Marx in the Mirror of Globalization
Sept. 5, 2000
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....
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.