gracchusdixit

The two biggest blabbermouths of right-wing talk radio, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, recently accused the new Pope, Francis the First, of being a “Marxist”.   When asked about this accusation, the Pope responded with a characteristically self-effacing smile, saying that, although he disapproved of Marxist ideology, he knew several Marxists who were decent people and consequently wasn’t offended by the comparison.

It scarcely needs saying that there is a world of difference between the Christian charity espoused by Pope Francis and the economic views of Karl Marx.  For Limbaugh and Beck to claim otherwise is, of course, ridiculous and reveals yet again (as if further demonstration were needed) that they and their ilk are little more than idiotic bullies.

Nevertheless, there is one thing the Pope and Marx do share:  a recognition that capitalism has failed to provide a decent life for the vast majority of mankind.  The Pope is calling upon the world to confront a truth that Christ proclaimed two thousand years ago—the truth that money and morality cannot coexist.  Christ may have proclaimed this truth, but it was Marx who analyzed it more exhaustively than anyone before or since.

When Marx’s reputation went into a steep decline after the collapse of the old Soviet Union, we were told that his assessment of capitalism had been rendered obsolete.  History, it was said, had declared a winner.  Laissez-faire capitalism and the two countries that most embodied it, the United States and the United Kingdom, were now the undisputed model of success.  Follow their model—the “neo-liberal” model—and the world would become a better  place for everyone.

But the Muse of History is a fickle creature, and she seems to delight in fooling us.   Today, scarcely more than 20 years after the Berlin wall came tumbling down, the underpinnings of global capitalism—the banks that feed it, the corporations that profit from it, the political institutions that support it—have lost their footing and their credibility.  All around the world, thousands of ordinary people have taken to the streets to protest governments that have betrayed them and an economic system that has failed them.  Suddenly, the verdict of history seems less certain.

None of this would have surprised Karl Marx.  On the contrary, he saw it coming.

It was Marx who first observed that the theory of capitalism is starkly at odds with its reality.  Although capitalism claims to benefit everyone by creating competition, it does precisely the opposite,  creating monopolies and oligarchies, which concentrate money and power in the hands of the few.   This, Marx foresaw, leads to inescapable social conflicts between those who possess wealth and those who do not—conflicts that can tear societies apart.

He also saw that capitalism is plagued by inherent and self-destructive contradictions.  To sustain profit, it demands endless growth and technological change, producing more and more goods at cheaper and cheaper prices.  This is a Catch-22.  Those who do the work are also the people who do the buying.  When their wages have been slashed or their jobs eliminated, the shelves fill with goods that nobody can afford.  The results are overproduction and collapse—a recession when we’re lucky, a depression if we’re not.  The financial collapse of 2007-2008 and the stagnation that followed it wouldn’t have surprised Marx.  They are merely the latest in capitalism’s long history of economic and social disasters.

Finally and most tellingly, Marx divined that the engine of capitalism—money—completely changes the fundamental relationships between human beings.  When a person’s work can be purchased in the marketplace, like a lump of coal,  human relationships turn into transactions, devoid of any moral content.   Human commitments turn into heartless “contracts”.  Thus do considerations of right and wrong, of fairness, of basic justice fall by the wayside.  Thus can corporations fire people, uproot their lives, and send their jobs packing to third world countries without a qualm.  Marx called this the “cash nexus”.  The Pope calls it “the idolatry of money”.  The words may be different, but the underlying truth is the same.

And the truth, no matter what you call it, is this:  capitalism is a moral and practical failure.  It isn’t just.  It doesn’t work.  And it never will.  The father of communism saw this clearly two hundred years ago.  The spiritual father of millions of Christians around the world sees it today.