Heath’s Misstep

Heath outlines several “stages” in the supposed unraveling of Marxism. Some of his observations are obviously true: it is difficult to defend any version of the labor theory of value without veering into metaphysics, and it is the case that Marxists often rely on a rigid, techno-determinist theory of history. However, other claims are plainly false, like Heath’s declaration that Marx failed to understand that recessions “are often preceded by crises in the banking system.” In fact, Marx spent an inordinate amount of time explaining that almost all economic crises start in the banking sector.

Another misstep is his claim that the “entire way of thinking” about capitalist crises had been “overturned by John Maynard Keynes” whose superior analysis demonstrated Marxism’s explanatory weaknesses. Ironically, it was the Marxist economist Michał Kalecki who got the jump on Keynes in his pathbreaking essay “An Attempt at the Theory of the Business Cycle” — published three years before Keynes made his supposed breakthrough. By Heath’s logic, Kalecki, laboring under Marxist dogma, should have never discovered the theory of effective demand — and certainly not before the liberal Keynes. That is, unless one decides that any valid insight made by a Marxist isn’t actually Marxism. And this is precisely what he does.

Heath’s central argument is that what socialists are always banging on about is not really Marxism at all, no matter how much we wish it to be, it’s all just “welfare-capitalism.” He argues:

[N]o matter how vociferously self-styled socialists may denounce capitalism, when you press them on what they imagine the alternative to be, the answer is usually some hand-wavey version of “market socialism.” This is fine, as far as it goes, except that once you accept the need for markets to set prices, it basically lets all the air out of the tires, because “market socialism” retains most of the features that people have traditionally disliked about capitalism (e.g. profit-oriented firms, unemployment, pollution, recessions, payments to providers of capital, commodification, alienation, etc.).

The problem for socialists is that, once they start to think seriously about how a socialist economy would work, they wind up on a slippery slope, where the commitment to a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism gradually gets whittled down to a series of rather tepid proposals for corporate governance reform.

He’s right of course, but he doesn’t realize how right he is. Many Marxists became “reformists” soon after Marx’s death, seeking gradual, incremental changes rather than pursuing a complete overthrow of the system. There is even evidence that Marx himself leaned toward reformism later in life. So, if today’s Marxists are all just “welfare-capitalists,” shouldn’t we just abandon Marxism altogether? Not so fast. Without Marx and Marxism there would be no “welfare-capitalism” in the first place. That is, without Marxist insights, and without the very real influence of Marxism on world politics, we would never have achieved the great advances in social democratic reform that liberals now take for granted.

This should be obvious and it demonstrates what is truly valuable in Marxist theory. Yet Heath, like so many liberals, is blind to what makes Marxism so compelling — so much so that, across two essays dedicated exclusively to Marxist theory, he fails to recognize or even mention the most significant theoretical contribution offered by the tradition.

To paraphrase James Carville: it’s the class system, stupid.

The Welfare State and the Class Problem

Being a good liberal, Heath surely admires the famously generous welfare states of Scandinavia. Does he wonder how the Nordic states managed to create such systems, where so many others have failed? Why is it that every thinking center-left party in the world openly claims to aspire to a Danish welfare state but almost none achieve it? Is it that people simply reject this vision? Obviously not, because many progressive parties win commanding majorities and yet still fail to institute Project Scandinavia. Is it that they have dreamt up schemes that aren’t sufficiently deferential to market rules? Since at least the 1990s, this clearly has not been the case. So why does “welfare-capitalism” — never mind social democracy, let alone market socialism — seem so elusive? If it’s so eminently reasonable, as Heath argues, why is it so practically impossible?

One could list the myriad contingent factors that might have caused the demise of this or that policy, or this or that party, or this or that government. But beyond all the specific historical and contextual reasons, there is a general theory available to us that explains Why We Cannot Have Nice Things. And what’s beautiful about this theory is that once we understand it, we don’t need to know the names and biographies of countless individual politicians, their personal beliefs, or what scandal preceded their coming into, or crashing out of, power. We don’t need to know the thousands of reasons why hundreds of congressional representatives make thousands of particular decisions that seem to all combine to dash the hope of social democratic reforms. We simply need to know two facts: that there is a ruling class, and that it does not want those reforms.

The wealthy and influential at the top of society, along with the institutions they control, have a direct interest in resisting higher taxes and restrictions on their ability to invest their money the way they choose. And when their money is threatened, they can exercise veto power over the democratic state; they can tank “business confidence” or withhold investment in order to steer the economic policies of whole nations. This is a problem that cannot be solved by Keynesian monetary policy, more persuasive messaging, or market-friendly welfare schemes. It is a political problem that requires a political solution.

It was Marxism, and no other theory, that worked out the impersonal mechanisms through which the ruling class rules. This dominance is not simply the result of a conspiracy of monocled men in smoke-filled rooms (though there is that) but rather stems from the dull compulsion of economic motives: competition, rational interests, and profit maximization. Marxist class theory provides a clear and consistent sketch of how modern capitalist society operates and identifies all those very stubborn obstacles to social reform. Liberals recognize this, but they seem intent on obscuring the reality of it. In doing so, they cling to a vision of the world that they know to be false, a vision in which Pure Reason, and the light of science, prevails over blind material interests. In liberalism, social class figures awkwardly. In reality, it structures almost everything.

To confront the immense, concentrated power of the ruling class at the top of the society we need to organize the great majority on the other end. It’s Marxism, and only Marxism, that pointed out this fact. It may be true — and we can grant that it is true — that Marxists have been mistaken, endlessly mistaken, in how to appeal to the working class and to what practical ends their political program may tilt. But it is the Marxist tradition that reveals that the working class is the key. Political appeals should be organized as such. Thinking of politics as a democratic class struggle, and organizing mass, self-consciously working-class parties, with political programs informed by Marxian economic theories, is what enabled the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians to successfully establish generous social states. Conversely, it’s the contemporary absence of this political tendency that has given rise to the clear crisis of center-left parties and liberal societies the world over.

One can dislike Marx the man, one can disprove Marxist theories about this or that, one can even falsify Marxist predictions about grand crises. But it is hard to deny the fundamental truth that all society is class society and that the ruling class has a vital interest in maintaining its dominance — a dominance that can only be challenged by the concerted action of the majority of working people, whether through economic means, like the strike, and political means, like the vote.

To find a great many faults with Marx’s thinking doesn’t invalidate this central claim. To reject Marx’s central theoretical contribution because many dogmatic Marxists have a religious faith in the coming revolutionary crisis would be like saying that one cannot abide the Big Bang theory because one disagrees with Father Georges Lemaître’s faith in God. To claim, as Heath might, that Marx deserves no special credit for being the first to plumb the question of class in capitalist society would be like saying that Darwin deserves no special credit for the theory of evolution.

Academic Hustling

Heath’s denial of Marx’s insights leads him to make the biggest error in his argument. Remember, he is purporting to explain why academic Marxism has declined; why there are so few Marxists in philosophy departments, English departments, economics, sociology, and the rest. This should be no great mystery. In fact, there is no need for an intellectual history of Marxism to explain it: Marxism is tremendously, even catastrophically, unprofitable as a research program for young and ambitious academics scurrying around in graduate schools and postdoctoral programs today.

The ideology of the academy thoroughly reflects the economic incentives of the contemporary university and there is precious little room for critical thought, especially critical thought as professionally inhibiting as Marxism. The better question is: Why was Marxism so popular in the 1970s?

For that answer, too, we can look to Marx. The postwar university system, flush with public funds, and relatively insulated from the corrupting influences of the market and private donors, hoovered up a generation of upwardly mobile kids from middle- and working-class families who, upon confronting the capitalist crises of their day, turned to Marx. Because they held secure positions in large research universities, they could pursue these interests without navigating a competitive gauntlet of academic conferences, each enforcing conformity to prevailing academic job market trends. Their interests were not molded by the temptation of lucrative opportunities offered by hundreds of corporate foundations and nonprofits. They felt little pressure to constantly publish, lest they perish. Nor did they need to develop an independent social media “brand” to relentlessly market themselves in order to secure a decent job.

In short, we can better understand the reasons academic Marxism has declined through the application of Marxist theory itself, rather than attributing it to a lack of explanatory power. If we were to assume, as Heath appears to, that theoretical schools in the academy survive or decline based on their explanatory power, we would struggle to explain the sheer number of “intersectionalists” or Foucauldians or whatever brand of faddish pseudoradical theory is currently coursing through the halls at Berkeley, Harvard, and New York University. For, whatever disagreements Heath may have with Marxism, he can’t deny that even its most vulgar application genuinely accounts for a great deal of what goes on in the world, while the most sophisticated followers of Jacques Derrida can’t seem to explain themselves in plain language let alone anything that goes on in the real world. Yet the former are an endangered species while the latter are thriving.

In some ways, Heath was on much firmer ground making the case that Rawls murdered Marxism, rather than arguing that Marxism fell prey to its own suicidal inconsistencies. Here, at least, he is tilting in the right direction. As a social theory, Marxism has no moral North. It adopts its ethical stance from the received wisdom of Western moral teaching, but it does not provide, or elaborate, a moral system that follows from the insights provided in its social theory. As a result, many Marxists drifted toward Rawls in the hope of resolving this problem, a trend that Heath rightly identifies.

Unfortunately, Rawls couldn’t resolve Marxism’s moral void, mainly because he didn’t set out to do so. His project was to provide the moral justification for liberal socialism. He sought to complete liberalism as a theoretical system by making its ethical goal socialistic, attempting to reconcile liberal individualism with social egalitarianism — and he succeeded. By doing so, he created a very attractive, and logically consistent, argument for socialism. One that was entirely independent of Marxism.

But, despite its theoretical elegance and moral defensibility, Rawlsian socialism is actually more impotent than the Marxian variety. That’s because while Rawls offers an argument for how the world ought to be, he doesn’t explain how the world works, nor how we might get to the promised land. Worse, Rawls’s commitment to liberalism — the political ideology most compatible with capitalist modernity — seems, at best, ill-suited to challenge the tenets of market society. Rawls may have completed and perfected liberalism as a theoretical system — ironically, by incorporating long-held socialist insights — but in doing so he has shown the utopianism of the liberal project. With all due respect to Heath, perhaps after Rawls, it is not Marxism but liberalism that has become otiose.

Sure, Marxism may have died another one of its many deaths, but it’s hard to imagine it will not rise again.