Cats Playing Heavy Metal: On Mongolia Finding Itself in the Modern World

September 8, 2024

Karl Marx astutely recognized the power, heavy artillery–like force of capital, and the capitalist mode of production, and he predicted (somewhat) the era of globalization we are now familiar with in the twenty-first century.

The cheap price of its commodities is the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production: it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. –The Communist Manifesto (1848)[1]

Karl Marx astutely recognized the power, heavy artillery-like force of capital, and the capitalist mode of production, and he predicted (somewhat) the era of globalization we are now familiar with in the twenty-first century.

What Marx didn’t recognize, and failed to account for and articulate in his philosophical, political, and economic writings, was the enticing nature of capitalism, both in good times and in bad. He also failed to understand the rather adaptive nature of capitalism, especially among those regions of the world where it was a foreign transplant that developed deep roots and produced voracious varieties.

Marx never foresaw the Leninist bastardization of his and Engels’ ideas that arrived first in imperial Russia, then later on among imperial Russia’s satellites, and then (again) when it was adopted (and adapted) to specific contexts throughout the developing world by Leninist parties (think: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)). His dream of communist utopias, springing forth from the heavily industrialized capitalist homelands never bore fruit. The Leninist nightmares of socialism and capitalism haunted parts of the world Marx never considered as sources of his proletariat revolutions.

Marx never witnessed the depravity, desperation, and poverty of the so-called socialist-communist world order. He never knew the brutal crackdowns, the Great Leaps, the gulags, the massive famines, and the corruption and decay brought on by the Marxist-Leninist elites. He would never witness the collapse nor the internal hollowing out of the Soviet Union and its satellites.

In the end, Marx and Engels never knew the failure of their ideas and the human misery that followed. While the capitalist world order is far from perfect, and it has its sins to answer for, the socialist-communist world order’s scale of human misery and political brutality cannot be left out of the conversation. The world held onto by the socialist and communist parties has had to navigate the world of capitalism, privatization, and commercialization, and this transition from collectivism to individualism, from communism or socialism to capitalism, hasn’t been an easy one–one of the many sins of the capitalist world order.

In northeast Asia, a small country, largely locked between two uneasy regional and world powers, sits. This country is Mongolia, a place with little mental real estate in the minds of Americans and other Westerners. Some might know of Chenggis Khan (i.e., Genghis Khan, the Persian variant of his name) and the so-called Mongolian threat to medieval Western Christendom. Mongolia, like many countries with a post-communist/socialist past, has struggled to define itself in the modern world. The transition from a one-party state to a multi-party democracy hasn’t been an easy one. Hell, it has been a tough transition for Mongolians, much like it has been for Russians, the Chinese, and many central and eastern European peoples.

The winds of change for the socialist-communist world order began cropping in the mid-to-late 1970s, with a contraction of Soviet Union efforts in Africa, and the beginnings of the USSR’s brutal war in Afghanistan. China would see the death of Mao and the arrest, public trial, and execution of the Gang of Four. Deng Xiaoping, a conundrum in Mao’s communist China, declared, “It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”[2]

The late 1980s and the early 1990s brought serious questions concerning the relevance and sustainability of the socialist-communist world order–a world order that seemed inevitable in its continuance and its opposition to Western politics, economics, culture, and military might. By the 1990s, the collapse of the socialist-communist world order brought uncertainty, pain, financial hardship, and shock. Gorbachev hawked pizza for Pizza Hut, which was looking to break into the Russian economy. China was lifting millions out of poverty, and the end of history seemed to be at hand.[3]

Cracks in the socialist-communist world order were gaping chasms, and the facade crumbled before everyone’s eyes, leaving behind a political and economic vacuum.

The era of the hypermobile global economy was the byproduct of rather fringe economists, who were propped up by conservative politicians across the globe, particularly in the United States. After the 1970s stagnation and energy crises, the United States saw the largest transfer of wealth in human history, creating the petrodollar and cementing the United States as an economic powerhouse. The post-WWII Keynesian model was no longer the only accepted economic dogma worldwide. The Chicago and Austrian schools were in vogue, and the era of hypermobile capital and globalization on a scale never before experienced. Milton Friedman, the Chicago School, Friedrich Hayek, and trickle-down economics were etched into the collective imagination. The hypermobile economy espoused supposedly free markets, open borders, unregulated trade and capital flows, and transfers of wealth and economic output once unimaginable in the postwar (WWII) era established with international agreements like the Bretton Woods Agreement.

Heavy metal is, originally, a product of the West, with countries like the United States and the United Kingdom playing a huge role in its inception. As the global economy spread its tendrils, so did the cultural artifacts of the Western world. Rap, hip-hop, rock, and even metal began to saturate those societies once closed off to Western cultural influences. Like any form of cultural intercourse, there was give and take. The seeds of hip-hop, rap, techno, rock, and metal formed into new varieties, sharing lineage with Western varieties but also offering a unique blend of indigenous sounds, languages, instruments, and concerns.

One of my first forays into non-Western metal came with a group named The Hu, a Mongolian folk/heavy metal group, who were a huge hit with YouTube viewers like myself, just before they released their debut album, The Gereg. (For those looking to get a taste of The Hu’s work, I’ve included two of my favorites in this essay.)

The Hu was a quick realization of Marx’s observations concerning the power of capital and the capitalist mode of production. Mongolia, a little-known place in the world, aside from the likes of Chenggis Khan and his unrelenting armies, too, has succumbed to the power of capital in the twenty-first century.

From 1921 to 1990, the Mongolian people existed (tenuously) within the socialist-communist world order, situated between two seemingly indifferent giants: the Soviet Union and China. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ascendency of China, and the arrival of the Russian Federation, Mongolia has needed to assert itself as an independent nation, a neutral nation, that must walk a tightrope between Chinese and Russian strategic and economic ambitions. Mongolia, following the Soviet Union’s collapse, saw the emergence of “a viable if flawed economy, flourishing but chaotic parliamentary structure and electoral system, and a deeply divided society.”[4]

Although wealth and comfort are staples for some Mongolians, the new Mongolia is a product of the times. Liberalization and commercialization have brought Western ideas and culture to Mongolia, which, in turn, have influenced the creation of a rather unique brand of Mongolian heavy metal/folk-rock music in the form of groups like The Hu. Democracy and capitalism have also produced pain points for everyday Mongolians. Music produced by bands like The Hu shows the difficulty of this struggle to transition from a marginalized people within the social-communist world order to a people who must find and assert themselves in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world, all the while trying to reclaim their rich and powerful cultural heritage.

As a student of history and political science, I find this fascinating. However, I cannot imagine what has been lost for the Mongolian people with their transition to a one-party state and communist economy and then later to democracy and capitalism. What has history given them? What has been forever lost? What contradictions exist in this society that is both old and respected and reformed by the changes of the last thirty or so years?

What Marx got right is a bit harder to nail down here. Marx, in his ever-nuanced way, showed the power of capital, yes, but he also managed to explain that the spread of capital and the capitalist mode of production is not necessarily a peaceful or painless process. The contradictions and the nostalgia explored in The Hu’s lyrics are indicators that globalization and the hypermobile global economy aren’t as painless and benign as many of us have been led to believe. Moreover, modernization, with all its wonders, is (sometimes) hollow in what it offers to the spirit of a people. It strips cultures of their institutions that generate meaning and purpose. It robs people of their traditional lifestyles, offering up consumerism, financial prosperity of a sort, and a disconnection with the past. When all of that fails, tradition, culture, and history become commodities sold to those who can afford to buy them.

While we must be careful of nostalgia and nostalgic tendencies, The Hu, among others, shows us that modern amenities, globalization, and the ever-expanding capitalist mode aren’t always as fulfilling in the end. Sometimes, just sometimes, we seek out meaning and purpose. Although the market, especially with its nostalgianomics, offers a taste of things lost, of lifestyles of yore, all for a price, of course, it also offers the keys to its demise. The Hu’s music, while not necessarily native to Mongolia, is an example of how people seek out purpose, meaning, and connection with tradition and the past (whether imagined or otherwise) using the market (and its cultural and social assets) to do so. In other words, The Hu is a great example of traditionalism and revivalism percolating to the top of the capitalist mode. While what was lost is (most likely) lost forever, it shows that people, often stripped of their traditions, cultures, and collective past, will seek these things out, despite what the market has done to them. Their pull will be quite powerful, because of the failings of our current politico-economic world order. Their gravity, much like a large black hole, will exert its influence. However, how long will it take for this seemingly subversive act to be absorbed by capitalism and the globalized economy?

One of the failings of traditional Marxism is the inability to account for the adaptive nature of capitalism. While Marx postulated that capitalism would end in what might be termed absolute immiseration, i.e., the depression of wages below that of subsistence level due to increased (cutthroat) competition creating a race to the bottom, evidence of this immiseration, particularly of the absolute variety, has failed to appear.

Something often discussed by neo-Marxists is relative immiseration, which is a good deal harder to nail down. With relative immiseration, we can see it playing out in countries like Mongolia, where capitalism and globalization have had a significant impact on Mongolians. Could it be that the development of heavy metal folk music by groups like The Hu is a sign of relative immiseration, the glacial erosion of traditional lifestyles, cultures, languages, and collective histories, which are then replaced with new lifestyles, new cultures, new languages, and collective history? These new things are creating a disconnect, an alienation, of those who have been forced into the heavily globalized economy.

Much like previous forms of capitalism, the capitalism that dominates the new millennium will (likely) absorb and commoditize these attempts at finding meaning and purpose. In other words, something that could have been a subversive resistance to the globalized economic order becomes a commodity, a product, manufactured, packaged, marketed, sold, and consumed within the capitalist economic ecosystem.

How do we resist something that has proven so adaptable? Do we simply drop our defenses and succumb to the heavy artillery of capitalist economics? Do we seek out new ways?

While the capitalist system isn’t perfect, it is hard to see what might replace it. It is hard to conceptualize a system, of political, cultural, and economic importance, that would replace it, but that doesn’t mean we should not seek to understand the alternatives and the realities of the politico-economic system that runs the world. Although I am far from what you would deem a Marxist or even a Neo-Marxist, I think Marx, and other like-minded individuals, have brought up important concerns that need to be addressed, so we can understand people, their societies, and their cultures in broader contexts of global history, globalization, and cultural evolution.

REFERENCES:

This passage was found here: Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, In The Marx-Engels Reader, Edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978).
Confirmed by multiple sources, including China Daily and Foreign Policy.
The last bit of this sentence was inspired by Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 2006).
Dillon, Michael, Mongolia: A Political History of the Land and Its People (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2019). [eBook]

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