Specters Old and New
In a news item from May 5, 2018 it is reported that the Chinese government has given Karl Marx’ hometown (Trier, Germany) an 18-foot tall statue of Karl Marx to commemorate his 200th birthday anniversary. While former anti-communists such as Vaclav Klaus believe that the statue makes a mockery of history, mere history cannot compete with economics: The city of Trier has been benefitting from Chinese tourism, and its mayor says that “it’s the right time to deal with Marx in this form.”
Judging from the tepid public reaction to the new statue of Marx in Trier, the historical memory of Marx, Engels, and the Communist Manifesto seems to be fading. Hence, we will mention that the relatively youthful Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels collaborated on writing the Manifesto during the winter of 1847 to 1848, publishing it in London in February 1848 as a 23-page brochure. At the time, governments across Europe were already tottering for various reasons, and the communists needed an official creed in order to unify their approach to the ongoing crises.
The Manifesto introduces the specter of communism as haunting (going around in) Europe: All the powers of old Europe [Pope, Tsar, Metternich (Austrian chancellor), and Guizot (French premier), among others], although failing to define the precise nature of this specter, have created fairy tales (Märchen) about it and have allied themselves in a kind of wild-animal chase (Hetzjagd) after it. (One thinks of hounds in a fury of bloodlust hunting a fox.) It is in opposition to these fairy tales and on behalf of the newly formed Communist League that Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, including several sections on the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, and the communist version of world history. The visible ill effects of communism awaited the Russian Revolution, and it took longer still for critics such as Boris Pasternak (Dr. Zhivago) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago) to document those ill effects.
Having died seventeen years before the Manifesto, Hegel cannot fairly be blamed for its excesses. Indeed, he had shown the good sense to say that, even if world history is the self-unfolding of Spirit, we cannot predict the details of history. Post-Hegelian radicals, however, had to make such predictions in order to attract attention. Some Marxist predictions presupposed that “all social facts can be reduced to economics,” a view that became known as “economism.”
Although today’s specter of obsequious statuary is less ominous than 1848’s specter of communism, the contemporary specter of economism could become quite serious. In the April 2018 edition of First Things, Richard H. Spady focuses on the gradual transformation of what had been convenient and contingent assumptions in economic models into normative goals for social planners. For example, some economic models assume that trade expansion, mobility of labor and capital, and technological change are always good. Spady finds that there is countervailing evidence that these economic factors also bring some negative consequences: Recent economic change has brought “widespread despair, resentment, and dysfunction among the lower two-thirds of American society,” consistent with Case and Deaton’s data on “dramatic decreases in life expectancy among white, high-school-educated Americans.” Spady believes that this new specter of economism, if not explicitly dealt with, will lead to an era of increased societal conflict.
Concurring with the spirit of Spady’s analysis, albeit without recourse to the terminology of “economism,” the dean of the Columbia Business School recently commented on the problematic nature of trade and immigration: He described a recent field trip that he took with 20 M.B.A. students - - not to the usual, globally-elite destinations such as Hong Kong, London, or Delhi - - but to Youngstown, Ohio in order to observe the specter of real industrial decline. “Whether it’s Brexit in the U.K. or the debate over trade and immigration in the U.S., … [people ask] ‘Why am I supporting something that benefits on average, when this just means [that] Columbia M.B.A.s get it all?’ ”