Progress
Some insightful observations from my favorite Marxist:
2. The Left is not proposing any viable alternative to capitalism. Whereas vulgar libertarians have their Econ 101, the [G20] protestors have nothing, bar a few money cranks and moralistic bleating about greed.
What’s unforgivable here is that there are alternatives. But no-one’s interested. Why don’t we hear about market socialism, or the real utopias project, or the work of Equality Exchange, or issues of ownership, or a basic income, or the democratization of finance, or left libertarianism or the superiority of co-operative forms of ownership?
Most of the Left is more interested in smug self-righteousness than in economics.
3. The debate about what to do now is conventionally framed in terms of the state versus (actually existing) markets – that is, as one set of bosses versus another. The possibility that people can organize themselves – through either genuinely free markets and/or through democratic co-operation – doesn’t arise. But it’s this spontaneous free organization that is the Marxist ideal.
We are, then, a million miles away from the end of capitalism, in any acceptable sense. I say all this in sorrow, as one who’s proud to call himself a Marxist.
The Right, of course, indulges in its own favorite varieties of self-righteousness. And note that this self-described Marxist thinks certain varieties of libertarianism might be a good idea. In many ways, the Left/Right divide is the relic of a previous intellectual era. This division will continue to be extremely important politically, but the more important intellectual divide is between people who understand economics and those who do not.
Old-school communism was politically successful in no small part because it had a clear villain: rich people. By contrast, economically sophisticated proposals for progress tend to focus on overcoming collective action problems, information asymmetries, etc. It’s not easy to get emotional satisfaction out of opposing an information asymmetry.
Today the major obstacle to progress is not any particular wrongheaded ideology but rather ignorance and instrumentally rational epistemic irrationality, which leads people to embrace dumb but emotionally satisfying ideas. And those are very difficult problems to overcome. My only hope is that we continue our present stumbling progress towards a wealthier and better educated world so that someday the intellectual grandchildren of Lou Dobbs might be laughed off the air.
Hi Jacob,
I find it interesting that you believe Marxism is more comparable to libertarianism than liberalism.
I agree with you, and I think the mix-up of all these labels is absurd.
Take George Orwell. His suspicion of the state leads libertarians like to claim him as their own, until the Left “corrects” them by informing them that he was a self-described “Socialist “. But Orwell actually favored “The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, [which] had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years.”
A paradise with no laws, but still plenty of brotherhood (i.e. charity, volunteerism, etc.), reminds me more of a “Marxitarianism,” not a bailout-junky leftism.
“I find it interesting that you believe Marxism is more comparable to libertarianism than liberalism.”
I don’t. And I suspect that lots of people who consider themselves Marxists object to Chris Dillow describing himself as such.
On second thought, let me amend that. Marxism does seek many of the same ends desired by libertarianism, perhaps moreso than left-liberalism does. Regarding means, Marxists are of course far left of the leftist liberals.