Understanding Marxist origins of William Ruto’s bottom-up economic model

The last time Kandara MP Alice Wahome was asked to explain the bottom-up economic model by Citizen’s Waihiga Mwaura, she fared, rather, badly. She stammered. Fumbled. And kept quiet. But we understand. 

The ideological complexity and the history of this economic model is quite intriguing. Its Marxist origins, more interesting.

I will deal with its history and leave our economists and political scientists to unpack the rest—if they will.

The historiography of the bottom-up economic model places it in Eastern Europe and, later, China. Students of history and political science will tell you that this model was quite popular in the Marxist-Leninist literature and had been experimented with in the former USSR where the sickle (representing farmers) and the hammer (representing workers) was the symbol of the Russian Revolution. At times, both bottom-up and top-down were used at the same time.

But how did Deputy President William Ruto, and his United Democratic Alliance (UDA), find themselves promoting the age-old Marxist-Leninist bottom-up economic model? I might not know, but let me help his supporters with some background on the bottom-up approach—in case they are lost in the ideological maze.

What interests me is that for the first time, we might have a general election campaign based on ideology, having missed that chance in 1969 after Oginga Odinga’s Kenya People’s Union, whose mantra was Bull, Freedom, Socialism, was banned. KPU, in its manifesto, advocated the elimination of the bourgeoisie class, attacked the rich, and called for the redistribution of land. Of course, Ruto won’t go the land route.

Jaramogi, for his part, might have scared the Kanu mandarins when he said in the manifesto: “KPU condemns Kanu’s capitalist policies. It is opposed to the creation of a small class of rich people while the masses live in poverty. [KPU] will pursue truly socialist policies...it will share out the nation’s wealth more equitably among the people, extend national control over the means of production and break the foreigners grip on the economy.”

Again, Dr Ruto is not going this route—though he has promised to ignore the middle class and reinvigorate the bottom- and it will be interesting to see how political scientists place his economic model as opposed to the capitalist system. That would be an interesting TV debate.

But is there an ideology that UDA is pursuing? I don’t think so. Dr Ruto is not a Marxist. He is a capitalist. A candidate looking for votes by using some Marxist promises. There is some Marxist symbolism in his campaign, by default or by design. The choice of yellow colours reminds me of the term Yellow Socialism, which was used to refer to those opposed to the Marxist Red Socialism and which was a complex mix of capitalism and socialism. Perhaps those who branded the party that way know about it, perhaps they just picked a colour. I will leave that to those who study symbolism.

It was Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher and former Marxist, who once remarked that "the belief that the working class, thanks to special historical mission, would become the liberator of mankind, is certainly the cornerstone of Marxism."

Leftist tactics

Of interest is how Dr Ruto’s campaign has ideologically moved to the left, or is applying leftist tactics, by promising the solidification of a welfare state and attacking what, in the Soviet parlance, would be ‘the arrogant and privileged ruling class’, the language that was used to organise the working class in the Soviet republics. Dr Ruto used to call this ruling class ‘dynasties’ though he appears to have dropped the term of late in his campaigns and replaced it with a “Hustler Nation’ narrative.

And allow me to share what I have found on this bottom-up from different scholars. One of the handbooks of Marxism was the Fundamentals of Marxism, which was published in Moscow in 1960. And that is where you find a justification of the bottom-up approach. 

It says: “The socialist revolution of the working class is distinguished from all preceding social revolutions by a number of important peculiarities. The main one is that all previous revolutions led only to the replacement of one form of exploitation by another, while the socialist revolution puts an end to every sort of exploitation...

“It represents the most profound of the transformations known to history, a complete reorganisation of social relationships from the bottom up.”

It further says that “the economic activity of the socialist state is built upon the Lenin principles of democratic centralism. This means that planning goes not only from top down, but also from the bottom up.”

Class antagonism

Thus, those claiming that the bottom-up approach has never been tested elsewhere should read the Marxist literature. In his book, Capitalism and Class Struggle in the USSR: A Marxist Theory, Marxist scholar Neil Fernandez prefers to call the bottom-up model as Autonomist Marxism and argues that though class antagonism is at the heart of this model, it is “different” from other forms of Marxism.

And this is further expounded by Italian Sociologist and Marxist philosopher Antonio Negri, who says that “unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism emphasises the ability of the working class to force changes to the organisation of the capitalist system independent of the State, trade unions or political parties.”

He writes: “Autonomist Marxism is a bottom-up theory: it draws attention to activities that autonomists see as everyday working-class resistance to capitalism...”

It is now said, within academic circles, that the autonomism, which is propagated by the bottom-up approach, is usually “anti-capitalist” and has two characteristics, according to a paper published in 2001 in the International Socialism Journal. These two are “the rejection of the Leninist conception of organisation and the adoption of substitutionist forms of action in which a politically enlightened elite acts on behalf of the masses.”

To fully apprehend its application, one has to read papers by Prof Paul de Grauwe, once chair in European Political Economy at the London School of Economics. There is a paper titled ‘Top-down versus bottom-up macroeconomics’ where he has broken down the differences between the two.

This is what he says: “a top-down system is one in which one or more agents fully understands the system. These agents are capable of representing the whole system in a blueprint that they can store in their mind.”

Prof Grauwe then says that “bottom-up systems are very different in nature. These are systems in which no individual understands the whole picture [and that] each individual understands only a small part of the whole.” He likens it to a market system where no individual can understand the nature of the entire market.

Trial and error

Thus, when he compared the top-down with the bottom-up, he found that bottom-up “agents have cognitive limitations and do not understand the whole picture (the underlying model). Instead, they only understand small bits and pieces of the whole model and use simple rules to guide their behaviour...Thus, agents in the bottom-up model learn about the world in a ‘trial and error’ fashion.”

He concludes that in his study, he found that bottom-up agents’ model “has agents who experience an informational problem. They do not fully understand the nature of the (economic) shock or its transmission. 

“They use a trial-and-error learning process aimed at distilling information. This process leads to waves of optimism and pessimism, which, in a self-fulfilling way, create business cycle movements. Booms and busts reflect the difficulties of economic agents trying to understand economic reality.

It is interesting that in that paper, Prof Grauwe does not dissect the top-down model in a similar manner. But he says that the top-down agents “understand the whole picture. These individuals use this superior information to obtain the “optimum optimorum” for their own private welfare. In this sense, they are top-down models.”

But how has it been used elsewhere? In Mao’s communist China, scholars say that he combined both top-down and bottom-up dual control. 

“It was neither optimal nor good...It was a weak satisficing regime. [But] Mao [when he came to power] did not abolish the top-down or bottom-planning. They [and his Red Guards] only weakened the influence of top-down planning and replaced fixed price enterprise bonus, maximising with revolutionary zeal,” said writers Stephen Rosefielde and Jonathan Leightner in their book, China’s Market Communism.

The two writers appreciate that Chairman Mao adopted the dual bottom-up-top-down model, the same way that Stalin had recognised in 1927 that top-down planning also had its limitations and could be supplemented with a bottom-up planning as well. 

While the Communist Party’s concept of power was top-down (where they regulated consumers), Mao’s dual top-down and bottom-up approach survived in China for 20 years after his death in 1976 when it was replaced by market communism.

Kenyans might have to read a new book, published this year titled The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes at Pages 514 and 515. In this book, Balint Magyar and Balint Madloviks makes interesting theoretical observations: “Among bottom-up annexing mechanisms, we find the first type of coercive corruption, bottom-up state capture. 

“This mechanism involves coercive capture of public actors by oligarchs or crime bosses, who use their influence to carry out relational market redistribution: they want to use state power to redistribute markets, either by means of discretional regulatory intervent or by using the politicians in schemes of grey and white raiding.”

It is their position, after studying the former socialist states, that bottom-up approaches could also lead to bottom-up state capture, which they define on page 381 as “a form of corruption where the elite private actors collude with elite public administrators, and they carry our corrupt transactions…the corruption partners from the private sector are oligarchs or crime bosses.”

“Top-down annexing mechanisms are, on one hand, political patronolisation and patrimonialisation and, on the other hand, economic patronalisation and patrimonialisation. 

“As relational markets constitute a lack of separation between the political and the economic spheres, these two methods go hand in hand in forming and operating mafia states of patronal autocracies...the chief patron achieves the concentration of state power in his hand, allowing him to reach the widest amplitude of arbitrariness in state interventions.”

There is much literature on the bottom-up approach, but most of it is in the Marxist field. Why Dr Ruto picked it to rally his supporters makes the next general election a campaign to watch, but more so how he navigates the ideology.

[email protected] @johnkamau1