Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
Marx dead or alive
Tom Smith

Brian Leiter has an interesting post on Marx. Here's an excerpt:

But what is equally striking is the accuracy of many of Marx's best-known qualitative predictions about the tendencies of capitalist development: capitalism continues to conquer the globe; its effect is the gradual erasure of cultural and regional identities; growing economic inequality is the norm in the advanced capitalist societies; where capitalism triumphs, market norms gradually dominate all spheres of life, public and private; class position continues to be the defining determinant of political outlook; the dominant class dominates the political process which, in turn, does its bidding; and so on. (The article, above, includes citations to supporting evidence.)

Much of the most embarrassing Marxian claims, I take it, many scholars of Marx are willing to jettison: declining profits, teleological history, etc. What strikes me about the above list is its relative plausibility, at least compared to where Marx was way off base.

Capitalism conquering the globe seems true enough, as does its gradual erasure of at least many cultural differences. Growing economic inequality? This I am not so sure about, in part because it is so difficult to measure inequality. But if it is true, I suspect it is because of the enormous wealth-creating power of capitalism, which enriches managers of assets to a degree scarcely imaginable in former eras. Absolute wealth of workers in the US is far above that of the rich in past eras. Yet the relatively poor still feel deprived.

It may be that in capitalist societies the ideology of property and freedom, let's call it, dominates discussion. But it does not follow that this ideology is not in the interests of the less well off, at least if free markets create the wealth that makes better lives for them possible, at least in absolute terms. It may also be there just isn't any very good alternative, if socialism is as impractical as recent failures of it as a governing theory suggest. So, it may be that market ideology dominates in capitalism because it seems to rational persons as the best available system, even if it is one that condemns them to relative deprivation. I mean this in contrast to some theory about class somehow shaping consciousness so that for example, a worker incorrectly thinks capitalism is better than socialism. A worker could think that capitalism was best, and be right, and still he would be adopting the view (albeit perhaps resentfully, wishing there was something better) that the managerial elite adopts much more gleefully.

As far as powerful economic interests dominating the political process, the only issue there is whether Marx should really get credit for what seems so obviously true. However, I'm also not sure how well these interests align with class, which I always took to be an essential part of the Marxist view. I suspect we are witnessing in the prescription drug benefit just passed, for example, one of the great give-aways in the history of government. Old people can spend unlimited money staving off death, and drug companies make a fortune helping them. The big winners are old people and shareholders of drug companies, a diverse group. The average income of the shareholders in the institutions that are the biggest shareholders is $30,000 -- In the US, workers do own the big corporations, at least most of them. Yet working taxpayers probably lose the most. Hard to see how this how all this maps on to class. How is this consistent with the tenets of Marx?

Finally, I wonder whether Marx really has a plausible causal account of why the things he may have foreseen, are happening, to the extent they are. Normatively, I am not convinced the average low wage American worker is happier than a hunter-gatherer, in fact, I doubt it. But she has got to be happier than the average subsistence farmer, which really does seem to be a miserable life. Even with increased inequality and increased intensity of labor (something Brian might want to add to his list of prescient predictions), most people seem to be better off under capitalism than any plausible alternative, something neither Marx nor modern Marxists seem to believe.
posted by thomas at 12/03/2003 08:48:00 PM