Why Marx Was Right Read Free Page A

brought
about great material advances. But though this way of organising our affairs
has had a long time to demonstrate that it is capable of satisfying human
demands all round, it seems no closer to doing so than ever. How long are we
prepared to wait for it to come up with the goods? Why do we continue to
indulge the myth that the fabulous wealth generated by this mode of production
will in the fullness of time become available to all? Would the world treat
similar claims by the far left with such genial, let's-wait-and-see forbearance?
Right-wingers who concede that there will always be colossal injustices in the
system, but that that's just tough and the alternatives are even worse, are at
least more honest in their hard-faced way than those who preach that it will
all finally come right. If there happened to be both rich and poor people, as
there happen to be both black and white ones, then the advantages of the
well-heeled might well spread in time to the hard-up. But to point out that
some people are destitute while others are prosperous is rather like claiming
that the world contains both detectives and criminals. So it does; but this
obscures the truth that there are detectives because there are criminals
. . .

 
    TWO
    Marxism may be all very
well in theory. Whenever it has been put into practice, however, the result has
been terror, tyranny and mass murder on an inconceivable scale. Marxism might
look like a good idea to well-heeled Western academics who can take freedom and
democracy for granted. For millions of ordinary men and women, it has meant
famine, hardship, torture, forced labour, a broken economy and a monstrously
oppressive state. Those who continue to support the theory despite all this are
either obtuse, self-deceived or morally contemptible. Socialism means lack of
freedom; it also means a lack of material goods, since this is bound to be the
result of abolishing markets.
    Lots of men and women in
the West are fervent supporters of bloodstained setups. Christians, for
example. Nor is it unknown for decent, compassionate types to support whole
civilisations steeped in blood. Tiberals and conservatives, among others.
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide,
violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet
Union. Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has
survived long enough to forget about much of this horror, which is not the case
with Stalinism and Maoism. If Marx was spared this amnesia, it was partly
because he lived while the system was still in the making.
    Mike Davis writes in his Late Victorian Holocausts of the tens of millions of Indians, Africans,
Chinese, Brazilians, Koreans, Russians and others who died as a result of
entirely preventable famine, drought and disease in the late nineteenth
century. Many of these catastrophes were the result of free market dogma, as
(for example) soaring grain prices thrust food beyond the reach of the common
people. Nor are all such monstrosities as old as the Victorians. During the last
two decades of the twentieth century, the number of those in the world living
on less than two dollars a day has increased by almost one hundred million. 1 One in three children in Britain today lives below the breadline, while bankers
sulk if their annual bonus falls to a paltry million pounds.
    Capitalism, to be sure,
has bequeathed us some inestimably precious goods along with these
abominations. Without the middle classes Marx so deeply admired, we would lack
a heritage of liberty, democracy, civil rights, feminism, republicanism,
scientific progress and a good deal more, as well as a history of slumps,
sweatshops, fascism, imperial wars and Mel Gibson. But the so-called socialist
system had its achievements, too. China and the Soviet Union dragged their
citizens out of economic backwardness into the modern industrial world, at
however horrific a human cost; and the cost was