Antipathy to capitalism is of legendary proportions, especially among the classes whose status is higher under aristocracies and dictatorships: aristocrats, clergy, scholars, artists, and of course government officials. Working people tend to prefer democratic capitalism which, as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci pointed out, quickly raises them into the middle class. Thus, even now that Marxism has been discredited as a social ideal, we may expect new forms of anticapitalism to appear. Eric Voegelin once pointed out that Marxism is a species of gnosticism, that is, a perfectionism (“the paradise of the proletariat”) access to which depends upon a privileged form of knowledge (gnosis, in this case “scientific socialism”) that makes a certain elite superior to everybody else. Gnosticism also implies a certain impatience with the human body, with imperfections, with democratic politics and the slow procedures of persuasion, with compromise, and (in short) with the human condition. Now that Marxism is no longer a credible vehicle for this underlying passion, what will replace it?

In 1990, it seems already clear that antimodern passions run high; even a passion for primitivism is again in evidence. Similar signs were present in the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century, notably in the operas of Richard Wagner. In the origins of totalitarianism, especially in Italy and Germany, the call of the primitive was quite important, including the cult of unspoiled nature. No doubt, the passions of National Socialism are as dead as the passions of communism. But the underlying sensibility is still very much alive. Capable of assuming a great many shapes, perhaps the cult of nature will be put to creative use in the environmental movement. That movement, however, has already shown many signs of hatred for business corporations, industry, property, and even- on a different plane of reality- the idea of “progress.” Its tendency to turn on the power of the state to enforce its own passions is also manifest. One can predict with some certainty that environmentalism is likely to replace Marxism as the main carrier of gnosticism (and anticapitalism) in the near future.

This is not, of course, inevitable. Environmentalists could conclude that the new forms of awareness they are teaching the public can best be served by a free and inventive economy. Whatever the public wants, industry has an incentive to invent a way of supplying. Given the widespread desire for environmental protection now growing in the public mind, a shrewd investor might even anticipate on the part of business corporations an outpouring of new technologies, approaches, products, and processes, around which entire new environmental-minded industries may come into existence. As the public becomes willing to pay for environmental enhancement, ways to achieve it will be swiftly invented. That is already happening. The newer the factory, the cleaner in tends to be; the more recent the product, the more “environment friendly.” Meanwhile, the public as a whole will not wish to abolish the benefits of modernity- the medical benefits especially- even though some extremists might. Environmental activists will want television for their messages and please, and airplanes to carry them to international conferences. An environmentally conscious industry will thus have plenty to do; the question is only whether environmentalists will perceive it as an ally or not.

Many environmentalists are, of course, conservatives quite committed to the capitalist economy, but many others are hostile to capitalism. The latter might wish to consider two points: First, the dire state of environmental protections both in socialist and in traditionalist (third world) countries; and second, the fact that no other system is as likely to produce the wealth necessary for environmental protections as democratic capitalist systems.

Another frequently overlooked source of the anticapiatlist leaning is the ancient and medieval experience of wealth as a zero-sum game: what some gained, others lost. Wealth was then thought to lie solely in land and gold coin and precious objects, and was usually acquired by plunder, conquest, or favor. In this context such aphorisms arose as Radix malorum est cupiditas (“Cupidity is the root of evils”); “Property is theft”; and “The rich get richer, the poor poorer.”

A third strain of this anticapitalist leaning is communicated through illusions about the precapitalist system. Not much has changed in the harsh life of the poor from the time of Christ until the realities of France as described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables. Similarly, before 1989 critics of capitalism seldom counted the moral and economic costs of socialism; they gave it the benefit of their dreams. Admittedly, the morality of democratic capitalism is low when compared with the supernatural standards of Christianity and other codes of spiritual perfection. But its daily practice in supplying opportunity to the poor is superior to the daily practice of any other historical system, traditional or socialist. It does not pretend to offer a moral paradise, only greater liberties and more flexible supports for moral living than any other system. It brings temptations, but also incredibly high moral possibilities. That is why people migrate in such numbers and with such passion toward it.

A fourth source of anticapitalist leaning is to associate capitalism solely with material things, with commodities, with objects. This is the usage of Karl Marx; it is also the usage adopted by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Laborem Exercens. To take this approach, however, is to overlook the spirit of capitalism, its dynamic principle, its central commitment to practical intellect: to invention, discovery, reasoned cooperation, and the intellectual and moral virtue of enterprise. Were the impulse of capitalism solely materialistic, the system would have long since fallen into narcissism, hedonism, and death. This was the theory of Marx; namely that the alienation inherent in the system would drive the workers to “narcissism” or, in the current Marxist lingo, “consumerism.” Instead, the spirit of capitalism seems constantly to reinvigorate itself, to work revolution after revolution in technological possibility (mechanical, industrial, and electronic), and to inspire creativity in every sphere of life. It is a system designed to arouse and to liberate, no the body, but the creative soul. It arouses even the high ideals of those who disdain the “consumerism” they think affects others.

Communism taught citizens to respect one moral principle alone: total subjection to the power of party rule. Nothing else mattered, neither truth nor fairness nor competence. However lazy, incompetent, immoral, or even criminal one’s behavior might be judged under other systems, under communism no burden of guilt had to be borne for it, so long as one was recognized as a loyal, obedient follower of the party. The polluting of the natural environment of Eastern Europe, the corruption of the moral ethos, and the relentless spending down of the capital stock of communist countries has left behind a wasteland- except for one thing. Somehow the love for liberty survived. Human nature has asserted itself, like green shoots at the end of winter. How to give moral nurture to those shoots is now on the world’s agenda. A huge moral task lies before us.

-Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism