The Virus of Marxism

A lot of people - ex-Marxists - talk about having caught 'the virus of Marxism' in their youth. They always seem less clear as to how they recovered from their complaint.

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Marx thought that the selfishness and egotism so obvious in the people around him were the product of capitalist relations of production. Under communism selflessness would be the norm, the benevolence of a society of abundance.

This is an empirical claim, yet one which Marxists are strangely unwilling to explore. Everything we know about human beings suggests such a prospect is false. There are strata of society which are currently very well off. The pages of 'Hello' magazine suggest that saintliness does not come naturally. Why not? They're not all evil oppressors.

We know from biology that (for good genetic reasons) most animals are either in it for themselves or at most for their close kin. It's considered noteworthy that some evidence has been uncovered for reciprocal altruism in chimpanzees.

Humans exhibit adaptations for living in large groups*, and for symbol-mediated cooperation: loyalty to causes, countries and empires (provided such causes sufficiently align with personal self-interest of course). Despite much effort however, in-group/out-group tribalism has never been close to eradication. It's a bit airy-fairy to blame those famed (and reified) 'capitalist relations of production' for that historical universal.

Rich societies in a state of formal peace fragment into tribes which pick intense fights on secondary issues, spearheaded by young males. Who'd have thought it? (Apart from evolutionary psychologists).

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Where does this leave the Marxist project? A clue can be found in the extreme unwillingness of Marxist theoreticians to engage with these issues. Their uneasiness is palpable: such research is neither acceptable nor refutable - a sheepish turning away of the head changes the subject.

Mediated of course by the social relations of production and exchange, it's new tech which opens the door to historical progress. The future presents as a branching tree: genomic experimentation in humans combined with social-agency in robots (cf replicants).

It's really hard to predict how things will turn out: there are many scenarios. Why suppose that Marx and Lenin tediously had the future nailed down more than a century ago?

The thing which scares Marxist intellectuals is that if humans can't make a collectivised society work - and they can't - then we seem to be stuck with capitalism indefinitely. That does seem a bit of a capitulation to bourgeois ideology. But private ownership of the means of production has a lot more flexibility than historical observers had imagined. Those dark satanic mills so graphically denounced in Capital Vol 1 have long since vanished in the west. Capitalism keeps getting richer (on trend) and more capable, with ever greater reserves. Its own dynamic will in the end utterly transform it .. I suspect.

Why is capitalism so bad, anyway?

We shouldn't ask the question this way. It's not the job of science to take sides on ethical questions. Marxists above all should not be appealing to platonic ethical absolutes. Yet they err in seeking ethical judgements about capitalism only in social relations.

If human beings didn't have a human, biological nature, if they didn't care whether they ate or starved, lived or died, then who could complain about social formations since the dawn of time where such 'bad' outcomes were the norm?

Of course, human beings very much subscribe (for obvious biological reasons) to something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

In Marx's day (and Lenin's too in Russia) capitalism was bootstrapping itself through primitive accumulation. It was a brutal time and every one of Maslow's levels was violated for the newly-emergent working class. The communists were vitriolic in their anger and hatred against capitalism - the new bourgeoisie were certainly not starving in their mansions.

But as Stalin showed in the 1930s, forced accumulation is inherently a brutal business.

A richer contemporary capitalism is less polar, more stratified. Large segments of the population - proletarian in that they own no means of production and need to sell their labour power to survive - find themselves not badly paid and doing socially-necessary work of deep intrinsic interest. They may well attain all of Maslow's levels in their occupations.

Marxists like to say that capitalism is irrational, not being centrally planned. This is a rather pejorative way of describing a decentralised economy composed of discrete, competing companies each trying to maximise its own profit. Companies may be legal persons, but in a dog-eat-dog capitalist economy their psychologies are psychopathic.

Still, self-centeredness is a common feature in natural ecosystems: we observed above that generalised altruism is rare to non-existent. Though corporates-gone-bad are a staple of dystopian fiction, in a healthy capitalist state there exist legal mechanisms to ensure rule-based behaviour, recognising that social-responsibility is not intrinsic to the capitalist firm.

Bad corporate behaviour is  often contested - see any newspaper.

The Marxist economist will then turn to crisis theory as evidence of capitalist inefficiency. The dynamics are not disputed (except by bourgeois equilibrium economists!) but given the inability to predict future demand, competitive overshoots will happen and in modern times the effects of downturns are somewhat mitigated.

It is claimed that capitalism has an inherent alienation, anomie caused by the fundamental deception of capitalism, that ordinary folks' efforts only serve to produce more profits for the bourgeoisie. We're all in it together, suckers! When things are going well, and capitalist corporations are achieving great outcomes (in construction, healthcare, new technologies) things don't seem that discordant. It's hard to identify "the Man" who sits in his top hat chortling at the efforts of his deceived minions.

Capitalism certainly has an ideology of 'atomism': the free individual contracting with an employer. But once in work, nothing much gets accomplished without the team .. and teamwork is pretty core to human nature. Outside of work there are associations in plenty for those who want them - even revolutionary communist parties.

We're down to the bottom line. In a class society, the rich and powerful tend to get their own way. What did you expect?

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* Less aggression and more self-control, but varies with population group.

Getting capitalism to work successfully is the most difficult task humanity has ever set itself. Success correlates with national IQ, as Professor Garett Jones describes in his book "Hive Mind".

From "Hive Mind" by Garett Jones