WHY INTELLECTUALS LOVE MARX:

AN ESSAY ON GLOBALIZATION, ANTI-AMERICANISM

AND THE NATURE OF POLITICS

PART ONE

A couple of months ago, I got into an argument on a Usenet newsgroup about whether or not Americans were "responsible" for the behavior of multinational corporations that happened to have their headquarters in the U.S. If you've ever taken part in one of these discussions, or even read them through while others debated, you're probably bored already. That's because they always go exactly the same way. The Americans say no, they're responsible for no such thing. The non-Americans say that Americans are too responsible, and the whole rest of the world holds them responsible, so they'd better start taking responsibility. The Americans hit back with are not. Then the whole thing disintegrates into a discussion of the definition of the word "responsible." It really can't get much better than that, because the Americans and the non-Americans are not using the word in the same way, and neither side is about to accept the other's definition.

I have by now either participated in or been an observer of maybe two dozen versions of this argument and, as I said, it's always the same--and neither side convinces the other, because the real point of disagreement is so fundamental that for either side to concede that point would be to destroy that side's entire weltanschauung. It's exactly the kind of conversation about which there is really nothing much to say, and I haven't until now said anything about it. What happened a couple of months ago was that the argument on that particular newsgroup got a new participant, an Aussie with an attitude, who decided to go at it all very aggressively and see if he couldn't cow me into submission by sheer bombast. When he couldn't, he announced that I didn't really mean anything I said, I was only arguing to argue, and he therefore wouldn't talk to me any more, and nobody else should either. It's the kind of thing people do when they're losing arguments they expected to win and don't want to have to admit it. In this case, though, my opponent managed to get where he was going by a very circuitous route, and it's the route I want to talk about.

This is the situation as it stands on February 1, 2003: after nearly a hundred years of trying out the experiment called socialism/Communism/leftism, the verdict is in. It was a terrible idea. Every society that tried to implement it was the poorer for it. None developed a healthy economy able to lift its majority to that standard of living routinely enjoyed in the non-Communist industrial states. What's more, when it came to protecting individual rights and civil liberties, socialist societies shat dead rats. If you wanted freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience--you went to New York or London, not to Moscow or Beijing.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of thousands of classified documents from the bowels of the KGB, a whole symphonic array of Western political music came almost to an end: the song about how the Communist states were more efficient and scientific than we were and were destined to overtake us economically and socially; the song about how the Communist states gave their people a larger ideal to live up to while Western democracies had nothing to offer but materialism; the song about how anybody with compassion for suffering humanity had to be a socialist. These songs came almost to an end because they were so flamingly, obviously untrue. The Communist states did not surpass us in efficiency. The "ideal" they gave people to live up to appeared to be treachery, betrayal and oppression. Anybody with compassion for suffering humanity would definitely want to start alleviating that suffering by emptying the gulags.

Still, the music came only almost to an end. There remained pockets of true believers, and all throughout the industrialized and developing world, those true believers were to be found principally in two places: academia, and the media. This was true of the United States and the United Kingdom, France and Germany, Spain and Italy. It was even true in places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Since it wasn't really possible to defend the positive side of the equation any more--it's hard to argue for what a good thing Communism would be once people actually have some experience of it--the true believers fell back on the negative side. The movement became not a movement for something, but a movement against something. It was against "globalization." It was against "hypercapitalism." It was against "the rape of the environment." Most of all, it was against "Americanism," which was supposed to be all these things and much worse, a malevolent, violent, arrogant ideology bent on global domination and the destruction of every other culture but its own. Women were being systematically deprived of education, health care and freedom in Afghanistan? That was much less evil than the way the United States was exporting McDonald's across the globe and forcing people to eat hamburgers instead of their native cuisine.

Okay, I'm exaggerating--a little. But any American who is not one of those who buy into the above idiocies can testify to the complete incoherence of the anti-American left, whether its analyses emanate from Paris or New York. On one of the newsgroups I read a man from Spain posted a long diatribe listing all the things he found evil about American life. In that list there was only one item that was actually true--yes, most American states do have the death penalty. The rest of it was comprised of bizarre fantasies and misconceptions so vast that I wouldn't have known how to start correcting them. He listed the depredations of "American" corporations. Of the three corporations he named, one was French, one was German, and one was British. He declared that a French book had "proved" that the United States government had actually blown up the World Trade Center itself, to have an excuse to invade Iraq and take its oil. He fulminated darkly on how Americans were now subject to being arrested without cause, thrown in jail, and left to rot without a lawyer for years on end. He decried American "racism" in terms that even Al Sharpton couldn't use with a straight face.

So, yes, the man was overwrought--but any American who has ever been part of one of these discussions knows the drill. Fueled by stereotypes, caricatures, and sheer ignorance, they often make the person delivering them sound as if he were having a psychotic break. Most of the time, when somebody parts company with reality quite that aggressively, we get him psychiatric help. Try even suggesting that your harranguer might be a tad misinformed, and he'll tell you that you're "collaborating" in the evils of rapacious corporations or American hegemonic power.

Try doing what most Americans do in the face of this kind of willful stupidity--that is, ignoring it--and the reaction you get is twice as hysterical and twice as angry. Americans don't care about anybody but themselves! Americans think they're the only country on the planet! Americans think the rest of the world doesn't exist!

Yada yada yada, as Mr. Steinfeld would have put it.

I know how it feels to listen to this stuff and think that it's all so ridiculous, there's no point in addressing it. I used to not bother. After September 11^th, I spent about a year trying to address it head on, pointing out where it had its "facts" wrong, pointing out where it had its logic so screwed up that it no longer made even elementary sense, pointing out the fact that too many of the judgments were made on the basis of a befuddled "moral" code that most Americans didn't share and didn't think they ought to.

This got me two kinds of reactions: first, that I was condemning the entire continent of Europe for what just a few people were doing or saying: second, that it didn't matter if these things were true or not. People thought they were true, and Americans had to do something to change the country's image--by doing what the vast misinformed wanted us to do and protesting globalization and getting Green.

In other words, in order to make more people like Americans, we should stop being ourselves and stop doing what we thought was right and do what everybody else wanted us to do instead. In order to make more people like Americans, we should stop being Americans.

This is the point at which these conversations begin to revolve around the proposition, "people don't hate Americans, they hate American policies."

Is that true?

No, in fact, it isn't, and any examination of the facts will show that it couldn't be.

First, because it's not clear that "people" hate Americans or American policies. There's a reason why Pepsi is the most popular soft drink and Baywatch the most watched television program in the Arab world, just as there's a reason why French people, given a choice of a French movie and an American one, pick the American one more times than not. There's a reason why America had seven million illegal immigrants at last count--as well as a few million legal ones--virtually all of them dirt poor and willing to do things like stow away in jet plane wheel casings to get here.

The "people" who hate America, or American policies, are almost always the same people. Most of them work in the "knowledge professions." Virtually all of them are more extensively educated than the majority of the people in their populations. They tend to be at least middle class, and a disproportionate percentage are better off than that. They tend to have been educated in the humanities or social sciences, rather than in the hard sciences or practical arts like business administration or information systems. There are some differences between civilizations--engineers are part of the group in Saudi Arabia but less likely to be in Berlin--but this description fits even within America itself. In New York and Los Angeles, these are the people who at least thought about voting for Nader, and who like to describe their politics as "progressive."

The second reason changing American policies would not change America's reputation is that America's reputation so often rests on policies that have nothing to do with America--and the people who castigate America for the behavior of Nestle in the third world don't even pause for breath when informed that Nestle is a Swiss, not an American, corporation. Facts literally don't matter, and they wouldn't matter any more if the US suddenly got much more concerned about saving the environment or alleviating AIDS in Africa than it is now.

Is it any wonder that Americans of the saner variety, faced with the utterly intractable nature of this sort of nonsense, tend to dismiss it as the product of "envy" or neurosis or spite?

The thing is--I don't much like "explanations" of that kind. I don't think that envy, or neurosis, or spite actually tells us anything about what's going on, although I do think all three are present in at least some of the people who claim membership in the anti-American left. Nor do I think that all those earnest declarations of virtue amount to anything but self-righteousness and hot air. The anti-American left can go on screaming all it wants that it's for social justice, sustainable development, and the end of poverty--but it doesn't really care about any of them, and it is comprised of individuals who almost always truly hate and fear both the working class and the poor. If they didn't, they'd be more careful to get their facts straight about "globalization."

But--if it's not about envy, and it's not about social justice, what is it about? Is there something that is either uniquely American, or close to it, that affects the educated more than the less educated and those educated in the humanities and social sciences more than those educated in the hard sciences and practical arts? Is there, to put it another way, something about American culture that threatens intellectuals more than it threatens anybody else? And is there something about Marxism in particular and anti-capitalism in general that solves this particular problem for this particular group of people better than any other available outlook would?

Yes, as a matter of fact, there is.

I call it the Death of Respect.

Its sacred text is a joke that surfaced in the United States in the 1980's, but that had little or no resonance in the rest of the world until much more recently than that.

The joke went:

The graduate with a science degree asks, "Why does it work?" The graduate with an engineering degree asks, "How does it work?" The graduate with an accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?" The graduate with a liberal arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?"

Most of us had no idea if it was funny, because we were too busy worrying it was true.

Don't worry about whether or not the joke is true for the moment Just think about having an elite university education in the liberal arts--in history or literature or sociology or art history. You put a lot of work into your studies to get your degree. You were smart enough to get into Harvard or Yale or Stanford. Maybe you even went on to get a Ph.D. You know more than other people do, and you've got the documents to prove it.

Now think about what happens when your fellow citizens start responding to your credentials by saying, "so what?"

Then, when you've got the chance, go on to part 2.

Comments on this essay?