In 7318 Alejandro Valle Baeza wrote
>Gerry this information is quite interesting. Do you know some
>discussion about economic interest related to academic interest? I
>read, some years ago, an interesting paper from J. Petras about
>politics and Latin-American intellectuals. In such paper Petras
>argued that personal economic interest are close related to changes
>in focus by LA intellectual (And elsewhere I presume). In Mexico,
>by example, during 70's it was compatible to obtain academic
>prestige and grants with Marxian ascription. This changed
>drastically during 80's and 90's and most of Marxian Mexican
>economist rejected the first M; hence they are now Mexican economist.
If one does not drop an M, then one may end up trying to become a
Marxist Hayekian Mexican (or Indian)?
rb
Marx in the marketplace
(Filed: 21/04/2002)
Michael Prowse reviews Marx's Revenge by
Meghnad Desai.
SOME books are more than the sum of their parts;
others are less. Unhappily, Marx's Revenge, falls into
the latter category. Many of the chapters are
entertaining and instructive. Meghnad Desai, the
Labour peer and LSE economist, is good at
explaining complex ideas, and many readers will
learn much from his analysis of two centuries of
economic history. But the coherence of the book's
central argument is more doubtful.
The root problem is one that afflicts many nominally
Left-wing intellectuals. Late in their careers they
have come to appreciate the strength of the case for
markets. Yet they also want to remain loyal to the
ideals of their youth. In Desai's case, the problem is
extreme: he once admired Marx sufficiently to
devote years to the writing of textbooks on Marxian
economics. He is now trying to show that one can
revere both Marx and some of his sternest critics,
such as Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist. The
task is, let us say, challenging.
When Desai refers to Marx's "revenge", he has two
different ideas in mind, neither of which will perturb
investment bankers. He argues, first, that Marx has
already had his revenge with respect to the likes of
Lenin and Mao. They deserved to fail, he argues,
because they ignored the master's warning that one
type of social organisation can succeed another only
when the former has exhausted its capacity for
development. Capitalism had not exhausted its
potential when the Bolsheviks seized power, and
their project was thus always doomed.
Although Marx didn't live to witness the atrocities
committed in his name, he lived long enough to
worry about the rationality of his more ardent
followers. "Tout que je sais, je ne suis pas marxiste"
he once wrote. But Desai hints that there is a
second sense in which Marx may yet get his
revenge.
Many people imagine that markets and democracy
represent a final destination, the highest imaginable
development of social organisation. After the Berlin
Wall collapsed, Francis Fukuyama expressed this
insight pithily with his claim that "history had
ended". But if Marx was right, capitalism, like
feudalism, will go under once it has exhausted its
potential. And the irony about recent efforts to
deregulate economies is that they will hasten rather
than retard this process.
So long as capitalism was shackled - by high taxes,
tariff barriers, capital controls and so forth - its
development was stymied. The truest friends of
socialism, Desai thus hints, are the conservative
leaders who liberalised markets. They restarted the
historical process that will lead, ineluctably, to a
socialism that is genuine because spontaneous
rather than imposed by revolutionary upstarts.
The problem with this argument is that it is not
rigorous. Marx could neither identify the process
whereby capitalism would fail, nor even sketch how
a post-capitalist society would function. There was
thus little content in his claim that something
(communism) would succeed capitalism, just as
capitalism had apparently succeeded feudalism.
Desai thus fails to produce the evidence that could
justify his claim that Marx should still be regarded as
a seminal thinker. Indeed if one reads Desai closely
one will discover that his allegiance has anyway
shifted. Like many centre-left thinkers, he has
flipped from one extreme position to another. Having
once had too little faith in markets, he now has too
much faith in them. If you doubt this, read his
hagiographic account of Hayek.
The risk he thus runs is of encouraging an
unnecessarily supine attitude to global capitalism.
The world may need markets for the forseeable
future, but the institutional framework within which
markets are embedded can be more or less humane.
Desai's book will do nothing to encourage a more
humane capitalism.
Michael Prowse is a columnist on The Financial
Times.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Jul 02 2002 - 00:00:04 EDT