In Thomas Pynchon’s classic novel The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist Oedipa Maas is surprised to encounter anticapitalist conservatives. They wearily explain to Oedipa that they oppose capitalism because of its bad habit of constantly producing Marxists. They have a point. As long as capitalism persists, there will always be many who are left behind by it, and at least some of them, looking for guidance, are bound to find their way to capitalism’s profoundest and most infamous critic.
Since Marx died in 1883, there have been many flavors of Marxism to choose from, though not all are created equal. One of the most interesting and controversial is analytical Marxism, which emerged in the 1970s as an effort to purge various kinds of “bullshit” from the tradition. Seminal texts included Oxford philosopher G. A. Cohen’s epic Karl Marx’s Theory of History and John E. Roemer’s A General Theory of Exploitation and Class. Analytical Marxists prided themselves on a lack of dogmatic attachment to the letter of Marx’s texts, a willingness to learn from and make use of contemporary social-scientific methods, and above all a clarity of exposition. Analytical Marxists wrote in good, plain English, ensuring their positions were both digestible and open for cross-examination. Occasionally, they were even funny.
By the 1990s, many thought analytical Marxism was finished, a casualty of both the fall of the Soviet Union and deep theoretical disagreements within its own ranks. Even many leftists would agree with Marcus Roberts’s severe judgment that the “self-professed ‘paradigm’” of analytical Marxism was “(if not quite there already) approaching a dead end.” Many members of the movement either moved away from socialism altogether or, like Cohen, began offering often powerful moral rather than strictly materialist arguments for socialism. Whatever was left of analytical Marxism began to look more and more like good old-fashioned ethical socialism.
Yet in recent years, as concerns with inequality and oligarchy have returned to the forefront of Western politics, there has been a small but significant resurgence of analytical Marxism. A lucid and engaging contribution to this resurgence is Steve Paxton’s brisk How Capitalism Ends: History, Ideology and Progress. Paxton did doctoral work under Cohen at Oxford, and How Capitalism Ends has all the hallmarks of the tradition Cohen did so much to form and transmit. The book is clearly written, draws insights from non-Marxist traditions like modern monetary theory, and engages at great length with high-order defenders of property and capitalism—from John Locke to F. A. Hayek and Robert Nozick.
Like any proper Marxist, Paxton acknowledges the enormous economic progress that capitalism has made possible. Paxton observes that when the “condition of the world was one of acute and generalized scarcity, capitalism’s responsiveness to demand…provided innovative solutions to problems of insufficient or ineffective supply. Demand was met, problems were solved, innovations were developed, profits were made—technological progress marched on.” As that last phrase suggests, Paxton’s account of history echoes Cohen’s own technophiliac take on historical materialism.
In Karl Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen put great weight on the preface to Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, reading it as something like the Rosetta Stone for Marx’s whole theoretical project. In that preface, Marx argues that the economic base of a society lies in its relations of production. Those relations organize technology, the forces of production, to create goods. Relations of production are not eternal; they change over time as the forces of production evolve. In an agrarian society where, because of technological constraints, little food could be produced at any given time in any given place, most people were compelled to work on farms, which naturally led to feudal relations of production. But as technological improvements increased food production while sharply decreasing the demand for agrarian labor, millions were compelled to leave the farm and sell their labor in emerging factory systems. As a result, new capitalist relations of production appeared and became dominant. The capitalist owner of a factory would focus on squeezing as much work out of his workers as possible for as little pay as possible while investing some of his profits in new technologies that would eventually replace some of those workers.
Paxton argues we’ve now reached a stage in history where technological developments have made capitalism as obsolete as feudalism. It’s time to scrap it and move on to the next thing. Paxton notes that capitalism has produced enormous inequalities of wealth and power that are generating ever-greater political and social discontent, while the environmental degradation caused by capitalism is now being felt by everyone, even people in rich countries. Despite capitalism’s enormous productive capacities, 9 million people a year still die from inadequate nutrition and millions more remain “food-precarious,” even as trillions of dollars’ worth of food is thrown away. The problem is not one of production, as Paxton notes, but of distribution: there’s more than enough food for the starving, but no market incentive to give it to them.
Many defenders of capitalism, going all the way back to Locke, have insisted that property and freedom are fundamentally linked with each other. So why wouldn’t they be critical of an economic system in which the only property a growing number of people will ever own is their burial plot? By effectively excluding billions of people from ownership of productive resources—from land to manufacturing equipment—modern capitalism limits both our freedom and our capacity to flourish. As Paxton puts it:
[The idea] that your freedom is not curtailed if I am within my rights to prevent you from camping in my field might sound reasonable, but it goes against what we normally think of when we talk about freedom. This idea that a person’s freedom is not diminished if they have no right to do the thing they are being prevented from doing entails the idea that a prisoner’s freedom is not diminished provided they have been properly convicted—if society is within its rights to lock them in a cell. This is clearly at odds with any normal concept of freedom or use of the term in general conversation.
These sections of the book are particularly powerful, though one wishes Paxton spent a bit more time exploring the distinction between personal property and private property, since that is a conceptual snag on which so many debates about socialism get caught.
How could we in the United States ever get to socialism from where we are? Paxton offers several ideas. Clearly a command economy of the kind associated with the Soviet Union is out of the question. Paxton suggests we could begin by offering a jobs guarantee, which would both ease economic precarity and increase the bargaining power of labor relative to capital. We could also follow Thomas Piketty’s “fully costed” plan to offer every citizen a guaranteed “universal capital endowment,” funded by large tax increases on the wealthy. Finally, Paxton argues that we must radically democratize the political systems of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom by abandoning or reforming unrepresentative first-past-the-post electoral systems and aristocratic vestiges like the Senate and the House of Lords. This would give ordinary voters more power and create space for socialist parties to influence public policy and form coalitions with other parties, as they do in many European countries that have proportional representation.
All of this makes for a very appealing agenda, but Paxton’s short book did leave me with some concerns. He devotes most of the book to offering powerful Cohenesque critiques of the moral arguments for capitalism. These deserve as wide an airing as possible. But the book would have benefited from engaging more deeply with purely economic defenses of capitalism, which are probably the most convincing arguments in favor of the status quo. After all, even with all the problems Paxton lists, capitalism remains the most productive economic system the world has ever known. Don’t we run serious risks by abandoning a good-enough system in favor of radical experimentation? Don’t we risk repeating the failures of every country that has tried a truly robust form of socialism, as opposed to the social-democratic meliorism of, say, Sweden? Paxton briefly addresses some of these concerns, and offers a lengthy account of the failures of Soviet Communism. More could be said here, and perhaps he will say it in a sequel. But enough quibbling. This book is a clear exposition of an important set of ideas that deserve a new hearing in our increasingly plutocratic era. Welcome back, analytical Marxism. The world missed you.
How Capitalism Ends
History, Ideology, and Progress
Steve Paxton
Zer0 Books
$21.95 | 248 pp.
