Economics of the Future: Marx on Paper

Like most people--including (especially) those who define and disdain Marxism--I haven't read Marx, or very much of him. While his name is a curse word in American discourse, in England at least not everyone is afraid to even read his work. And Terry Eagleton is one of those not even afraid to write about him.

He's got a review in the March 3 London Review of Books of a book by another Brit, Eric Hobsbawm, called How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011. It's the latest of several interesting reviews in that publication about Marx's economics or Marxian economic analyses. It's not the one I find most interesting, but it's probably a good idea to clear the air about Marx with a few quotes from it.

Eagleton asks why Marx is in such disrepute--he figures this began in the mid 70s, though here in the U.S. it's more like the 80s. The fall of the Soviet Union was widely seen as the last bit of evidence that Marx was wrong, as well as advocating a system of evil. On that advocacy, people like me in my generation took the prevailing bombast in the depths of the Cold War with a hefty grain of salt. Because we were against the Vietnam War and the excesses of capitalism, we were called Marxist tools, or even more extremely, as following the dictates of our Soviet Communist masters. That was a laugh. We knew it wasn't true about us, so it seemed likely a lot of other bullshit being promulgated about Marx wasn't true either.

What little we knew about Marx--like his adoption of Hegel's thesis/antithesis/synthesis, the class struggle, etc.--had nothing logically to do with Soviet totalitarianism. Stalin was more in tune with Hitler than anything we knew about Marx. Eagleton/Hobsbawm support that view, on the advocacy("Revolution was to be seen not simply as a sudden transfer of power but as the prelude to a lengthy, complex, unpredictable period of transition;" "the word ‘dictatorship’ in the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, used by Marx to describe the Paris Commune, means nothing like what it means today" ) as well as economic analysis.

Demonizing Marx has a handy class-based utility: without factoring in "labor" (i.e. everybody except the rich captialists), economic analysis doesn't have to take their interests or their worth into account. And that's been the pattern. Marx didn't invent the class system--which is pretty obvious to the English, where classes have been central to their history for centuries. It is obviously in the interests of the rich plutocrats of America to expunge the very notion that there are classes here. There's a certain romantic appeal to the notion, but there are bosses and the bossed and everybody knows it. Just as there are producers and customers, although the fact that a lot of those customers or consumers are also labor is what a lot of these economic analyses leave out. (And incidentally, according to Eagleton, Marx had high praise for the middle class.)

These oligarchs also have a vested interest in the idea of capitalism triumphant--the perfect system. Why not? It's been perfect for them. The only way that makes sense is if you ignore most of the world and what happens there. The idea has been made more difficult to stomach by the capitalist-fueled Great Recession, and near Greatest Depression. So at least in England some are going back to check out what Marx actually wrote.

But even so, as Eagleton points out, the contemporary analysis of real world economics and actual capitalism must take into account one particular situation that Marx did not clearly foresee:

"Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be socialism that replaces it. It may be fascism, or barbarism. Hobsbawm reminds us of a small but significant phrase in The Communist Manifesto which has been well-nigh universally overlooked: capitalism, Marx writes ominously, might end ‘in the common ruin of the contending classes’. It is not out of the question that the only socialism we shall witness is one that we shall be forced into by material circumstance after a nuclear or ecological catastrophe. Like other 19th-century believers in progress, Marx did not foresee the possibility of the human race growing so technologically ingenious that it ends up wiping itself out."

The runaway consequences of human-made technologies--notably the Climate Crisis-- have changed the game, big time. While setting the record straight and gleaning Marx on paper for any relevant insights to the present and future are reasonable activities, what interests me has more to do with an analysis of the economics of the future that makes sense, regardless of its inspirations. As it turns out, there is such an analysis, which provides a guide to the future that at least gives us a chance to avoid humanity wiping itself out. That's the topic of my next post on this subject.