An opposing View by John B. Judis
If someone had claimed 60 years ago that prominent Washingtonians would be sporting Adam Smith ties, they would have been laughed at. In a similar way, there will be scorn for anyone predicting now that in two decades, American politicians and intellectuals may be wearing Karl Marx around their neck. To many liberals and conservatives, socialism and Marx perished on the day the Berliners started tearing down their wall. But let me risk derision by suggesting that socialist ideas remain alive and kicking. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two utopian schemes vied for supremacy: laissez-faire capitalism andrevolutionary socialism, or communism. Today, both have been discredited as comprehensive visions—the former by the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s, the latter by the Russian revolution and the subsequent history of socialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The more dogmatic exponents of laissez-faire economics have long since been forgotten (there never were “Smithists”). And only a fool would now describe himself as a “Marxist”—meaning a quasi-religious adherent to Marx’s doctrine. But that doesn’t mean that the ideas spawned by those movements aren’t relevant to the present. Here are some principles of Marxist thought and socialist politics that continue to be valuable: The Marxist interpretation of history as a series of discrete epochs defined by different modes of production (slavery, feudalism, capitalism), driven, ultimately, by struggle over the economic surplus generated by subordinate classes remains useful.
Marxist theory helps us understand capitalism as an historical creation that depends for its existence on legal andsocial relationships, a creation that goes through successive stages (mercantile, competitive, corporate).
Marxists remind us that capitalism is an inherently unstable system that, without political contravention, ignores national boundaries, tends toward monopoly, cycles through boom and bust, and brings unequal results to individuals and nations.
Socialists aim to gain some control for subordinate classes over the process by which surplus is generated—whether through workplace reform or through the power of government.
There remains the socialist objective of winning for workers, through this struggle, the kind of liberty, leisure, and opportunity previously enjoyed only by the upper classes.
The first three of my enduring socialist principles derive from Marx and his followers, but have also been adopted in thinly disguised form by thinkers who claim to have nothing to do with socialism or Marx. (In The Third Wave and Future Shock,for instance, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, mentors to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, propound a kind of techno-Marxism.) The last two principles derive from European social-democratic and U.S. progressive-liberal political practice. To my mind, the first and fourth principles have been battered most by the last century and a half of experience. It is difficult now to envisage socialism as a distinct mode of production that will follow what we now know as capitalism. It makes more sense, as historian Martin J. Sklar has suggested, to envisage the present as a mixture of capitalism and socialism that has superseded the stage of pure, laissez-faire capitalism.
It is equally difficult to envisage a popular socialist movement seeking to eliminate all vestiges of capitalism. The young Marx and many of his followers foresaw socialism as a negation of capitalism, in which money and market exchanges would eventually disappear. Clearly this vision is sheer fantasy. The socialist goal must now acknowledge the importance of markets and management. But the quest for greater popular control over the economy—like the age-old struggle for control over nature—will continue to drive politics and define political alternatives. We are now living at a time very much like the late nineteenth century, when life seems subject to large impersonal forces over which the average citizen can have no control. Economists argued then that it was futile to seek wage increases and union recognition because of ruinous price competition among firms. Now defenders of the status quo argue that movements of capital and international currency make it futile to protect workers’ jobs and incomes. But just as the twentieth century learned to live with labor unions, the twenty-first century will have to learn to live with measures that regulate the flow of capital. The new “socialist international” could take the form of a merger of NAFTA and EU pacts, intended (unlike current trade agreements) to strengthen rather than to eviscerate international labor rights. It is unlikely anyone will describe this new international as “socialist.” And I certainly don’t think that future intellectuals will describe themselves as “Marxists” in the same worshipful way as past generations. But once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates, politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy of socialism. And who knows? They may even wear Karl Marx ties.
July/August 1995 issue The American Enterprise Online – taemag.com 20 Required Readings: John B. Judis <URL: http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/JA96/judis.html >
John B. Judisis a senior editor at the New Republicand author of Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992). He first wrote for Mother Jones in January 1978, profiling President Jimmy Carter. His choices, listed chronologically: 1978 The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks & Changing American Institutions, by William Julius Wilson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Wilson's thesis was as simple as it was provocative: While many middle-class blacks had joined the suburban mainstream, poor blacks suffered primarily from economic dislocation rather than from racial discrimination. Wilson has backed away from his own thesis, but he got it right the first time. 1979 The Culture of Narcissism, by Christopher Lasch (New York: W.W. Norton). This might not be Lasch's best book, but it was the first clear indictment (from the left rather than the right) of the counterculture's anarchic individualism. He should be read for his articulation of problems, not his often contradictory solutions. 1980 The Third Wave, by Alvin Toffler (New York: William Morrow). If I were listing the most important books of the last 25 years, I'd cite Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society(1973). Instead, in the shorter span, Toffler's book is the most penetrating analysis of how the silicon chip is transforming America and the world. 1982 MITI and the Japanese Miracle, by Chalmers Johnson (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press). This was the first book to shatter the myth that Japan's capitalism is just like ours. 1983 The Economics of Feasible Socialism, by Alec Nove (London: Routledge). Nove wrested socialism, and me, from the grips of dogmatic Marxism. He showed that "market socialism" was not an oxymoron. His ideas are relevant to Eastern Europe and may one day provide the basis for a renewal of socialist thought in the United States. 1987 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, by Paul Kennedy (New York: Random House). Kennedy revived the 18th century view of world history as the rise and fall of empires. It is one important way to understand what is happening to America. 1988 Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism: 1890-1916, by Martin J. Sklar (New York: Cambridge University Press). It's heavy going (Sklar used to say that he demanded "militant readers"), but this book shows how the fundamental assumptions that shape our understanding of state, society, and economy were born in the Progressive Era. 1990 The Politics of Rich and Poor, by Kevin Phillips (New York: Random House). None of Phillips' books are particularly outstanding, but together they establish him as the most perceptive political commentator of our generation. This book remains the most telling indictment of the Reagan- Bush years. 1991 The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Gordon S. Wood (New York: Knopf). Wood's book is the best ever on how Americans came to understand they are "created equal." It makes clear why a conservatism that exalts class and status can never catch on here. Like Sklar's history of progressivism, it's entirely relevant to political debate today. 1992 Reinventing Government, by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley). Not the best-written book but, like Wilson's, it propounds an astonishingly simple but brilliant thesis: Governments should "steer, not row."
What books would you choose for your 1976-96 political syllabus? E-mail your suggestions to backtalk at motherjones.com Katha Pollitt's required readings
-- Michael Pugliese
"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without listening to
each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other, understanding that
we would be flattered and praised in return. Other times we abused and shouted
at each other, as if we were in a madhouse." -Tolstoy