34 Foreign Policy

[ C O V E R S T O R Y ]

DustbinThe

A ccording to Darwinism, species that adapt to their environment

thrive; those that fail to evolve face extinction. The same is true for

ideas. Marxism evolved from the primordial swamp of the Industrial Rev-

olution but lies gasping for relevance after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Asian val-

ues—fashionable when South Korea and Thailand were economic success stories and the

West was mired in recession—lost their luster following the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Mutual assured destruction kept the two Cold War superpowers in check but offers lit-

tle assurance to nations threatened by suicide terrorists. The Club of Rome’s doomsday

prophecies of global starvation are now starved for credibility. The threat of the military-

industrial complex is taken seriously only in Hollywood films and on conspiracy news-

groups. Dependency theory thrived amidst a backlash against economic imperialism yet

withered in a globalized era of free trade and foreign investment.

Are these ideas really doomed to oblivion? Or, for all their flaws, do they still have some

relevance? Can they make a comeback? Foreign Policy has invited six notable minds to sort

through the dustbin of history and share what they found.

Historyof

November | December 2002 37

comrades would give me great pleasure.” This efflo-rescence of nationalist feeling made nonsense of thepostulate that class is the decisive historical variable.

Yet just at the moment that the theory had thusbeen rendered nugatory, it gained a cachet far beyondany it had previously enjoyed. The Bolshevik seizureof power rescued Marxism from the wreckage of itseconomic and social predictions by seeming to vali-date its most seductive claim—namely, that historyhad a foreseeable end. However far trends and eventshad strayed from the forecasts, this much was certain:socialism of some kind had risen in Europe’s largestcountry. The Russian Revolution seemed a powerfulvindication of the prophecy that humankind wasstriding from the capi-talist past to the social-ist future. Even suchprofound anti-Marx-ists as Austrian econo-mist Joseph Schum-peter and U.S.journalist WhittakerChambers concededthis directionality,much to their despair.

Communism’s riseendowed Marxismwith a brilliant newallure, even while itdemolished anythingthat remained ofMarxism’s theoreticalstructure. The in-dustrial proletariatassuredly had notbrought socialism toRussia. The countrywas still mostly agri-cultural. The Bolshevikmilitia that seized power consisted of disaffected sol-diers, Lettish peasants yearning for national inde-pendence, student revolutionaries, and no doubt someworkers, but it had no distinct proletarian coloration.Nor were the men guiding it workers (certainly notLenin, who had a title of nobility that he was notashamed to invoke when it served his purpose).

In addition, socialism was supposed to come tothe most advanced capitalist countries, whereasRussia was among the most backward. Addinginsult to injury, the most advanced capitalism wasto be found in the United States, the country thatmore than any other proved stubbornly resistant to

36 Foreign Policy

[ The Dustbin of History ]

No other idea so enchanted the 20th century asMarxism. To this day, one often comes across

assertions that Marxism retains value as an “analytictool”— the use of which does not necessarily makeone a Marxist. The first person to make this dis-tinction was, of course, Karl Marx himself, whofamously forswore “Marxism,” an appellationcoined by his detractors. Marx’s collaborator,Friedrich Engels, however, embraced the term, build-ing a powerful cult around it, in which he was thehigh priest and Marx the oracle.

The first of the many ironies surrounding this cultwas its claim to being scientific. In Manchester, wherehe was sent by his fatherto be isolated from radicalinfluences, the youngEngels searched out thefollowers of Welsh indus-trialist and social reformerRobert Owen. The Owen-ites had hit upon the ideaof “socialism,” a termthey coined, and set outto demonstrate its efficacyby means of experimentalcommunities. Scores ofsuch experiments yieldeduniform results: the settle-ments collapsed, usuallywithin the span of twoyears. Engels was well aware of this record butbrushed it aside. He and Marx, a pair of 20-some-thing children of privilege, believed they had dis-covered a pattern to history that would producesocialism regardless of human will or ingenuity. (“Itis not a matter of what this or that proletarian or eventhe proletariat as a whole pictures at present as itsgoal,” wrote Marx in their first collaborative work,The Holy Family. “It is a matter of what the prole-tariat . . . will historically be compelled to do.”) Inshort, they substituted prophecy for experimentationand thereby claimed to have elevated socialism fromthe plane of utopia to that of science.

If Marx and Engels turned the idea of science onits head, the bold breadth of their prophecy (or theo-ry, if you wish) was still dazzling. “The history of allhitherto existing societies is the history of class strug-gles,” they said. They claimed that the immutableworkings of “capitalism” (a term largely, if not whol-ly, of their invention) would lead to the reduction ofsociety to two classes, an ever growing and increasinglyimpoverished proletariat and an ever shrinking andincreasingly wealthy bourgeoisie. This dynamic wouldmake revolution morally necessary and politicallypossible. It would also assure that the socialist revo-lution would be the final revolution. Previous tri-

umphant classes had them-selves become the newexploiters, but since theproletariat would consistof almost everybody,whom could it exploit?Ergo, its rule would inau-gurate the golden era ofclasslessness.

From the momentMarx and Engels pennedthis theory, it proved falseon every front. Over thecourse of the second halfof the 19th century, thestandard of living ofworkers in Europe, far

from falling, roughly doubled—a trend that contin-ued apace until the outbreak of World War I. Con-comitantly, the middle classes did not disappear butgrew many times larger, and the wealth of the capi-talists, although it certainly multiplied, became moredispersed, not more concentrated.

A still more deadly blow struck the doctrine in1914, as the outbreak of war put to test Marx andEngels’ claim that “the working men have no country.”At once, working men displayed their patriotism on allsides. Moreover, most of the socialist leaders, either asa result of similar stirrings within their own breasts orin response to the mood of their constituents, also ral-lied to their respective fatherlands. Georgy Valenti-novich Plekhanov, the dean of Russian Marxism, cap-tured the spirit of the moment: “If I were not old andsick I would join the army. To bayonet [the] German

Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enter-

prise Institute, is the author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise andFall of Socialism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002).

MarxismBy Joshua Muravchik

socialism and that responded to the Bolshevik tri-umph with a wave of anti-Red hysteria.

However, there were always some Marxists whodenied that Russia was truly socialist. For them, noneof these aspects of the Bolshevik experience weighedagainst the validity of the theory. But this defenseraised new problems. If the Soviet state was not social-ist, then it assuredly was not accounted for by Marx-ist theory and could not be explained by it. And if thestruggle between communism and the West (and fora time, the triangular struggle with fascism, a phe-nomenon that Marxism could do even less to explain)was not a class struggle, as the Kremlin claimed, thenwhat remained of the Marxian approach to history?

The crowning irony isthat a movement pro-claiming that materialmotives determinedhuman behavior gaverise to an era in whichideology dominatedworld politics as neverbefore.

What, then, is leftof this once mighty the-ory? It remains the offi-cial orthodoxy of a fewminor police states andnominally even ofChina. But the adoptionof President JiangZemin’s “three repre-sents” (making theparty the official repre-sentative of all “pro-ductive classes,” includ-ing entrepreneurs)aligns theory as well aspractice in antithesis to

Marxian precepts. And social democratic partieshave one after another renounced both Marxismand socialism, although a few retain the word “social-ist” in their names.

Moreover, despite dubbing themselves the newvanguard of the proletariat, the antiglobalizationprotesters have twisted the doctrine beyond recog-nition. Their complaint about capitalism is the oppo-site of the Marxist critique, which held that capital-ism must develop to its utmost degree in order tocomplete its historic mission of becoming the chrysalisfrom which a new society could emerge. Those whowould stand in the way of this evolution, though they

“The crowning irony is that a

movement proclaiming that

material motives determined

human behavior gave rise to

an era in which ideology

dominated world politics

as never before.”

ILLU

STRA

TIO

NS

FOR

FPBY

HORA

CIO

CARD

O

November | December 2002 3938 Foreign Policy

[ The Dustbin of History ]

simplest proof is that, as Malaysia has copied the Sin-gaporean model, it has also succeeded economically.

The discussion about Asian values was not simplya scholarly debate. Many Asian dictators used argu-ments about their region’s unique culture to stop West-ern politicians from pushing them to democratize. Thestandard rebuttal was that Asians prefer order to themessy chaos of democracy. But East Asia’s recent polit-ical history makes a powerful case for the universalityof the democratic model—if it is done right. Unlikeother Third World countries, many in the region lib-eralized their economies first and then democratizedtheir politics, thereby mirroring the sequence that tookplace in 19th-century Europe. The result has been thecreation of remarkably sta-ble democratic systems inTaiwan and South Korea,with more mixed but stillimpressive results in Thai-land and Malaysia.

The point is not thatculture is unimportant. Onthe contrary, it mattersgreatly. Culture representsthe historical experience ofa people, is embedded intheir institutions, andshapes their attitudes andexpectations about theworld. But culture canchange. German culture in1939 was much different from what it became in1959, just 20 years later. Europe, once the heartlandof hypernationalism, is now post-nationalist; its statesare willing to cede power to supranational bodies inways Americans can hardly imagine. The UnitedStates was once an isolationist republic with a deepsuspicion of standing armies. Today, it is a worldhegemon with garrisons around the world. The Chi-nese were once backward peasants. Now they aresmart merchants. Economic crises, war, political lead-ership—all these circumstances change culture.

A century ago, when East Asia seemed immutablypoor, many scholars (most famously German sociolo-gist Max Weber) argued that Confucian-based culturesdiscouraged all the attributes necessary for success in cap-italism. A decade ago, when East Asia was booming,scholars turned this explanation on its head, arguing thatConfucianism actually emphasized the essential traits foreconomic dynamism. Then the wheel turned again,and many came to see in Asian values all the ingredientsof crony capitalism. Lee Kuan Yew was compelled to

admit that Confucian culture had bad traits as well,among them a tendency toward nepotism andfavoritism. But surely recent revelations about some ofthe United States’ largest corporations have shown thatU.S. culture has its own brand of crony capitalism.

Weber linked northern Europe’s economic successto its Protestant ethic and predicted that the Catholicsouth would stay poor. In fact, Italy and France havegrown faster than Protestant Europe over the last halfcentury. One may use the stereotype of shifty Latins anda mañana work ethic to explain the poor performanceof some countries in the Southern Hemisphere, but thenhow does one explain Chile? Its economy is perform-ing nearly as well as the strongest of the Asian tigers.

Indeed, Chile’s success isoften attributed to anotherset of Latin values: strongfamilies, religious values,and determination.

The truth is that thereis no simple answer to whycertain societies succeed atcertain times. When a soci-ety does prosper, its suc-cess often seems inevitablein retrospect. So theinstinct is to examine suc-cessful societies and searchwithin their cultures forthe seeds of success. Cul-tures are complex; one

finds in them what one wants. If one wants to find cul-tural traits of hard work and thrift within East Asia,they are there. If one wants to find a tendency towardblind obedience and nepotism, these too exist. Lookhard enough and most cultures exhibit these traits.

One would think that the experience with theAsian values debate would have undercut these kindsof cultural arguments. Yet having discarded this one,many have moved on to another. Now it is Islam’s turn,but this time as a culture of evil. Rather than faultingbad leadership, politics, and policies in Muslim coun-tries, many in the West—including British historianPaul Johnson, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, andU.S. evangelical leader Pat Robertson—have found itmore comforting to fall back on grand generalizationsabout Islam. They will find that the one group of peo-ple who most strongly agrees with them are the Islam-ic fundamentalists who also believe that Islam’s truenature is incompatible with the West, modernity, anddemocracy. But history will disprove this new versionof the culture theory as it has the last.

of determining a precise moment of death really implythat at some point a creature is both dead and alive?What could that possibly mean? This entire rhetori-cal sand castle was demolished in a single sentence byphilosopher Sydney Hook: “State a proposition thatwould be false according to conventional logic, buttrue according to dialectic.”

Others who invoke this analytic tool seek to con-vey sympathy for the poor, but Marxism adds noth-ing on this score to what is found in the Torah or theSermon on the Mount. For others, it means a materi-alistic interpretation of human motives, but the historyof Marxism itself refutes this claim. For still others, itsignifies a fascination with revolution. But after a cen-tury of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, surely we havelearned that far from constituting a leap “from thekingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom,” asMarx put it, revolution has more often been a leap intoa bottomless abyss of human suffering.

might espouse socialism, are, in the words of Marxand Engels, “both reactionary and utopian.”

Finally, what of those who forswear the doctrinebut claim to employ Marxism as an analytic tool?Many of those who make this claim write withHegelian obscurity. Perhaps the analytic tool is the“dialectic,” the Marxian claim to a distinctive formof reasoning more penetrating than conventionallogic, and a term one still sees bandied about. Engelsgave this idea its fullest explication (in Socialism:Utopian and Scientific), pointing out that by con-ventional logic “a thing either exists or does not exist;a thing cannot at the same time be itself and somethingelse.” As an example, he cited the conventional viewthat a creature is either alive or dead. This premise iswrong, he said, because the precise moment of deathis hard to determine. Dialectic allows us to see that athing can simultaneously exist and not exist, be bothdead and alive, he explained. But does the difficulty

Asian ValuesBy Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek Internationaland author of the forthcoming book The Future of Free-dom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New

York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

A bout a decade ago, East Asia was hot and sowere “Asian values.” In explaining East Asia’s

extraordinary economic development—what theWorld Bank termed a “miracle”—many believedthat culture played a pivotal role. After all, so manyThird World countries had tried to climb their wayout of poverty, and only those of East Asia had fullysucceeded. Singapore’s brilliant patriarch Lee KuanYew became a world-class pundit, explaining how theunique culture of Confucianism permeated Asiansocieties. Many scholars agreed, perhaps none moreforcefully than Joel Kotkin, who in his fascinating1993 book, Tribes, essentially argued that if youwant to succeed economically in the modern world,be Jewish, be Indian, but above all, be Chinese.

I have to confess that I found this theory appeal-ing at first, since I am of Indian origin. But then I won-dered, if being Indian is a key to economic success,what explained the dismal performance of the Indi-an economy over the four decades since its inde-pendence in 1947 or, for that matter, for hundreds of

years before that? One might ask the same questionof China, another country with an economy thatperformed miserably for hundreds of years until twodecades ago. After all, if all you need are the Chinese,China has had hundreds of millions of them for cen-turies. As for Jews, they have thrived in many places,but the one country where they compose a majority,Israel, was also an economic mess until only recent-ly. All three countries’ economic fortunes improvedmarkedly in the last three decades. But this turn-around did not occur because they got themselves newcultures. Rather, their governments changed specificpolicies and created more market-friendly systems.Today, China is growing faster than India, but thathas more to do with the pace of China’s economicreform than with the superiority of the Confucianethic over the Hindu mind-set.

It is odd that Lee Kuan Yew is such a fierce pro-ponent of cultural arguments. Singapore is not so cul-turally different from its neighbor, Malaysia. Singa-pore is more Chinese and less Malaysian, butcompared with the rest of the world, the two are quitesimilar societies. But more so than its neighbors, Sin-gapore has had an effective government that has pur-sued wise economic policies. It’s not Confucius butLee Kuan Yew that explains Singapore’s success. The

“When a society does pros-

per, its success often seems

inevitable in retrospect. So

the instinct is to examine suc-

cessful societies and search

within their cultures for the

seeds of success.”