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Marx's conception of markets is the obverse of the view taken by laissez faire advocates. He seems to believe that all the goods that markets are supposed to deliver, according to the panglossian view of their devotees, and goods far beyond these, like the overcoming of scarcity, will be attained precisely when the capitalist market system is abolished.
One might say, in recommending capitalism, the likes of Hayek promise the best of all worlds, but attach certain conditions, especially the need for hard work and the risk of personal hardship, to achieving the otherwise largely blissful prospects of a completely free market.
Marx's bag of promises is even richer (in both senses of the word) and does not seem to tie to his utopia the prospect of hard effort to make his brave new world go round, excluding perhaps the bother of one class abolishing violently and without mercy another class.
In his Ethics, Efficiency, and the Market, Allen Buchanan dedicates a number of remarkable passages to Marx's grandiose promise of a world exploding in superabundance and bliss thanks to the abolition of markets.
I find it hard to dispel the impression that it is this vision of a paradise whose entry condition is the disappearance of markets that informs the anti-capitalism of (large sections of) the "Left", making its judgement vitriolic, destructively prejudiced, even blind with hatred, rather than genuinely critical, constructive and open-minded.
But both sides suffer from an inability to break away from the idealistic extremes on the continuum where markets appear either pristine or sepulchral, and instead focus on the middle part where the real economy—the mixed economy—lies chock-full with its countless pros and cons, its intersecting spheres of law, politics, social pressure and economic action, and the ever disturbing uncertainties, contradictions, and upheavals that inhere them.
Materially powerful and socially productive market economies go hand in hand with the political system of freedom. Yet, both detractors of capitalism and its acolytes tend to tear asunder this vital connex.
Radical friends of the markets are inclined to regard politics as largely distinct from markets, inferior to them and, indeed, a major source of disturbance of their proper working.
However, markets depend on politics, good markets depend on good politics—i.e. the politics of freedom—, and the politics of freedom gives rise to and depends on markets.
Staunch opponents of the markets are largely ignorant of the fact that the universal rights which are the founding gift of the "Left" to the world, encourage, even demand, markets, while markets require and support a community that respects the universal and other rights that expedite personal freedom and a free and open society.
This creates a strong predisposition — born out by each and every attempt at concrete socialism — to ignore, denigrate or subvert the competitve, open-access politics of freedom and rely instead on the politics of a select power elite whose interests completly dominate the interests of the population.
Instead of politics "the Right" wants markets.
Instead of politics "the Left" wants a benign dictatorship.
Instead of politics "the Left" wants a benign dictatorship.
Writes Allen Buchanan,
[Marx's] view seems to be that the basic civil and political legal rights which individuals enjoy in capitalism are valuable only as ways of coping with those sorts of conflicts of interest that are themselves artifacts of the capitalist system.
Marx seems to have believed that basic civil and political rights, as well as distributive rights to a share of material wealth, are necessary and hence valuable only where there are class-divisions and the egoism to which class-divisions give rise, under conditions of scarcity.
Since he also believed that communism will end class-divisions and greatly reduce egoism and scarcity, he believed that conceptions of rights will not play a significant role in communism, the form of social organization which he believed would replace capitalism.
This prediction of the obsolescence of the conceptions of rights, and the implied rejection of the ultimate value of rights, rests upon a prediction that there is a nonmarket system of social organization which will be so efficient as to reduce greatly scarcity and the clashes of interest to which scarcity gives rise.
In order to justify this prediction, the Marxist who rejects the market system and the moral framework of civil and political rights with which it is associated, must execute three ambitious tasks which so far remain uncompleted.
First, he must develop a theory of nonmarket social organization in sufficient detail, and with sufficient explanatory power, to show how the problems of allocation, production, and distribution can be solved without the aid of the market as a coordinating device (and without the use of unacceptable levels of coercion, as in totalitarianism, state socialist systems).
Second, he must show that such a system would be efficient enough to reduce significantly the problem of scarcity.
Third, the Marxist must also show that the nonmarket system is not only coherent in theory but psychologically and politically feasible.
(p 48, emphasis in the original)
See also Is the Left Reactionary?
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