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A Spectre is Haunting Europe, the Spectre of Communism

by Willy Chaplin

These are the first words in The Communist Manifesto, arguably the second most important book ever published...numero uno: The Bible). Both these books are important not because they represent some kind of absolute "truth," but because of the effect they have had on people's minds...and thus on their lives. The Manifesto, in fact, can hardly even be called a "book," since it is hardly more than a long political pamphlet.

One of the reasons I am writing about it...and about its author, Karl Marx...is because it is 150 years old this spring and has recently been republished. The second and more important reason is that this book profoundly influenced my early political education and its reading remains, in my mind, one of the great literary events in my life. The opening lines promise something mysterious and powerful. The closing line, "WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" suggests exciting upheaval, the promise of human fulfillment and revolution, always more tantalizing to the young than to the geezer I have become. And are we all not WORKING men (or women...in those days the masculine designator was used for the "neutral" case)? Or, at least most of us. Like most young people...especially those ignorant of the nature of capitalism...the existence of the very rich (who were presumed not to need to work) seemed grossly unfair and unjust.

Reading the Manifesto led me to digest Marx's magnum opus, Capital, in the vain hope of discovering the secrets of this new wonder, Communism. It was vain because Marx was primarily a student of Capitalism. Like every other utopian futurist of his day, he had no more idea of how an egalitarian...communist...society could be constructed...or how it might work...than the Man in the Moon. Even today, after a century and a half of futile efforts to build communism (or its bastard little brother, socialism)...ranging from the anarchist utopian "communes" of the Hippies, to the more sensible but equally troubled "communes" of the Israelis, to the ghastly coercive social systems of Eastern Europe and Asia calling themselves communist...no one yet seems to have the foggiest notion of how to eliminate the more troubling aspects of capitalism...at least on the societal level.

For that is what Marx was writing about. In truth, his praise of the workings of capitalism bordered on religious. Like his predecessor and economics mentor, Adam Smith...not to mention every libertarian in the modern world...he virtually worshipped the productive wonders of capitalism and the free market. How else to interpret words like these?

The bourgeoisie has created...more massive and more colossal productive forces than all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways...clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers...what earlier century had even the presentiment that such productive powers slumbered in the lap of social labour?

Hardly the words of someone who believed that capitalism didn't "work!"

His much more turgid and scholarly work, Capital, elaborates on the workings of capitalism at much greater length and detail...soporifically so...staying awake and attentive through two consecutive chapters is a real test of one's stamina and dedication. Marx remains to this day one of the premier theoreticians of capitalism, a fact that surprises most people raised...like me...in the Cold War climate of bullshit and propaganda. It was always feared by the capitalist elite, probably correctly so, that were the unwashed (read: WORKERS OF THE WORLD) apprised of what Marx was actually saying, we would rise up and smash their little paradise as we are always wont to do when feeling a bit frustrated.

And what was Marx "really" saying? Well, like any good scholar, he studied the bad (Capitalism as a pyramid racket...) along with the good. And, in capitalism, he found plenty of the former as well as the latter. Like any good theologian...for, harbor no doubt that Marx was also profoundly "religious" on the subject of economics whatever his atheist bent concerning pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die...he played on the reader's emotions as much as upon his intellect.

For Marx, like many other students of capitalism, was profoundly troubled by the vast social upheavals engendered by the constant change so integral to market capitalism. Capitalism absolutely depends upon this change and will die without it. He agonized at the thought that human labor was made, by capitalism, into just another price sensitive commodity to be bought, sold or traded at whatever might be the going rate. By the way, I could never quite grasp why he...or anyone else...thought that the "stability" of slavery or serfdom was somehow superior to the uncertainty of commodity labor...but that is another subject...and one that goes a long way toward explaining the nature of totalitarian communism.

Marx correctly saw then...in the mid-nineteenth-century...all the "evils" which we modern humans are still stuck with resolving; the vast disparities of wealth and income arising "naturally" between the rich and poor; the despoiling of the environment by wanton looting of natural resources; the competitive pressures to constantly "exploit" human labor to its limits. We can ignore at our peril the similarities between the child labor sweatshops of industrial Europe and America at the turn of this century and the Nike sweatshops of modern Southeast Asia. Environmentalists may be a bit hysterical about global warming...or at least about human ability to do anything about it...but there is no doubt we are in for some very "interesting" changes due to what we have done, through industrialization, to the planet. And then there is that nasty "Bill Gates" phenomenon. What, reasonable people may ask, has this man done that could EVER justify his accumulation of wealth rivaling many entire nations...while millions of people still starve and live in abject poverty?

And what is the peril we risk if we ignore these facts? I think the experience of Eastern Europe is a good teacher. If we do not attend to what most people find troubling about capitalism, we risk falling into the trap of seeking "revolutionary" change. In order to produce more stability and greater equality, we have to make a few "sacrifices." To achieve less drastic change, more security, we have to give up...what? FREEDOM, THAT'S WHAT!

Make no mistake. When liberals call for economic justice, when environmentalists demand ecological "sanity," when conservatives crave law and order...what they want you to give up, to sacrifice in return for these "rewards," is some of your freedom. That is why libertarians must pay such scrupulous attention to the "other half" of freedom...responsibility. If we ignore these real problems of capitalism and insist...with religious fervor...that only unlimited freedom will do as a "principle" for libertarians to follow...that only free markets can "work" to solve all problems of humankind...then we are setting the stage for the Hitlers and Stalins and Castros of the world to impose their "solutions" upon us. If we neglect now the responsibilities that our very humanity imposes upon us, we will surely pay later. The danger always is that if you give up freedom seeking security, you may end up with neither. Nor do we need to get as esoteric as the "battle" between communism and capitalism to see this. Just take a look at what the "war on drugs" has accomplished...

It may be true that the markets of capitalism can go on expanding "forever" (read: until the Universe itself dies). We may indeed be destined to go out into the galaxy in giant starships where "no one has gone before." But, maybe not. In the mean time, it behooves us to attend to those little bumps and grinds that spice up the nature of reality. And, go ahead and read a little Marx, at least the Communist Manifesto. You might learn something.

Talk to you later...

Willy Chaplin is a man who calls himself a libertarian and thinks he has something to say to us all. This rant was previously published on How Can You Laugh at a Time Like This?