By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, December 30, 2022
The 11 scariest words in the English language, at least
in some very specific circumstances, might be: “Let’s ditch the rules and do
something really off the wall.” This is simply not something you’d want to hear
from, say, your heart surgeon. I imagine prostitutes don’t want to hear
it from their clients, either.
And maybe it’s not something you want to hear from me,
either. But there’s nothing you can do to stop me (cue maniacal laugh).
I had a weird idea occur to me while recording The
Remnant podcast this morning. I want to make the Marxist case for
nuclear fusion. I know what you’re thinking: “Not that dead horse again.” But,
as an early draft of Castaway had Tom Hanks saying before they
changed his inanimate buddy from a lacrosse stick to a volleyball, “Stick with
me.”
Marx the poet.
I think I’ve established my street cred as an opponent of
Marxism. But that doesn’t mean Marx isn’t worth reading.
But let me make a few points up front to dispel any
confusion. First, don’t get me wrong. Just because some of Marx’s stuff is very
interesting and occasionally very insightful, doesn’t mean I think it’s
necessarily correct or persuasive—never mind defensible.
Second, you can buy into vast amounts of Marx’s writing,
and still believe that Marxism—i.e. the brand name for
authoritarian policies and politics imposed on whole societies—is hot garbage.
It’s sort of like how every Christian I know is willing to admit that some of
the things done in the name of Jesus (never mind Paul’s!) teachings weren’t very
Christian. Right now, there are Russians who insist the answer to “What would
Jesus do?” is “Bomb Ukrainian children.”
I’d like to think there are very few sincere Christians
who aren’t utterly disgusted by that. So it is with Marx and Marxism (also just
to be very, very, clear: Marx was no Jesus). This is something pretty much all
the sincere Marxists acknowledge today, in part because if they didn’t, they
wouldn’t be able to bore the crap out of everyone at the co-op by shouting
“Real Marxism has never been tried!”
Intoxicating ideas can make anybody drunk, but what often
happens is that the intoxicant turns out to be insufficient and the idea turns
into a mixer of sorts hiding the real high proof stuff: power.
Marx wrote very little on how Communism would actually work,
because as Paul Johnson and others
argue, Marx was really a frustrated Romantic poet. “The poetic gift manifests
itself intermittently in Marx’s pages,” Johnson writes in Intellectuals,
“producing some memorable passages. In the sense that he intuited rather than
reasoned or calculated, Marx remained a poet to the end.”
This is one of the things that makes Marx interesting to
read because it was the poetry, not the analysis, that lit fires in the minds
of men.
This was George Sorel’s insight about Marx, that he
should be read more as a prophet. He admitted that Das Kapital was
pretty worthless as “scientific” analysis, but really useful as “myth.” It
should be seen as an “apocalyptic text … as a product of the spirit, as an
image created for the purpose of molding consciousness.” Sorel, by the way, was
an immense influence on both Lenin and Mussolini.
For all the clever marketing involved in calling his
views of history’s unfolding “scientific”—what better way to fend off criticism
than to accuse your opponents as science “deniers”—Marx’s vision was
apocalyptic and fundamentally religious (even if he claimed to reject religion
in all forms). In his 1856 speech commemorating the anniversary of the Chartist People’s
Paper, he concluded with a kind of prophecy. He dubbed the “English working
men” the new chosen people for his eschatological vision. And why not? History
was supposed to make its great leap forward in industrial, capitalist Britain,
not in the rural backwater of Russia. These “first-born sons of modern
industry” in England would lead in the liberation of their class all around the
world. Marx lamented that their struggles had not been showered in the glory
they deserved because they had been “shrouded in obscurity, and burked* by the
middleclass historian.” But the workers would get their vengeance. On this
score he invoked the medieval institution of the Vehmgericht.
To revenge the misdeeds of the
ruling class, there existed in the middle ages, in Germany, a secret tribunal,
called the “Vehmgericht.” If a red cross was seen marked on a house,
people knew that its owner was doomed by the “Vehm.” All the houses of Europe
are now marked with the mysterious red cross.
History is the judge—its
executioner, the proletarian.
But what would come after the righteous slaughter of the
bourgeoisie and the ruling classes, according to Marx? Good times!
Specifically, a post-scarcity civilization where you could do pretty much
whatever you liked and be whatever you wanted.
You see, one of the things Marx hated the most about
capitalism and industrialization—necessary evils according to Marx, by the
way—was the specialization of labor. He hated the idea that you had to pick a
lane to earn your daily bread. A plumber couldn’t be a poet—at least not if he
wanted to make a living. The capitalist system erodes all “human and natural
qualities,” he wrote in his Philosophical Manuscripts. It makes
workers, “both physically and spiritually de-humanized (entmenschtes),”
living in hovels that are worse than pre-modern caves because they were
“poisoned by the pestilential breath of civilization.” Marx was like the dorm
room loser who insists he could be a great novelist, musician, or inventor—or
all three—if only the “system” (or the Man, the globalists, Wall Street, Jews,
or Egg Council) didn’t keep him down. He reminds me of Zach Galifinakis in an
episode of Between Two Ferns when he said the Jews want to
keep him fat (or something like that).
This would all end under true communism. “In place of the
old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an
association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all,” he wrote in the Communist Manifesto.
Or as he put in The German Ideology:
For as soon as the distribution of
labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of
activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a
hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he
does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society,
where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production
and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow,
to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,
criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter,
fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Marx put the “commune” in Communism.
Now, a lot of this is warmed over Rousseau. What Marx
wants is a return to the bogus idea of the noble savage who, according to
Rousseau, lived in relative solitude and peace doing what he pleased when he
pleased.
As anthropology, this stuff is trash. And as economic
prescription, the idea that humans—remember all humans—could live
the way he imagined humans did in the past, this is more like science fiction.
Star Trek economics.
Which brings me to fusion.
Among the fundamental problems with Marxist economics is
an inability to deal with the problem of scarcity. If the market isn’t allowed
to work its magic at figuring out how to allocate resources by using prices and
profit, it has to fall to something, i.e. someone, else to do it.
That’s why you need a party and a bureaucracy to figure out who gets toilet
paper and who gets back issues of Pravda. Marxists are hardly alone
in believing that planners, experts, and social engineers should—and
can!—figure out the best way to distribute finite resources. But Marxists went
the farthest with it.
But what if the problems of scarcity can be “solved” not
by planners but by technology and entrepreneurs?
I’ve never really understood the economics of Star
Trek, but it always seemed to me that they weren’t as nonsensical as they seemed
given that they’d invented the “replicator.” This was a doohickey that used the
same technology as the transporter to rearrange molecules to make just about
anything, including food and clothing. It was a perfected form of 3D
printing.
Physical space was also no longer an impediment. In a
universe where there are an infinite number of habitable planets, there’s real
estate for everyone. Of course, all of this is only possible when you have
enough energy to get where you want and replicate the materials and food you
need. I’m not saying that the economics—or politics—of Star Trek actually
make sense. I’m just saying they’re not as crazy as they seem. When the means
of production have been truly democratized, who the hell knows what political
economy would look like?
And that’s why I think Marxists—and more generic
leftists—should be stoked about fusion. Yeah, it’ll be a long time before it’s
commercially viable at scale, but if and when it is, all sorts of
impossibilities become possible. (Jim Pethokoukis has a great primer on
the state of play in Fusion World.)
There’s a rich tradition of Marxist/leftist/Green
hostility to the idea of limitless, cheap, energy. Cheap energy fueled
industrialization, deforestation, and all sorts of things that are at war with
a “sustainable” environment. The environmental left hated oil because it was
the lifeblood of capitalism before they hated it because of climate change.
But cheap energy could also fix a lot of the
problems—“externalities”—that the era of fossil fuels created. Fossil fuels
would be relatively easy to phase out. Hydroelectric dams, environmentally
gruesome edifices, could be torn down. All of the hideous solar and wind farms
could also be mothballed, returning all of that land to nature or more
productive uses. Desalination is crazy expensive in part because it’s so energy
intensive. Fusion could solve that. Heck, it’d be crazy to try and scrub
meaningful amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere with existing technology. But
maybe with inexhaustible supplies of cheap energy it wouldn’t be? I’m not sold
on genetically engineered meat yet, but it seems to me you could come up with
some nifty stuff at scale with limitless energy supplies. Say goodbye to
factory farming.
Of course, cheap energy wouldn’t solve every problem, and
it would undoubtedly create some new ones. But that’s true of every new form of
energy. The question is whether the problems the new forms of energy creates
are better problems than the old ones.
More broadly, while I hate most of the “metaverse” stuff,
if I were of a Marxist or hyper environmentalist bent, I’d be pretty psyched by
its potential to keep people from using up natural resources. More to the
point, in the physical world we can’t all be the Renaissance men that Marx
envisioned, but in the virtual world? Why not? There’s a hell of a lot of
scarcity in meatspace: a finite number of trees to make your cabin and a finite
number of Walden Ponds to put them on. But in the virtual world? You can be as
much of a hermit or socialite as you like. I don’t want to be a herdsman,
hunter, and critic the way Marx did. But if that floats your boat, plug into
the Zuckerverse and knock yourself out.
We’re already in the opening chapter of
the Dematerialization Era. As my friend Jonathan Adler writes:
What is now being observed
represents a fundamental decoupling of resource consumption from economic
growth, such that as mature economies grow, they not only use fewer resources
per unit of output, but they also consume fewer resources overall. In short,
economic growth in the most developed nations increasingly coincides with a net
reduction in resource consumption. The United States in particular is
“post-peak in its exploitation of the earth,” according to Andrew McAfee
in More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper
Using Fewer Resources — and What Happens Next
Dematerialization is a fancy way of saying that scarcity
may no longer be the iron cage it once was. I suspect there will always be
scarcity of some sort, not least the scarcity of human attention and
time.
But what I’m getting at is that because of the Marxists’
hostility to markets and all that comes with them, they might be missing the
only viable route to the Heaven on Earth the Marxists promised but couldn’t
deliver.
Marxist economics is a boneheaded way to structure an
economy precisely because it fails utterly to confront the problems of scarcity
and the benefits of innovation. It pretends to be a “productivist” ideology but
it sucks at producing the stuff normal people want, like wealth and improved
living standards. Yeah, yeah, the Soviet Union delivered on this score for a
while because they imposed technological advances—like replacing ox-carts with
tractors— but they did that by using Western technology and killed a lot of
folks in the process. And yes, the Chinese Communist Party lifted hundreds of
millions out of poverty, but they did that only by embracing markets and trade.
We’ll never get to the immanentized eschaton Marx
envisioned, but the great irony is that we can get much, much, closer to it
thanks to capitalism. In Henry Adams’ autobiography he has a chapter titled
“The Virgin and the Dynamo,” in which he postulates that the Dynamo, i.e.
technology, had replaced the Virgin, traditional Christian religious notions,
as the organizing passion of Americans. In effect, he was saying that
“engineering,” broadly understood, was the new religion, an idea that in the
Progressive Era (and perhaps today) seemed to be proven true. There’s a
lot that can be said about that, but I’m running very long. Still, it does
provide a nice opportunity to bring up, again, my favorite quote by Eric
Voegelin:
When God is invisible behind the
world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of
transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly
language of science to take their place. Like the Christian ecclesia, the
inner-worldly community has its apocalypse too; yet the new apocalyptics insist
that the symbols they create are scientific judgements.
But what I want to leave you with is the profound irony
that the system Marxists and environmentalists so despise may not be what
stands between them and the egalitarian romantic nirvana they yearn for but the
best, and probably only, means of delivering it. Whether we should want to live
in that nirvana is a subject for another time.
Various & Sundry
Way back at the beginning of this “news”letter, I put an
asterisk after the word “burked.” I did that because I wanted to offer a
definition but I didn’t want to break the flow. Burke is an awesome word I had
forgotten. It means: “to murder, as by suffocation, so as to leave no or few
marks of violence” or “to suppress or get rid of by some indirect maneuver.” So
you might say, the best assassins burke their victims.
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