What's not plausible?

Last week the Independent dealt with Marx in its “The Great Philosophers” series of free booklets. After recounting and discussing fairly enough Marx’s philosophy - mainly his writings on humans being alienated from their nature to engage in freely-chosen co-operative activity - their anonymous author went on to contest the “plausibility” of what Marx saw as the society that would replace capitalism:

“The problem is that the Marxist idea that capitalism will be replaced by a society free of systematic inequality and conflict just isn't very plausible.”

But why? Apparently because Marx

“had not experienced the horrors of the twentieth century when putting his theories together. It is not implausible to think that with the kind of hindsight that the last century leaves us with, Marx might have been less optimistic about human potential and the possibilities for a world without fundamental conflict.”

It is pointless - and silly - to speculate on what somebody from the 19^th century might think if they had lived on until today. In any event Marx was very well aware of the horrors of his own and previous centuries and wrote extensively about them in Capital. He would also have been aware of people in his day who were just as pessimistic “about human potential and the possibilities for a world without fundamental conflict” as the Independent’s philosophy expert. Most people then, as today, considered that “human nature” was such that a world without systematic conflict was “implausible”, not to say impossible. After all, this followed from the dogma of original sin and innate human depravity preached by christianity, the dominant ideology in Europe and America to which Marx was implacably opposed.

The horrors of the 20^th century - two world wars, many minor wars, many massacres - can very plausibly be attributed to the continuation of capitalism beyond its sell-by date. The wars of the 20^th century were caused by conflicts of economic interests between the rival capitalist states, into which the world is artificially divided, over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets and investment outlets and strategic points to secure and protect these.

When states go to war they are risking everything for everything; and, faced with defeat, some of their leaders are prepared to go to any lengths, whatever the human cost. Other massacres happen when different groups struggle against each other, often stirred up by interested parties, against the background of the artificial scarcity imposed on them by capitalism and its economic law of “no profit, no production”. The world could produce enough for everyone if only the barrier of profit was removed. If this was done, then there would be no groups massacring each other? Why would they?

Or perhaps the Independent’s writer thinks that it is part of the nature of Europeans to massacre other people by aerial bombardment and of Africans to massacre each other with machetes?

And he didn’t give any reasons why he thinks it plausible that a society of systematic inequality is inevitable and eternal and that, presumably, we should just sit back and accept this.