Karl Marx, Enthusiast for Capitalism

Chris Blattman promises us a randomized evaluation of Marx vs Smith:

Marxists ever since fear wage labor means earnings are lost, enslavement to capital emerges, and with it a loss in humanity.

There are plenty of unsavory factories to worry about in the world. But the Marxist view is difficult to reconcile with the thousands of Africans that line up for the chance at a factory job (when they’re available).

As Henry Farrell points out this is completely misframed. There are plenty of people out there today, and historically, who can be found arguing that traditional rural life is somehow better than industrial wage slavery. But Karl Marx is not one of them. The Communist Manifesto involves a paen to capitalism’s eradication of the peasant farmer economy:

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.

The dispute between Marx and the capitalists has to do with whether society can, will, and should progress beyond capitalism. There are people who hold the critique of capitalism that Blattman is talking about here, many of them on the political left, but it’s not a Marxist view.

Of course one of the main practical impacts of anti-capitalist thinking in postwar China, India, and Africa has been to keep billions of people trapped in the idiocy of rural life, a situation from which China and India are now rapidly emerging. But on the level of theory, the Marxist schematic is that you should pass from rural-based feudal economic systems into capitalism, and then eventually beyond capitalism. But industrial capitalism is supposed to be a good thing relative to toiling on the farm.