This book review by my old colleague Dan Agin On Huffington Post is a gem:Books: Collectivism, Capitalism, and Propaganda in the New York Times Book Review The book he is reviewing is by Tony Judt, entitled:Ill Fares the Land Penguin Press. I am more interested in Dan's comments than the review itself even though I will now get the book. Tony Judt is one of my favorites in the New York Review of Books which, incidentally, is far superior to the New york Times Book Review which is what Dan is commenting on. Read on below and you will see an interesting critique of how things like this are presented to us by those folk.
Dan begins by laying it all out:
It's easy to get the feeling that we live in a land of calumny piled on baloney, a land where conservative newspapers masquerade as liberal press. Who but the New York Times would assign a foreign conservative hack to review a new liberal anti-capitalism book by Tony Judt? (Ill Fares the Land, Penguin Press). The reviewer, Josef Joffe, is a former publisher-editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit. (Joffe's review appears in the New York Times Book Review, May 2, 2010.)
Tony Judt's thesis is leftist-classic: Capitalism needs to be highly regulated in order to prevent the breeding and fomenting of greed and sociopathy.
Josef Joffe's counterargument is rightist-classic: Collectivism is evil because it leads to bureaucratic excess.
What is ironic to me is that Judt is far too conservative in his diagnosis of capitalism. Capitalism and its unchecked growth and its spawning of uncontrolled technology is the biggest threat to mankind ever by my way of thinking. Nevertheless we have this game we play rather than getting our problems solved. Let's see how Dan handles this:
The problem is that Joffe ignores the most important difference between collectivism and capitalism: the focus of one is social justice, the focus of the other is the acquisition of private wealth. One can argue from now until doomsday which is "better" or more practical (practical for what?), but the difference in attitude about social justice remains the defining dichotomy.
In America, capitalism is hawked by so-called political conservatives,. an ill-defined group ranging from a lunatic fringe to "think-tank" intellectuals over-burdened with vague college-student memories of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. But the attitudes of the group toward social justice are never vague: they like to avoid the subject.
Conservative young people do not travel by bus to the American South to work in the civil rights movement and get murdered by racists.
Conservative old people do not vote to possibly reduce their health insurance benefits in order to assist people who have no health insurance at all.
A list of conservative anti-social-justice actions and inactions is easy to construct. Conservatism is not about social justice and is usually explicitly against social justice.
There it is in a nutshell: Are you for or against social justice? Is the New York times totally unaware that it picked a reviewer who would pan the book because he too is not that hot on social justice?
Social justice is an interesting concept. It implies an injustice. What is that injustice? Dan says it has something to do with the accumulation of wealth. I say that the accumulation of wealth is a form of theft that has been going on for a long long time. I have lived my 74 years among people whose holdings came from their labor. Accumulation of wealth? Oh yes, my dad even managed to save a small bundle over his 82 years by living like a pauper. That, to me, is not what accumulation of wealth means. Even though he managed to salt something away and even make it grow by participating in the casino called the stock market, he is not an example of the accumulation of wealth that is on the other side of the coin with social justice. The system keeps folks like him quiet by allowing such illusions of doing well. Meanwhile, not too far from him at any time real injustice was going on.
Dan makes a number of points about Joffe's review and this is his last one:
Joffe says: "Sometimes, as in 2008, markets are not self-correcting, which is why government must step in. But let's hope it will pull out again; officials are not wiser or nobler because they come with a government title."
Well, yes. And free-marketers are also not "wiser or nobler" because they've been lucky in the Wall Street casino--or because they've learned how to game the system in a sociopathic delirium.
The left has always had too much ideology. And so has the right -- and the screed by Joffe is a good example of Rightist ideological propaganda. Reading Joffe, one sniffs the absurd idea that the free market is "manly."
The struggle for social justice requires tremendous courage. The idea that human misery should be considered as merely collateral damage in the hunt for capital assets is an idea suited to sociopaths but not at all suited to the human species.
The choice of Josef Joffe to review the new book by Tony Judt was an unfortunate and silly choice by the New York Times. It may get the New York Times some attention, but it acts against the good of the public. Next time choose a centrist to review a book on the left or right.
So was the paper simply short sighted in its choice? I think not. I think it was doing its usual job of packaging a criticism of the beloved capitalist system in a way that makes the criticism of little importance even though it is both correct and mild.
What really drew my attention to this essay is a comment by Dan posted after the review:
To clarify my essay: There are really two "Lefts", one merging into the other. the Popular Left has little cognizance of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and academic theories of Marxism and Marxist economics. The people in the Popular Left are primarily interested in political, economic, and social justice (summarized by me as "social justice"), not in academic theories. In my view, it's a strategic error to forget the difference between the Popular Left and the Academic Left. Similarly, there are two "Rights", a Popular Right and an Academic Right. They are not the same, and the views and agendas of the people of the two Rights are different. Like the Popular Left, the Popular Right has little cognizance of academic theories, e.g., theories of people like Smith, Burke, Hayek, and Friedman.
As in all such discussions, the two stereotypes of the "left" are abstractions and most of us, if not all, are a mix of these two stereotypes. But the two categories say something about our discussions here.
The gap between the "academic" and the "popular" left is a very interesting one. I guess I am more of an academic left type because I find fault with this popular left for a number of reasons.
The biggest fault is that I keep getting told that it is enough to want the same values, this ephemeral "social justice" what ever it is. I have come to the conclusion that the American political system is not working and certainly not working well enough to win any struggle for social justice. I also believe that the capitalist greed machine is stronger than ever and it is in adaptive transition because of technology. It will never be sustainable and that may make social justice a small issue as we go farther and farther down the path of self destruction.
The New York Times seems content to perpetuate the myth that capitalism is a good thing and the source of all our well being. Meanwhile anyone who is "academic" enough a leftist to read history, read the reports from a scientific community actually beholden to their capitalist masters, and look at the news of what is being done to us daily should have no trouble understanding that capitalism is both doomed and dooming us.