“Marx was too busy being clever to be correct”

The incomparable Vernunft of The New Skeptic (just try to compare him to something; it’s impossible) has a delightful post about the unfortunate tendency found among capitalism’s greatest critics to telescope capitalism into a Theory Of Everything rather than just accepting it as a smaller component of a larger worldview:

Capitalism is a tool; the purpose has to exist beforehand, and the tool has to be fit for that purpose. Capitalism cannot make a people adopt an ethical viewpoint; if, however, a people’s ethics values prosperity and material goods, then capitalism will allocate human and other resources in an efficient way for that people. Because capitalism substitutes market forces for central planning, a people with individualist politics will find it conducive to an enjoyable life free from undue interference. That’s why capitalism seems to be such a dominant ideology – it gives some people what they wanted with minimal effort. It works. It can’t fulfill every need, but it is designed to fulfill the material needs efficiently so that there is little waste; whatever else a person is disposed to seek, he can devote more resources to seek it under capitalism than under a more wasteful system. If he is a mere consumer, then capitalism will dominate his life – not because of capitalism, but because of his constitution. Marx essentially blamed a theory for the failings of individuals.

You can see the foolish thing being done here, albeit in a manner Vernunft didn’t specifically have in mind when he wrote the above.  Stuart Jeffries’ insistance that French president Nicolas Sarkozy needs to read more Hegel is bizarre on a number of fronts, not least of which is the fact that “read more Hegel” is only ever the proper course of action when the deficiency being remedied is something like clear thought or simply being alive.

Jeffries makes a number of absurd errors quite apart from that, though.  Let’s take a look at the most relevant:

Such is the freedom of late capitalism, which seems to systematically strive to deprive us of an identity that we might construct ourselves.

Here is the error in its fullest manifestation; “capitalism” does not strive to do anything, or deprive anyone of anything.  It is an abstract concept, and a subordinate one at that.  It does nothing, and strives for even less.  What people do with it, however, is another thing altogether, and Mr. Jeffries would have done well to have limited his commentary to that particular issue.

It’s also the case that describing it as “late capitalism” is indefensible; Mr. Jeffries, whatever he may or may not think of himself, is not a seer of the future and thus does not know what that future holds for capitalism.  For all he knows this could still be very early days for it, even by his own problematic understanding of the idea.  More importantly, however,  “capitalism” is not some mere fashion to which people voluntarily subscribe and that just waxes and wanes in popularity.  It makes no more sense to speak of “late capitalism” than it does to speak of the latter days of the second law of thermodynamics or the infancy of inertia.  Capitalism describes very well what happens when people freely exchange goods and services, just as the laws of motion (for example) describe very well what happens when bodies move and collide.  Neither set of ideas describes much beyond that, though: Newton’s first law is not a literary theory; capitalism is not a government.

The Holy Father’s new, much-delayed and exahaustively-researched encyclical on finance and social justice is scheduled to be released on June 29th – the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul – and I look forward to it with great interest and not a little anxiety.  Interest because it will no doubt be excellent, and anxiety because the world’s media is gearing up even as we speak to condemn it as either right- or left-wing propaganda, depending on which sections of the document they choose to emphasize in their editorials.  It won’t actually be as easy as that, of course, but never let it be said that the media can’t find a way to reduce something beautifully complex into something stupefyingly simple.