Diagnosis and Prescription

Karl Marx was a brilliant social analyst, sort of a social M.D. you might say. His diagnosis of the ills of capitalism remains the best I've seen, but his prescription was way off base, because its foundation is an erroneous view of human nature.

Consider these nuggets of analysis from "The Communist Manifesto (1848):"

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other...

The bourgeoisie (i.e., the capitalist ruling class) cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

Whatever happened to U.S. Steel? Where has Detroit gone? Why does the milkman no longer come to my door?

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.

Nowadays we call that either "globalization" or "The Iraq War."

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

They're smoking Marlboros and watching "Walker, Texas Ranger" in Shanghai.

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.

It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

Marx is speaking here of the periodic contractions that afflict our modern day societies, crises in which millions are thrown out of work and thousands of businesses collapse. And he observed in 1848 that we can no longer live this way, even though we have continued to do so since then (160 years!).

And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

Unfortunately, Marx's prescription for the ills of capitalism derive from the enlightenment tradition of laying all blame for the evils of society on evil institutions. If only the Church and aristocracy were done away with, Voltaire claimed, France would become a just and equitable society. But the French Revolution, ending as it did with Napoleon, was neither just nor equitable, and portions of it brought out the very worst in human nature.

Likewise, Marx's prescription -- abolishing the bourgeois ruling class and replacing it with proletarian rule -- would do little to usher in a society in which resources are evenly and fairly distributed, and if experience is a guide, such a society would be just as vulnerable to corruption, greed, and violence as the present state of affairs.

If we didn't learn anything else from the horrors of the twentieth century's two great wars, we should have perceived that our problems do not issue from corrupt institutions or social arrangements, but from dark and destructive instincts at the center of the human soul. Hitler, Stalin, and the bomb dropped on Hiroshima were tokens of evil impulses which are as much a part of us as the instinct to love.

We can no longer live with this ruling class, true enough. But can we learn to live with ourselves? Before we can do that, we must learn to know ourselves.