I have some thoughts on Communism. First of all, it can never hope to match capitalism’s clever harnessing of human greed. Secondly, though, it’s never really been tried absent a deporable totalitarian government, and so it gets a bad rap.
People don’t recognize that. They think “communism” and they immediately think of the top-down power structure of Stalin, Mao and Castro.
But communism’s an economic system, not a political system. It’s communism vs. capitalism, and democracy vs. totalitarianism. There’s no good reason that a communist economic system couldn’t flourish under a democratic political system — and I’d love to see it tried.
I’ve been thinking a bit about communism because it seems like capitalism is out of vogue, lately — at least the runaway, laissez-faire capitalism that has run amok the past, oh, eight years or so. It has everyone dusting off their Das Kapitals.
It’s been a while since I read mine, mind you, but luckily Christopher Hitchens has decided to take a survey of the current Marx landscape.
His essay, in the current issue of The Atlantic, is titled “The Revenge of Karl Marx” and tantalizingly promises to cover “What the author of Das Kapital reveals about the current economic crisis.”
I can’t say it goes quite that far, but it’s an interesting read, and it does cover — with quite a bit of breadth — both the limits and the possibilities of Marxist study in today’s economy.
Short version? Marxism is in no danger of replacing capitalism anytime soon. Caveat, as Hitchens puts it: “who was predicting even 30 years ago that Russia and China would today be turbocharged capitalist systems, however discrepant in type? And the present crisis was actually triggered by a “subprime” attempt to transform low-income people into property owners, albeit indebted ones.”
Grant Hamilton
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