Marxism Remains a Dangerous Idea

I have been meaning to write a blog post about Marxism following an exchange in the comments to one of my posts about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. Essentially the thrust of the comment was that Marxism is a bigger threat in the US today than fascism. I disagree with this assertion, but I do think that the extremes to which we have taken capitalism have opened the door for a resurgence of beliefs that it needs to be toppled entirely rather than shrunken dramatically, as I propose in The World After Capital.

I want to start by pointing out a few things that should be obvious but maybe aren’t. First, there is a huge body of Marxist thinking that has evolved over more than a century and entire books have been written about narrow subfields, such as say Marxist critiques of modern cinema. I find it somewhat comical to think that anyone would find this a threat — it is a valid mode of criticism, which one can debate on its merits, but which in no way is going to give rise to a revolution. When people say that the liberal arts are overrun with Marxist thinking, it is useful to keep this in mind.

Second, there are policies, such as the Green New Deal or Single Payer Healthcare that I disagree with for a variety of reasons (mostly related to their approaches to labor and innovation) but which are not Marxist per se. Applying the Marxist label to them is often an attempt to smear them and avoid a debate on the merits. Canada and the UK have national health systems and last I checked neither of them is a Marxist country. Here it is worth keeping in mind that healthcare is but one sector of the economy and we have other heavily regulated or government owned sectors (e.g. water and sewage).

So the central idea that matters and is worth discussing is that of class struggle between labor and capital that can ultimately get resolved only through worker control of the means of production (and by extension the abolishment of capitalists). The first thing to note is that Marx was perceptive and right in understanding that there is a conflict here — that the interests of those providing labor often diverge from the interest of those providing capital. The second thing to note is that this conflict lay somewhat dormant for many decades as capitalism produced material progress that was widely shared. And the third thing to note is that with the advent of digital technology, the role of capital has changed (again this is the central theme of my book The World After Capital).

What then is wrong with the Marxist idea? The key problem is one of scale. It is entirely possible to have small worker owned companies and there are tons of successful examples for that. The question is how do you do implement worker ownership for something that requires thousands or tens of thousands of people, such as say a car company? Or at even bigger scale, how does worker ownership apply to the economy as a whole? One very quickly runs into governance issues which defy easy solution. That has been the key source of the problems with the attempted implementations of the Marxist model. So far the result has inevitably been a bureaucracy that wields great power and becomes deeply entrenched often abusing the very workers it was meant to represent. This is especially true in the model of Marxism where the means of production are owned outright by the state as a proxy for workers (the idea being that the state *IS* the workers, but the state inevitably winds up being its own entity).

Now I should be quick to point out that the same governance problem also exists in capitalism, but in theory bureaucratic excess is checked there by the functioning of markets. I say in theory, because in practice, especially over the last few decades of the rise of managerial capitalism combined with ever more concentrated markets and regulatory capture, the bureaucratic hierarchy has in fact become largely unaccountable (as have large concentrations of financial capital). We see this is in many forms including the extraordinary rise of managerial compensation as well as various abuses of market power.

So where does all of this leave us? I believe that the idea that all means of production should be owned by the state is a genuinely dangerous one due to the power that it vests in what becomes an unaccountable bureaucracy.  The ideas that we have well-functioning capitalism today or for that matter that capitalism can solve all problems are, however, equally dangerous. As long as we promote these (which unfortunately most of the political establishment in the US does, including much of the Democratic Party) we will have more and more people flocking back to ideas, such as Marxism, which argue that we should overthrow capitalism entirely.

My book The World After Capital, is an explicit attempt to point to an alternative path. A path in which over time capitalist activity will shrink as a part of human affairs, much as agriculture has gone from being the defining aspect of societies to being one of many endeavors.