July
1, 2002, 9:00 a.m. We’re
All Marxists Now
The crisis of
capitalism.
By James Bowman
t's
easy to dismiss Marxism as a "failed theory" because of its
economic failures, but Marx lives on in a way that makes him arguably
more influential than he was when his discredited economic ideas served
as an excuse for the immiseration of a quarter of mankind. For he and
his followers have provided us with a lot of the political language that
we still use and therefore the terms in which we still think about politics.
In a sense, we are all Marxists now. That this is the case is something
we should all be reminded of by the alleged crisis of "capitalism"
suggested to so many distinguished minds by the accounting scandals at
Enron or WorldCom or the alleged insider trading of Martha Stewart.
A cartoon in the
Daily Telegraph of London, for instance, shows cavemen with weapons
labeled "Enron," "WorldCom," and "Andersen"
slaughtering what we are to suppose is the last of the Wooly Mammoths,
which is labeled: "Trust in the System." In the same paper,
George Trefgarne worries that "some academics, pundits and Left-wing
rabble-rousers, playing on fears that the system doesn't work, will take
advantage of the situation and question the very values and institutions
on which the world economic system rests." Meanwhile, the Times
hastens to soothe our natural anxiety on behalf of the same "system"
by editorializing that "WorldCom is an exception and not capitalism's
rule."
This kind of reassurance
is actually more worrying than the outright attacks on "capitalism"
by such papers as the Guardian, which has been saying similar things
for so long that nobody pays much attention to it anymore. But when Mark
Leibovich in the Washington Post says that the news from WorldCom
is "yet another body blow to our national faith in capitalism triumphant,"
we have to wonder if the defenders of "capitalism" shouldn't
consider the dangers of using their enemy's vocabulary. For "capitalism,"
as a man from Mars unfamiliar with the terms of political debate in the
20th century would have to conclude, is simply the socialist word for
life.
Or, to put it another
way, this supposed "system" of capitalism is simply the way
things are, baby — even under "socialism," as the inevitable
black markets in socialist countries bear witness. To give this fundamental
economic reality its socialist name, to call it an "ism" and
speak of that "ism" as a "system" implies that there
is some alternative to it — which is the cue for the socialist, who
just happens to be the only person with a ready-made alternative that
he has been tinkering with for well over a century, to step forward. He
may not expect to sell his whole program anymore, but if he's got the
rest of us being defensive about the alleged system we already use, he
is more than half-way to being able to sell us socialist patches for it
— such as over-regulation of accountants or stock markets, or maybe
a Clinton-style health-care plan.
His remedies are
designed for the bits of the system he has got us to believe don't "work."
The hidden metaphor in such language is that of a machine — as we
might expect from ideas having their origins in the 19th century —
which has been designed to perform a specific task. It "works"
when it performs the task and doesn't "work" when it doesn't.
But the economy is not a machine and wasn't designed by anybody. It is
more like an organic being and therefore can't work or not work —
since there is no specific task it is designed to perform — but only
be healthy or unhealthy. It can continue to generate wealth, as it always
has done, or it can be hobbled and interfered with and prevented from
generating wealth and doing other things natural to it. But it cannot
be replaced by a machine which has been designed so that everybody will
be happy.
Nor is it only "capitalism"
which is the victim of this kind of intellectual con-trick. Every time
we use words like "imperialist," "racist," "sexist,"
etc., we are thinking in quasi-Marxist terms. Or when we use the word
"fascist" in a non-historical context. Thus a Reuters story
tells us that the government of the tyrant Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe has
described the desire of his nation's white farmers to go on farming as
"racist and fascist." Mugabe is himself an unashamed Marxist,
of course, and so is happy to use "fascist" as the Marxist does
to describe any political view to the right of his own. But for the rest
of us there is no excuse for using such language which, like that of "capitalism,"
is designed to impose a bipolar structure on the world, requiring us all
to be counted either among the far-left sheep or the far-right goats.
—
James Bowman
is, among other things, movie critic of The American Spectator
and American editor of London's Times Literary Supplement.
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t's
easy to dismiss Marxism as a "failed theory" because of its
economic failures, but Marx lives on in a way that makes him arguably
more influential than he was when his discredited economic ideas served
as an excuse for the immiseration of a quarter of mankind. For he and
his followers have provided us with a lot of the political language that
we still use and therefore the terms in which we still think about politics.
In a sense, we are all Marxists now. That this is the case is something
we should all be reminded of by the alleged crisis of "capitalism"
suggested to so many distinguished minds by the accounting scandals at
Enron or WorldCom or the alleged insider trading of Martha Stewart.
