It looks like the New York Times thinks we’ve strayed
too far from paying proper respects to the central tenets of
Marxism.
The whole ball game, as Karl Marx painted it, was nothing more
than a class brawl between the rich and the poor. Or as Frederick
Engels and Marx wrote in the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,”
first published in 1848 in London, “The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles.”
In the Marxian view of economics, a rising tide doesn’t lift all
boats, and entrepreneurs and investors aren’t viewed as
job-creators. The relationship between Microsoft founder Bill Gates
and his multimillionaire programmers is judged to be as
intrinsically exploitive as the relationship between a master and
his slave, as inherently repressive as the connection between
peasants and the nobility.
As the theory goes, knock off Bill Gates and things will be
better for everyone, or at least more equal. Killing the key guys,
of course, isn’t exactly the best way to motivate successive
generations to be front-runners. And so, understandably, things
tend to nose-dive under collectivism.
Marx was wrong, in short, in seeing production as something
automatic, like eggs out of a hen, a process unrelated to
incentives. His focus, mistakenly, was on distribution, not on
output. What he saw, in every age, was two classes pitted against
each other in a struggle to the death over the spoils: “Freeman and
slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden,
now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a
revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common
ruin of the contending classes.”
It’s that “hidden” part of the class struggle that seems to be
bothering the New York Times. Things appear a little too
classless these days, with secretaries on cruises in the Caribbean
and the average guy grabbing a $3 Caffe Mocha on the way to work.
“The contours of class have blurred; some say they have
disappeared,” write Times reporters David Leonhardt and
Janny Scott in the kickoff article of a new Times series
on “Class in America.”
But don’t be fooled. Things are still bad between the exploited
proletariat and the overbearing bourgeoisie, and Leonhardt and
Scott provide a quick inventory of various injustices and class
crimes. Success in school remains “tightly linked” to class. The
rich are “isolating themselves more and more.” Class differences in
lifespan “appear to be widening.” And, of late, mobility up and
down the economic ladder may have “possibly even declined.”
On the upside, the Times reporters show evidence that
entry into the ranks of the elite has opened up: “Only 37 members
of last year’s Forbes 400, a list of the richest Americans,
inherited their wealth, down from almost 200 in the mid-1980s.”
Still, that’s not good enough for Leonhardt and Scott because
getting ahead by way of hard work and merit rather than through
inheritance is still too based on class: “Merit has replaced the
old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner
born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns
out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education,
and connections cultivate in their children the habits that
meritocracy rewards. When their children then succeed, their
success is seen as earned.”
Well, there it is, right in a front-page article and it’s not
the Beijing Evening News! Work hard, do the right thing, cultivate
the right habits, perform with merit and it’s still no good. Any
“success” is still bogus, only “seen as earned” — not really
earned — because every parent in America doesn’t deal exactly the
same hand to every child.
Leonhardt and Scott explain: “The scramble to scoop up a house
in the best school district, channel a child into the right
preschool program or land the best medical specialist are all part
of a quiet contest among social groups that the affluent and
educated are winning in a rout.”
“Quiet” maneuvering to “scoop up a house,” to help your kid? The
Times makes it sound like a sinister scheme, like a plot
to inflict class oppression. Funny, but the whole thing has a tone
to it that’s not unlike how the Red Guards talked about the most
successful peasants in China.
