Capitalism and the Suicide of Culture

Not long before he died, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin somberly summed up his, and our, age: "I have lived through most of the twentieth century without, I must add, suffering personal hardship. I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western history." What made it so horrific is politics or, more precisely, the secular religions of National Socialism and communism that violently sought to transfigure the bourgeois economic and political condition of modern man. The exact number of people killed by these dark political adventures is lost to time, though surely it exceeds 125 million.

The secular religions are now gone, leaving behind only loss and ruin. Communism, as an ongoing political experiment, expired with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989; National Socialism didn’t survive its crushing military defeat during World War II. As the twenty–first century dawns, it is difficult to imagine a serious ideological challenger to what communism and National Socialism wanted to destroy: prosaic bourgeois liberal democracy—what social theorist Michael Novak calls democratic capitalism.

Despite the fall of the political messianisms, however, the future of democratic capitalism is by no means unclouded. Perhaps this is as it should be, since all things merely human are flawed. The hubris of the secular religions was to think that they had solved "the political problem." Properly understood, democratic capitalism makes no such claims. It has been a virtue of the richest current of liberal democratic thought, from James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville to Irving Kristol and Pierre Manent, to explore bourgeois society’s inherent limitations and failings without losing sight of its basic decency and relative justness. Three important recent books allow us to confirm the relevance of that anti–utopian tradition and gain a better understanding of what troubles democratic capitalism today.

François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press) provides striking insights into the political tensions of democratic capitalism. While most nations have awakened to the economic merits of the free market, John Gray’s False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New Press) proclaims the post–Marxist era of the new global economy a human disaster. He’s mostly wrong, but enthusiasts of unleashed markets would be foolish simply to ignore the dissatisfactions he gives voice to. And Francis Fukuyama’s ambitious The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (Free Press), which seeks to explain the social chaos that has plagued the economically advanced democracies for several decades, helps illumine—though not in a way the author intends—the biggest danger to democratic capitalism: the growing alliance between the free–market economy and a culture of moral libertinism. Politics, economics, culture: in each sphere, democratic capitalism faces deep challenges.

At the time of his death in 1997, François Furet was France’s foremost historian and the world’s preeminent authority on the French Revolution. Though once a Marxist himself, Furet broke with the Marxist view of the French Revolution—long dominant in French historiography—which saw it as an economically determined bourgeois warm–up for the Russian Revolution of October 1917. In the Marxian optic, 1789 was the inevitable result of a rising bourgeoisie overthrowing the ancien régime and the agricultural society tied to it. Furet rejected the notion of historical inevitability and gave human political actions a central explanatory role. In a Tocque villian register of melancholic liberalism, he also claimed that the revolution released utopian hopes for a humanity reconciled with itself and in control of its destiny that neither liberal democracy nor any other political regime, including socialism, could ever satisfactorily fulfill.

The Passing of an Illusion, which appeared in France in 1995 and quickly became a controversial best–seller across Europe, shifts the focus to the twentieth century and to the rise and decline of the Communist idea, the inheritor of those profound but—when directed into politics—destructive longings. Disabused, attentive to the complex interactions of "ideas, intentions, and circumstances" that give meaning to history, Furet’s final testament is written on the far side of the revolutionary passions of the epoch. It serves as a kind of warning about expecting too much from politics.

Communism’s seductive appeal, Furet argues, came in considerable part from coupling the inherently incompatible ideas of human volition and the science of history. The Russian Bolsheviks showed the true capacity of man’s revolutionary will, which, in the most backward nation of Europe, promised the achievement of human liberation first announced by the French Revolution. To this "cult of volition," Furet explains, "Lenin would add the certainties of science, drawn from Marx’s Capital." History has a predetermined outcome, and thanks to Marxist "science," we know exactly what it is, the revolutionaries claimed. Knowledge would transform Proletarian man into the Lord of Time, ushering in the classless society.

The writer is full of crap. Communism lives in our Universities and Communist China is the most populist country on earth. Communists are still murdering people in Nepal and we have Castro's Cuba 90 miles off our coast.

If Communism is dead, it has a very lively and dangerous corpse.

well i'm in complete agreement with you that communism lives on our universities and still exists in other countries, i think the author may have a decent point. Outside of the unversities and these few countries, where is communism respected as a viable challenge to democratic captalism (or whatever you want to call it)? Virtually no place; and i think that's what the author is trying to stress, the fall of communism as a widespread legit system.

ok. i tried, lol. does communism's existence then prove its continued viability? I don't think so. it exists in china, yes; however, is the chinese economy purely communist, or is it somewhat market-based? Fine, communist china is the most populous country in the world: there may be other factors besides communism which cause that; and, that lots of people are living under a communist regime doesn't necessarily mean that the regime is supported by those people; it might be that most people don't support it, however nothing can be done against it. When it's said that communism is dead, i don't think it means that it's literally dead: that'd be foolish. I think that once a belief system exists, there will always be someone who supports it; the question is how viable is it and is great support still there? In the case of communism, i think not (granted, it's not gone fully yet, but it hopefully will get there). In those places where communism did exist (say in the former USSR), does communism flourish, or is the system relegated to the background in favor of other ones? I think of it more like communism as an alternative to this democratic capitalism thing is slowly fading away (except in hotbeds of left-wingy-ness like universities left-wing totalitarianisms). That it exists doesn't necessarily mean it's a viable alternative. It just means that it still exists.

China's market based economy is a consession to the fact, as was Lenin's New Economic Policy of the Soviet Union's early years, that Communist economics won't work until absolute world dictatorship is achieved and the new man is created.
But so what? China has enough of a military and enough nuclear armed ballistic missles that the United States will not stand up to them. The Communists also have an appeasement lobby inside our government. Chris Matthews interviewed Bill Richardson, Clinton's Ambassador to the United Nations, and asked him if he thought China was a Comunist country. Richardson said no.
It is a dangerous thing to believe your worst enemy doesn't exist or is not a threat to you.

I'm not buying it

I'm not either, but I did read the rest of the article. He reviews Furet and Gray, and notes that Gray sees democratic capitalism's similarity to communism: "Gray believes that capitalism is leading inexorably to a new late–modern barbarism. Indeed, Gray argues, the project of creating a world market is as utopian as Soviet communism—both are Enlightenment ideologies, he stresses, wedded to the cult of reason and blind to history—and threatens 'to rival it in the suffering that it inflicts.'"

However, in speaking for the West, you can't debunk him for crap. Elections and market commerce predominate our governments in the West.

I'm re-reading this article and reading the posts, and I'm thinking that there's a difference between communism as an alternative system to democracy, and communist china being a threat to the US or whomever. Of course it is: the real threat exists; but, the question isn't about whether communist china per se (or whatever other country out there) is a threat? I think the author is trying to argue that communism as a system is bankrupt. Fine, china has enough nukes to blast us to kingdom come. There's little doubt that communist china is a threat. It is. And those in the government who don't think that should realize it. But, independent of communist china, is communism as a system a threat to the democratic system? or has the democratic system been shown to be better?

I work in a union job and many fellow employs who blindly vote for who the union tells them to. Democrats.
I tell them that, in the absence of a viable Communist Party in the US, I guess I'll have to vote Democrat.
Democrats are the weak sisters to the Communists. They want the same thing, but don't have the guts to do the murdering themselves.

There is an easier explanation for the allure of communism. Forget ideology for the moment. Communism (or any other form of government) represents a shift in how resources and power are allocated. There are clear winners in the capitalistic system and there are clear losers. The losers will often gravitate to some form of change that will give them power and more resources (such as being Democrats, Socialists or Communists - depending on the lengths that they are willing to go). However, once the communist option is selected, the country is stuck because communism usually adopts a strict police state (to prevent the others from regaining power and resources). So capitalism and democracy are by the preferred form of enterprise and government.

Now, why do Alec Baldwin and Babs Streisand have such liberal (aka, socialist, communists) views? Simply because it makes them feel better, usually at the cost to others, to pontificate about social issues and the evil capitalistic system. As long as a socialist/communist state NEVER happens, they can pontificate about the H.G. Wells utopian society. But can you imagine communists with Alec and Babs? First, they would be imprisoned as dissident artists. Second, even if they weren't imprisoned, they would be subject to wage constraints and given a run-down apartment to live in. Of course, they would never acknowledge this point; limoisine liberals are not big on irony.

The secular religions are now gone, leaving behind only loss and ruin.

Oh, no, they're not. Their priests have simply changed vestments. The fastest-growing religion in the world today is a secular one, a leftist one. It is Environmentalism.

Just because marxism is discredited doesn't mean its dead. The Democratic party and EU goons are basically moving towards the same system as what fell apart in the Soviet Union. They're just implementing it much more slowly than the Bolshevics did, hoping not enough sheeple will notice until its too late.

I know marxism isn't dead: china, cuba, american universities prove that; but, in the rest of the world, are people moving toward marxism, or are democratic (or other)systems setting in? That's the point i'm trying to make: states and peoples are opting for something other than communism. As for the dems and the EU: the dems i might buy, but the EU is moving toward a communist/marxist state? how so?

The losers will often gravitate to some form of change that will give them power and more resources

That describes "the masses" to a T. This shows why aristocratic conservatism forever has its hands tied when the cracy is in the demos

. The best argument is a practical one: what works. That is why Novak is mentioned in the article. His argument for democratic capitalism over democratic socialism is that the one works, the other dont. But there is a price to pay: inequality. The other price, bad quality.

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