Inequality and ... Other Stuff
Rick Salutin writes in the Globe and Mail that "the Marxist tradition may not have had the answers, but it always asked better questions."
Specifically, socialists inspired by Marx always recognize that capitalism tends to produce inequality by its very workings. The real political question is whether to do something about that. Presumably he means (as Marx seems to have meant): enjoy the tremendous wealth-production of capitalism, but distribute the wealth differently than capitalism would on its own.
Salutin is concerned that Jack Layton, leader of the NDP in Canada, has slid to the right in order to get votes. The rhetoric is about spending on this or that program for the poor or cities, which just allows the right to come along and say we can't afford it, it's not fair to hard-working taxpayers, or whatever. The debate Saluin wants never gets underway.
My question: Marxism always asked "better" questions? Does Salutin mean the best questions? I suppose this is different than saying any or all of the Communist regimes in the world have meant well, they started out idealistic and then something went wrong, things would have been better with Trotsky, or whatever. But still: are questions about economic inequality the best questions?
One sign that they are not is what happened to real Communism. First you take control of all the wealth. Then you try to produce wealth in a way that imitates capitalist society. At every stage, you have to make war on your own people, who seem to have a natural desire to own something of their own, and get ahead, and create opportunities for their children. As your gargantuan plans fail, you lurch from one crisis to another. When I was an undergraduate in the 70s, the left pretty much admitted what Krushchev had said about the Soviet Union, so it could no longer be described as a paradise. Instead the focus was on countries where, because of the brutal totalitarianism, little information ever made its way to the outside world: China, Albania, maybe Cuba.
In the intervening years, more and more specific information has flowed from all of these regimes, and the same conclusion keeps emerging. If you treat the lessening of economic inequality as your only goal, or even as the main one, you have to make endless, brutal war on your own people. In other words, you simply have to treat things like privacy, property, family, religion, nationalism and other loyalties as if they don't matter at all. Even the "socially liberal" views of Communists--why not try free love, etc., since it shocks the bourgeoisie?--have to give way to a demented puritanism in order to maintain control. It's hard to believe this is a profound view of human nature, or that a theory that keeps coming back to this point is one that asks "better" questions. Of course, many leaders of actual Communist regimes must have lost faith along the way, so their claims to be trying to achieve equality were hypocritical and false, on top of everything else.
On the other hand, there is a bit of an exchange on the Corner on whether there is a way that conservatives should worry if there is too much inequality--even if the income and living standards of the poor are steadily rising. (Thanks to John Derbyshire--a one-time Brit). I guess this brings us to what in Canada we sometimes call "Red Tories." (I have friends who hate that term as inexact, and I have friends who would rather die than be Red Tory).
With George Grant, who was close to being a Canadian political philosopher, the term had a fairly exact meaning: a Tory wants to preserve British North American, non-American yet not quite British traditions; to do so against the power of the U.S. will require government intervention--socialist means will be needed to achieve Tory ends.
With Dalton Camp, it seems to have meant only: let's be open to "progressive changes," which may be articulated by social democrats. Let's be free from any ideology, since that will help us see problems and solutions clearly. Yet let's also be different from the Liberals. Less ... sleazy, somehow. By remaining a Tory, Camp was constantly forced to work with people who condemned the NDP as socialists, and Camp himself probably rejected (at least until after his heart surgery) much of the "social planning" agenda as too ideological. Yet Camp himself was not a lover of any particular traditions, political, social or otherwise. What was Tory about him?
Derbyshire says, shrewdly enough: we should prepare, politically, for the problem of the envy that the poor can feel for the rich--even if the poor are better off, in a material sense, than they used to be.
|
