Marx: GOD and Credit

 At the moment, Marxism seems better prepared to interpret the world than to change it.

                                    --Benjamin Kunkel

That quote is from the closing sentences of an article in the February 2011 London Review of Books.  The article itself – “How Much is Too Much?” – ostensibly reviews David Harvey’s effort in his 2010 work The Enigma of Capital: and the Crises of Capitalism [no, I don’t know why there is a colon in that title] to consider the world’s current economic situation through the lens of Marxian crisis theory.  However, most of its length is devoted to explaining what “Marxian crisis theory” actually is and to describing the gloss that Harvey put on this theory in his earlier work from the 1980s, The Limits to Capital.

I came across the LRB article about a month ago, read it, was highly intrigued by it, but realized that I didn’t actually understand it.  So I printed it out, put it aside, and waited until this weekend to re-read it.  I think I have a better handle on it now, but reading the thing does underscore how woefully little I know about Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism.  It doesn’t help – judging solely from Kunkel’s review and some of the passages he quotes – that the critique does not seem to be easily penetrable. 

In any event, while there is a great deal in the article to pique one’s interest, I cannot claim to really be on any kind of sure footing when I discuss (as I do below) some of the ideas I found particularly interesting.  I suspect that what I really need is a very dumbed-down introduction to this stuff, something like Marxian Economic Theory for Dummies.  (I looked for it; it doesn’t seem to be in print.)

Anyway . . . here goes.

Privatizing Evil for Profit

I’ve been thinking a long time about the privatization of public services and some of the inherent dangers that go along with such schemes.  I would not say that I am anti-privatization in all cases (I suppose I can imagine some scenarios where turning over a government service to a private company might make sense), but there is one entire class of services that it seems obvious to me the government should never privatize – and yet it does.  It is the class of services I call “Necessary Evils.”

“Necessary Evils” are the services a society needs that – in an ideal world – it would never wish to have.  Things that we have to do that we wish we didn’t.  Two obvious examples of such Necessary Evils are (i) our prison system, and (ii) our military.  In an ideal world, we wouldn’t be locking people up because we wouldn’t need to lock people up.  In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have a military because we wouldn’t need to have a military. 

But we don’t live in an ideal world.  We live in a world that contains some dangerous people, and both for the sake of punishment (we gave up a long time ago on rehabilitation in this country; about the time Ronald Reagan was elected, we committed ourselves to an Old Testament – not a New Testament – approach to crime) and for the sake of public safety some people must be locked away.

And we live in a world that requires (although a whole lot less, in my opinion, than our political leaders seem to think) that we be able to defend ourselves militarily.  So we have to have a military.

But when we privatize these government services we attach a profit motive to the provision of these services.  In other words, we create circumstances that argue in favor of locking up more people or argue in favor of more military action (here, I'm thinking about outfits like Blackwater).  We create conditions that further the promotion of Necessary Evils and – sometimes – just plain Evil, no qualifier required.

Why Does America Hate Free Market Capitalism?

Over at Balloon Juice, mistermix reports on how America’s internet service is being left in the dust by . . . wait for it . . . Lithuania.  Lithu – fuckin – ania.  Apparently, service (10/1 Mbps) that costs $40 - $60 here (depending on where you live) used to cost only $14.72 in Lithuania.  I say “used to cost” because Lithuania just doubled its speed with no increase in cost.  Which means that right now we in America are paying 3 or 4 times what Lithuanians pay and getting internet service at half the speed. 

(Click through and read mistermix’s entire post; weep at the fact that American internet service is half-speed compared to Lithuania’s worst service, and that if you were in Lithuania and willing to pay a little more you would have access to internet speeds that you can only dream about here in America.)

Look, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the United States isn’t going to even make an effort to keep up with Korea or Japan – I mean, they’re supposed to be the high-tech havens of the world.  And I’ve even resigned myself to the fact that the United States isn’t going to even make an effort to keep up with Western Europe.  But when our tech infrastructure is being left in the dust by Lithu – fuckin – ania, a former Soviet bloc country . . . Jesus! we aren’t even trying anymore.

What really ticks me off about this is that there is absolutely no reason for us to lag so far behind the rest of the developed world.  But by our policy decisions we have chosen to do so – it didn’t just evolve this way in the United States, we picked this outcome because, basically, we don’t understand what “free market capitalism” means.