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| Karl Marx Was Really a Free-Marketeer (really!), Says Attali |
| 2005-08-30 |
| What is old, is new again. Karl Marx was a closet capitalist. So writes French author Jacques Attali in ``Karl Marx ou l'esprit du monde'' (Fayard, 504 pages, 23 euros.) Attali argues that the theoretician widely blamed for the rise and fall of the Soviet Union was actually a free-marketeer who favored capitalism as a stepping stone to his communist ideal and predicted globalization as we know it today. That, he says, makes Marx the thinker du jour. Sales of his book suggest he may be right, at least in France: ``Karl Marx'' ranks among the country's non-fiction bestsellers. I think that says more about France than it says about KM. Like his subject, Attali is something of an overachiever. He graduated from four of France's elite ``grandes ecoles,'' finishing top of his graduating class at the Ecole Polytechnique engineering school. When the late Francois Mitterrand became president of France in 1981, Attali, then 38, moved into the adjacent office as his special adviser. Some of his ideas later became reality: the Grande Bibliotheque, the giant library in eastern Paris, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, based in London. Today, Attali is president of PlaNet Finance, a federation of some 10,000 micro-lenders that provide funding to the poorest of the poor. He is also the author of 37 books, including novels, children's stories and a play. The topic of his 38th? Mitterrand, his one-time mentor, who died a decade ago. Free Marx On a rainy day last week, Attali settled into a red armchair at Bloomberg's Paris bureau and, between sips of Earl Grey tea, shared his views on Marx, the world and the future. Nayeri: In your biography, you say Marx has become relevant to the world today. How so? Attali: Marx was understood as the thinker of Marxism and, more than that, a thinker of Sovietism. Actually, Marxism and Sovietism were built after Marx, and against him. Marx was a thinker of globalization. He was strongly against the idea of taking power for socialism in one country, strongly against the idea that communism could come instead of capitalism. For him, socialism should come after capitalism spreads everywhere in the world, including China and India. Ironically, he explained that the one country where socialism cannot begin is Russia, which is too backward. True, but that is because Marx believed in historism (ref Karl Popper and The Poverty of Historicism) For Marx, capitalism was huge progress compared to the previous feudal system. Therefore, he was strongly in favor of capitalism as progress toward liberty for mankind. He was in favor of free markets. He was in favor of free trade, explicitly; against protectionism, explicitly. And he explained that socialism, therefore, should come after. Beyond Capitalism Nayeri: Do you think that the world according to Marx will ever see the day? Attali: I'm sure there will be something beyond capitalism. It is clear that capitalism will win against the previous regime. It will take a lot of time, there will be some fights against theocracies as well as dictatorships. But I believe capitalism is not here forever, meaning more than one, two, three or five centuries. Wow! a Marxist gets a clue and predicts we will win against the Islamonuts. What is beyond capitalism is a world of free things and (things of) no value, and what we see on the Internet, in (downloaded) music ... is exactly that: the beginning of a world where some things, or everything, will or may become free. Nayeri: Do you think the U.S. and the West will lose their political and economic dominance of the planet in 50 years' time? Attali: In 50 years, no. But there is no empire forever, just as there is no civilization forever, and it's clear that the American empire, like the Roman Empire, will begin to decline, and is beginning to decline. As we saw with the Roman Empire, the decline took more than four centuries to happen and what happened after that was a disaster. The fatal blow to the Roman Empire was abrupt climate cooling, so with climate warming (TM) there is no risk of the same fate. Anarchy or Governance? The question is how long the decline of the American empire will take, and for me, it will be very long. What will happen after will be global anarchy, such as happened in the early Middle Ages, or the beginning of global governance, if we see a victory of democracy. Nayeri: Bob Geldof famously said he would like to make poverty history. As the president of PlaNet Finance, do you consider that aim possible? Attali: It is needed. I don't know if it is possible. We see that poverty is one of the main sources of violence; terrorism finds its sources in poverty, and poverty finds its sources in violence. Bullshit and demonstrably untrue. But I don't believe that the instruments that Bob is proposing, such as debt relief, are the most efficient ones, because debt relief means debt relief of governments, and the debt of governments is made for buying weapons or whatever. It is more important to help the very poorest to get out of debt. It's what micro-finance is about. I actually agree with him on microfinance. Its perhaps the most important way of jump-starting capitalism in the developing world. |
| Posted by:phil_b |
| #2 Actually, Karl Marx was a commie scumbag. But that's not the PC version. |
| Posted by: Chris W. 2005-08-30 21:05 |
| #1 I think this guy read the Cliff's Notes version of Marx. Although Marx's theory of history does say that capitalism is a stage on the way to communism, his theory of economics -- the labor theory of value -- is built from the ground up as a critique of capitalism as inherently exploitive. He may or may not have considered capitalism to be an improvement over feudalism, but he most certainly loathed capitalism in its 19th-century manifestation. As many critics of marxism have pointed out, however, the labor theory of value is bogus, in that it does not recognize profit as the entrepreneur's salary for risk-taking. Moreover, the information on which Marx based his theories was out of date by the time he got around to writing Das Kapital. As to this line -- "Like his subject, Attali is something of an overachiever" -- it reveals the writer's ignorance more than anything. Marx spent most of his life sponging off of Engels, cheated on his wife, exploited the help, and pissed off everybody who tried to work with him. The fact that some Frenchman is trying to resurrect Marx's discredited theories is an indictment of France's educational system more than anything else. |
| Posted by: Jonathan 2005-08-30 12:25 |