A sort of Pax Americana? There would be one power, and it would be benevolent?
Yes.
It doesn’t work that way.
It doesn’t work that way. Even the Roman Empire, which had the Pax Romana, couldn’t maintain its dominion for too long, and began to crack up. The United States on its own terms is already a very, very large country with a huge population and enormous resources. The best example it could set in the world is to put its own house in order. I mean, the fact is, the United States doesn’t have a health service. The education system leaves a lot to be desired. When New Orleans was flooded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and all of those people were left unprotected, large numbers of my American friends in New York and the West Coast said they had no idea things were so bad. And that worried me. Why didn’t you?
I remember during the last election, people were energized the world over when they saw huge numbers of kids turning up for Obama’s election campaign. People said this couldn’t happen in Europe, because in Europe the bulk of kids between eighteen and twenty-six tend not to vote these days. So we are seeing a process where, because of the economic system and the way it offers no possibility of any alternatives, democracy itself is becoming hollowed out as a process. And people are saying if the choice we were offered between center left and center right in Europe, or between the Congress Party and the BJP in India, or between party X and party Y in some other country is really not very deep, then what the hell is the point of voting? And, again here, the example which contradicts all that is Latin America where you have people who are offered choices, different choices, and who go and vote according to their beliefs. Some wanted to stay with the old, some wanted the new. So which of these trends is going to win out remains to be seen. I think a lot will depend on how the economy develops.
Let’s talk about the economy for a moment. What is Marxism, first of all?
Marxism is essentially a form of understanding history. I think Marx’s most important contribution theoretically was to say that history is essentially, though not exclusively, a struggle between contending classes, from the days of antiquity to now. And that assumption, which seems now relatively straightforward, transformed the way we look at the world and how we study history.
The second thing Marx did was to explain the ways in which capitalism functions. The drive to profit, which is the dominant drive in capital, determines everything. And then there are some incredibly prescient passages in which he talks about fictive capital, fictional capital, the system using money that it doesn’t have and imploding. And he points out that this cycle will repeat itself in the history of capitalism as long as the system lasts. He never describes in detail what an alternative to the capitalist system would look like. That is not his function. That is left to other people who make revolutions to describe. But he says that the gravediggers of the system are produced by the system itself, the system will let people down, that they will rise and topple it.
So for Marx, the countries most suited for socialism are the countries where the productive forces and technology have developed the most. According to this conception, the United States would be the country most suited for a rapid transition from one system to the other because all it needs is a planned system. Whereas most of the revolutions, if not all the revolutions that took place, happened in countries that were very backward—tsarist Russia, China. Cuba was pretty backward, too, in many ways.
You have written that we only had one shot at socialism, and it failed. But there have been many shots at capitalism.
This is true. I say this because capitalism has failed numerous times. I don’t know whether there’s agreement, but, from 1825, there have been dozens and dozens of capitalist cycles of boom and bust, boom, bust, collapse. I mean, certainly we can remember the big ones, but there have been minor ones as well. Yet that system is always permitted to revive, or is revived, as we are seeing today. And the socialists, the communists and the socialists, had one attempt, which lasted seventy-five years and then collapsed, and everyone says it’s over. And in my opinion, that particular style of communism and that particular attempt may be over, but there is absolutely no reason why people shouldn’t think of better systems than the existing one, without going back to the worst of what the Soviet system was.
The United States, ironically, is in a position where the state has a large ownership in the economy now.
This is true, but how is it using this stake? Is it for state capitalism or is it to create a public utility capitalism, which is certainly possible now by injecting a lot of state money into public utilities that would produce for need and not for profit. I mean, that is I think what should be done, and what a rational capitalist state would now do. What I would say to these guys at the banks and mortgage companies and investment houses is you failed. We gave you a big chance, we backed you up. It’s not that the state didn’t intervene. The state provided the basis for you guys to get away with murder, to make billions, and you let us down very badly, you failed us, so now we are not going to let you do it for the next fifty years. We’re going to build and develop public utilities, which we are doing to control, run, and pay for. And this is going to benefit our population far more than anything you ever did. I mean, there are some things that people deserve by right, including health, education, some form of affordable dwelling—which in Europe social democracy used to promise to try and deliver, and often did deliver.
In smaller countries.
In smaller countries.
It’s harder to do in the Soviet Union, the United States, or China, I would imagine.
It is true though, to be fair, I do not think the Chinese breakthrough, because that’s what we have to call it, would have been possible had they not had a revolution and created a very high-level class of graduates, scientists, and technicians. And I think that explains why they’re economically way ahead of India. The raising and lifting of the culture of the country, producing these people who came from very humble backgrounds, is actually the basis of the current transformation of China.
Would you describe yourself as a pessimist of the intellect and an optimist of the will?
I would. We are now for instance coming to a time when the car as the big icon of capitalism, as the only way for nations to move forward, is facing collapse. This is not just the rising price of oil, but also because the demand for American cars is falling. Why can’t a rational government in the United States develop an effective public transport system, including rebuilding trains, rebuilding tracks? It’s the one thing the Europeans are beginning to do now.
Or pass a tax on carbon emissions?
Yes. Pass a tax. It’s a simple political decision. It’s a matter of willpower. Instead we see the same paralysis that existed at the end of the Roman Empire, when the population could not be imposed on for anything; they had to be provided with spectacle, as Octavio Paz said. Now we have the spectacle of television. And reality television, in which everyone is encouraged to be a celebrity.