This article introduces Professor Hiroshi Furuta’s essay “The Folly of Socialist Economics” and argues that socialist economics was never a genuine economic theory, but rather a return to the logic of ancient despotic states.
By tracing North Korea’s Jeong Chun-sil Movement, the collapse of the Soviet Union, collective farms, the neglect of distribution under planned economies, and the Marxist illusions of Japan’s humanities professors, Furuta delivers a devastating critique of intellectuals who clung to socialism long after the Cold War had ended.
It is also a powerful refutation of the postwar “cultural intellectuals” represented by Kenzaburō Ōe, and a first-rate essay for understanding the intellectual failures of the postwar world.

2019-03-15
This essay is, for example, a complete refutation of Kenzaburō Ōe, and an unsurpassably brilliant refutation of the so-called cultural figures represented by him.
Many humanities professors are the defeated remnants of the Cold War.

The night before last, after watching the NHK BS1 documentary The People and the Dictator’s Dream Palace, I found myself thinking of Professor Hiroshi Furuta’s remarkable words.
Thanks in part to his insight, I became convinced of how hopeless communism truly is.
I became convinced that Marx was an outrageous fool who inflicted tremendous damage upon humanity.
Professor Furuta explained that the defining mark of ancient despotic states was the construction of gigantic structures.
It was exactly as he said.
For what the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and all communist states carried out was nothing other than a return to ancient despotic states.

Yesterday, I had not read the newspaper.
Today, a book-loving friend told me that Professor Hiroshi Furuta had contributed an article to yesterday’s Sankei Shimbun.
Once again, I felt that there is such a phenomenon in life as resonance.
Professor Furuta possesses the same sense of humor as Masayuki Takayama and I do.
Men of discernment must surely have read the essay below while laughing heartily throughout.
And yet they must also have straightened their collars upon realizing that this is one of the finest essays in the postwar world.
For this essay is, for example, a complete refutation of Kenzaburō Ōe, and an unsurpassably brilliant refutation of the so-called cultural figures represented by him.

The Folly of Socialist Economics.
Hiroshi Furuta.
Professor, Graduate School, University of Tsukuba.

A Production Campaign Full of Fakes.

While reading the November 22, 1991 issue of the Rodong Sinmun, I, then thirty-eight years old, learned that a new production campaign had begun in North Korea.
Thus a researcher ends up writing papers that interest no one except a portion of his fellow specialists.
It is a hollow process.
Yet to fill one’s field thoroughly with knowledge is important for the future.

That production campaign was truly absurd.
Jeong Chun-sil, originally from the commercial sector, was said to have produced 500,000 tons of silkworms, raised 15,000 beavers and 300 black silver foxes, gathered 500 tons of wild mountain vegetables, and been honored as a labor hero.
To begin with, the figures are exaggerated, so they may be ignored.
After that, “Conferences of Pioneers in the Jeong Chun-sil Movement” spread throughout the whole of North Korea.

A paper I wrote around that time merely stated the following.
“Those involved were mostly officials driven into sinecures in sectors such as commerce because of the stagnation of distribution, with idle posts at inns, restaurants, and shops added in.
This movement was intended to drive those who had no work, or had lost their work, into production and gathering.”
In truth, the person writing it, namely I myself, honestly did not understand why the Party was making North Korea do such things.

Ordinarily, researchers interested in socialist economics study nothing but industrialization and militarization.
That is because tribute payments from factories and farms are poured intensively into those sectors.
Yet the Party newspaper is filled with foolish production campaigns, “campaigns to make the non-working work.”
Heavy industry and the military do not appear because they are secret.
Articles about power plants do appear, so I once wrote a paper inferring such matters from electricity.

Later, in 2009, the German writer Herta Müller, born in Romania, depicted the economic and social realities of Romania under the Ceaușescu regime in The Fox Was Ever the Hunter and received the Nobel Prize.
When I read the Japanese translation, an intuition arrived like a flash of lightning.
From there began a reverse calculation toward the body of knowledge with which I had been filling the field.
“Socialist economics is a fake, and it possesses no economic foundation on the other side.
Therefore, a true theory of socialist economics will never come into being.”
That was my conclusion.

Knowing Neither Demand Nor Supply.

Socialist economics is the application of backward nineteenth-century Marxist economics to the economy of the twentieth century.
As a result, because it knew nothing of the economics of supply and demand after Marshall, melons were overproduced and piled up in corners of farms, giving off a putrid stench, while steel turned into masses of red rust in factory courtyards.
To begin with, there is no way a planned economy can function without understanding supply and demand.
The statistical bureaus stamped approval again and again on crude, back-of-the-envelope plans submitted by factories and farms.
In boastful China, this padding was especially severe.

Marxist economics is the “labor theory of value.”
It holds that productive labor creates value, but distribution does not.
For that reason, distribution was almost entirely neglected in socialist countries.
Because transportation was poor, food was put under rationing, and in the Soviet Union long lines formed.
In Chinese cities, ration coupons were distributed.
In North Korea, because there were no trucks, the Rodong Sinmun was transported by train and unloaded at stations.
This is where the Jeong Chun-sil Movement connects.
The Soviet Union collapsed the following month.
As aid from the Soviet Union dwindled, North Korea drove people from the distribution sector, who had formerly held idle posts, into the mountains and made them engage in hunting and gathering.
Is this not an ancient economy.
Was socialist economics not in fact “the Marxization of an ancient economy.”
Overproduced consumer goods flowed into the black market, while lacking producer goods were filled in by specialists transporting them by truck.
In the Soviet Union this was called tolkach, and in North Korea, materials trading companies.
It is pathetic in its absurdity.

Many Humanities Professors Are the Defeated Remnants of the Cold War.

What most resembled an ancient economy was the collective farm.
In China this was the People’s Commune, and in North Korea the Cooperative Farm.
Originally, this was what the Soviet figure Preobrazhensky had called “the production of socialist surplus value,” and Stalin put it into practice.
From the end of 1929, it spread throughout the Soviet Union.
It was a mechanism by which the state directly exploited the peasants.
There, in thoroughly ancient fashion, despotic rule and status hierarchy remained deeply entrenched, whether one came from landlord stock or poor peasant stock, and the peasants were exhausted.

Today, socialist economics has entirely collapsed.
Its industrial and military sectors remain only in the form of extreme concentration on nuclear weapons, missiles, and space development.
North Korea no longer even has aircraft it can fly.
That is why Kim Jong Un made the long journey by train to Hanoi.
Would he borrow an airplane from China again.
Surely he has had enough of that humiliation.

During the Cold War, most Japanese university professors in the humanities loved socialism and Marx.
With the fake known as the Hegelian-Marxist progressive view of history, they fancied they had foreseen the future.
And they divided the age with the political and economic practitioners of the capitalist camp.
Even for twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they would not let go of what they loved.
In the end, they were criticized as being of no practical use whatsoever, and from 2015 onward they were driven toward the abolition and reorganization of university humanities faculties.
They are the defeated remnants of the Cold War.

At the beginning, they would invariably bring in the ideas and theories of famous Westerners and write their essays around them.
But such things no longer possess any universality.
Meanwhile, I filled my time by writing many foolish papers.

(Hiroshi Furuta)