Everyone's a Marxist

Observing that "we're all marxists now," James Bowman offers this comment on NRO,

...the economy is not a machine and wasn't designed by anybody. It is more like an organic being and therefore can't work or not work — since there is no specific task it is designed to perform — but only be healthy or unhealthy. It can continue to generate wealth, as it always has done, or it can be hobbled and interfered with and prevented from generating wealth and doing other things natural to it. But it cannot be replaced by a machine which has been designed so that everybody will be happy.

While I agree that an economy cannot be regulated like a machine and thus abhor centralized beauracracies, it seems that Bowman is writing to "naturalize" capitalism, as well as the current orientation of the market, and thus place it outside the realm of historical accountability. So, any critic or implied "socialist" is therefore lamenting something which emerged to meet human needs, even though billions of needs are not met by the current oligarchic market system dominated by absurdly hierarchical institutions also known as corporations.

Throughout the piece, it seems to me that Bowman is conflating notions of "capitalism" with "commerce." In my opinion, though, it would be a bit more accurate if he were to argue that commerce - the exchange of goods, services, ideas, whatever for something else - is a natural human process, and that capitalism emerged to regulate an increasingly complex world of commercial networks during the late modern period.

That distinction is an important one. The desire for contact, exchange, and self-preservation (maybe even self-aggrandizement) is likely to be an innate human characteristic; part of our seeming need to enter into relationships, reciprocal or otherwise, with other humans. But let's not confuse this desire with the institutional relations that make up what amounts to a beauracratic form of organization - with its own levels of hierarchy, and assymetric power relations - known as capitalism.

Capitalism, as we experience it, didn't just appear out of nowhere; its emergence had much to do with the rapid dissemination of knowledge, technology, and people which was bound up with the developing Renaissance, early mercantilist ideology, and information transferal techniques (ie. books, science, mathematics). In other words, it was a product of the Enlightenment: a time when vastly intertextual and intercultural experiences began to achieve some form of regulation through abstract commodity exchanges. Astute observers might now interject that this is where Marx spent most of his energy: trying to plot the tendency of capitalism towards contradiction and monopoly via an analysis of commodity fetishism and surplus value.

But, no, observing all of that would be inconvenient for Bowman, so he just implies that a dehistoricized "capitalism" is natural and any other model is a crude form of intervention. How nice.

Bowman concludes:

But for the rest of us there is no excuse for using such language which, like that of "capitalism," is designed to impose a bipolar structure on the world, requiring us all to be counted either among the far-left sheep or the far-right goats.

Coming from NR, this criticism of the imposed "bipolar structure on the world" is highly ironic. It seems to me that virtually everyone affiliated with that magazine lost the ability to talk beyond Manichaen binaries on 9/11...