John Lanchester
In
trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have
to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think
that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from
experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a
picture of reality from the fragments you’ve accumulated. Since this is
what most of us think we’re doing most of the time it marks a
fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense, a notion
that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular
political and class order turns its construction of reality into an
apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the
natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the
existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities
things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological
pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He
would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from
‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the
watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the
circumstances of their own production.
I,
on the other hand, am an empiricist. That’s not so much because I think
Marx was wrong about the distorting effect of underlying ideological
pressures; it’s because I don’t think it’s possible to have a vantage
point free of those pressures, so you have a duty to do the best with
what you can see, and especially not to shirk from looking at data which
are uncomfortable and/or contradictory. But this is a profound
difference between Marx and my way of talking about Marx, which he would
have regarded as being philosophically and politically entirely
invalid.
Consider these passages from The Communist Manifesto, which Marx wrote with Engels in 1848, after being kicked out of both France and Germany for his political writings:
Capitalism
has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created
enormous cities. Capitalism has agglomerated population, centralised
means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.
Capitalism has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’.
Capitalism
has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has
accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts
and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the
shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. Capitalism has
created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all
preceding generations together.
Capitalism
cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of
production, and thereby the means of production, and with them the whole
relations of society. Constant revolutionising of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the capitalist epoch from all
earlier ones. All old-established national industries have been
destroyed or are daily being destroyed.
In
place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we
find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of
distant lands and climes.
Commercial
crises put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the
entire capitalist society. In these crises a great part not only of the
existing products, but also of the previously created productive
forces, are periodically destroyed.
It’s
hard not to conclude from these selected sentences that Marx was
extraordinarily prescient. He really did have the most astonishing
insight into the nature and trajectory and direction of capitalism.
Three aspects which particularly stand out here are the tribute he pays
to the productive capacity of capitalism, which far exceeds that of any
other political-economic system we’ve ever seen; the remaking of social
order which accompanies that; and capitalism’s inherent tendency for
crisis, for cycles of boom and bust.
I
should, however, admit that I haven’t quoted these sentences exactly as
Marx wrote them: where I wrote ‘capitalism’, Marx had ‘the
bourgeoisie’. He was talking about a class and the system which served
its interest, and I made it sound as if he was talking only about a
system. Marx doesn’t use the word ‘capitalism’. The term never occurs in
the finished first part of Das Kapital.
(I checked this by doing a word search and found it three times, every
time an apparent mistranslation or loose use of the German plural Kapitals – in German he never talks of Kapitalismus.)
Since he is widely, and accurately, seen as capitalism’s greatest
critic, this is quite an omission. The terms he preferred were
‘political economy’ and ‘bourgeois political economy’, which he saw as
encompassing everything from property rights to our contemporary idea of
human rights to the very conception of the independent autonomous
individual. I think he didn’t use the word ‘capitalism’ because that
would have implied that capitalism was one of a number of competing
possible systems – and Marx didn’t believe that. He didn’t think it was
possible to move past capitalism without a fundamental overturning of
the existing social, political and philosophical order.
He
was right: no alternative has developed. Economics as a discipline has
in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same
subject. If there were ever going to be a serious and sustained
theoretical challenge to the hegemony of capitalism inside economics – a
serious and sustained challenge subsequent to the one provided by what
used to be called ‘actually existing socialisms’ – you’d have thought
one would have come along since the near terminal meltdown of the global
economic system in 2008. But all we’ve seen are suggestions for
ameliorative tweaking of the existing system to make it a little less
risky. We have at the moment this monstrous hybrid, state capitalism – a
term which used to be a favourite of the Socialist Workers Party in
describing the Soviet Union, and which only a few weeks ago was on the
cover of the Economist
to describe the current economic condition of most of the world. This
is a parody of economic order, in which the general public bears all the
risks and the financial sector takes all the rewards – an
extraordinarily pure form of what used to be called ‘socialism for the
rich’. But ‘socialism for the rich’ was supposed to be a joke. The truth
is that it is now genuinely the way the global economy is working.
The
financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat
to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy
has ever been destabilised by terrorism, but if the cashpoints stopped
giving out money, it would be an event on a scale that would put the
currently constituted democratic states at risk of collapse. And yet
governments act as if there is very little they can do about it. They
have the legal power to conscript us and send us to war, but they can’t
address any fundamentals of the economic order. So it looks very much as
if Marx’s omission of the word ‘capitalism’, because he foresaw no
alternative within the existing social order, was an instance of his
crystal ball functioning with particularly high resolution.
Marx
puts great pressure on the question of where value comes from, how
commodities are exchanged and what money is. It’s a very simple question
but not one that had been asked with such clarity before; it’s also the
kind of question no longer asked at a professional or institutional
level because the current order of things is taken so much for granted.
But it is a very basic and important question, or two questions: what is
money and where does its value come from?
There
are many hundreds of pages on this subject in Marx, and many tens of
thousands in commentaries and analyses of his work, so my summary of his
views is of necessity cartoonishly compressed and simple. Marx’s model
works like this: competition pressures will always force down the cost
of labour, so that workers are employed for the minimum price, always
paid just enough to keep themselves going, and no more. The employer
then sells the commodity not for what it cost to make, but for the best
price he can get: a price which in turn is subject to competition
pressures, and therefore will always tend over time to go down. In the
meantime, however, there is a gap between what the labourer sells his
labour for, and the price the employer gets for the commodity, and that
difference is the money which accumulates to the employer and which Marx
called surplus value. In Marx’s judgment surplus value is the entire
basis of capitalism: all value in capitalism is the surplus value
created by labour. That’s what makes up the cost of the thing; as Marx
put it, ‘price is the money-name of the labour objectified in a
commodity.’ And in examining that question he creates a model which
allows us to see deeply into the structure of the world, and see the
labour hidden in the things all around us. He makes labour legible in
objects and relationships.
The
theory of surplus value also explains, for Marx, why capitalism has an
inherent tendency towards crisis. The employer, just like the employee,
has competition pressures, and the price of the things he’s selling will
always tend to be forced down by new entrants to the market. His way of
getting round this will usually be to employ machines to make the
workers more productive. He’ll try to get more out of them by employing
fewer of them to make more stuff. But in trying to increase the
efficiency of production, he might well destroy value, often by making
too many goods at not enough profit, which leads to a surplus of
competing goods which leads to a crash in the market which leads to
massive destruction of capital which leads to the start of another
cycle. It’s an elegant aspect of Marx’s thinking that the surplus theory
of value leads directly and explicitly to the prediction that
capitalism will always have cycles of crisis, of boom and bust.
There
are obvious difficulties with Marx’s arguments. One of them is that so
many of the contemporary world’s goods and commodities are now virtual
(in the digital-oriented sense) that it’s not easy to see where the
accumulated labour in them is. David Harvey’s lectures on Capital, for instance, the best beginning for anyone studying Marx’s most important book, are of immense value but they’re also available for free on the internet,
so if you buy them as a book – you can take in information much more
quickly by reading than by listening – the surplus value you’re adding
to is mainly your own.
This
idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising
from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful
explanatory tool in the digital world. Take Facebook. Part of its
success comes from the fact that people feel that they and their
children are safe spending time there, that it is a place you go to
interact with other people but is not fundamentally risky or sleazy in
the way new technologies are often perceived to be – that VHS, for
instance, was when it was launched on the market. But the perception
that Facebook is, maybe the best word would be ‘hygienic’, is sustained
by tens of thousands of hours of badly paid labour on the part of the
people in the developing world who work for companies hired to scan for
offensive images and who are, according to the one Moroccan man who went
on the record to complain about it, paid a dollar an hour for doing so.
That’s a perfect example of surplus value: huge amounts of poorly paid
menial work creating the hygienic image of a company which, when it
launches on the stock market later this year, hopes to be worth $100
billion.
When
you start looking for this mechanism at work in the contemporary world
you see it everywhere, often in the form of surplus value being created
by you, the customer or client of a company. Online check-in and bag
drop at airports, for example. Online check-in is a process which should
genuinely increase the efficiency of the airport experience, thereby
costing you less time: time you can spend doing other things, some of
them economically useful to you. But what the airlines do is employ so
few people to supervise the bag drop-off that there’s no time-saving at
all for the customer. When you look, you see that because airlines have
to employ more people to supervise the non-online-checked-in customers –
otherwise the planes wouldn’t leave on time – the non-checked-in queues
move far more quickly. They’re transferring their inefficiency to the
customer, but what they’re also doing is transferring the labour to you
and accumulating the surplus value themselves. It happens over and over
again. Every time you deal with a phone menu or interactive voicemail
service, you’re donating your surplus value to the people you’re dealing
with. Marx’s model is constantly asking us to see the labour encoded in
the things and transactions all around us.
Last year the National Geographic
ran a feature on ‘the world’s most typical human being’ to commemorate
the birth of the world’s seven billionth person. The single
uncontentious point about this person is the fact of right-handedness.
(Actually, though handedness isn’t contentious, it is quite interesting,
since the average rate of left-handedness runs at about 10 per cent,
but seems to be higher in societies that have a higher level of
violence. Nobody knows why, but that isn’t surprising since the reason
some people are born left-handed isn’t understood.) That he is a he is a
relatively recent development. More male children are born than female
ones, in the ratio of 103-106 to 100, because male children have a
higher rate of infant mortality and to balance the gender ratio of the
species you need more male babies. But modern medicine has in most parts
of the world sharply decreased infant mortality and now the difference
in birth rates is feeding through into other demographic distributions,
which have historically had more women than men because women live
longer, again for reasons which aren’t understood. In addition, and much
much more darkly, rising prosperity and technological abilities have
led to huge disparities in birth rates, which can only be to do with the
selective abortion of female children. The sex ratio in many parts of
Asia in particular has risen way past biologically possible levels. In
China and India, census data indicate that the level is nationally
around 120 to 100. By 2020, China will have between thirty and forty
million more men than women under the age of 19. To put that figure in
perspective, forty million is the total number of American men in that
demographic bracket. So, within eight years, China faces the prospect of
having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America
permanently single. One of the dark things about this is that ‘son
preference’, as it’s dryly called in the literature, rises with income
and with modernisation – which means it’s been rising sharply. That
amounts to many tens of millions of missing girls.
So
he’s a he. He earns less than £8000 a year. He has a mobile phone but
not a bank account. That fits Marx’s model of how capitalism would play
out: he doesn’t have a bank account because the typical worker is a
proletarian who’s got nothing to deposit in a bank; he doesn’t have any
capital; he has to sell his labour for the best price he can get. He is
28 – that’s the median age of the world population, the guy in the
middle. And if you say the world’s most typical person belongs to the
world’s most numerous ethnic group, it follows that he is a Han Chinese.
So this representative human in 2012 is a 28-year-old Han Chinese man,
no bank account but a mobile, earning on average less than £8000 a year.
Guess how many people fit those exact criteria today? Nine million. We
can even guess his name: Lee, or Li, the most common surname in the
world. There are as many people called Lee as there are people in the UK
and in France added together.
I
don’t think Marx would have seen anything in that picture to disprove
his model, to use a word he would have disliked. He foresaw the
development of a proletariat who did most of the world’s work and a
bourgeoisie who in effect owned the fruits of their labour. The fact of
the proletariat being in the developing world, in effect shoved out of
sight of the Western bourgeoisie, does nothing to disprove that picture –
an ‘external proletariat’, it’s sometimes called. Take as a case study
of this process the world’s most valuable company, which at the moment
is Apple. Apple’s last quarter was the most profitable of any company in
history: it made $13 billion in profits on $46 billion in sales. Its
bestselling products are made at factories owned by the Chinese company
Foxconn. (Foxconn makes the Amazon Kindle, the Microsoft Xbox, the Sony
PS3, and hundreds of other products with other companies’ names on the
front – it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that it makes every
electronic device in the world.) The company’s starting pay is $2 an
hour, the workers live in dormitories of six or eight beds for which
they are charged rent of $16 a month, their factory in Chengdu, where
the iPad is made, runs 24 hours a day, employs 120,000 people – think
about that, a factory the size of Exeter – and isn’t even Foxconn’s
biggest plant: that’s in Shenzhen and employs 230,000 people, who work
12 hours a day, six days a week. The company’s answer to a recent
scandal about suicide rates was to point out that the suicide rate among
Foxconn employees is actually lower than the Chinese average, and that
it turns away thousands of applicants for jobs every day, and both of
those facts are true. That’s what’s really shocking. These conditions
are equal to or better than most of the equivalent manufacturing jobs in
China, where most of the world’s goods are made, and that life is
widely seen among Chinese workers as preferable to the remaining
alternatives of rural life. And all this, in an irony so large there is
almost no word to encompass it, in the world’s biggest and most powerful
notionally Communist state. I don’t think you can describe these as
19th-century labour conditions, but they come very close to fulfilling
Marx’s model of an alienated proletariat whose labour is sucked away
from it and turned into other people’s profits. Our 28-year-old Mr Lee
can easily be imagined as working at one of those plants.
The
challenges to Marx’s account of where we would be now come when you
look in closer detail. If you look at a large picture of the world, much
of what he predicted has come true. We have an affluent bourgeoisie
which is international but which in the Western world forms the majority
of the population, and a proletarian workforce largely in Asia. Add to
that the regularity of economic crises, the growing concentration of
wealth among the already wealthy and the increased pressures that are
everywhere apparent on the international bourgeoisie – the squeezedness
we read so much about. There’s a general sense that there are no longer
any safe havens, that there’s no escaping economic change, that
capitalism moves at a pace faster than humans themselves can move. If
you are a welder but your daughter has to be trained as a software
engineer in order to get work, that’s probably something you and your
society can adapt to; if you are a welder and you have to retrain as a
software engineer halfway through your productive career, that just
isn’t so easy. And yet changes of this scale are what is implied by
developments in modern labour markets. This is exactly what Marx meant
when he foresaw a world in which ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ It
is therefore not too hard to convince yourself that Marx’s predictions
were right at a certain level of broad-brush impressionism.
The
most obvious mistake in his version of the world is to do with class.
There is something like a classic Marxian proletariat dispersed through
the world. But Marx foresaw that this proletariat would be an
increasingly centralised and organised force: indeed, this was one of
the reasons it would prove so dangerous to capitalism. By creating the
conditions in which labour would be sure to organise and assemble
collectively capitalism was arranging its own downfall. But there is no
organised global conflict between the classes; there is no organised
global proletariat. There’s nothing even close. The proletariat is
queuing to get into Foxconn, not to organise strikes there, and the
great danger facing China, which is in a sense where the world’s
proletariat now is, is the inequality caused by fractures within the new
urban proletariat and the rural poverty they’re leaving behind. China
also has tensions between the coast and the centre, and increasing
problems with corruption and maladministration that erupt regularly in
what are known as Mass Group Incidents, MGI – basically anti-authority
riots which occur regularly all over China and seem never to be reported
in the Western mainstream media. But none of these phenomena is to do
with class, and given the emphasis put on organised class struggle in
Marx’s work you have to file this under predictions which haven’t proved
true.
Why
not? I think for two main reasons. The first is that Marx did not
foresee, as no one else did and I don’t think anyone could, the variety
of different forms of capitalism which would evolve. We talk of
capitalism as one thing, but it comes in many different flavours,
involving different models. The contemporary welfare state – housing and
educating and feeding and providing healthcare for its citizens, from
birth to death – is a development which challenges the basis of Marx’s
analysis of what capitalism is: I think he would have looked hard at the
welfare state and wondered whether it fundamentally undermined his
analysis, just because it is so different from the capitalism Marx saw
operating in his day, and from which he extrapolated. Perhaps he would
argue that what has happened is that British society in its entirety has
become part of a global bourgeoisie, and the proletariat is now in
other countries; that’s a possible argument, but not one that’s easy to
sustain in the face of the inequalities which exist and are growing in
our society. But Scandinavian welfare capitalism is very different from
the state-controlled capitalism of China, which is in turn almost wholly
different from the free-market, sauve-qui-peut capitalism of the United
States, which is again different from the nationalistic and heavily
socialised capitalism of France, which again is not at all like the
curious hybrid we have in the UK, in which our governments are wholly
devoted to the free market and yet we have areas of welfare and
provision they haven’t dared address. Singapore is one of the most
avowedly free-market countries in the world, regularly coming top or
near top of surveys for liberalisation of markets, and yet the
government owns most of the land in the country and the overwhelming
majority of the population lives in socialised housing. It’s the world
capital of free markets and also of council flats. There are lots of
different capitalisms and it’s not clear that a single analysis which
embraces all of them as if they were a single phenomenon can be valid.
One
of the ways this plays out is in the variety and complexity of our
interests in this system. In February all the workers in Foxconn had
their basic pay increased by 25 per cent overnight. That wasn’t because
of a feat of organisation and protest on the part of the workforce: it
was because of an article about working conditions there in the New York Times.
Ethical pressures from the West are one of the most potent forces for
improving factory conditions in Shenzhen. Another example, well known in
the medical world but not much outside it, concerns Mectizan, a drug
developed to treat river blindness by the American company Merck. (The
initial samples that contained the chemical used to make the drug came
from a golf course in Japan.) The drug was developed at considerable
cost in 1987, and then given away, free, in perpetuity, with the effect
of saving many hundreds of thousands of people from blindness, and also
saving many more from starvation because it allowed 25 million hectares
of previously uncultivatable land to be turned over to agriculture. You
can just about squeeze that into a Marxist model by describing it as a
publicity stunt, but I don’t think that analysis works, not least
because hardly anybody in the Western world has ever heard of it.
That’s
something Marx didn’t predict and it touches on something else that
couldn’t have been foreseen. That’s the diversity of our interests and
roles in contemporary capitalism. Marx talked about people, indeed
classes, as being divided into workers and owners of the means of
production, and he made some allowance for the fact that we are
‘bearers’ of these roles, different aspects of which might be in play at
different times, with the result that a proletarian may find himself
competing against other proletarians even though their class interests
are aligned. The fact is that in the modern world our selves are far
more fragmented and contradictory than that. Many workers have pensions
invested in companies whose route to profit lies in cutting to a minimum
the number of workers they employ; one of the things that led to the
credit crunch was pension funds’ search for higher stable returns to pay
the pension liabilities of future generations of retiring workers, so
that in very many cases we had a situation in which people lost their
jobs because of losses incurred in the attempt to provide future
security for the same workers. Most of us are wage slaves, beneficiaries
of the welfare state, funders of that state, at the same time as being
current or future pensioners who, in that capacity if in no other, are
textbook bourgeois owners of the means of production. It’s complicated;
and the intense ethical pressures which can intermittently be brought to
bear on companies are a symptom of that complexity and multiplicity of
interests. It’s very striking how seldom companies defend themselves
using the simplest – and under classic capitalism most truthful – answer
to criticism of their behaviour: our ethical role is to make a profit
for our shareholders, provide employment and pay our taxes. That’s it.
The other stuff is for government. But they never say that, perhaps
sensing that we all intuit the fact that our interweaving and internally
conflicting interests make the world more complicated than that.
Complicated
though Marx’s model of the world is, the modern world is more
complicated still. This exerts great pressure in one more area, one Marx
would have recognised through a favourite saying that comes from Hegel:
quantity changes quality. What this means is that you can have an
explanatory system which accounts for certain phenomena – in this case,
the way capitalism produces things which run against its own main
current of accumulation and exploitation – while the broad direction of
travel remains the same. But a point comes when the phenomena mount up,
and stop seeming like isolated contradictory examples and look instead
like a basic challenge to the central ideas. Something like this has
happened with the countercurrents that run inside capitalism.
Take
the most basic statistical measures of life, infant mortality and life
expectancy. Life expectancy in Britain in 1850, the year The Communist Manifesto
was first published in English, was 43 years; that’s lower than today’s
life expectancy in Afghanistan, which is in turn lower than in any
country that hasn’t been hit by the Aids epidemic. UK life expectancy is
now over eighty and rising so sharply that buried in the statistics is a
truly strange fact: a woman who is eighty today has a 9.2 per cent
chance of living to be a hundred, whereas a woman of twenty has a 26.6
per cent chance. It may seem weird that the person sixty years younger
has a three times better chance of making it to a century, but what it
shows is just how fast progress is being made. Infant mortality, which
is often taken as a proxy for a whole set of things (level of medical
and technological development, strength of social ties, degree of access
to care for the poor, a society’s acknowledgment of the needs of
strangers), is something in which Marx would have taken a keen interest.
In Victorian Britain it was at the rate of 150 deaths per thousand
births. Today, UK infant mortality is 4.7 per thousand. That’s an
improvement of 3191 per cent. (Many countries have done better than us
and have lower rates; we’re only 31st in the world – the lowest of all
being in the place where everyone lives in council flats, at 1.92 per
thousand.) The global infant mortality rate is 42.09 per thousand, a
third of the British rate in Marx’s day. Aids has a terrible effect on
these figures: Botswana, for instance, has a life expectancy of 31.6
years, but according to UN data, if you remove the impact of Aids that
goes up to 70.7 years.
At
what point do data of this sort represent a challenge to Marx’s ideas?
These data mask significant inequalities – the notorious example in
London is that if you take the Jubilee Line from Westminster towards the
east, male life expectancy goes down a year every stop for the next
eight stops – but leaving that aside, the very broad picture is that
pretty much everyone lives longer and enjoys better health. If that is
true, can it be true that capitalism consistently and reliably
immiserates? Can it be true that the system is destructive, if people
who live under it quite simply live longer? Take the Millennium
Development goals, announced at the turn of the new century, and setting
targets to reduce infant mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality
by three-quarters by 2015 from a starting point of 1990 (the books
slightly cooked by setting the starting point ten years in the past),
halving the number of people who live in absolute poverty, doubling the
percentage of children getting at least a primary education. Can an
achievement on that scale be ignored? If a system does that, can you say
that it produces nothing but immiseration? Marx himself said that there
were moments when the capitalist mode of production could transcend
itself, as in the invention of the joint stock company. Further evidence
of this possibility for self-transcendence would have exerted great
pressure on his intellectual models.
A
final challenge to Marx’s model, and also to his picture of the future,
comes from something he did see very clearly and prophetically, the
extraordinary productive power of capitalism. He saw how capitalism
would transform the surface of the planet and impact on the life of
every single person alive. There is, however, a crack or flaw close to
the heart of his analysis. Marx saw the two fundamental poles of
economic, and social and political, life as labour and nature. He didn’t
see these two things as static; he used the metaphor of a metabolism to
describe the way our labour shapes the world and we in turn are shaped
by the world we have made. So the two poles of labour and nature don’t
stay fixed. But what Marx doesn’t allow for is the fact that nature’s
resources are finite. He knows that there is no such thing as nature
unshaped by our assumptions, but he doesn’t share our contemporary
awareness that nature can run out. This is the kind of thing which is
sometimes called ironic, but is closer to tragedy, and at its heart is
the fact that the productive, expansionist, resource-consuming power of
capitalism is so great that it is not sustainable at a planetary level.
The whole world wants to have a First World bourgeois lifestyle, and the
whole world can see what that looks like by glancing at a television
set, but the world can’t have it, because we will burn through its
resources before we get there. Capitalism’s greatest crisis is upon us,
and it is predicated on the unavoidable fact that nature is finite.
This
is a point that Marxists for the most part have been reluctant to
address, and for a very good reason: the problem of resources in the
world today, whether food or water or power, power in all senses, are to
do with inequitable distribution and not with the total supply. There
is more than enough of all those things for all of us. Writers and
activists in the Marxist tradition have tended to stress that point, and
they’re right to do so, but we need also to face the fact that the
world is heading towards ever greater consumption of and demand for
resources on the part of everybody. Everybody simultaneously. That fact
is capitalism’s most deadly opponent. To give just one example in
relation to one resource only, the American average consumption of water
is one hundred gallons per person per day. There isn’t enough fresh
water on the planet for everyone to live like that.
So
the question is whether capitalism can evolve new forms, in the way it
has so far managed to do, and come up with property and market-based
mechanisms which deflect the seemingly inevitable crisis that will
ensue, or whether we need some entirely different social and economic
order. The irony is that this order might in many respects be like the
one Marx imagined, even if he saw a different route to getting there.
When Marx said that capitalism contained the seeds of its own
destruction he wasn’t talking about climate change or resource wars. If
we feel a natural gloom and despondency at the prospect of the
difficulties ahead, we should also take comfort in the fact of our
imaginative adaptability and the ingenuity which has brought us so far
so fast – so far, so fast, that we now need to slow down, and don’t
quite know how. As Marx wrote, towards the end of the first volume of Capital,
‘man is distinguished from all other animals by the limitless and
flexible nature of his needs.’ Limitless needs we see all around us and
they’ve brought us to where we are, but we’re going to have to work on
the flexible part.
