Help! I’m a Marxist who defends capitalism

As one of the Marxists named in James Delingpole’s recent Spectator article (3 November) on his alleged conversion to the commie cause, I really should be angrier about reckless, risk-hungry, overambitious bankers. Yet I find myself in the curious position today of thinking capitalism isn’t risk-hungry enough, certainly in areas where it matters: developing the forces of production and creating new wealth. I also find myself shaking my head in violent disagreement whenever I hear so-called radicals put the boot into capitalism. They seem to loathe the very parts of the capitalist system that Marx quite liked. Delingpole’s crisis of Tory/commie identity is nothing compared with mine: Help! I’m a Marxist who sometimes feels the urge to defend capitalism.

It’s trendy to be an anti-capitalist these days. Newspaper columnists attack greedy fat-cats and their big bonuses. Environmentalists protest about the impact of the capitalists’ dirty factories and aeroplane-enabled international trade on poor Mother Earth, where it’s not so much a case of everything solid melting into air, as Marx described the rise of the bourgeoisie, but everything solid polluting the air, with smog and soot and various other Very Bad Things. Some posh kids born with an entire cutlery set of silver in their mouths now stop washing their hair in order to develop dreadlocks and then wield cudgels against a McDonald’s restaurant or a Starbucks outlet. Meanwhile, everyone looks at China as it lumbers from Stalinism to capitalism, building a mind-boggling two coal-fired power stations every week, and says in unison: ‘Eeerugh!’

Marx would have told these shallow anti-capitalists to get a grip. Where they view capitalists as overly cocky and arrogant, always erecting new factories and building new cities to satisfy mankind’s insatiable lust for stuff, Marx was quite happy to champion the naked ambition of the capitalist class. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and his sidekick Frederick Engels upheld and even celebrated the achievements of capitalism in overcoming and controlling nature, through its rapid development of industry, science, agriculture and telecommunications.