This may be of interest to some...
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From: Sid Shniad [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: September 12, 2000 4:51 PM
Subject: Marx in the Mirror of Globalization - Britannica.com
Britannica.com Sept. 5,
2000
Marx in the Mirror of Globalization
by Peter Hudis, special to Britannica.com
One interesting-some would say surprising-aspect of the ongoing discussions
and debates about globalization is the renewed interest being shown in the
ideas of Karl Marx, which only recently seemed to have been consigned to the
dustbin of history. In the journalistic and academic worlds alike, a number
of reappraisals of Marx's work are appearing that identify the 19th-century
thinker as "the prophet of globalization" because of his focus on capital's
inherent drive for self-expansion and technological innovation on the one
hand and its tendency to exacerbate social inequality and instability on the
other. Even some of globalization's most fervent supporters note the
importance of Marx's work for anticipating the imbalances and disturbances
associated with the unfettered expansion of global capital. As John
Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, writers for the passionately
pro-capitalist magazine The Economist, put it in their new book A Future
Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization, "As a prophet of
socialism, Marx may be kaput; but as a prophet of 'the universal
interdependence of nations,' as he called globalization, he can still seem
startlingly relevant...his description of globalization remains as sharp
today as it was 150 years ago."
Some may find such talk of Marx a bit odd, given the abject failure of the
communist regimes that claimed to rule in his name. Yet as Marx scholars
have long pointed out, the communist regimes had little in common with
Marx's actual ideas. Marx opposed centralized state control of the economy
(he called those who advocated it "crude and unthinking communists"); he
passionately defended freedom of the press (he made his debut as a radical
journalist espousing it); and he ridiculed the notion that a small
"vanguard" of revolutionaries could successfully restructure society without
the democratic consent of its citizens. If anything, the collapse of
communism seems to have spurred new interest in Marx, since it makes his
predictions concerning the global reach of capitalism seem even more timely.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge contend that "one of the things that Marx would
recognize immediately about this particular global era is a paradox that he
spotted in the last one: The more successful globalization becomes, the more
it seems to whip up its own backlash.... The undoing of globalization, in
Marx's view, would come not just from losers resenting the success of the
winners but also from the winners themselves losing their appetite for the
battle." "There is even a suspicion," they go on, "that globalization's
psychic energy-the uncertainly that it creates which forces companies,
governments, and people to perform better-may have a natural stall point, a
movement when people can take no more."
The tone of much of the current discussion of Marx on the part of both
supporters and critics of globalization (for a forceful example of the
latter, see William Greider's One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of
Global Capitalism) was established by John Cassidy's 1997 New Yorker article
"The Return of Karl Marx," in which he called Marx "the next big thinker."
Cassidy cited a high-placed Wall Street investment banker who told him, "The
longer I spend time on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was
right."
What is it about Marx's work that produces such comments? First, though Marx
was a severe critic of capitalism, few captured better its inherent drive
for technological and social innovation. As Marx saw it, capitalism is not
only about the production of material goods and services but also about the
production of value. Labor, in Marx's view, is the source of value. And the
magnitude of value, he argued, is determined by the amount of socially
necessary labor time it takes to produce a given commodity. Marx held that
there is a continual contradiction between these two purposes: producing for
material wealth and producing for value. As productivity rises, more goods
are produced in the same unit of time, so the value of each commodity falls.
The increase in material wealth corresponds with a decline in the magnitude
of value-that is, production costs fall and prices tend to fall as a result.
This presents the capitalist with a knotty problem: the relative decline in
the value of each commodity risks leaving him short of the funds needed to
maintain his level of productive output. He responds by trying to further
boost productivity, since the greater the quantity of goods produced, the
better the opportunity to realize the value of his initial investment. The
best way to increase productivity is to invest in labor-saving devices. The
resulting growth in productivity, however, reproduces the initial problem,
since the increase in material wealth leads to a further decrease in the
relative value of each commodity. Capitalism is thus based on a kind of
treadmill effect, in which the system is constantly driven toward
technological innovation regardless of its human or environmental cost. The
restlessness and drive for innovation that characterize contemporary
high-tech capitalism was long ago anticipated by Marx.
Second, Marx held that this process of constant innovation and productive
expansion ultimately proceeds with disregard of national borders. The logic
of capital, he held, was to create a world market. National restrictions on
the movement of capital would eventually have to be lifted, he argued,
because capital must constantly find new markets to absorb its ever-growing
productive output.
Third, Marx held that this process inevitably leads to a concentration and
centralization of capital at one pole and a relative immiseration of the
majority of the population at the other. Since capital is driven to increase
productivity through labor-saving devices, "dead labor"-machines,
technology-expands at a faster rate than the need for labor power. Since
workers do not own capital, but only their labor power, social wealth gets
increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Many consider this
confirmed by the growing inequities that follow from the globalization
process, as indicated by the fact that 225 individuals now control more
wealth than half of the world's population.
Marx the Man
The importance of such issues is also addressed in Francis Wheen's Karl
Marx: A Life, the first English-language Marx biography to appear in almost
two decades. In Wheen's portrait Marx the man comes across as embodying in
many respects the dialectic, a concept Marx drew from Hegel, that every unit
contains its opposite within itself. Marx came from a family of renowned
rabbis, yet showed not the slightest inclination toward religion. He was a
loving husband and father whose daughters became important spokeswomen for
socialism in their own right, yet he once sighed "blessed be he that hath no
family." He preached the virtues of communalism and railed against egotism,
yet he was such an individualist himself that when a friend said that she
couldn't imagine him living happily in an egalitarian society, he responded:
"Neither can I. These times will come, but we must be away by then." He
spent more time thinking over the origins, nature, and function of money
than perhaps anyone, yet he was continuously unable to earn any himself.
What is most striking from Wheen's portrayal is Marx's gargantuan
intellectual appetite. From his earliest writings there appears no subject
that was not of interest to him-history, ancient and modern philosophy,
economics, art, literature, geology, natural science, ethnology, and
mathematics. This surely makes any effort to sum up his contribution far
from easy. So formidable was Marx's output that although he published only a
handful of books in his lifetime (including one volume of his planned
multivolume magnum opus Das Kapital), his collected works come to more than
100 volumes, and the work of transcribing and publishing all his writings
remains to be completed even today.
Wheen approaches his subject with considerable skepticism, especially
concerning Marx's goal of a classless society. A columnist for The Guardian,
Wheen has never considered himself sympathetic to Marxism. Yet, he writes,
"The more I studied Marx, the more astoundingly topical he seemed to be.
Today's pundits and politicians who fancy themselves as modern thinkers like
to mention the buzzword 'globalization' at every opportunity-without
realizing that Marx was already on the case in 1848." Two issues make Marx
especially relevant in his view: one, Marx's notion that even in the most
propitious economic conditions, the laborer under capitalism is compelled to
endure overwork and "the reduction to a machine, the enslavement to
capital"; and two, Marx's insistence that once capital becomes the
predominant formation in any society, "what is truly human becomes congealed
or crystallized into a material force, while dead objects acquire meaning,
life and vigor."
None of these recent discussions of Marx can be considered wholesale
appropriations of his legacy. The consensus on the part of most commentators
is that while Marx may have been right about the nature of capitalism, he
was less correct about the practicality of the alternative he envisioned.
Yet in light of the way Marx is gaining increased attention from many who
only a short time ago thought that history had pronounced his ideas dead,
his work may continue to illuminate the quest to understand life under the
"manic logic" of global capitalism. As Marx once put it, "We are firmly
convinced that the real danger lies not in practical attempts, but in the
theoretical elaboration of communist ideas, for practical attempts, even
mass attempts, can be answered by cannon as soon as they become dangerous,
whereas ideas, which have conquered our intellect and taken possession of
our minds...are demons which human beings can vanquish only by submitting to
them."
Peter Hudis is a freelance writer living in Chicago.
