A whole host of pundits—journalists, historians, economists, policy wonks, and philosophers—have written about the current crises. But, according to Joshua Clover, they all get it wrong. In one way or another, they all blame some general character flaw (especially greed) and fail to provide an analysis of the “extraordinary turn we have all taken or its historical specificity.”
The evident irony is that greed—the self-interest of individuals, spread across the society—is exactly what’s supposed to make capitalism work. This is a tenet of classic liberalism, raised to a fundamentalism by Ayn Rand and her protégé Greenspan. And while [John] Lanchester rakes Greenspan over the coals for this contradiction, he can only do so halfheartedly. They basically agree on the cause of the current crisis. Greed done us in.
Clover’s view is that we need to look at capitalism from the outside, through the critique of political economy. In other words, through the lens of Marx’s Capital.
Marx’s 150-year-old guide renders specifics of the current crisis that appear only as intuition in the other books. Something really did happen in the 1970s. The long postwar boom played itself out; intensive competition born in that period pushed industries to accept lower and lower profit rates. Eventually they got too low, and capital itself needed another profit center if it was to continue its requisite expansion. Enter finance, on the heels of creeping deregulation, among other things, seeming to provide not just its own profits but a broader cycle of consumption-fueled growth.
I might quibble with Clover’s reading of Marx (Capital, in my view, does not present a theory of macroeconomic crises—although it is certainly a theory of the contradictory nature of capitalism which creates the possibility of such crises). But he does understand that a Marxist approach to the current crises differs radically from the various efforts on offer.
The possibility of an unhappy ending for capitalism is exactly the one thing that a thousand books written from within the crisis won’t contemplate, even as we know that everything ends eventually. And so, as we parse the flood of explanatory texts, we should turn to China one more time—but not to speculate about whether it will revalue the renminbi against the dollar. We must resurrect the judgment of Zhou Enlai (often misattributed to Mao) on the success of the 1789 French Revolution, offered some century and a half on. But we must take it as an admonition regarding our race to grasp the historical import of the 2007 Crisis of Capital: “It’s too early to tell.”
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