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Patrick Luciani: The strange and eternal endurance of Karl Marx’s terrible, terrible ideas

Commentary

A bronze statue showing German philosopher Karl Marx is unveiled in Trier, Germany, May 5, 2018. Michael Probst/AP Photo.

In this week’s Hub book review, Patrick Luciani examines two books, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis (Melville House, 2024), and Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito (Astra House, 2024), to examine the ideas of Karl Marx and how they’ve managed to persist to this dayand why they ultimately always fall short in practice.  

Capitalism has never had a good reputation, even though it pretty much rules the world. It’s an ugly word invented by its enemies in the nineteenth century, even though the history of private property and free exchange goes back centuries, including Italian city-states in the Middle Ages. Adam Smith preferred “commercial society,” but the Left won that PR battle.

Throughout the twentieth century, when Europe and North America were in economic distress, capitalism was an easy scapegoat, even though capitalism led to manufacturing jobs, bringing millions out of poverty. Karl Marx was right about one thing: the bourgeoisie saved millions “from the idiocy of rural life.”

Following the massive success and influence of Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, inspired by Marx, the French economist turned Marx’s prediction on its head. Marx predicted wild business competition would drive out profits, ending capitalism; Piketty worries that capitalism is too successful, with returns to capital continually outpacing economic growth, leading to a concentration of wealth in fewer hands. Hence his famous r > g expression.

Now we have two more books that continue the assault on free markets by self-professed Marxists.

Yanis Varoufakis, a former Greek finance minister in 2015 and now YouTube star, claims in his book Technofeudalism that capitalism is already dead, killed by a new class of feudal overlords: the owners of cloud capital. He argues that we have allowed a few creators and owners of computer platforms, such as Google and Amazon, to set the direction of technology to their benefit against everyone else.

These titans of technology have turned us into serfs who voluntarily turn over personal information for free. This new ruling class “draw[s] power from owning cloud capital whose tentacles entangle everyone.” Varoufakis takes the reader on a journey of how technofeudalism works, peppered with insights from the Mad Men TV series and comparing it to the rise of the Greek mythological Minotaur monster that rose “From the Ashes of the Bretton Woods system.”

Varoufakis is a great storyteller with fascinating insights, including his mother’s observation that capitalism might pay workers for their productivity but not their enthusiasm. Although a trained economist, the book lacks any data or evidence. Why let facts get in the way of a good story? Varoufakis has little regard for traditional economics, claiming it is closer to a religion than a science.

As finance minister, he fought hard against any austerity program to get Greece’s economy back on track. As it turned out, austerity put the economy on its current path to prosperity.

Although Varoufakis hates big media platforms, how ironic that he has made himself a star on YouTube, pontificating on all manner of economic and political topics. The allure of fame was just too tempting to resist.

Another book influenced by Karl Marx that has gained a following, especially among the young, is Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito, translated by Brian Bergstrom. To save the world from environmental destruction and the oppression of the poor, capitalism must be replaced with a form of degrowth communism. Saito blames capitalism for the climate crises, forgetting that “to live is to pollute,” and as a species, we’ve been living long before capitalism made its appearance.

He claims neoliberal capitalism is all about overproduction and overconsumption, whereas green capitalism is a myth. He calls sustainable development goals (SDGs) the opiate of the people and useless in the fight to protect the environment, one thing he has in common with environmental skeptics.

Saito, who teaches philosophy at the University of Tokyo, wants to marry degrowth, reducing production year over year, with Marx’s theory to “update our vision of a post-capitalist world.” He argues that market economies produce scarcity, while communism provides abundance. For example, if land speculation were banned, prices would fall, and voilà, more land for everyone. Forget the old Marx, he of failed predictions about the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the rise of the proletariat. Saito sees Marx as a cutting-edge thinker opposing colonialism and a protector of the environment.

On this last point, Saito completely ignores that communism left the environment in ruins everywhere it ruled. I doubt he has ever visited Cuba, Venezuela, or most of the Soviet Union—all scarred by devastating environmental disasters. If he has, he suspiciously makes no mention of it. China is cleaning up its act only because of the wealth created by capitalism. For someone born in 1987 and who completely missed the fall of the Soviet Union, he still has time to visit these places and see for himself. And when he does, he might take along something to read by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes said, “I prophesy that in 1950 every Treasury in the world will be talking about my ideas; but by that time, the problems will be quite different, and my ideas will be not only obsolete but dangerous.” That’s one lesson Marxists have never learned.

However, the conflict or struggle today isn’t between capitalism and communism but between different kinds of capitalism. Economist Branko Milanovic, who knows a thing or two about the history of capitalism, reminds us that the real battle is between two capitalisms. Liberal capitalism, as practiced in the West, with democracy tempered by the rule of law, and China’s political capitalism run by technical bureaucrats to maintain growth with the power to punish political opponents. The winner of that battle is just getting started.

Patrick Luciani

Patrick Luciani is a writer and book reviewer for The Hub and former executive director of the Donner Canadian Foundation.

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