Claire Fox: Not, please, in Marx's name...

If Marx argued anything, it was that no system simply collapses

Monday, 27 October 2008

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I used to publish Living Marxism magazine: I must, people assume, be like a cat that's got the cream, gleefully dancing on the grave of capitalist excess. Wrong: this is no time for feeling smug. In today's climate, it's not just capitalism that's under attack but humanist and political values we should all hold dear. And all too often it's pseudo-Marxist commentators who are the worst offenders.

Too many "radicals" happily lined up behind the Archbishop of Canterbury when he (mis)quoted Marx to preach the dangers of "idolatry" of material wealth. Kicking greed has too easily become an attack on an important human driver – the aspiration to better oneself, to want more than the basics. It is not just fat-cat bankers who stand accused of avarice, but the rest of us – house-buyers who may have overstretched ourselves and anyone with a credit card debt. Wanting more is seen as degenerate: tighten your belts – it's your unrealistic dreams that have caused this mess.

The new "age of austerity" is less a necessary response to economic challenges, and more a moralistic dig at excessive consumption. Long before the sub-prime crisis, consumption had been castigated for everything from the decline of the family to destroying the planet.

A year ago, leading environmentalist George Monbiot wrote, "I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises", as he railed against teenagers with their "expensive haircuts, fashionable clothes and mobile phones" and "cars, which they drive incessantly". The hardship of real cuts in living standards is not something that any radical should relish.

For the record, Marx wasn't a fan of austerity. His critique of capitalism was not that it was excessive, but the opposite. His life work revealed the limitations of the capitalist system as a mode of production precisely because of its inability to consistently develop the productive potential of society – that is our potential. He was resolutely pro-economic growth.

For Marx, capitalism wasn't up to the job, its limitations curtailing social and material progress for all. Today's anticapitalism is all too often not about a progressive desire to replace capitalism with something better. Its creed has become economic restraint and the downgrading of individual aspirations.

Prosperity and belief in people shaping their own destinies has been replaced by fatalism. One of the most irritating vulgarisations of Marxism is the inevitability theory, where capitalist collapse is a sure-fire thing. Marx was no determinist. If he argued anything, it was that no system simply collapses – we shape the world and it is we who make or break any system. This Marx is antithetical to today's more pessimistic attitude towards human authorship.

Today, the public are presented as hapless victims, helpless in the face of forces beyond their control, reduced to seeking advice from "financial experts" on radio phone-ins. We are all referred to as "tax-payers" as though that is our only leverage. But what happened to the idea of citizens, active political agents, who can effect change?

Marx's theory of crisis was not a prediction or a blueprint for understanding the present. But his favourite motto is worthy of resurrecting: "Question everything", even turning Marx himself into a new poster boy for the recession.

*Claire Fox convenes the Battle of Ideas, a weekend festival of debates in London on 1-2 November. www.battleofideas.org.uk