05.07.09
Marx, ideology and Darwinism
When it comes to Marx, there’s no time like the present
I would suggest on the contrary that there’s no time like the present to learn from Marx’s theory of ideology — the idea that wealth and power have a tremendous ability to gin up self-justifying narratives. Global elites’ curious passivity in the face of the growing housing bubble was an excellent example. That prices were out of line with historical trends was easy enough to see, and the fact that asset bubbles recur periodically and lead to financial crises was once well-known and then swiftly rediscovered after the bubble popped. But during the bubble years, prominent policymakers on both sides of the aisle found themselves in the grips of an extremely naive rationalism that held that there couldn’t possibly be a bubble, since the market should be magically self-correcting.
While one can applaud the renewed interest in Marx’s critique of ideology, the fact remains that all this is a mere flicker of interest. During the last great Depression, the New Deal was in part driven from the left, and that left was still a massive social movement. The current left is crippled on the subject of Marx, as we consider flameout of Bolshevism that was synchronous with the New Deal.
So it requires more than a mere rehash of bits of Marx. If anyone is really interested in Marx’s critique of ideology they might recall his penetrating contempt for Darwinism.