Why Marx is man of the moment - He had globalisation sussed 150 years ago

Even the Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, eager cheerleaders for turbo-capitalism, acknowledge the debt. 'As a prophet of socialism Marx may be kaput,' they wrote in A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation (2000), 'but as a prophet of the "universal interdependence of nations" as he called globalisation, he can still seem startlingly relevant.' Their greatest fear was that 'the more successful globalisation becomes the more it seems to whip up its own backlash' - or, as Marx himself said, that modern industry produces its own gravediggers.

The bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the beast. 'Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones,' he wrote in The Communist Manifesto.

There is something uniquely irritating about this article. When I was in high school and stepping knee-deep is the aspirational counterculture, I had the idea that most embattled young men and ladies have that maybe there was something wrong with this system (democracy & markets) that had produced a society that wasn't to keen on me and that, by extention, perhaps its cheif adversary and the opposing system (Communism) might be right. There were certainly enough Soviet-Union-wasn't-really-Communism arguments floating around for the reds to save face and get young people like me to think that maybe - maybe - they had a point.

But I never truly bought in to it and mostly it was just the desire to agitate. The desire to feel a bit different and to have views that separated me from others. But while I rejected Communism the system, I did hold on to the notion that the Soviet Union wasn't Communism and that, in theory, it could work, and besides it's not like our system was perfect and one imperfect system is truly equal to every other imperfect system. Then I got to college and met some Communists and determined that people in that mind set would inevitably screw things up. And, along the way, I grew out of the adolescent state of rebellion that seemed to fuel so many of the true-believing Communists.

The February following 9/11 I got into a conversation with an Austin artist. The subject of bin Laden came up and he suggested that bin Laden wasn't out to get America but rather the imperial America and its capitalist system. Though he looked both ways before saying it, I could tell that he someone prided himself on his courage to speak up. Almost as if the courage to say something unpopular alone made his view both more courageous and more correct. Having only been a few months removed from college, I found such ideas considerably less groundbreaking. I even found his giddiness more off-putting than the idea that inspired it.

But what I find irritating is the cocky tone and "I'm-so-naughty" tone of those saying that Marx has been vindicated. That Marx may have been right about globalization is collossally beside the point. As a system, Communism (and I'm talking about capital-C Communism, not socialism) has been a miserable failure both economically and humanitarily in every place that it has been tried. The system either causes or so fails to safeguard against brute totalitarianism that the two are unavoidably intertwined. Even if Marx's prediction of globalism didn't remind me of reading Nostradamus's tea-leaves, who cares if he was right about a particular aspect of the market? I personally think that Marx's insights in the alienation of man from his labor were enlightening, but the sheer magnitude of what was mistaken surely outstrips what was gotten right.

It's akin to arguing that the Confederacy had a point about interstate law enforcement. Even if true, utterly irrelevent. What philosophical differences the Confederacy had with Washington were primarily dealing with a highly immoral institution. But God knows there are enough that will make the same "naughty" arguments in favor of the Confederacy that others make for Communism.

[via Orrin Judd]