I caught a bit of an interesting discussion on cable TV yesterday in which one of the commentators was talking about the attitudes of the Occupy Movement participants toward established political parties and the rules and regulations of voting, law-making, and such. The thrust of this man's comment [I never caught his name] was that the Occupy folks are completely disenchanted with both parties and view Capitalism itself as the root of our current problems [rather than particular laws regulating Capitalist institutions and behavior.] Instead of devoting their time and energy to political campaigns, he said, the people in the Movement to whom he talked had decided to commit themselves to direct action to make changes in the world around them.
This got me thinking, once again, about a very large question that has absorbed my attention for much of my life: How do the fundamental economic and associated institutions of a society change, and what, if anything, can individuals do to influence the direction of that change?
It will not come as a surprise to the readers of this blog that whenever I think about this question, my first impulse is to return to Marx and remind myself of what he had to say, for all that he wrote a century and a half ago in a different country.
Marx's thought about this question was deeply influenced by the ideas of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, who conceived of the economy as a system, on the analogy to the physical system of nature, governed by general laws that operate more or less independently of the wishes and beliefs of particular individuals. Marx liked to talk of the "laws of motion of Capitalist economy," invoking Newton. He understood, of course, that this was at best an analogy. Economic actors are persons with consciousness, desires, intentions, and beliefs, whereas physical objects have none of these characteristics. Nevertheless, his study of the early capitalist economy of England convinced him that large structural changes, such as the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, are the quite unintended result of the interaction of countless particular actions and decisions rather than the outcome of deliberate programmatic planning. He wrote dismissively of people like Proudhon, Fourier, and Saint Simon, whom he called "Utopian Socialists" because they substituted wishful fantasies for rigorous analysis.
One of Marx's most powerful insights was that Capitalism is constantly changing, evolving, developing. Marx identified three great tendencies or directions of change, all of which he thought would drive Capitalism in the direction of Socialism. These major tendencies were, First, the irresistible concentration and centralization of capitals, leading to huge firms that would dominate entire industries; Second, the corresponding unification of the Working Class, whose concentration in ever larger associations of workers would be the unintended by-product of the centralization of capitals; and Third, an ever more exacerbated succession of booms and busts, caused by the fratricidal competition of capitalist firms, which would end in a world-wide crash out of whose ashes Socialism would emerge.
In my opinion, Marx's fundamental approach was absolutely right. He denied that Capitalism was simply rationality writ large [the view of the apologists for Capitalism], but instead was a particular socio-economic formation in a constant process of change, and he correctly identified ever-greater centralization of capital as the dominant tendency. He was wrong about the corresponding unification of the Working Class, and although he was right about ever greater financial crises, he was wrong to think that in such crisis the Working Class would take control of the economy and society and carry through the final establishment of Socialism.
In my essay, "The Future of Socialism," which is on box.net and soon will be published by the Seattle University Law Journal, I went into a good deal of detail about exactly how I think fundamental changes are growing within the "womb of the old order," to quote Marx's evocative phrase. The pessimistic conclusion of that analysis is that utopian projects for the transformation of Capitalism are no more likely to succeed now than they were in Marx's day.
I expect that governments will continue to become more skillful, by fits and starts, at managing the booms and busts of contemporary Capitalism. I also expect that inequality will continue to grow as Capital finds that it can wrest profits from the economy despite the progressive immiseration of an ever-greater proportion of the working population. It is possible, I suppose, to view such abominations as the Citizens United Supreme Court decision as evidence of the desperation of a Capitalist managerial class ever more fearful of a popular uprisings, though even a congenital optimist like me finds that rather fanciful.
But of one thing I am, unfortunately quite convinced, namely that small-scale, local, people-to-people actions will not, and indeed cannot, accrete into a force producing a fundamental change in the socio-economic organization of modern Capitalism.
What then is to be done? as Lenin famously asked. It is, I suppose, an evidence of my advancing age that when I ask that question, my mind turns to Dylan Thomas' greatest poem:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
