Friedman, Marx, and the conservative(s)

At risk of being written off as a 'damn communist/socialist', I offer a brief excerpt from Marx's Manifesto. My only defense is that i ran across it in a book of a very different era and kind - Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat (2005). Friedman has been a senior Foreign Affairs correspondent for the New York Times. This book represents his lengthy reflections upon Globalization after the turn of the millenium. (More to come on Friedman, as his latest book represents a major shift in tone - this Hot, Flat, and Crowded finds the great challenges facing us as a planet and, in contrast to the previous work, doesn't believe that global expansion and deregulation will solve things.)

Recall that Marx penned these words in 1848...


All fixed, fast, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.

In the place of old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.

In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

Friedman then provides some commentary on this passage, noting in particular the resemblance between a world which had begun to see the Industrial Revolution, and one which now faces the Global Flattening Revolution. He quotes a conversation with Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel,

"...a flat, frictionless world is a mixed blessing. It may, as you suggest, be good for global business. Or it may, as Marx believed, augur well for a proletarian revolution. But it may also pose a threat to the distinctive places and communities that give us our bearings, that locate us in the world. From the first stirrings of capitalism, people have imagined the possibility of the world as a perfect market - unimpeded by protectionist pressures, disparate legal systems, cultural and linguistic differences, or ideological disagreement. But this vision has always bumped up against the world as it actually is - full of sources of friction and inefficiency. Some obstacles to a frictionless global market are truly sources of waste and lost opportunities. But some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits, cultures, and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect nonmarket values like social cohesion, religious faith, and national pride. If global markets and new communications technologies flatten these differences, we may lost something important. That is why the debate about capitalism has been, from the very beginning, about which frictions, barriers, and boundaries are mere sources of waste and inefficiency, and which are sources of identity and belonging that we should try to protect." (pg. 204)

It strikes me that this debate also draws out a range of responses - the scale of which is broader than simply 'liberal' and 'conservative'. (The caricature being that the liberals want to sit and sip coffee while the governments hand out checks to everyone, while the conservatives want governments to get out of the way so that we can all compete.) While there are echoes of truth in these caricatures and we need to think about them very carefully, I have become increasingly convinced that there are (at least) two kinds of conservatives.

The first is concerned to protect the small community which he is rooted in - the health of its people and land, the sense of trust neighbors have with one another, the ease with which children grow up free to roam and play. They don't particularly like politics, but care very much about which people are running their town hall meetings! The second is concerned with his or her own freedom to do as they please and with the need for governments to get out of the way. Though they also live in a relatively small community, they regard high property values and low taxes as the main reason for their being there. They see no reason why jobs shouldn't be outsourced, for it could mean - in the big picture - that we make more money at home.

This is a perplexing constrast. Friedman seems to be in the second category at least when it regards economics. He is largely positive towards the 'flattening' of the world (even if it entails the removal of the sort of boundaries that Sandel points to), believes that the less we restrict individual liberty and creativity the better it will be for all of us. And yet, 3 years later he writes a book which claims, "America has a problem and the world has a problem... it's getting Hot, Flat, and Crowded." Furthermore, our businesses haven't creatively anticipated these problems and our governments haven't shaped policy which could help businesses to move in this direction either. Individuals bicker about the demands of change in lifestyle. So where do we go from here? Well, one option is to return to an older form of conservatism which conserves the local embodied community and the virtues thereof.

I intend to blog further on Friedman as I continue reading. Feel free to join the discussion.