Confused on the Left, Blinded by the Right (Part I, Confused)
First things first: I'm not someone who appreciates absolute descriptions. I see the planet and its people interacting in a myriad of ways best described with a myriad shades of grays, not blacks and whites. Is an act of offering someone a job, for example, capitalist exploitation or one of beneficent opportunity? For me, it depends on the job and the wage.
How about the decision one must make if one is "communist" or "capitalist?" In Orson Welles: A Biography, Welles tells his biographer of an encounter he had with an FBI agent during the Cold War. Agents were common in theater, since Hoover thought all entertainers were Commies until proven otherwise. Welles finally cornered the G-Man tailing him and asked him why he was being followed. The Fed said to prove he wasn't a communist. Welles asked him what a communist was. The Fed said, "Someone who gives his money to the government."
Welles pointed out that since he was at the top of the income bracket, he therefore paid 90% of everything he made in income taxes. "I guess that makes me 90% Communist," he concluded.
His answer always resonated with my belief in a spectrum of conditions providing one the boundaries of any given definition, as opposed to a binary "either/or" declaration of definition. More and more, though, I realize how unique I must be in this regard. I see in so many people the need to absolutely declare beyond any and all argument that X situation must be called X-ism, and that this definition must be maintained in perpetuity for all to see and learn from. These people can be found on both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum. The need to define and categorize knows no philosophical boundary. However, I have noticed one disturbing trend that does follow party lines, though not a way most could reasonably expect.
Let's dive into some historical definitions, just for fun. Everyone seems to describe the monetary/economic/legal system in which we Americans live today as "capitalist." Capitalism: that's the general moniker given to our mostly unencumbered economic transaction tradition. Here's a question, though: Where did those words come from? Consulting Wikipedia, we learn that the terms date back to 1633 (for "capitalist") and 1850 (for "capitalism"). There seems to be little disagreement that the terms refer to those that own capital and the system that supports their continued ownership and activity.
Here's where a little digging gets some interesting results. Early in the article, we read: "There is no consensus on capitalism nor how it should be used as an analytical category." Say, what?
It turns out the myriad of transactions, traditions both legal and cultural, behaviors et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseum have existed longer than most can trace under a great number of descriptors. Merchant capitalism, feudalism, mercantilism -- all sort of blend together in a melange of action translated today as capitalism. How pervasive is this blending? In the section entitled Mercantilism, one citation notes mercantilism and feudalism "disagreed only on the methods of regulation." Both seemed to cede from importance in favor of capitalism as technology improved transportation and nation-states consolidated from feudal holdings, thus reducing the importance of inherited lands as a measure of wealth. Neil Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle tackles this fascinating transition mostly in the birth of fossil fuel as a means of production and the rise of banking, trade and money as an early indicator of dying traditional seats of power.
The key difference between capitalism and its antecedents seems to be the notion that wealth is stagnant under mercantilism and feudalism, while it can grow under capitalism. This concept of growth proves important when one considers the change industrialism and the rise of banking inflicted especially on the cities of Europe. Take this passage from Emergence concerning growth of the English city of Manchester:
It was impossible to see it at the time, but Manchester. . . had planted itself at the very center of a technological and commercial revolution that would irrevocably alter the future of the planet. Manchester lay at the confluence of several world-historical rivers: the nascent industrial technologies of steam-powered looms; the banking system of commercial London; the global markets and labor pools of the British Empire. . . . (This) created a new kind of city, one that literally exploded into existence.
The statistics on population growth alone capture the force of that explosion: a 1773 estimate had 24,000 people living in Manchester; the first official census in 1801 found 70,000. By the midpoint of the century, there were more than 250,000 people in the city proper -- a tenfold increase in only seventy-five years.
(Steven Johnson, Emergence, Scribner, 2001, p. 34.)
Keep in mind that ten-fold increase occurred before modern construction methods made it possible to increase the housing of a city at a commensurate rate. The result of this growth was felt disproportionately by the poor, who were at the mercies of the tight housing market and the landowners who found themselves in a very good bargaining position as a result. This is the England of Charles Dickens, experienced also by a resident of London described in another of Johnson's books, The Ghost Map:
Living in (a) two-room attic were seven individuals: a Prussian immigrant couple, their four children, and a maid. . . . Yet somehow these cramped, tattered quarters did not noticeably hinder the husband's productivity, though one can easily see why he developed such a fondness for the Reading Room at the British Museum. The husband, you see, was a thirty-something radical by the name of Karl Marx.
(Johnson, The Ghost Map, Riverhead Books, 2006, p. 19.)
The same squalid conditions that drove Dickens to pen his descriptions of life in industrial England also drove Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto and other books that pin down and further define "capitalism," giving it the accepted modern meaning, a definition that has been, it seems, embraced by capitalists themselves. And Marx continued a rejection of capitalism by trying to formulate an alternative philosophy regarding the traditional nature of possessions, transactions and people.
But here's the rub: He was trying to simultaneously describe and condemn something that was morphing and forming faster than it could be defined, let alone condemned. Marx identified quite a bit of value in his work, giving definition to what for centuries had been simply assumed. But he did it during one of the most chaotic economic times in all of human history.
And therefore, sometimes his work misses the mark entirely.
One of the more basic elements of Marx's definitions is the distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the owner class and the worker: From The Communist Manifesto itself:
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
Really?
See, this is the problem I've always had with Marx, this increasingly binary division of humanity. It gets worse when one considers that, though he spent his life supposedly supporting the Proletariat he defines, he wasn't one of them. He didn't understand the working class -- or, for that matter, work itself -- at all.
Marx also understood first-hand -- and formed his seminal opinions based upon -- the most egregiously skewed labor market probably ever to have existed in all of history up until then, the England of Dickens. Remember how fast the cities were growing, how rapidly the population turned up at the factory gates looking for work. The gentry had the means to build these new factories, and were in an enviable position when it came to negotiating a wage for the work those factories provided.
(By the way, "gentry" here refers to the traditional division between the landed class and the commoner, a social system that dated back to the feudal system of lords managing the inherited lands worked by the peasants. Essentially, if one took a wage from another, one proved oneself needful, basically lowering one's social status. Jane Austen has some passages in her novels where poor gentlemen engage in highway robbery rather than admit the poverty that besets them and taint themselves with the harness and stigma of a salaried profession.)
Those factories increasingly became complicated bastions of new, emerging technologies. They exemplified for Marx the capital the bourgeois used to wage enslave and exploit the worker. However, is that how things were always done? Hardly.
Let's say you were a craftsman. What do you need to build a house? A factory? No, merely material and tools. They need not be fancy, either. My grandfather built the house in which my mother spent most of her childhood with simple hand tools. It can and has been done many, many times. With skills and a few simple tools one can go out in the world and seek employment. The better your tools, the better your product, the greater your profit. I inherited Grandpa's tools after he died. She said the greatest regret he had when he built that house was that he didn't buy the Craftsman rotary saw (sadly, stolen when I was in college) until after he finished it. Why? According to Witold Rybczynski in One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw, the total cuts needed to build a modest house would, if organized perfectly, would take about a week of 8-hour days to complete with a hand saw. The same cuts organized similarly would take someone wielding a powered rotary saw about a 1/2 hour.
So you have a hammer or two, you have a saw. You own both. You are a capitalist, your tools worn on your belt and stowed in your toolbox. You literally own means of production. Let's say you hire a young apprentice to help. He can use some of your old tools as he helps, training him in the art of craftsmanship. Are you exploiting his labor? Absolutely. You are able to build more houses, execute more repairs with him than without. But he is also learning the trade. He is using your old hammer and saw, thus able to learn without having to buy costly tools himself.
That was the way things worked for many, many years, the way things still work in many places today. But it was not something Marx understood well. Here's an example from Henry Petroski:
In spite of Marx's astonishment that five hundred different kinds of hammers were made in Birmingham in the 1860s, this was no capitalist plot. Indeed, if there were a plot, it was not to make more. The proliferation of hammer types occurred because there were then, as now, many specialized uses of hammers, and each user wished to possess a tool that was suited as ideally as possible to the tasks he performed perhaps thousands of times each day.
(Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things, Vintage, 1994, p. 156. Emphasis mine.)
The worker's ultimate champion could not imagine a world with so many hammers simply because he had never swung a hammer. This was a man who saw himself as a temporarily poor gentleman, not a commoner. Remember, even though he could only afford two squalid rooms, he hired a live-in maid.
With this admittedly cherry-picked view of the man best known for defining capitalism and inventing communism, let's go to how "capitalism" is used by his acolytes. In my opinion, it's pretty shoddy work. Nuance be damned; anyone who hires is bourgeois, anyone who accepts a wage is proletariat. Never mind the very real distinctions that in every real workplace refine the roles each of us play. Never mind the primal social drives that shape our behavior into its hierarchy, analogs of which that can be seen in just about every social animal from monkeys to magpies. To the literal Marxist mind there can be no progress in history until no one exists who offers or accepts, until no one dominates and no one submits.
The trouble comes in earnest when these people identify a very real problem. Let's take the current financial situation. To me, this is a result of years of de-regulation brought primarily by Alan Greenspan, a fierce champion of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, a philosophy that allows for no government oversight. At all. Though people other than Greenspan actually pulled the stunts that led to the economy's hyperbolic expansion and eventual collapse, Greenspan actively blocked key regulators that wanted to oversee the mechanisms causing the increase (For a fascinating overview of how this came to be, watch Frontline's "The Warning", something you can do online). Furthermore, Greenspan held the Federal Reserve rate so absurdly low that investors sought -- and thus created the market for -- alternative (and questionable) investment opportunities. (This American Life has several episodes dissecting the explosion of wealth, including "The Giant Pool of Money," "Scenes from a Recession" and "Return to the Giant Pool of Money," episodes they produced in association with NPR's Planet Money Podcast. Many of the Planet Money episodes should be required listening in high school and college economic classes.)
How would I describe our current troubles? Think about the old geometry lesson: A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. Both are four-sided shapes with each side joined at a right angle; only the square, though, has four sides of equal length. Furthermore, both a rectangle and a square are parallelograms, but a parallelogram is neither a rectangle nor a square, since a parallelogram need not have right angles. It's a matter of defining each situation encountered with greater and greater precision.
So, though avowed capitalists are indeed involved in just about every aspect of this financial clusterfuck, I would further refine the situation as primarily corporate in nature (with the short-term needs of publicly-held corporations driving the urgency and need for quick returns) and definitely objectivist in origin. Those were the two defining philosophical excesses that primarily colluded to create the excess, spuriously-created money that has yet to fully be revealed as non-existent.
No one in the popular press has, though, identified those two elements, not to my knowledge. Nope. Absent this needed clarification, all the criticism from the left has been leveled directly at "Capitalism!" Michael Moore especially disappointed me with his new movie. I found the title alone too obscure, too binary, painted with too broad a brush, too general a description of the situation to allow me to even see the flick. I would just find myself chafing at the scattershot "capitalism bad!" accusations which would, I'm sure, be woefully nebulous and thus largely undefined.
That, in my opinion, has become the real problem; hardcore and occasional Marxists everywhere have so overused the C word that every laissez-faire excess is painted as a primarily Capitalist! problem without considering the nuances that actually led to the problem. This blinds these experts -- and everyone listening to them -- forcing the problem-causing complexities to forever dwell in a poorly-understood fog.
When people have problems understanding problems, they cannot be expected to effectively prevent them.
And all this happens to people who kinda understand Marx's ideas. What happens when the language drifts, as it inevitably does? Now all types of strange definitional things start to happen.
For instance, consider Welles again. In his early career, he staged Marc Blitzstein's "highly political Operetta The Cradle Will Rock". He related to his biographer that Blitzstein was an ardent revolutionary Marxist. Ah, but what would the future look like after the revolution? Welles asked Blitzstein if everyone would drive a Cadillac. Blitzstein said that everyone would have two. In his revolutionary utopia, everyone would enjoy the excesses enjoyed in 1937 by only a few.
Consider also a newspaper quote I committed to memory in the early 1980s. It concerned the changes in China after Mao's death, especially those loosening the Communist Party's prohibition on, well, capitalism. Factories were springing up. Small businesses supplemented incomes. And though these changes flew in the face of life under Mao, the culture of traditional China, one that embraced the rewards of hard work, trumped dogma. One man dismissed the concerns of his more hard-line Marxist countrymen with a simple, pithy bit of irony: "This is communism. If you want more, work harder."
So much for all that From each according to his ability, to each according to his need crap.
So where are we? By abandoning nuance in favor of the bourgeois/proletariat divide, many on the left have created a blind spot in their thinking that fails to observe, collate and consider subtle distinctions in individual capitalist situations. The broad brush cannot fill in the tiny but important details. That's a problem, to be sure; but I hesitate to suggest it is a deliberate problem. No, economic theory can be complex and therefore might cause confusion. Cultural differences, historical context, personal myopia, all conspire to distort a more accurate portrayal of circumstances and the language that should be used to describe said circumstances. It's not deliberate; it's just complex.
I cannot, however, say the same is true of the right. I'm sorry, folks, but the language is in much graver danger of abuse from the more conservative elements of our society, a claim I intend to support with argument backed by evidence in Part II.
How about the decision one must make if one is "communist" or "capitalist?" In Orson Welles: A Biography, Welles tells his biographer of an encounter he had with an FBI agent during the Cold War. Agents were common in theater, since Hoover thought all entertainers were Commies until proven otherwise. Welles finally cornered the G-Man tailing him and asked him why he was being followed. The Fed said to prove he wasn't a communist. Welles asked him what a communist was. The Fed said, "Someone who gives his money to the government."
Welles pointed out that since he was at the top of the income bracket, he therefore paid 90% of everything he made in income taxes. "I guess that makes me 90% Communist," he concluded.
His answer always resonated with my belief in a spectrum of conditions providing one the boundaries of any given definition, as opposed to a binary "either/or" declaration of definition. More and more, though, I realize how unique I must be in this regard. I see in so many people the need to absolutely declare beyond any and all argument that X situation must be called X-ism, and that this definition must be maintained in perpetuity for all to see and learn from. These people can be found on both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum. The need to define and categorize knows no philosophical boundary. However, I have noticed one disturbing trend that does follow party lines, though not a way most could reasonably expect.
Let's dive into some historical definitions, just for fun. Everyone seems to describe the monetary/economic/legal system in which we Americans live today as "capitalist." Capitalism: that's the general moniker given to our mostly unencumbered economic transaction tradition. Here's a question, though: Where did those words come from? Consulting Wikipedia, we learn that the terms date back to 1633 (for "capitalist") and 1850 (for "capitalism"). There seems to be little disagreement that the terms refer to those that own capital and the system that supports their continued ownership and activity.
Here's where a little digging gets some interesting results. Early in the article, we read: "There is no consensus on capitalism nor how it should be used as an analytical category." Say, what?
It turns out the myriad of transactions, traditions both legal and cultural, behaviors et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseum have existed longer than most can trace under a great number of descriptors. Merchant capitalism, feudalism, mercantilism -- all sort of blend together in a melange of action translated today as capitalism. How pervasive is this blending? In the section entitled Mercantilism, one citation notes mercantilism and feudalism "disagreed only on the methods of regulation." Both seemed to cede from importance in favor of capitalism as technology improved transportation and nation-states consolidated from feudal holdings, thus reducing the importance of inherited lands as a measure of wealth. Neil Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle tackles this fascinating transition mostly in the birth of fossil fuel as a means of production and the rise of banking, trade and money as an early indicator of dying traditional seats of power.
The key difference between capitalism and its antecedents seems to be the notion that wealth is stagnant under mercantilism and feudalism, while it can grow under capitalism. This concept of growth proves important when one considers the change industrialism and the rise of banking inflicted especially on the cities of Europe. Take this passage from Emergence concerning growth of the English city of Manchester:
It was impossible to see it at the time, but Manchester. . . had planted itself at the very center of a technological and commercial revolution that would irrevocably alter the future of the planet. Manchester lay at the confluence of several world-historical rivers: the nascent industrial technologies of steam-powered looms; the banking system of commercial London; the global markets and labor pools of the British Empire. . . . (This) created a new kind of city, one that literally exploded into existence.
The statistics on population growth alone capture the force of that explosion: a 1773 estimate had 24,000 people living in Manchester; the first official census in 1801 found 70,000. By the midpoint of the century, there were more than 250,000 people in the city proper -- a tenfold increase in only seventy-five years.
(Steven Johnson, Emergence, Scribner, 2001, p. 34.)
Keep in mind that ten-fold increase occurred before modern construction methods made it possible to increase the housing of a city at a commensurate rate. The result of this growth was felt disproportionately by the poor, who were at the mercies of the tight housing market and the landowners who found themselves in a very good bargaining position as a result. This is the England of Charles Dickens, experienced also by a resident of London described in another of Johnson's books, The Ghost Map:
Living in (a) two-room attic were seven individuals: a Prussian immigrant couple, their four children, and a maid. . . . Yet somehow these cramped, tattered quarters did not noticeably hinder the husband's productivity, though one can easily see why he developed such a fondness for the Reading Room at the British Museum. The husband, you see, was a thirty-something radical by the name of Karl Marx.
(Johnson, The Ghost Map, Riverhead Books, 2006, p. 19.)
The same squalid conditions that drove Dickens to pen his descriptions of life in industrial England also drove Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto and other books that pin down and further define "capitalism," giving it the accepted modern meaning, a definition that has been, it seems, embraced by capitalists themselves. And Marx continued a rejection of capitalism by trying to formulate an alternative philosophy regarding the traditional nature of possessions, transactions and people.
But here's the rub: He was trying to simultaneously describe and condemn something that was morphing and forming faster than it could be defined, let alone condemned. Marx identified quite a bit of value in his work, giving definition to what for centuries had been simply assumed. But he did it during one of the most chaotic economic times in all of human history.
And therefore, sometimes his work misses the mark entirely.
One of the more basic elements of Marx's definitions is the distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the owner class and the worker: From The Communist Manifesto itself:
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
Really?
See, this is the problem I've always had with Marx, this increasingly binary division of humanity. It gets worse when one considers that, though he spent his life supposedly supporting the Proletariat he defines, he wasn't one of them. He didn't understand the working class -- or, for that matter, work itself -- at all.
Marx also understood first-hand -- and formed his seminal opinions based upon -- the most egregiously skewed labor market probably ever to have existed in all of history up until then, the England of Dickens. Remember how fast the cities were growing, how rapidly the population turned up at the factory gates looking for work. The gentry had the means to build these new factories, and were in an enviable position when it came to negotiating a wage for the work those factories provided.
(By the way, "gentry" here refers to the traditional division between the landed class and the commoner, a social system that dated back to the feudal system of lords managing the inherited lands worked by the peasants. Essentially, if one took a wage from another, one proved oneself needful, basically lowering one's social status. Jane Austen has some passages in her novels where poor gentlemen engage in highway robbery rather than admit the poverty that besets them and taint themselves with the harness and stigma of a salaried profession.)
Those factories increasingly became complicated bastions of new, emerging technologies. They exemplified for Marx the capital the bourgeois used to wage enslave and exploit the worker. However, is that how things were always done? Hardly.
Let's say you were a craftsman. What do you need to build a house? A factory? No, merely material and tools. They need not be fancy, either. My grandfather built the house in which my mother spent most of her childhood with simple hand tools. It can and has been done many, many times. With skills and a few simple tools one can go out in the world and seek employment. The better your tools, the better your product, the greater your profit. I inherited Grandpa's tools after he died. She said the greatest regret he had when he built that house was that he didn't buy the Craftsman rotary saw (sadly, stolen when I was in college) until after he finished it. Why? According to Witold Rybczynski in One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw, the total cuts needed to build a modest house would, if organized perfectly, would take about a week of 8-hour days to complete with a hand saw. The same cuts organized similarly would take someone wielding a powered rotary saw about a 1/2 hour.
So you have a hammer or two, you have a saw. You own both. You are a capitalist, your tools worn on your belt and stowed in your toolbox. You literally own means of production. Let's say you hire a young apprentice to help. He can use some of your old tools as he helps, training him in the art of craftsmanship. Are you exploiting his labor? Absolutely. You are able to build more houses, execute more repairs with him than without. But he is also learning the trade. He is using your old hammer and saw, thus able to learn without having to buy costly tools himself.
That was the way things worked for many, many years, the way things still work in many places today. But it was not something Marx understood well. Here's an example from Henry Petroski:
In spite of Marx's astonishment that five hundred different kinds of hammers were made in Birmingham in the 1860s, this was no capitalist plot. Indeed, if there were a plot, it was not to make more. The proliferation of hammer types occurred because there were then, as now, many specialized uses of hammers, and each user wished to possess a tool that was suited as ideally as possible to the tasks he performed perhaps thousands of times each day.
(Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things, Vintage, 1994, p. 156. Emphasis mine.)
The worker's ultimate champion could not imagine a world with so many hammers simply because he had never swung a hammer. This was a man who saw himself as a temporarily poor gentleman, not a commoner. Remember, even though he could only afford two squalid rooms, he hired a live-in maid.
With this admittedly cherry-picked view of the man best known for defining capitalism and inventing communism, let's go to how "capitalism" is used by his acolytes. In my opinion, it's pretty shoddy work. Nuance be damned; anyone who hires is bourgeois, anyone who accepts a wage is proletariat. Never mind the very real distinctions that in every real workplace refine the roles each of us play. Never mind the primal social drives that shape our behavior into its hierarchy, analogs of which that can be seen in just about every social animal from monkeys to magpies. To the literal Marxist mind there can be no progress in history until no one exists who offers or accepts, until no one dominates and no one submits.
The trouble comes in earnest when these people identify a very real problem. Let's take the current financial situation. To me, this is a result of years of de-regulation brought primarily by Alan Greenspan, a fierce champion of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, a philosophy that allows for no government oversight. At all. Though people other than Greenspan actually pulled the stunts that led to the economy's hyperbolic expansion and eventual collapse, Greenspan actively blocked key regulators that wanted to oversee the mechanisms causing the increase (For a fascinating overview of how this came to be, watch Frontline's "The Warning", something you can do online). Furthermore, Greenspan held the Federal Reserve rate so absurdly low that investors sought -- and thus created the market for -- alternative (and questionable) investment opportunities. (This American Life has several episodes dissecting the explosion of wealth, including "The Giant Pool of Money," "Scenes from a Recession" and "Return to the Giant Pool of Money," episodes they produced in association with NPR's Planet Money Podcast. Many of the Planet Money episodes should be required listening in high school and college economic classes.)
How would I describe our current troubles? Think about the old geometry lesson: A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. Both are four-sided shapes with each side joined at a right angle; only the square, though, has four sides of equal length. Furthermore, both a rectangle and a square are parallelograms, but a parallelogram is neither a rectangle nor a square, since a parallelogram need not have right angles. It's a matter of defining each situation encountered with greater and greater precision.
So, though avowed capitalists are indeed involved in just about every aspect of this financial clusterfuck, I would further refine the situation as primarily corporate in nature (with the short-term needs of publicly-held corporations driving the urgency and need for quick returns) and definitely objectivist in origin. Those were the two defining philosophical excesses that primarily colluded to create the excess, spuriously-created money that has yet to fully be revealed as non-existent.
No one in the popular press has, though, identified those two elements, not to my knowledge. Nope. Absent this needed clarification, all the criticism from the left has been leveled directly at "Capitalism!" Michael Moore especially disappointed me with his new movie. I found the title alone too obscure, too binary, painted with too broad a brush, too general a description of the situation to allow me to even see the flick. I would just find myself chafing at the scattershot "capitalism bad!" accusations which would, I'm sure, be woefully nebulous and thus largely undefined.
That, in my opinion, has become the real problem; hardcore and occasional Marxists everywhere have so overused the C word that every laissez-faire excess is painted as a primarily Capitalist! problem without considering the nuances that actually led to the problem. This blinds these experts -- and everyone listening to them -- forcing the problem-causing complexities to forever dwell in a poorly-understood fog.
When people have problems understanding problems, they cannot be expected to effectively prevent them.
And all this happens to people who kinda understand Marx's ideas. What happens when the language drifts, as it inevitably does? Now all types of strange definitional things start to happen.
For instance, consider Welles again. In his early career, he staged Marc Blitzstein's "highly political Operetta The Cradle Will Rock". He related to his biographer that Blitzstein was an ardent revolutionary Marxist. Ah, but what would the future look like after the revolution? Welles asked Blitzstein if everyone would drive a Cadillac. Blitzstein said that everyone would have two. In his revolutionary utopia, everyone would enjoy the excesses enjoyed in 1937 by only a few.
Consider also a newspaper quote I committed to memory in the early 1980s. It concerned the changes in China after Mao's death, especially those loosening the Communist Party's prohibition on, well, capitalism. Factories were springing up. Small businesses supplemented incomes. And though these changes flew in the face of life under Mao, the culture of traditional China, one that embraced the rewards of hard work, trumped dogma. One man dismissed the concerns of his more hard-line Marxist countrymen with a simple, pithy bit of irony: "This is communism. If you want more, work harder."
So much for all that From each according to his ability, to each according to his need crap.
So where are we? By abandoning nuance in favor of the bourgeois/proletariat divide, many on the left have created a blind spot in their thinking that fails to observe, collate and consider subtle distinctions in individual capitalist situations. The broad brush cannot fill in the tiny but important details. That's a problem, to be sure; but I hesitate to suggest it is a deliberate problem. No, economic theory can be complex and therefore might cause confusion. Cultural differences, historical context, personal myopia, all conspire to distort a more accurate portrayal of circumstances and the language that should be used to describe said circumstances. It's not deliberate; it's just complex.
I cannot, however, say the same is true of the right. I'm sorry, folks, but the language is in much graver danger of abuse from the more conservative elements of our society, a claim I intend to support with argument backed by evidence in Part II.