I was reading The Communist Manifesto the other day, you know, as you do. It occurred to me that Karl Marx’s historical reading of the nature of economics was spot on. It also occurred to me that his conclusions of what had to happen as a result were somewhat less than spot on. That should surprise no one, though. We’re living on the back-end of the downfall of Communism as an actual, viable form of human governance, after all.
Still, there are parts of The Communist Manifesto that could have come from John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405. That’s why we’re here to talk about my reading habits. I was actually going to play a game where I quoted Marx and claimed that it was from Darwin and then said, “Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with you.” But Marx used the word “bourgeoisie” nearly as often as Darwin uses extraneous commas, so I decided against it. Also, he spoke of economic trends in the present tense, which would be a dead giveaway, at least for the five people who seem to frequent this blog and aren’t looking for evidence that Coldplay sucks. So let’s do this in a more standardized way.
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Let’s talk Marxism. Specifically, let’s talk Marxism as a critique of history:
Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
That, quite literally, could have come directly from the pages of Darwin’s book. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look.
By the first half of the nineteenth century a high degree of economic integration had developed between North West Europe and the British Isles and North East America. The world economy of the later nineteenth century was partially the consequence of extending the dense commercial networks of the North Atlantic basin to new parts of the globe: South America, parts of Africa, India, South East Asia, Australasia, and East Asia. One of its distinguishing features was that, right across the world, the price not just of luxuries but of even quite common commodities (like food grains) was decided not by local or regional factors but by market forces on a global scale.[1]
Darwin points out that the world market was a result of globalization. Marx points out that the world market is a bad thing due to the fact that it’s a product of people who intend to profit from the market costs. Neither Marx nor Darwin was wrong.
That’s the funny thing about Communism/Marxism/Socialism/whatever you want to call it. The base assumptions made by Karl Marx weren’t wrong. We’ve spent the last century in a conflict between Communism and capitalism based on the conclusions drawn by those conclusions, though. There’s been a great deal of wrong drawn in that space. The reason for that wrong was simple: part of the wrong was based on Marx’s own conclusion. Part of the wrong was based on the lack of willingness on the part of the free market capitalists to acknowledge any path to economic security other than their own. Part of the wrong was based on a belief that there is a binary response to the human condition.
In the next post I shall discuss how there isn’t a binary response to this conflict between Communism and capitalism. I shall also discuss how, at least in the context of the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Century, we’ve given up allowing that conversation.
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[1] John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 330.
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