From Barron's:
Speaking of economic determinism, this year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of the greatest testament to that doctrine ever written -- The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and his longtime collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Various capitalist publishers have tried to cash in by issuing deluxe editions of that document, and a spate of articles have been written celebrating Marx's contribution to economic thought. A new low for Marxian chic was struck in the New Yorker, which set forth the great man's enormous relevance to our times in an article that was woven through the ads for those pricey items that appeal to the magazine's readers.
Any valid assessment of Karl Marx must begin with the statement that, on balance, his economic theories were of less enduring value than those of Groucho or Harpo. I say on balance, because the point is that bad ideas are not only worthless, they're usually worth less than nothing. By obscuring more than they clarify, they tend to blind their adherents to what's really going on and consequently become impediments to thought.
Take the Marxist notion that the working class is increasingly impoverished under capitalism, which then gave rise to the still widely fashionable view that the only reason the proletariat prospered instead was because of unions and social legislation. That naive point/counterpoint has stood in the way of a deeper understanding of how labor gets most of the gains from increased productivity, not because capitalists want it that way, but because competitive forces make it so.
Or consider the labor theory of value, which says that the value of a good is directly proportional to the amount of labor time required to produce it. Actually, there's a germ or two of truth in the idea, since things that require more effort do tend to be worth more. But the Edsel wasn't worth much when it was first put on the market, even though its design and manufacture took plenty of effort. And the habits of thought this concept helped create still tend to get in the way of the simple point that, first and foremost, nothing is worth anything unless consumers place some subjective value on it.
But I do think there's one good idea that can be salvaged from the great wreckage of Marxist thought. In his celebrated essay on "Estranged Labor" in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx gave eloquent voice to the sense of alienation that people suffer in the workplace. In his evocative words, "The worker only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home."
Of course, there are plenty of people today who treat the workplace as their home -- and don't like to go home as a result. And Marx himself couldn't understand that if there's any solution to the problem of alienation, it lies not in less but in more capitalism -- that is, in worker ownership and control. In fact, workerowned enterprise existed around the time he wrote, and he dismissed it as being too bourgeois.
But still, he put his finger on an abiding problem, which gets papered over in such fallacious and still-current concepts as "consumer sovereignty." The consumer isn't and shouldn't be sovereign under capitalism. Only the individual is and should be, which necessarily means that he has the power of choice over how and where he wants to work.
And in homage to the seductive power of Marxian thought, I defy anyone to read the Manifesto without feeling some quickening in the blood. From its very first sentence -- "A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism," to its sweeping and accurate statements about the achievements of capitalism -- "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together," to its final clarion call-"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!" -- the Manifesto tells a compelling story about fate.
That story of fate is recounted in even more vivid detail in Marx's magnum opus, Das Kapital, and it's about nothing less than the inevitability of the triumph of good over evil. What must happen, says the author, given the inexorable laws of capitalist dynamics, is that the proletariat gets impoverished, sinking as it does into "misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation." But "with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself."
There then follows the final clash of cymbals that ends the Marxian symphony, as the workers take over: "The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." |
