I said yesterday I was going to write today about the most common and addivctive intellectual Peter Pan pipe dream when it comes to political economy - a worldwide "Communist" revolution that ushers in a worldwide Communist millenium where everyone will, as Marx only aphoristically envisioned, provide "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs."
But the serious upheavals underway in Greece today and some other looming clouds on the global horizon compel me to put that off and offer a little reflection.
What Marx and others captured by this secularist counterpart to the religious anticipation of a future paradise of streets paved with gold really are looking toward is the abolition of the law of exchange, on which all theories of "economy" or "economics" are based.
Notice I did not use the phrase, common to all introductory economic textbooks, "law of supply and demand." That is deliberate. Supply and demand is what regulates "markets," or keeps them in balance. But exchange is what "makes" markets in the first place.
If I grow, gather, or shoot all my own food in sufficient supply to feed myself and my family, and make everything I need from food, shelter, and even "frivolous" stuff like art objects from whatever I easily obtain without relying on somebody else, I don't need a market.
But if I can only grow only pinon, which I use for my housing, and you grow the grain I need to stay alive, but can't get the pinon you need to have a roof over your head, you and I have the making of a market. It all depends on whether you can spare a little grain, and I can spare a little pinon. Then we come to some "exchange value" (e.g. a bushel of one for a peck of the other) that benefits us both, if not equally.
It was Rousseau and Marx who first gave currency to the idea that paleolithic hunter gatherer bands didn't exchange anything with other bands, and that market economies - which is what we really mean when we talk about "capitalism" - only arose when the "state" was created. Anthropologists have successfully proven that hypothesis historically false, but that kind of persists, especially as we increasingly don't have to get the leather to make our own shoes or grow our own food.
What's the difference between Wal-Mart and Mother Nature, except that the former supposedly exploits people to provide us with cheap shoes and food and the latter supposedly beneficently gives us whatever we need? The former is "capitalism" and the latter is "natural and organic."
I'm wondering if all the wild animals who died from starvation as a result of drought in the Southwest this summer would have welcomed the opportunity to go to Wal-Mart. But that's getting off topic. Back to the real subject at hand - greed, capitalism, and income inequality.
Consider Greece. The Greeks are striking, and some are burning their country down, today because the "socialist" Greek government is about to pass legislation that would increase "austerity" and cut public-sector jobs to satisfy the international community that they can solve their runaway sovereign debt problem. The sovereign debt problem, we are told, is caused by too many government sector workers with too high wages and too short working hours who were given that by governments they voted for, because they were tired of all the "austerity" of the past.
That may be too much of a simplification, but it's basically the case, at least from their creditors' perspective.
To appease the Greek street (which the Greek government can't do, even if they wanted to), then, the other less or not indebted EU countries would have to ante up even more than they have, and their wage-earners would have to pay more taxes (which they already pay a lot of anyway).
The ballooning problem globally, especially for the "developed" countries, is not just a shrinking number of "jobs" relative to our income expectations but runaway debt - whether its personal or collective increasingly matters little. That runaway debt is the long-term result of a lot of factors, including very bad behavior on the part of the financial industry, which only four years ago more and more American college graduate wanted a high-paying job in.
But it's also the result of what I would call the "revolution of unrealistic expectations" on the part of a consumption-sated, virtual-world-addicted, emptily idealistic, slogan-addicted Western-cultural elite (hell, we "developed-world" people are the "1 percent" if you compare us Asia, Africa, much of the Middle East, and of course Latin America).
They've ALWAYS thought we were too greedy and capitalistic, and now they've started to play the game finally. It's interesting to me that THEY are not in debt these days - it's us. I won't throw in here the famous line years ago from Pogo (who was that, you say) about meeting the "enemy", which is someone we didn't expect.
History has shown us there are two ways to avoid getting into debt - both "personal" or "sovereign." Live off the land, or live within your means.
Okay, you say, but if only those "millionaires" would pay their fair share. Pay for what?
I'm reminded of something that actually happened to me when I visited Greece in the mid-1970s, when the country was in one of its cylical bouts of "austerity" imposed at that time by a fascist, military dictatorship that had staged a coup about four years earlier. I was invited by a shopkeeper into the back of his modest shop, who recognized me as an American, to drink ouzo with him, because "I love Americans so much" (or so he said).
As we were seated in private he pulled out a long knife, put it to my throat, and said, "ah, you rich American, now give me every dollar you've got."
It turns out he was pulling a prank, for which I then forgave him, but until he let on to his real intentions, the dialogue went something like this.
"But I'm not a rich American. I'm a poor, American student" (I was then just out of grad school with large student loans and no job yet).
"Ah, but all you Americans are millionaires,as far as we Greeks are concerned" he cackled, "so give me all your money - now!"
If you look at who a lot of those "millionaires" we are talking about are, they are often Indians, Chinese, Africans, and perhaps even a Greek here and there.
This morning in Dallas I was listening to FM 104.9 in Dallas, which is part of an Indian-owned media company that caters to the swelling Indian population of North Texas. There were more cheesy buy-buy-buy commercials than you have on AM radio. And, of course, there was the movie "Slumdog Millionaire."
My point is that the quest for global economic justice built around anger, resentment, and "class warfare" (actually, in the global sense it's just as much a "war of the worlds" (as in developed and developing) is self-defeating, if it's simply a comparison of who's got and who thinks they don't got what they deserve because somebody else somehow got more.
We Americans should look at ourselves less as indignatos and more as resentemados, especially if you following Nietzsche's diagnosis of the universal, modern, Western pathology of resenntiment.
I don't care if you're a blue-collar worker who resents all those "illegals" who worked at all those less-than-minimum wage jobs while you were out refusing to pay your taxes while getting high on meth, or a "millennial" with a high-powered grad degree who resents small business owners, the remaining backbone of the American economy, because they don't get all the jokes on "The Big Bang Theory."
We're all in this deep you-know-what as Americans, and I'd like to sit down together to start working together to do what we can to turn this ship around, even if we have to throw all the crystal chandeliers overboard to reduce the weight.
If you were on the Titanic, it was easy to blame to captain (actually, historians say it was a silly screw-up on the part of the first or second mater) for hitting the iceberg. But they were still all going down together.
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