Unabashed self-promotion, department of literary-political cogitation

My new book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, will be out in early June. The good news is that it is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Velocity is king! Order one (or two) now and make an author happy. No dogs are eaten in this book.

Here’s the first in a series of previews I’ll share with PJM readers on the run-up to publication:

All of Marx’s major predictions have turned out to be wrong. He said that societies based on a market economy would suffer spiraling class polarization and the disappearance of the middle class. Every society lucky enough to enjoy the fruits of a market economy shows that Marx was wrong about that. He predicted the growing immiseration and impoverishment of the working class in capitalist societies. (Actually, he didn’t merely predict that it would happen, he predicted that it would happen necessarily and inevitably—thanks, Hegel.) The opposite has happened. Indeed, as Kolakowski notes, “in the second edition of Capital Marx updated various statistics and figures, but not those relating to workers’ wages; those figures, if updated, would have contradicted his theory.” Contradicted, Comrade. Dialecticians like Hegel and Marx pretend that a contradiction is as much an intellectual commendation as a refutation. It’s merely pretense, though. A simpler, but more profound philosopher, David Hume, had the right attitude when he complained of “the custom of calling a difficulty what pretends to be a demonstration, and endeavoring by that means to elude its force and evidence.”

Marx further predicted the inevitable revolution of the proletariat. Mark that, inevitable. This is the very motor of Marxism. Take away the proletarian revolution and you neuter the theory. But there have been no proletarian revolutions. The Bolshevik revolution, as Kolakowski points out, “had nothing to do with Marxian prophesies. Its driving force was not a conflict between the industrial working class and capital, but rather was carried out under slogans that had no socialist, let alone Marxist, content: Peace and Land for Peasants.” Marx said that in a capitalist economy, untrammeled competition would inevitably squeeze profit margins: eventually—and soon!—the economy would grind to a halt and capitalism would collapse. Take a look at capitalist economies in the hundred and fifty years since Marx wrote: have profit margins evaporated? Marx thought that, when they matured, capitalist economies would hamper technical progress and Communist societies would support it: the opposite is true.

No, Marxism has been as wrong as it is possible for a theory to be wrong. Addicted to “the self-deification of mankind,” it continually bears witness to what Kolakowski calls “the farcical aspect of human bondage.” Why then was Marxism like moral catnip—not so much among its proposed beneficiaries, the working classes who bore the brunt of its immiserating effects, but among the educated elite? Why?

—From “Leszek Kolakowski & the Anatomy of Totalitarianism,” in The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.