Why Marx Was Right Read Free

imagine a future in
which the megarich took shelter in their armed and gated communities, while a
billion or so slum dwellers were encircled in their fetid hovels by watchtowers
and barbed wire. In these circumstances, to claim that Marxism was finished was
rather like claiming that firefighting was out of date because arsonists were
growing more crafty and resourceful than ever.
    In our own time, as Marx
predicted, inequalities of wealth have dramatically deepened. The income of a
single Mexican billionaire today is equivalent to the earnings of the poorest
seventeen million of his compatriots. Capitalism has created more prosperity
than history has ever witnessed, but the cost— not least in the
near-destitution of billions—has been astronomical. According to the World
Bank, 2.74 billion people in 2001 lived on less than two dollars a day. We face
a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of resources;
and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. For the
first time in history, our prevailing form of life has the power not simply to
breed racism and spread cultural cretinism, drive us into war or herd us into
labour camps, but to wipe us from the planet. Capitalism will behave
antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human
devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is
today no more than sober realism. The traditional leftist slogan ''Socialism or
barbarism'' was never more grimly apposite, never less of a mere rhetorical
flourish. In these dire conditions, as Fredric Jameson writes, ''Marxism must
necessarily become true again." 2
    Spectacular inequalities
of wealth and power, imperial warfare, intensified exploitation, an
increasingly repressive state: if all these characterize today's world, they
are also the issues on which Marxism has acted and reflected for almost two
centuries. One would expect, then, that it might have a few lessons to teach
the present. Marx himself was particularly struck by the extraordinarily
violent process by which an urban working class had been forged out of an
uprooted peasantry in his own adopted country of England—a process which Brazil,
China, Russia and India are living through today. Tristram Hunt points out that
Mike Davis's book Planet of Slums, which documents the "stinking
mountains of shit'' known as slums to be found in the Lagos or Dhaka of today,
can be seen as an updated version of Engels's The Condition of the Working
Class. As China becomes the workshop of the world, Hunt comments, ''the
special economic zones of Guangdong and Shanghai appear eerily reminiscent of
1840s Manchester and Glasgow.'' 3
    What if it were not Marxism
that is outdated but capitalism itself? Back in Victorian England, Marx saw the
system as having already run out of steam. Having promoted social development
in its heyday, it was now acting as a drag on it. He viewed capitalist society
as awash with fantasy and fetishism, myth and idolatry, however much it prided
itself on its modernity. Its very enlightenment—its smug belief in its own
superior rationality—was a kind of superstition. If it was capable of some
astonishing progress, there was another sense in which it had to run very hard
just to stay on the spot. The final limit on capitalism, Marx once commented,
is capital itself, the constant reproduction of which is a frontier beyond
which it cannot stray. There is thus something curiously static and repetitive
about this most dynamic of all historical regimes. The fact that its underlying
logic remains pretty constant is one reason why the Marxist critique of it
remains largely valid. Only if the system were genuinely able to break beyond
its own bounds, inaugurating something unimaginably new, would this cease to be
the case. But capitalism is incapable of inventing a future which does not
ritually reproduce its present. With, needless to say, more options . . .
    Capitalism has