David Laibman

David Laibman's "Deep History" is yet another discussion of historical materialist principles, the nature of socialism, the Soviet experience etc. etc. from a modern Marxist perspective. I am not certain what made Laibman think that we needed another one of these.

Laibman starts out with inventing a series of acronyms for often-used phrases in discussions about historical materialism, so that productive forces becomes "PFs", production relations "PRs", modes of production "MPs", and so forth. To me, this is after a while vastly more annoying than just repeating those phrases, so I don't see the advantage. In any case this serves the purpose for Laibman of making easier to read models of the basic theses of historical materialism, which he discusses reasonably well, including a rather summary discussion of culture and symbolism. This then segues into an overview of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, also something that by now has been done many many times.

The middle part of the book concerns itself with capitalism as such. Laibman makes the point that given productive forces can be embedded in various relations of production, from laissez-faire to heavy interventionism, and that it is hard to form a useful 'abstract' theory of capitalism. This is accompanied by, alas, an explanation of the Marxist theory of capital and accumulation - again wholly superfluous. There is also a chapter on stages theory with regard to capitalism itself, a mildly useful overview of the debate on this subject, but rather short.

The main interesting part of this book is the end part, where Laibman goes into socialism and its political economy. He engages several criticisms of traditional socialist plan models, mainly the Hayekian and the Pareconian. His points about Parecon are well-made, and also should satisfy Michael Albert's complaints that no-one is willing to argue against it publicly. The chapter on the Soviet experience discusses a neo-Stalinist history of the USSR by Keeran & Kenny, as well as a 'market socialist' view of Erwin Marquit, which is of some interest since none of these authors are well-known. Laibman also posits what he calls the "Cherry Esplanade Conjecture", which entails that it is possible that moving towards socialism causes inefficiencies and lower productivity at first, but over time, as the whole of society is 'socialized', this situation may reverse and efficiency and productivity may be superior. An interesting, almost Koestlerian thesis, and it leads to his advice to Cuba and similar countries to "hang in there". It would be interesting to see if Laibman is going to make more of this Conjecture in future works, as it might be promising as an avenue of research.

Overall though, this book is pretty poorly done. The vast majority of the content contains absolutely nothing new to people informed about the mainstream socialist theoretical discussions, while the complete concentration on Marxist theory and the high degree of jargon use in the book also precludes it from being useful as introduction, which is why the redundancy is so annoying. Laibman's own innovations, such as the acronyms, only add to the confusion, and many of the chapters are little more than literature review. The book is also overall rather confused and meandering - the precise point is not clear at all, and "social evolution" really plays no role in the discussion at all, despite the title.
What can be said in its favor is that the bibliography is quite extensive and useful as reference for people interested in reading more about Marxist theory; maybe this book can serve some use as an undergrad college textbook. But for most purposes it adds nothing new.… (mais)