ON THE STACK.

Time permitting, I intend to finish and comment on Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat (and several of the other books Amazon would like to bundle with it) before year's end. Perhaps I ought to get to that shortly while this John Gray review (via Frank Foer, pinch-hitting for Andrew Sullivan) is still timely. I do wish people would read and understand the theories they're attempting to apply. Mr Gray begins his review with an excerpt from The Communist Manifesto that will be familiar to regular readers. Then the train of thought slowly derails.

Marx and Engels had no doubt that they were witnessing the emergence of a global market—a worldwide system of production and consumption that disregarded national and cultural boundaries. They welcomed this development, not only for the increasing wealth it produced but also because they believed it enabled humanity to overcome the divisions of the past. In the global marketplace nationalism and religion were destined to be dwindling forces. There would be many convulsions—wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions—before the Communist order was securely established; but when global capitalism had completed its work a new era in the life of humankind would begin.

The train is still on the track, but here a reviewer ought really be more conversant with Volume I of Capital to grasp the full implication of "global capitalism had completed its work."

The centrally planned economies that were constructed to embody Marx's vision of communism have nearly all been swept away, and the mass political movements that Marxism once inspired are no more. Yet Marx's view of globalization lives on, and nowhere more vigorously than in the writings of Thomas Friedman. Like Marx, Friedman believes that globalization is in the end compatible with only one economic system; and like Marx he believes that this system enables humanity to leave war, tyranny, and poverty behind.

I'll have to read Friedman before offering any hypotheses about Friedman's belief system. It's what comes after capitalism -- when the integument bursts asunder and the expropriators are expropriated -- that will enable humanity to leave war, tyranny, and poverty behind, and Mr Gray's review neglects that feature of the argument. The omitted actors Mr Gray mentions well might matter to the outcome, but one can make that point without drawing misleading parallels between Karl Marx and Thomas Friedman.

Neoliberals, such as Friedman, have reproduced the weakest features of Marx's thought—its consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history. They have failed to absorb Marx's insights into the anarchic and self-destructive qualities of capitalism. Marx viewed the unfettered market as a revolutionary force, and understood that its expansion throughout the world was bound to be disruptive and violent. As capitalism spreads, it turns society upside down, destroying entire industries, ways of life, and regimes. This can hardly be expected to be a peaceful process, and in fact it has been accompanied by major conflicts and social upheavals. The expansion of European capitalism in the nineteenth century involved the Opium Wars, genocide in the Belgian Congo, the Great Game in Central Asia, and many other forms of imperial conquest and rivalry. The seeming triumph of global capitalism at the end of the twentieth century followed two world wars, the cold war, and savage neocolonial conflicts. 

Over the past two hundred years, the spread of capitalism and industrialization has gone hand in hand with war and revolution. It is a fact that would not have surprised Marx.

The question as yet unanswered is whether global capitalism will be a competitive capitalism with many of the features Adam Smith envisioned and Leon Walras made formal, or whether it will feature the dwindling numbers of magnates of industry who must accumulate or be accumulated as Marx anticipated.