Ideas: The Dead, The Undead, and The Darwin Award nominees

Marxism’s pretend prescience; Did Sarah Palin get mugged by reality? AND: The New York Times on how to cover a Wikipedia slapboxing match.

Original: CP file photo via The Star

Leo Panitch of York University says in the Star that the ideas of Karl Marx are on their way back since the collapse of the world financial system last autumn. But is this comeback kid for real, or the latest Michael Jordan of retired ideas?

In any case, as the globalization of capitalism quickened through the 1990s, it actually became more fashionable than ever to quote Marx, especially on how "the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe," creating in the process "a world in its own image." But what was usually left out when the Communist Manifesto was quoted in this way in the 1990s was Marx’s prescience on capitalist globalization "paving the way for more extensive and exhaustive crises."

Panitch, like the Marxists he says are back in vogue (since when?), comes up with a story about how Marxism is prescient about things like the spread of global capital and the onset of financial or military crises (the current financial meltdown, the First World War, etc.). What they leave out is just how powerful Marxist ideas are and how exclusive their correct findings have been. That’s because the truth doesn’t put Marxism in particularly good light.

Marxists are supposed to be economic materialists—that is, those who believe that the entirety of our social world is created and manipulated by economic forces only. Not only is this a narrow and soulless theory about human behaviour, but it’s also very wrong. Marxism would like to think it can explain behaviour like how the poor are duped into voting against their economic interest, or interesting things like how norms, values and opinions affect political outcomes, but its mechanics are hackneyed and contrived.

Because of this radical materialist view, Marxists tell us that all governments and their institutions are really just part of a "superstructure," the marionettes of our capitalist overlords. Like Tommy Douglas, when he pushed for national health care in Canada. Martin Luther King, when he got Lyndon Johnson, one of the most powerful men in history, to sign away extreme white privilege and the electoral hopes of his party for a generation, was just another cog in the superstructure. So was every freedom fighter, legislator, and muckraker who fought within the legal and political frameworks of their countries to give more people the rights and privileges they deserved.

But to Panitch, that doesn’t take away from "Marx’s prescience on capitalist globalization ‘paving the way for more extensive and exhaustive crises.’"

It has been this aspect of Marx’s profound understanding of capitalist dynamics that has come to the fore in the current crisis. It does indeed seem to confirm that capitalism is like "the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells." But what is especially important to bear in mind on Labour Day is that Marx, unlike many of those Marxist economists who make it their business to predict economic crises, would have had no illusions that the purely economic contradictions of capitalism would bring about a better world.

But you didn’t need to be a Marxist at all to see the current financial crisis coming. Paul Krugman gives us a rather fascinating look into the minds of the economists who got it wrong, and a glimpse of why those who got it right did so in the first place. To sum up Krugman’s arguments in his lengthy, thorough piece: It’s not the superstructure.

The solution for Panitch is, of course, for organized labour to "recover the spirit of revolution," whatever the hell that means. (I think I agree.) Yet Marxism doesn’t actually believe people can make a difference in the world. Humans are just pawns in some uncompromising cosmic materialist game, the outcome already determined, the end of history always just within reach and always indubitable. The entire political, social and economic system of "late capitalism"—thousands of votes, the millions in protest, the billions of individual decisions—is dismissed out of hand because that’s what the ideology of Marxism calls for and nothing less. Even the most profound progressive change is nothing but a speck in the eye of the great robber baron in the sky.

So do go home, Rosa Parks, Mohandas Gandhi, Lech Walesa. Your services are not needed in this materialist universe.

It lives!

Sarah Palin (fingers crossed, will go away tomorrow) signed a neoconservative letter to President Obama urging him to keep at it in Afghanistan. David Corn finds this fascinating:

Some conservative intellectuals dismissed Palin when she was Senator John McCain’s running mate—partly because of her apparently flimsy knowledge of foreign policy (she once referred to Afghanistan as "our neighboring country"). ... The neocons figure that if they grab a potential 2012 GOP presidential contender and get her to commit to a hawkish position on Afghanistan, it will be easier for them to hold the line on Afghanistan within Republican circles. "It’s laying down a marker," this signatory says. The question for Frum and the neocons is, do you regard Palin as a useful idiot?

It really does say something about how bankrupt of ideas these neoconservatives are. This is the same cynical behind-the-scenes scheming that got them (and, uh, us) in the Iraq mess and made a mess of Afghanistan. It’s utterly insane. As Corn points out, some of the signatories of the letter, which is critical of how the war has been run so far, were not too long ago pretty much declaring victory in the graveyard of empires.

Is neoconservatism ever going to die? Or is the movement just too vacuous to go away completely—some endless, byzantine series of piss-poor, self-defeating and destructive political calculations that goes absolutely nowhere—like its forefather, Marxism?

From each according to his pettiness, to each according to his zealotry

The New York Times’ The Lede blog dedicates an entire post to a Wikipedia article about Rep. Joe Wilson and his outburst during Obama’s health care speech. No, actually The Lede dedicates the entire post to the petty discussion about the Wikipedia entry on the entry’s talk page.

How much is there really to say? Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a news service or platform for political diatribes. And the president is supposed to be a person to whom you give a certain basic respect, especially when he’s speaking.

If the discussion about WIlson’s outrageous outburst on Wikipedia was as petty and stupid as the Lede post suggests—even more pointless than the discourse outside of the Wikipedia world—does the Times really need to waste any ink on it? Survival of the loudest should be as dead as the New York World. End.