Prosperity comes from the incentives of individual free choice while social control and government coercion deincentivize human initiative and therefore prosperity as well. Marx in his Communist Manifesto encouraged revolutionary social control by a compassionate elite and many argue even today that it is only government coercion by an elite party that will deliver outcomes like universal healthcare and guaranteed employment.
Free choices to invest your own limited resources into any of education health care, leisure travel, and so on, is an equitable way to distribute the limited resources of an individual. In contrast, the ideology of government coercion by an elite rations those limited resources and picks winners and losers. Slavoj Zizek argues in his The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto that the growth of capitalism has resulted in the historical deadlock of Marxism. In fact, Zizek argues that even though capitalism has had and continues to have repeated crises, capitalism emerges from each crisis stronger and not weaker. As a result, Zizek concludes that capitalism is much more resilient than Marx ever supposed it would be.
Correspondingly, Communism and Marxism are much less resilient than Marx ever supposed. Communism and Marxism also go through repeated crises, but in contrast to capitalism, Marxism emerges from each crisis weaker and not stronger. This is fundamentally because government coercion does not deal well with the anxieties and emotions of unknown risks, which are the cause of most crises. Despite the many dismal failures of prosperity under Marxism, there is an enduring modernist Marxist view that the current historical epoch of selfish free choice capitalism will eventually end. However, Marx argued in 1848 that only when civilization develops a more coerced compassion enforced by an elite to eliminate the selfish individual free choice of capitalism.
A key Marxist notion is the labor theory of value where the profit of selfish capitalism necessarily exploits labor and there is a struggle between capital and labor. Marx argued that government should own all resources and distribute the profit of labor equitably among all people. Government should then distribute all property and wealth and replace the free choice of selfish private ownership with the coerced compassionate choice of government ownership. Of course, government is also a hierarchy of competencies as Jordan Peterson notes in his classic 2018 debate with Zizek in Toronto, CA. The many flaws Marx noted of capitalism are flaws of human nature and not really capitalism.
In other words, capitalism is both selfish as well as compassionate because capitalism makes up the same hierarchies of competency that make up any civilization. The free choices of capitalism between selfishness and compassion give anyone that free choice. A coerced choice of compassion, then, is simply a limit on individual free choice. Civilization already limits free choice, but the modernist allure of Marxism supposes the need for many more limits for individual free choice enforced by some elite minority.
No comments:
Post a Comment