ReMarx, #5

I’m still noodling with my rediscovery of Marx, presently by reading Robert Heilbroner’s “Marxism: For and Against.” I’ve always thought the world of him, not least because he told me he had high regard for me. He actually footnoted something I wrote with Jeff Faux, my former boss, in one of his essays in the New York Review of Books. This was a big deal among my parents’ old lefty friends. I tried to coax him into co-authoring something, but he wouldn’t bite.

The intro to the book cites a fellow named Ron Blackwell, one of his graduate students, as an inspiration. It took a minute to dawn on me that this was someone I actually knew personally, when he was chief economist at the AFL-CIO. I hadn’t spoken to him for a long time, and he passed away six years ago.

At any rate, the book. It made me resolve to refuse to read anything less well-written. There is too much good stuff out there to waste time struggling with turgid prose. I gained some appreciation for dialectics, though not enough to convince me of its value. This might be part of a more general bias against philosophy on my part. To my untutored mind, dialectics just means not being simple-minded.

I just bought the new new translation of Volume 1 of Capital, encouraged by glowing recommendations from people I trust. The foreword by Wendy Brown of Princeton is something else. She urges a reading of Capital with more awareness of its philosophical scaffolding. In light of my remarks above, this causes me to worry that I have undersold Marx, so I would like to see what more I could make of it.

I’ve already said the historical materialism dimension of Marxism appeals to me, and I also think it has been absorbed at least partly into mainstream analysis. That’s a problem for the prestige of Marxism. Its best stuff is appropriated and is no longer Marxism per se. What tends to stick out are unsympathetic, uninformed caricatures of Marxism, such as economic determinism.

The main event in the book is Heilbroner on Marx on capitalism itself, rather than the methodological preliminaries. Heilbroner distinguishes between Marx’s analytical powers and his predictive ones. The inadequacies in the latter dimension, which I made a point of in previous remarks, has become cliche. Who after all is better at prediction? I would say nobody. It’s the wrong context to understand and evaluate Marx.

Nevertheless there may be more to the prediction side than commonly appreciated. We certainly do not see class consciousness making proletarian revolution, culminating in common ownership of the “means of production.” Just fooling around here, we do see similar forces playing out in similar fashion.

We do not see mass immiseration in the older advanced industrial nations. That’s a canard. We do see extreme privation in the Global South, the destination for globalized industry. The globally geographic dispersion of industry precludes the density of workers that makes revolution, or at least labor insurgency, imaginable.

What we do see in the Global South is an interplay of proletarianization with antediluvian religious dogma and sectarian conflict, which leads to tyrannical, inefficient rule by corrupt elites.

The big exception is the Peoples Republic of China, as well as proximate Asian economies that are evolving along similar lines. Their real distinguishing feature is not socialized industry per se. That’s too simple. What we do observe is more efficient economic management producing historic economic growth. It’s not socialism but it’s not the same kind of capitalism we see evolving in Russia and the U.S. The extent of gross consumption by the rich, I would guess there is no lack of it in the PRC, is a distraction.

As I’ve written before, the common emphasis on public ownership is simplistic. The spectacle of the rich gorging themselves on wealth was never the focus of economic exploitation and dysfunction, even in Marx. Its political weight is disproportionate to its analytical significance.

In a nutshell, the rise of the PRC is the twisted fulfillment of Marx’s prediction of proletarian revolution, against the pattern of globalization weakening working class consciousness and politics. It isn’t democratic, nor is it necessarily pacific with respect to neighbors. Its ecological implications remain to be seen. But it works in its own way. It produces.

There is a gradient of public influence over capital, from extreme deregulation bordering on kleptocracy (the direction the U.S. is heading in, where Russia is already), and rational economic management, typified by the PRC and the EU. I’m reminded here of Branko Milanovic’s interesting survey in Capitalism, Alone that I reviewed here. I should probably add that Branko was not pleased by my review.

The other twisted fulfillment of Marxian class consciousness is arguably the rise of MAGA, not limited to the U.S. As the historian Tony Judt pointed out long ago, the pressure of migration from failed states with basket-case economies in the Global South threatens social-democratic institutions in the rich nations of the West. In the U.S., we can already see how hysteria over immigration facilitates chipping away at our primary institutions of social insurance.

We could really use a Marxist analysis of MAGA. I don’t mean to overstate its support among what is conventionally defined as the working class, nor would I discount its perverse, malignant social implications. It is more general and less concentrated than that. It is even stripping its former racial boundaries. It will leave America ruined before it is great.