather than primary. The division of labor in Captain Swing seems to divide sharply between Rudé’s primary scholarship on eighteenth-century uprisings (Randall 2009:421) and Hobsbawm’s synthetic historical imagination, guided by Marx’s conceptualization of history. Here too, then, Hobsbawm works as a theoretically-minded historical narrativist rather than as a primary historical researcher.

Might we say, then, that we need less from a historian than what Hobsbawm gives us? Hobsbawm paints a consistent, detailed picture of the evolution of social unrest. But it is fundamentally just an extensive interpretation based on a reading of secondary sources, and it may even be a caricature – certain features may be over-drawn and others minimized, in order to make the coherent and consistent Marxist story plain. But we don’t want our knowledge of history to be “pre-digested” according to a prior plan; we want a reasonable, evidence-based account that is open to contingency, unexpected developments, and details that do not fit the model.

In my mind I contrast Hobsbawm’s Ages books with Jill Lepore’s These Truths, which provides an account of the history of the United States that is not wedded to any particular trope. Instead, Lepore seeks to document and discuss the many themes that enter into US history, without bending the edges to make the facts fit the frame. And I think of more regional and local historians, such as William Sewell (Work and Revolution in France), whose analysis of the “working-class consciousness” of working people of Marseille breaks many stereotypes of the Marxist hymnal. And Sewell’s work, unlike Hobsbawm’s, is deeply grounded in his own research on primary documents and sources. Here is how Lynn Hunt describes Sewell’s primary research in Work and Revolution (link):

Sewell’s sources are eclectic: they range from a philosophical tract by Diderot to the statutes of mutual-aid societies, from artisanal and working-class newspapers to quasi-official reports on the conditions of the working poor, from intellectual tracts on socialism to workers’ poetry. All these comprise “a set of interrelated texts that demand close reading and careful exegesis” (11-12). Sewell rereads and reinterprets these texts with an eye for their linguistic and historical logic. The “socialist vision of labor” was a logical development of certain fundamental Enlightenment concepts, but that logic was pushed forward not so much by intellectual as by social and political developments, in particular, by the revolutionary “bursts” of 1830-34, 1839-40, and 1848-51 (278). In attempting to explicate this “dialectical logic,” Sewell synthesizes an extensive published literature on French labor, and he effectively underlines the importance of paying very close attention to what people in the past said, sometimes indirectly, about what they were doing.

Perhaps this suggests that we need another category of historical misrepresentation beyond the two offered by Andrus Pork (link). In addition to “direct lies” and “blank-page lies”, we need “interpretations of history cut to order by an antecedent interpretation of history”.

Moses Finley's persecution by McCarthyism

MI Finley (1912-1986) played a transformative role in the development of studies of the ancient world in the 1960s through the 1980s. He contributed to a reorientation of the field away from purely textual and philological sources to broad application of contemporary social science frameworks to the ancient world. His book The Ancient Economy (1973) was especially influential.

Finley was born in the United States, but most of his academic career unfolded in Britain. The reasons for this "brain drain" are peculiarly America. Like many other Americans -- screenwriters, actors, directors, government officials, and academics -- Finley became enmeshed in the period of unhinged political repression known as McCarthyism. Finley was named as a member of the Communist Party of the United States by fellow academic Karl Wittfogel in his own sworn testimony to the McCarran Committee (United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security). (Pat McCarran (D-NEV) was also the primary sponsor of the Subversive Activities Control Act (1950), which provided for mandatory registration of members of the Communist Party and created the legal possibility of "emergency detention" of Communists. Police state institutions!) When Finley was called to testify under oath to the committee, he declined to answer any questions based on his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. He was subsequently fired by Rutgers University for his refusal to answer the committee's questions. (Daniel Tompkins' essay "Moses Finkelstein and the American Scene: The Political Formation of Moses Finley, 1932-1955" provides some valuable information about the first half of Finley's career until he departed the United States; link.)

It should be noted that one's Fifth Amendment rights do not allow the witness to pick and choose which questions he or she is willing to answer. Many of the witnesses who took the Fifth during this period were fully willing to discuss their own activities but were not willing to name associates -- for example, Case Western Reserve professor Marcus Singer. Here is a brief summary of Singer's case taken from his New York Times obituary (October 11, 1994).

In 1953, when he was on the Cornell University faculty, Dr. Singer was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and questioned about his political affiliations. He admitted having been a Communist until 1948, although he said he had never held a party card. He refused to name Communists he had known while teaching at Harvard, from 1942 to 1951, on grounds of "honor and conscience" and invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment.

In 1956, he was convicted of contempt of Congress, fined $100 and given a three-month suspended sentence in Federal District Court in Washington, which ruled that he had waived the Fifth Amendment's protection. In 1957 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit set aside the conviction, saying its ruling was required by a Supreme Court decision in a similar case. The court sent the case back to Federal District Court with instructions to enter a judgment of not guilty.

In hindsight the willing participation of university presidents, law professors, and other faculty in the effort to exclude Communists or former Communists from faculty positions, and to fire professors who chose to plead the fifth amendment rather than provide testimony to the various congressional committees about their associates seems to reflect an almost incredible level of hysteria and paranoia. Ellen Schrecker documents the compliant actions of many administrators, trustees, and fellow faculty members (link). This was a betrayal of the principles of academic and personal freedom. One does not need to be an advocate of the Communist Party in order to defend a strong principle of academic freedom for all professors; and yet administrators and faculty at many leading universities were eager to find ways of supporting these anti-Communist measures. Schrecker quotes an official statement of the AAU in 1953 that provided grounds for firing faculty for membership in the Communist Party and for refusal to testify about their activities (link):

The professor owes his colleagues in the university complete candor and perfect integrity, precluding any kind of clandestine or conspiratorial activities. He owes equal candor to the public. If he is called upon to answer for his convictions, it is his duty as a citizen to speak out. It is even more his duty as a professor. Refusal to do so, on whatever legal grounds, cannot fail to reflect upon a profession that claims for itself the fullest freedom to speak and the maximum protection of that freedom available in our society. In this respect, invocation of the Fifth Amendment places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society. (325)

The AAUP eventually issued a statement condemning firing of professors for these reasons in 1956; but the damage was done.

But what about MI Finley? Was he a member of the CP-USA? And did this membership influence his thinking, teaching, and writing? Was he unsuitable to serve as a professor at an American university? F.S. Naiden answers the first question unequivocally: "Incontrovertible evidence now shows that Moses Finkelstein, as he was then named, joined the Party in 1937–8. The Party official who enrolled him, Emily Randolph Grace, reported this information in a biographical note she wrote about Finley in order to prepare for an international conference in 1960" (link). And Naiden suggests that his membership continued through the mid-1940s. 

Let's take Naiden's assessment as accurate; so what? Should Finley's membership in the 1930s be viewed as basis for disqualification as a professor fifteen years later? Here the answer seems clear: Finley's choices in the 1930s reflected his political and social convictions, his ideas and thoughts, and should fairly be seen as falling within his rights of freedom of thought, speech, and association. If his political ideas led him to commit substantive violations of the law, of course it would be legitimate to charge him under the relevant law; but there is no suggestion that this was the case. So Finley's persecution in 1953 -- along with the dozens of other faculty members who were fired from US universities for the same reason -- is just that: persecution based on his thoughts and convictions.

And what about his teaching? Did his previous membership in the Communist Party interfere with his professional responsibilities to his students or to the academic standards of his discipline? Again, the answer appears to be unequivocal. Finley, like the great majority of other professors dismissed for their Communist beliefs, appeared to make a strong separation between his personal political beliefs and the content of his teaching. He did not use the classroom to indoctrinate his students. And his activism in the 1930s -- organizing, leafletting, efforts to persuade others -- was clearly separated from his academic performance. (He had not even completed his PhD during the prime years of his membership in the Communist Party.) So any unbiased observer from Mars would judge that Finley was a fully ethical academic.

Finally, what about his research and writing? Did his membership in the Communist Party distort his scholarship? Did it interfere with his ethical standards of honesty and evidence-based historical research? Again, by the evidence of his writing, this charge too seems wholly unsupportable. Finley was a superb scholar, and his research is grounded in a reasonable and extensive marshaling of evidence about the social and economic realities of the ancient world. Finley was not a communist hack; he was not a dogmatic ideologue; rather, he was a dedicated and evidence-driven scholar -- with innovative theoretical and methodological ideas.

It is especially interesting to read Finley's short essay on the trial of Socrates in the context of his political persecution in the United States in 1953 (Socrates on Trial, first published in slightly different form in Aspects of Antiquity in 1960). Though there is an obvious parallel between the trial of Socrates and the encounter between Finley and the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security -- in each case the accused is brought to legal process based on his thoughts and criticisms of the society in which he lives -- there is no indication in this text that Finley wishes to draw out this comparison. Instead, most of his essay focuses on the point that much of the trial of Socrates has been mythologized for political purposes -- to attack direct democracy and the tyranny of the majority. Plato's text is a work of literature, not a transcription of the details of the accusations and the responses of Socrates. 

Paradoxically, it is not what Socrates said that is so momentous, but what Meletus and Anytus and Lycon said, what they thought, and what they feared. Who were these men to initiate so vital an action? Unfortunately, little is known about Meletus and Lycon, but Anytus was a prominent patriot and statesman. His participation indicates that the prosecution was carefully thought through, not merely a frivolous or petty persecution.

And Finley attempts to understand the thinking of the jurors themselves by placing the trial in the context of the massive Athenian trauma of the Peloponnesian War and two devastating plagues:

One noteworthy fact in their lives was Athens had been engaged in a bloody war with Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 B.C. and did not end (though it was interrupted by periods of uneasy peace) until 404, five years before the trial. The greatest power in the Greek world, Athens led an exceptional empire, prosperous, and proud -- proud of its position, of its culture, and, above all, of its democratic system. But by 404 everything was gone: the empire, the glory, and the democracy. In their place stood a Spartan garrison and a dictatorship (which came to be known as the Thirty Tyrants). The psychological blow was incalculable, and there was not a man on the jury in 399 who could have forgotten it.

So Finley offers a historically dispassionate reading of the trial of Socrates. But we might draw out the essential parallel between the two cases anyway. We might say that Finley, like Socrates, was attacked because he "denied the gods of the city" -- in Finley's case, he challenged the unquestioned moral superiority of capitalism over socialism; and because he threatened to "corrupt the youth" -- to teach through his classroom and his example an unwholesome inclination to "communism". Might we say that the "crimes" of Socrates and Finley were similar after all, in the minds of their persecutors: they were too independent-minded and too critical of their society for the good of society?

I.F. Stone's Trial of Socrates offers a fascinating perspective on Socrates that is relevant to these connections to Finley; and in fact, Stone suggested to Finley that he should write a memoir of his experience (Tompkins (link) p. 5). In Trial of Socrates he writes: "Was the condemnation of Socrates a unique case? Or was he only the most famous victim in a wave of persecutions aimed at irreligious philosophers? ... Two distinguished scholars ... have put forward the view that fifth-century Athens, though often called the Age of the Greek Enlightenment, was also ... the scene of a general witch-hunt against freethinkers." The same words could apply to MI Finley and the dozens of other faculty members who lost their careers to McCarthyism, and to the regrettable failure of liberal democracy in those decades of ideological warfare against critics of capitalism.

Marxism and British historiography

It is noteworthy that some of the very best historical research and writing of the 1930s through 1970s in Britain was carried out by a group of Marxist historians, including E.P. Thompson, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and a few others. Many belonged to the British Communist Party and were committed to the idea that only sweeping revolution of economy and politics could bring to an end the exploitation and misery of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism. These historians did not align with the democratic socialists of the Fabian and Labour varieties (link), and the chief demarcation line had to do with the feasibility of gradual reform of advanced market economies. These were gifted and rigorous historians with a particular set of ideological commitments (link).

All of these historians researched some aspect or other of the history of "capitalism", an effort that required dispassionate and objective inquiry and assessment of the facts. Equally, all of them embraced a view of capitalism and a stylized history of capitalism that derived from Marx's writings -- especially Capital and the scattered writings defining the theory of historical materialism. Third, all of them had an ideological apple to peel (as a Dutch friend of mine used to say): they took the view that exploitation and misery were so intimately bound up in the defining institutions of capitalism that only wholesale revolution could root them out. And finally, most of them were politically committed to a party and a movement -- the Communist Party -- which itself made harsh demands on the thinking and writing of its adherents. The "party line" was not merely a form of discipline, it was an expression of loyalty to the cause of communism. And since Soviet communism dominated throughout the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, the party line was almost always "Stalinist" in the most dogmatic sense of the term. So the difficult question arises: how is it possible to reconcile a commitment to "honest history" with a commitment to Marxism and revolution?

Harvey Kaye's British Marxist Historians provides a detailed treatment of many of these historians, including Dobb, Hilton, Hill, Thompson, and Hobsbawm. Kaye fully recognizes the dual nature of the thinking of these historians: "I consider their work to be of scholarly and political consequence" (x). Kaye evidently believes that the scholarly and political commitments of these historians are in no way in conflict. But this is an assumption that must be examined carefully.

Kaye's book can be read as an effort to establish a careful geography of Marxist theoretical ideas about the development of capitalism and how those ideas were both used and transformed in the hands of these historians. His account of Dobb offers a detailed account of Dobb's view of a "non-economistic" historical treatment of capitalism, and he expends a great deal of effort towards identifying the key criticisms offered of Dobb's views by Paul Sweezy, Rodney Hilton, Robert Brenner, Perry Anderson, and others. The chapter can be read as a meticulous dissection of the definition of key ideas ("mode of production", "relations of production", "feudalism", "class conflict", ...) and the theoretical use that these various Marx-inspired historians make of these ideas to explicate "capitalist development" and the notion of "transition from feudalism" in its various historical settings. Most compelling is Kaye's treatment of E.P. Thompson's historical and theoretical writings. He makes it clear that Thompson provides a highly original contribution to the idea of "class determination" through his insistence on the dynamic nature of the formation of consciousness and experience in the men and women of the British laboring classes.

Kaye makes clear in his treatment of each of these historians that their research never took the form of a dogmatic spelling-out of ideas presented in Marx's writings, but rather a much more rigorous effort to make sense of the historical record of feudalism, the English Revolution, the early development of capitalist property relations, and the like. These were not Comintern hacks; they did not treat Marxism as a more-or-less complete theory of history, but rather as a set of promising insights and suggestions about historical processes that demand detailed investigation and analysis. And none of the books of these historians that Kaye discusses can be described as "orthodox Comintern interpretations" of historical circumstances. Kaye quotes Christopher Hill (102): "A great deal of Marxist discussion went on in Oxford in the early thirties. Marxism seemed to me (and many others) to make better sense of the world situation than anything else, just as it seemed to make better sense of seventeenth-century English history." And later in this chapter he quotes Hobsbawm (129): "An advantage of our Marxism -- we owe it largely to Hill ... was never to reduce history to a simple economic or 'class interest' determinism, or to devalue politics and ideology." These comments seem to point the way to partial resolution of the apparent conflict between political commitments and historical integrity: Marx's writings about capitalism, class, and historical materialism constitute something like a research programme or analytical framework for these historians, without eliminating the need for historical rigor and objectivity in searching out evidence concerning the details of historical development (in England, in France, or in Japan). 

If we wanted to assess the possible distortions of historical selection and analysis created by party commitments with regard to historical writing and inference, one natural place to look would be at the selection of topics for research. Are there topics in British history that are especially relevant to the ideological concerns of the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s, and did the British Marxist historians stay away from those topics? Kaye remarks on Hobsbawm's own assessment of the role the party line played in defining issues and positions for the British Marxist historians: very little, according to Hobsbawm (15). He quotes Hobsbawm: "There was no 'party line' on most of British history,' at least as far as they were aware at the time." So we can reasonably ask: when these historians treat "politically sensitive" topics, do the analyses they offer seem to reflect ideological distortions? 

Kaye notes that one topic that should be of interest to Marxist historians is the history of the labor movement in Britain. "The 'modern' historians of the Group were naturally most anxious to pursue and make known the history of the British labour movement and, no doubt, were encouraged in their efforts by the British Communist Party. And yet this was the one field in which constraint was felt in relation to the Party. As Hobsbawm has stated on a number of occasions, there were problems in pursuing twentieth-century labour history because it necessarily involved critical consideration of the Party's own activities" (12). Kaye also quotes from an interview Hobsbawm offered in 1978:

[Hobsbawm] acknowledges that he took up nineteenth-century history because when "I became a labour historian you couldn't really be an orthodox Communist and write publicly about, say, the period when the Communist Party was active because there was an orthodox belief that everything had changed in 1920 with the foundation of the C. P. Well I didn't believe it had, but it would have been impolite, as well as probably unwise, to say so in public". (134)

This passage makes it clear that Hobsbawm avoided twentieth-century British labor history precisely because the party line was in conflict with the historical realities as Hobsbawm saw them. So Hobsbawm refrained from writing about this period.

So a preliminary assessment is perhaps possible. When these Marxist historians went to work on a given historical topic, they exercised rigor and care in their assessments of the past; they enacted fidelity to the standards of honesty we would wish that historians universally embrace. And indeed, the historical work done by these historians does indeed conform to high standards of honesty and independence of mind -- even as the research focus on "capitalism" is framed in terms of Marxist concepts. But the example of Hobsbawm's statements about twentieth-century labor history imply that certain topics were taboo, precisely because independence of analysis would run counter to the party line. (Kaye also suggests that Hobsbawm's continuing adherence to the 'base-superstructure' model derived from his deference to the orthodox Party line on the nature of the mode of production; 135.)

But we can also ask an even more fundamental question: did the historians of this group take any public notice of the crimes of Stalinist USSR -- the Holodomor, the terror, the show trials, the Gulag? Or was explicit condemnation of systemic actions like the Holodomor or the Gulag too much of a repudiation of the Communist Party for these historians to accept? Should they have made public mention and condemnation of these occurrences? Does their silence cast doubt on their honesty as historians? To this question Kaye's book provides no clear basis for an answer.

It is intriguing to ask about Harvey Kaye's own ideological orientation. He makes it clear in the Preface that his book is a sympathetic treatment of the circle of British Marxist historians, and in fact he acknowledges feedback and comments from several of these authors. His later book, The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of History, is likewise committed to defending the insights offered by Western Marxist historians. So his is something of an insider's account of the Historians' Group. We can ask, then, whether Kaye's own sympathies have colored his assessment of the objectivity and rigor of the historians in this group. Does he bring the necessary critical edge that we would expect from an historiographic assessment of a group of historians? (I should confess too that the historians that Kaye studies are also among my list of favorites as well. I would add Marc Bloch and a few others from French and German history, but the broad framework of historical narrative and analysis developed by Dobb, Hilton, Thompson, and Hobsbawm is one that has been powerful for me as well.) 

My own assessment is that Kaye's sympathies do not distort his interpretations of these historians. Rather, he offers a careful, reflective, and knowledgeable analysis of the development of their historical ideas and the relations that emerged among them, and he documents the willingness of these historians to avoid the dogmas of CP-driven "party lines" about history. For example, Kaye's critique of Hobsbawm's continuing use of the base-superstructure model illustrates Kaye's willingness to apply a critical eye to these historians (154 ff.). Only obliquely does he address the hardest question, however: did these historians speak out about the atrocities and crimes of Stalinism? Many of these figures (not including Hobsbawm or Dobb) rejected Stalinism through their decision to leave the British Communist Party after the Soviet brutal use of force against Hungary in 1956. But this is still less than forthright recognition of the horrendous crimes of the Soviet dictatorship throughout the 1930s and 1940s, extending through the death of Stalin and beyond.

The penultimate paragraph of the book appears to encapsulate Kaye's own perspective as well as the collective view he attributes to the group of Marxist historians he considers:

In other words, they [British Marxist historians] have accepted that the making of a truly democratic socialism -- or libertarian communism, requires more than 'necessity' -- the determined struggle against exploitation and oppression -- and more than organization. It also requires the desire to create an alternative social order. And yet, even that is not enough. There must be a 'prior education of desire' for, as William Morris has warned: 'If the present state of society merely breaks up without a conscious effort at transformation, the end, the fall of Europe, may be long in coming, but when it does, it will be far more terrible, far more confused and full of suffering than the period of the fall of Rome.'

And this passage perhaps expresses an appealing resolution as well to the question of how to reconcile political commitment with historical objectivity.

(Ronald Grigor Suny has written quite a bit of interesting material on the falsifications offered by "Stalinist history". A few snapshots of his views can be found here: "Stalin, Falsifier in Chief: E. H. Carr and the Perils of Historical Research Introduction" and "The Left Side of History: The Embattled Pasts of Communism in the Twentieth Century".)

Eric Hobsbawm's history of the Historians' Group

photo: Hobsbawm at work

The British historian Eric Hobsbawm was a leading member of the British Communist Party-affiliated Historians' Group. This was a group of leading British historians who were members of the British Communist Party in the 1940s. In 1978 Hobsbawm wrote a historical memoir of the group recalling the important post-war decade of 1946-1956, and Verso Press has now republished the essay online (link). The essay is worth reading attentively, since some of the most insightful British historians of the generation were represented in this group.

The primary interest of Hobsbawm's memoir, for me anyway, is the deep paradox it seems to reveal. The Communist Party was not well known for its toleration of independent thinking and criticism. Political officials in the USSR, in Comintern, and in the European national Communist parties were committed to maintaining the party line on ideology and history. The Historians' Group and its members were directly affiliated with the CPGB. And yet some of Britain's most important social historians were members of the Historians' Group. Especially notable were Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Maurice Dobb, Raphael Samuel, Rodney Hilton, Max Morris, J. B. Jefferys, and Edmund Dell. (A number of these historians broke with the CPGB after 1956.) Almost all of these individuals are serious and respected historians in the first rank of twentieth-century social history, including especially Hobsbawm, Hill, E.P. Thompson, Dobb, and Hilton. So the question arises: to what extent did the dogmatism and party discipline associated with the Communist Party since its origins influence or constrain the historical research of these historians? How could the conduct of independent, truthful history survive in the context of a "party line" maintained with rigorous discipline by party hacks? How, if at all, did British Marxist historians escape the fate of Lysenko? 

The paradox is clearly visible in Hobsbawm's memoir. Hobsbawm is insistent that the CP members of the Historians' Group were loyal and committed communists: "We were as loyal, active and committed a group of Communists as any, if only because we felt that Marxism implied membership of the Party." And yet he is equally insistent that he and his colleagues maintained their independence and commitment to truthful historical inquiry when it came to their professional work:

Second, there was no 'party line' on most of British history, and what there was in the USSR was largely unknown to us, except for the complex discussions on 'merchant capital' which accompanied the criticism of M. N. Pokrovsky there. Thus we were hardly aware that the 'Asiatic Mode of Production' had been actively discouraged in the USSR since the early 1930s, though we noted its absence from Stalin's Short History. Such accepted interpretations as existed came mainly from ourselves— Hill's 1940 essay, Dobb's Studies, etc.—and were therefore much more open to free debate than if they had carried the by-line of Stalin or Zhdanov....

This is not to imply that these historians pursued their research in a fundamentally disinterested or politically neutral way. Rather, they shared a broad commitment to a progressive and labor-oriented perspective on British history. And these were the commitments of a (lower-case) marxist interpretation of social history that was not subordinate to the ideological dictates of the CP:

Third, the major task we and the Party set ourselves was to criticise non-Marxist history and its reactionary implications, where possible contrasting it with older, politically more radical interpretations. This widened rather than narrowed our horizons. Both we and the Party saw ourselves not as a sect of true believers, holding up the light amid the surrounding darkness, but ideally as leaders of a broad progressive movement such as we had experienced in the 1930s.... Therefore, communist historians—in this instance deliberately not acting as a Party group—consistently attempted to build bridges between Marxists and non-Marxists with whom they shared some common interests and sympathies. 

So Hobsbawm believed that it was indeed possible to be both Communist as well as independent-minded and original. He writes of Dobb's research: "Dobb's Studies which gave us our framework, were novel precisely because they did not just restate or reconstruct the views of 'the Marxist classics', but because they embodied the findings of post-Marx economic history in a Marxist analysis." And: "A third advantage of our Marxism—we owe it largely to Hill and to the very marked interest of several of our members, not least A. L. Morton himself, in literature—was never to reduce history to a simple economic or 'class interest' determinism, or to devalue politics and ideology." These points are offered to support the idea that the historical research of the historians of this group was not dogmatic or Party-dictated. And Hobsbawm suggests that this underlying independence of mind led to a willingness to sharply criticize the Party and its leaders after the debacle of 1956 in Hungary. 

But pointed questions are called for. How did historians in this group react to credible reports of a deliberate Stalinist campaign of starvation during collectivization in Ukraine in 1932-33, the Holodomor? Malcolm Muggeridge, a left journalist with a wide reputation, had reported on this atrocity in the Guardian in 1933 (link). And what about Stalin's Terror in 1936-1938, resulting in mass executions, torture, and the Gulag for "traitors and enemies of the state"? How did these British historians react to these reports? And what about the 1937 show trials and executions of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov, along with hundreds of thousands of other innocent persons? These facts too were available to interested readers outside the USSR; the Moscow trials are the subject of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, published in 1941. Did the historians of the Historians' Group simply close their eyes to these travesties? And where does historical integrity go when one closes his eyes? 

Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and many ex-communist intellectuals have expressed the impossible contradictions contained in the idea of "a committed Communist pursuing an independent and truth-committed inquiry" (link, link, link). One commitment or the other must yield. And eventually E. P. Thompson came to recognize the same point; in 1956 he wrote a denunciation of the leadership of the British Communist Party (link), and he left the Communist Party in the same year following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. 

Hobsbawm's own career shows that Hobsbawm himself did not confront honestly the horrific realities of Stalinist Communism, or the dictatorships of the satellite countries. David Herman raises the question of Hobsbawm's reactions to events like those mentioned here in his review of Richard Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History and Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (link). The picture Herman paints is appalling. Here is a summary assessment directly relevant to my interest here:

However, the notable areas of silence -- about Jewishness and the crimes of Communism especially -- are, ultimately, devastating. Can you trust a history of modern Europe which is seriously misleading about the French and Russian Revolutions, which barely touches on the Gulag, the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution, which has so little to say about women and peasants, religion and nationalism, America and Africa?

And what, finally, can we say about Hobsbawm's view of Soviet Communism? In a review called "The piety and provincialism of Eric Hobsbawm", the political philosopher, John Gray, wrote that Hobsbawm's writings on the 20th century are "highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism." Tony Judt wrote that, "Hobsbawm is the most naturally gifted historian of our time; but rested and untroubled, he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age." Thanks to Richard Evans's labours it is hard to dispute these judgments. (199-200)

Surely these silences are the mark of an apologist for the crimes of Stalinism -- including, as Herman mentions, the crimes of deadly anti-semitism in the workers' paradise. Contrary to Hobsbawm, there was indeed a party line on the most fundamental issues: the Party's behavior was to be defended at all costs and at all times. The Terror, the Gulag, the Doctors' Plot -- all were to be ignored.

Koestler's protagonist Rubashov in Darkness at Noon reflects on the reasons why the old Bolsheviks would have made the absurd confessions they offered during the Moscow show trials of the 1930s:

The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats -- and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience.  They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves.  There was no way back for them.  Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of their strange game.  The public expected no swan-songs of them.  They had to act according to the text-book, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night....

This is the subordination of self to party that was demanded by the Communist Party; and it is still hard to see how a committed member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s could escape the logic of his or her commitment. Personal integrity as an intellectual was not part of the bargain. So the puzzle remains: how could a Hobsbawm or Thompson profess both intellectual independence and commitment to the truth in the histories they write, while also accepting a commitment to do whatever is judged necessary by Party officials to further the cause of the Revolution?

Regrettably, there is a clear history in the twentieth century of intellectuals choosing political ideology over intellectual honesty. Recall Sartre's explanation of his silence about the Gulag and the Soviet Communist Party, quoted in Anne Applebaum's Gulag: 

“As we were not members of the Party,” he once wrote, “it was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were free to remain aloof from the quarrels over the nature of the system, provided no events of sociological significance occurred.” On another occasion, he told Albert Camus that “Like you, I find these camps intolerable, but I find equally intolerable the use made of them every day in the bourgeois press.” (18)

So much better is the independence of mind demonstrated by an Orwell, a Koestler, a Camus, or a Muggeridge in their willingness to recognize clearly the atrocious realities of Stalinism.

(Here is an earlier post on the journal created by the Historians' Group, Past & Present; link. And here are several earlier posts about post-war Marxist historians; link, link, link.) 

Sherwood Eddy’s treatment of Marx

Sherwood Eddy was an American Protestant activist and missionary in the early twentieth century. (Here is a brief biography and bibliography of Eddy; link.) He was educated in elite American institutions but acquired a deep empathy for the less-well-off members of society, both in the US and Asia. He was drawn to Communism, though never a member of the CP. Eddy explicitly identified himself as a Christian socialist. In 1926 he engaged in a debate in Moscow on the subject, "wherein lies the essence of the present religion and is it compatible with communism?". In 1934 he was invited to participate in an important symposium, “The meaning of Marx”, with Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Morris Raphael Cohen, and Sidney Hook (link). In 1936 he co-founded a cooperative-based reform of farming for sharecroppers in the US south, with strong commitment to racial equality. 

What is striking in Eddy's contribution to the Marx symposium is the depth and detail of his knowledge of Marx’s economic theories. Eddy summarizes Marx's substantive social and economic theories under three topics: his dialectical method of analysis of history; his labor theory of value and surplus-value; and his theory of class conflict as the fundamental driver of historical change (6). Under exposition of the second point Eddy offers a reasonable summary of Marx's main ideas of accumulation and exploitation. He ends this section with a denunciation of capitalism, and he writes favorably of revolution and the "dictatorship of the proletariat". 

Eddy's interpretation of social change remains "religious" in a sense; he understands Communism as a unifying belief system capable of motivating the masses of the population.

Russia has achieved what has hitherto been known only at rare periods in history, the experience of almost a whole people living under a unified philosophy of life. All life is focused in a central purpose. It is directed to a single high end and energized by such powerful and glowing motivation that life seems to have supreme significance. It releases a flood of joyous and strenuous activity. The new philosophy has the advantage of seeming to be simple, clear, understandable, all-embracing and practical. (2)

Further, he contrasts the ideological unity and purity of Soviet society with the degeneration of values in western capitalist society:

As surely as Soviet Russia has become united, we of the West have witnessed a philosophic decadence and disintegration. Where feudalism once united the world, capitalism has divided it by the competitive anarchy of a loose individualism. Not organized society but the insecure individual is now the unit where every man is for himself. The economics of profit conflict with the aims of culture. The gain of the few is pitted against the welfare of the many. This whole laissez-faire philosophy of life breeds competitive strife between individuals, classes, races and nations. (4)

Also striking is Eddy’s own inclination towards the need for thorough-going class revolution. In 1934 Eddy’s intellectual support for Communism was evident.

Is the system just? Must it continue? No! Marx shows the masses a way out. It is a way, he tells them, grounded in science and in natural law. It is bound to win, for the very stars in their courses are fighting for them. By some mystic and incomprehensible "dialectic process," by a supposedly scientific theory of value and of surplus value it is all being worked out for them. They do not need to understand it. They must believe that they are being exploited and join in the crusade for their own emancipation. (12)

Revolutions are almost inevitably destructive. They occur only when evolutionary progress to justice is blocked by the class in possession and power, when the hard crust of the status quo restrains the molten lava of discontent until the volcano of revolution bursts into eruption. Nearly always the possessing class is blinded by its own self-interest and class ethics of property "rights," so that it cannot see in time the injustice of the system which seems hallowed by custom and tradition. (16)

According to the Marxian formula, as the advance guard of the working class, a Communist Party must be organized with centralized power, under iron discipline, with a single mind and will. The sole purpose of this party must be to prepare for and direct the coming revolution which Marx sees as the only solution of the class struggle. No class has ever been known to surrender its special privileges and share them equally with the dispossessed, unless it was forced to do so.... Once the state has been seized the workers are bidden to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat under the direction of the vanguard of the Communist Party. The party then seeks to make the revolution permanent and continuing until all the members of the ruling and possessing classes are deprived of power. (17)

At the end of the essay Eddy summarizes points of agreement and disagreement with Marx. Most important is this point:

I. I do not believe that violent revolution is inevitable, nor do I believe that it is desirable in itself as Marx almost makes it. When once violence is adopted as a method in an inevitable and "continuing revolution," when to Marx's philosophy is added Lenin's false dictum that "great problems in the lives of nations are solved only by force," most serious consequences follow wherever communism is installed under a dictatorship or prepared for by violent methods. This shuts the gates of mercy on mankind. In Soviet Russia all prosperous farmers are counted kulaks, and the kulak becomes the personal devil or scapegoat of the system, as does the Jew in Nazi Germany. Intellectuals and engineers are all too easily accused of deliberate sabotage, of being "wreckers," class enemies, etc. When this philosophy--that great problems are solved "only by violence"--is applied, then trials, shootings and imprisonment follow in rapid succession. Hatred and violence mean wide destructive and incalculable human suffering. (27)

Thus, though I acknowledge my real debt to Marx, I do not count myself a Marxist. I have stated elsewhere: the reasons which would make impossible my acceptance of the system as practised in Soviet Russia under the dictatorship: Its denial of political liberty, the violence and compulsion of a continuing revolution, and the dogmatic atheism and anti-religious zeal required of every member of the Communist Party. (29)

Here he draws out precisely the implication of totalitarianism contained in Stalin's version of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". The war on the kulaks -- the Holodomor -- was going on as this symposium took place (1933-34) (link).

It is useful to distinguish between  the content of Marx's political economy and his sociology of capitalism, on the one hand, and the political manifestos, slogans, and party politics of Marxism and communism, on the other. Marx's theory of capitalism as a class-based system of exploitation is compatible with multiple possible remedies, including democratic socialism. Both sets of issues come up in the 1934 symposium. Eddy's essay here makes plain the urgency with which intellectuals committed to social justice were searching for answers, and Marx (and Lenin) represented persuasive and compelling ideas about a blueprint for comprehensive change. But strikingly, Eddy — unlike his contemporaries in the English democratic socialist movement — had not yet moved as far as his English contemporaries in attempting to imagine a democratic socialist solution (link).

(George Novack's lecture on American radical intellectuals in the 1930s, delivered in 1967, provides some context for Eddy's political orientation, though Eddy's name does not appear in Novack's lecture; link. Novack was a longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyist alternative to the American Communist Party.)