ON KARL MARX FORSEEING A "FLAT WORLD"

RIGHT DATA, WRONG CONCLUSION

One of the best "new things I didn't know" that I got out of re-reading Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" over the New Year's holidays (see yesterday's post), was his generous suggestion that the ideas in his best-selling book may have been foreshadowed by none other than Karl Marx over a 150 years ago.

Friedman got this after a conversation with Harvard University's political theorist Michael J. Sandel (Chapter 4, page 201).  As he describes it:

"Sandel startled me slightly by remarking that the sort of flattening process that I was describing was actually first identified by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848"

While the shrinking and flattening of the world that we are seeing today constitute a difference of degree from what Marx saw happening in his day, said Sandel, it is nevertheless part of the same historical trend Marx highlighted in his writings on capitalisim—the inexorable march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions, and restraints to global commerce”.

Apparently, according to Sandel,

“Marx was one of the first to glimpse the possibility of the world as a global market, uncomplicated by national boundaries”.

Friedman saves readers like me the work of reading the actual Communist Manifesto, by doing so himself as research for his book. He concludes:

“Indeed, reading the Communist Manifesto today, I am in awe at how incisively Marx detailed the forces that were flattening the world during the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and how much he foreshadowed the way these same forces would keep flattening the world right up to the present.”

Friedman then highlights the key paragraph of the Communist Manifesto, from his “world is flat” perspective, over two pages in his book (pages 202-203). It’s very interesting, reading.

 As has been said by some folks much smarter than me a long time ago, it’s not the lessons of history that matter, it’s the lessons from history that you draw that matter. Or in Wall Street parlance, it’s not the data, it’s the conclusions drawn from the data that matter.

Although Marx and Engels seemed to have been eerily prescient in their vision of a “flattening” world, the conclusions they drew from their “data” were disastrously wrong, with incalculable negative consequences for much of humanity for over half of the previous century.

As Friedman notes:

“…once capitalism destroyed all national and religious allegiances, Marx thought, it would lay bare the stark struggle between capital and labor. Forced to compete in a global race to the bottom, the workers of the world would unite in a global revolution to end oppression.”

 Wrong!

In reality, being the world is being forced to compete in a global race to THE TOP. The workers of the world are only becoming MORE UNITED in a global revolution for a better, freer, more prosperous life for themselves and their families…they’re becoming more united in a global revolution for better, less expensive products and services to consume, for more personalized, customized entertainment to enjoy.

They’re more united in a global revolution for more powerful ways for their personal voices to be heard, not ONLY in a political context, but in all areas of human discourse. 

Oh, and they want it all THEIR WAY.

Guess what, with the forces of technology and globalization, they’re going to get just that, despite all forms of friction, cultural, political, regulatory, and protective business barriers.  It’s just a matter of time.  In every country that wants in on the globalization game.

And this time, no totalitarians need apply.

Comments

[Niko]

I'm not sure if the "workers of the world" you refer to are the relatively few well-managed, iPod-buying western consumers, who work to consume even more, or the hundreds of millions of workers who struggle for under $1 a day and work to stay alive.

I know this is an exaggeration, but one necessary to illustrate the point.

[Tapsearcher]

Communism does not work because workers have no voice in the process. The same applys to Globalization and Free Trade. It seems Thomas Friedman and others in the Flat World ignore this essential factor. Economies without borders will not work because the value of work has to be in sync with the value of end products. Consumers are workers first and need to make enough money to buy the products they make. Henry Ford knew this with automobiles.
And just imagine what would happen to the world if there were 400 million more cars in India and China. The Flat World would implode.
Explore the losts worlds in the Flat World of Friedman and the Free Traders with Ray Tapajna at http://tapsearch.com/flatworld/

[Peter]

this sounds like a bad mcdonald's commercial. granted - u wrote it a long time ago, but still.

as for whether or not Communism works or not, i have no idea, but whatever China is doing right now seems to be 'working' in the traditional sense of the word.