This essay by Lee Harris is almost 2 years old, but very, very thought-provoking. I found most answers to the question of whether the USA is the devil incarnate, is it really the Evil Capitalist Empire, etc. Lee Harris among other things, provides a well-reasoned critique of Marxism, and neo-Marxism (more appropriately, late 20th Century Marxism).

He concludes that both are fanciful theories. I must confess that I have little scholarly/academic knowledge of Marxism. However, its ideology of creating a New World Order by demolishing all existing structures and systems has always struck me as a little too far fetched; and appalling more so after I read scattered accounts of the horrors of Communism in practice, the USSR variety.

America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and totalizing. Its goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to destroy. It repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no difference between American liberals and American conservatives; it views every American action, both present and past, as an act of deliberate oppression and systemic exploitation. It is not that America went wrong here or there; it is that it is wrong root and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is really quite simple: that America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity.

America is the fundamental organizing principle of the left as it exists today: To be against America is to be on the right side of history; to be for it is to be on the wrong side.

The Left’s anger is understandable especially in the wake of the USSR’s collapse and the Iron Curtain proving that it was no more than an Ice Curtain, sure to melt some day under the heat of its oppression imposed on its own people. The failure of Communism has only incensed them all the more; however, this time around, with no real political support, they are indulging in internal sabotage–occupying prestigious positions in the academia and media they constantly criticize the political system that has accorded them the privilege of free speech. I don’t see a greater irony than this. In the US for instance, they went on a rampage when Bush announced his decision to “liberate Iraqis from Saddam.” Back home, their damage has been even more precocious given the limited political representation they enjoy. Thus, for every Chomsky in the US, you have tens of Arundhati Roys, and Praful Bidwais who echo his theme. More on this later…

Of all criticisms of Marxism that I’ve read, Lee Harris’s I feel, is among one of the best. For instance,

…once you accept the initial premise about the falling rate of profit, the rest does indeed follow realistically. Now, this does not mean that it follows necessarily or according to an ironclad scientific law; but it certainly conveys what any reasonable person would take as the most probable outcome of a hypothetical failure of capitalism.
So in order for revolutionary activity to have a chance of succeeding, there is an unavoidable precondition: The workers must have become much poorer over time. Furthermore, there had to be not merely an increase of poverty, but a conviction on the part of the workers that their material circumstances would only get worse, and not better ? and this would require genuine misery.

This is the immiserization thesis of Marx. And it is central to revolutionary Marxism, since if capitalism produces no widespread misery, then it also produces no fatal internal contradiction: If everyone is getting better off through capitalism, who will dream of struggling to overthrow it? Only genuine misery on the part of the workers would be sufficient to overturn the whole apparatus of the capitalist state, simply because, as Marx insisted, the capitalist class could not be realistically expected to relinquish control of the state apparatus and, with it, the monopoly of force. In this, Marx was absolutely correct. No capitalist society has ever willingly liquidated itself, and it is Utopian to think that any ever will. Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of socialism, nothing short of a complete revolution would do…

This–only genuine misery on the part of the workers leading to overthrow of capitalism–is the chief weapon in our Marxists’ armoury. Unfortunately, the cultural history of India makes this country an impossible setting for implementing Marxism/Communism. Caste is not equal to Class. The idea of Marxism gained widespread currency in Europe chiefly because of the industrial revolution which created the Owner vs Worker gulf. Whereas India hardly witnessed any significant effect of the selfsame industrial revolution; we were perpetually The Exploited under the British. Further, the Caste system (a crude translation of Varnashrama Dharma) was based on hereditary occupation, the chief merit of which lay in its assuring employment to each member of a particular varna. Equating Caste with Class is thoroughly absurd when you view it from this accurate historical perspective. However, the Indian Marxists who had pawned their brains to this destructive ideology do not want to acknowledge this; for, everything is black or white in their world: when something doesn’t quite fit into their world view and/or if they encounter something that their Bible Communist Manifesto/Das Captial doesn’t hold an answer for, they force-fit it. This is the explanation for Caste=Class.

When decades of harping about the Evil Upper Caste Conspiracy didn’t quite overturn the wheel as they had hoped, they set their eyes on the New Enemy: America. Hatred of America was in full bloom during the golden days of Nehruvian Stalinism Socialism; however, when State patronage steadily began to deplete especially post 1991, the Indian Marxists turned aggressive on a global scale in bashing America first, and then the MNCs who supposedly control the whole world.

This is better explained by Lee:

By the twentieth century the immiserization thesis was already beginning to look shaky. Empirical evidence, drawn either by impressionistic observation or systematic statistical studies, began to suggest that there was something wrong with the classical version of the thesis, and an attempt was made to save it by redefining immiserization to mean not an absolute increase in misery, but merely a relative one. This gloss allowed a vast increase in empirical plausibility, since it accepted the fact that the workers were indeed getting better off under the capitalist system but went on to argue that they were not getting better off at the same rate as the capitalists.

The problem with this revision lay not in its economic premises, but its political ones. Could one realistically believe that workers would overthrow an economic system that was continually improving their own lot, simply because that of the capitalist class was improving at a marginally better rate? Certainly, the workers might envy the capitalists; but such emotions simply could not supply the gigantic impetus required to overthrow a structure as massive as the capitalist system. Before the workers of a capitalist society could unite, they had to feel that they had literally nothing to lose ? nothing to lose but their proverbial chains. For if they had homes and cars and boats and rvs to lose as well, then it became quite another matter.

The post-World War II period demolished the last traces of the classical immiserization thesis. Workers in the most advanced capitalist countries were prosperous by any standard imaginable, either absolute or relative; and what is even more important, they felt themselves to be well off, and believed that the future would only make them and their children even better off than they had been in the past. This was a deadly blow to the immiserization thesis and hence to Marxism. For the failure of the immiserization thesis is in fact the failure of classical Marxism. If there is no misery, there is no revolution; and if there is no revolution, there is no socialism. Q.E.D. Socialism goes back once more to being merely a utopian fantasy.

What needs to be stressed here is that, prior to Baran, no Marxist had ever suspected that capitalism was the cause of the poverty of the rest of the world. Not only had Marx and Engels failed to notice this momentous fact, but neither had any of their followers. Yet this omission was certainly not due to Marx?s lack of knowledge about, or interest in, the question of European colonies. In his writing on India, Marx shows himself under no illusions concerning the brutal and mercenary nature of British rule. He is also aware of the ?misery and degradation? effected by the impact of British industry?s ?devastating effects? on India. Yet all of this is considered by Marx to be a dialectical necessity; that is to say, these effects were the unavoidable precondition of India?s progress and advance ? an example of the ?creative destruction? that Schumpeter spoke of as the essence of capitalist dynamics. Or, as Marx put it in On Colonialism: ?[T]he English bourgeoisie . . . will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the [Indian] people . . . but . . . what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both? the emancipation and the mending of this social condition.

So there we have! Our Father Karl Marx has written thus about India, which must absolutely be true!

And Lee traces the intellectual origins of America-bashing to Baran’s thesis.

… the role that this thesis played in bolstering and revitalizing late twentieth-century Marxism. For it is here that we find the intellectual origins of the international phenomenon of America-bashing. If there is any element of genuine seriousness in this movement… then that element of seriousness is to be found in the global immiserization thesis: America has gotten rich by making other countries poor.

Furthermore, this is no less true of those who, like Chomsky, have focused on what is seen as American military aggression against the rest of the world, for this aggression is understood as having its ?root cause? in America?s systematic exploitation of the remainder of the human race.

So what had I said earlier about Roys and Bidwais as echoes of Chomsky? For every article of Chomsky, there’s a corresponding (I’ll grant that it might be coincidental, but the bottomline is the same: slavish parroting of Agenda) trash written about the Unjust Afghan Invasion or messing in the Iraqi Quagmire.

Lee then argues that Baran’s thesis is a fantasy by Marx and Engels’ standards, and then outlines the potential seed of destruction that Baran’s thesis holds for us:

This is because the original immiserization thesis was set within the context of a class war within a society ? an actual civil war between different classes of one and the same society, and not between different nations on different continents. This makes an enormous difference, for it is not at all unreasonable to think that a revolutionary movement could succeed, by means of a violent and bloody civil war, in gaining the monopoly of force within a capitalist society, and thus be able to dictate terms to the routed capitalists, if any survived.

But this is an utterly different scenario from one in which the most advanced capitalist societies have a monopoly of force ? and brutally effective force ? at their disposal. For in this case it is absurd to think that the exploited Third World countries could possibly be able to alter the world order by even a hair, provided the advanced capitalist societies were intent on not being altered.

What could they do to us?

The answer to this question, according to many of those who accept the global immiserization thesis, came on 9-11. Noam Chomsky, perhaps America?s most celebrated proponent of the Baran-Wallerstein thesis, expressed this idea in the immediate aftermath. Here, for the first time, the world had witnessed the oppressed finally striking a blow against the oppressor ? a politically immature blow, perhaps, comparable to the taking of the Bastille by the Parisian mob in its furious disregard of all laws of humanity, but still an act equally world-historical in its significance: the dawn of a new revolutionary era.

And so there it is! The Revenge of the Oppressed!

But was 9-11 truly world-historical in the precise sense required to sustain the Baran-Wallerstein revision? For 9-11 to be world-historical in this sense, it would have to contain within it the seeds of a gigantic shift in the order of things: something on the scale of the decline and collapse of capitalist America and with it the final realization of the socialist realm.

But this investment of world-historical significance to 9-11 is simply wishful thinking on the part of the left. It is an effort to transform the demented acts of a group of fantasists into the vanguard of the world revolution. Because if there is to be a world revolution at all there has to be a vanguard of that revolution, an agent whose actions are such as to represent a threat to the capacity of the capitalist system simply to survive. This means that it is not enough to injure it; it is not enough to wound or madden it; it is not enough to rouse it to rage ? the agent must kill it, too. He must be capable of overthrowing the hegemonic power at the center of the capitalist world system.

When Lee mentions about the act of Islamic fanaticism, and its subsequent misuse portrayal as the Return of the Revolution, he has hit upon a standard tactic in use in India by desi Marxists. As I’ve repeatedly mentioned, this is again the same technique of painting the oppressors as benevolent people come down for mankind’s salvation, and that of the oppressed as “asking for it.”

Ah… but I can go on quoting from this superb essay. Go ahead and read it fully.

Tags: Commentary, Society & Culture