Karl Marx and the New Economy Analysis/Commentary After reading Francis Wheen's immensely entertaining biography of Marx, Karl Marx, A Life (1999), readers might begin to wonder whether Marx would have fit into the New Economy. He would surely have been amused by all its theorists in tactician uniform. (It is even difficult to assume that there exists a New Economy in the aftermath of the right-leaning revolution of the Reaganites and the left-leaning revolution of the Keynesians.) The little-hatted revolutionists of the New Economy want to go back to Adam Smith -- without passing Go and without collecting $200 -- on the whim of a verbal flourish and a string of booming stocks. If it exists, the New Economy probably doesn't resemble the economy of Adam Smith's classical theory. It probably more closely resembles Marx's view of a global geopolitics -- an economy prone to complex influences and far-flung effects. It is an economy that has only been changed -- not fundamentally refashioned -- by the technology boom in the U.S. and the advent of electronic communications (computers, satellites, cell phones, electronic stock markets, and the Internet). Current capitalism seems to remain an eighteenth century commercialism with a bourgeois vengeance, a cult of prosperity the fills out millennial habits, crystallizing Christianity, manorialism/feudalism, and perhaps most of all the myth of the nation state. It's a form of economics that subjects culture to a reduction as sweeping as a marching army, and benefits people who seek a material religion, not enlightenment -- or an egalitarianism of comfort, not self-betterment. Marx wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat. If he meant by that a dictatorship of the unevenly educated and self-indoctrinated naive -- the sports enthusiasts and Peyton Place ganders and gooses -- we probably got it. Commercialism, the ideology of capitalist economics, has become, at least in America, an ideological adjunct to religion, reproduction, and entertainment. It's a cult that professes belief in hard work, family values (the taboo credos of ultra-cleanliness; mystical fidelity; ultra-normalcy; the brotherhood of plain people; the privileges of women and prerogatives of men); and other customary props. Commercialism in America also professes functional stereotypes: you are what you do or you are what you earn (and often both). It battles with bucks, not broadswords, and weaves a tapestry of bureaucratic law. It states that an employee is not and must not be an individual, or get old, or belong to an underclass. It has a scientific basis for evaluating employees -- numbers, measurements, and comparative categories -- that results in strengths and weaknesses developing a central tendency: conformists and stereotypes. Commercialism today states that when you create a market, you create value. Marx would have been amazed at the market for late fees developed by video rentals or the market for penalties developed by credit card bill collectors. (Theft by any other name.) And it has created the universal petty cheater, coupon grabber, and gamester of life. Perhaps the Pope is right: neither Marx, nor capitalism. April 4, 2001