The New Nation - Internet Edition

Guy Dammann

I've often wondered why economics was labelled a "dismal science", and now I know. In most sciences, there's an element of mastery such that the more you know your subject, the better you get at it. But with economics, the reverse seems to be the case.

Thus, while even though all of us lowest-common-denominator joe-schmoes have known that the economy has been heading for recession for some time, it's taken until this week for the news to reach both the governor of the Bank of England and the prime minister. When Brown's faithful replacement as chancellor called time on growth way back in August, he was roundly criticised from every quarter.

The problem, of course, is that because the science of economics is not only dismal but soft, the credibility of those whose power is rooted in economic analysis rests not on solid findings but on something like a credit scoring system. To the extent that they guess right, or gamble successfully, they build up credibility, or creditworthiness, and because no-one can hold anyone to account on the basis of the facts of the matter - because, by and large, there aren't any - then their credit rating is, again by and large, pretty much all they have.

But in the case of figures like Brown and Mervyn King, there's so much credit invested in them by virtue of their position that they're left with few options but to oversell everything that they do announce, or - in cases such as the present one, where the bottom has fallen out of whole system - simply come clean after the fact in a kind of credibility correction.

Now we're in this mess, of course, it doesn't help to have people like me poking fun at the whole thing, any more than it helps to have what Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins the other day called "Guardian writers" pretending that capitalism has eaten itself. Capitalism is more likely to eat us before it eats itself.

But there is one interesting absence in the melee of commentary on the recession, which is that there don't seem to be any Marxists left to take a moral stand. You'd think, to continue the economics analogy, they'd stand to profit from the situation, buying up dirt-cheap political stock in what must surely be a bear market for anti-capitalist ideology. But while there has been slight increase of the visibility of Socialist Worker sellers amid the usual swarms of London Lites, of high profile told-you-so-ing there has been little sign. Even Brendan O'Neill has kept quiet, perhaps preferring to cry for alms rather than arms.

It has been said often enough, since the Soviet bloc crumbled into nothingness during the early 1990s, that Marxism has been thoroughly "discredited". Yet, in its absence, as the pragmatics of free-market capitalism have, in various guises, filled the ideological vacuum, I wonder if we don't miss it. By this I don't mean that we miss the Cold War - although it is clearly the case than many do - or that anyone should want to bring back Stalin. Rather, it is simply that, in the absence of any even weakly viable alternatives, the tenets of capitalism come to be presented as self-evident truths.

But you don't need to be Marx's little brother to see that most of the central tenets are far from being self-evident. Indeed, the central idea of capital ownership - that you can, effectively, get money for nothing - is being roundly, and literally, discredited at this very moment. There's no such thing as a free lunch - at least not in a capitalist society - and there never will be. At the same time, the astonishingly pervasive myth that the acquisition of excessive wealth has ever made anyone any happier is as far from being grounded in anything resembling reality as ever. We're all - if Oliver James has it right - simply sick from it.

For all its grim analysis and frequently turgid prose - not to mention the lack of allowance for the simple law that absolute power corrupts absolutely - Marxism was at least a system of political thought predicated on the idea of destroying inequality and, ultimately, creating a society whose citizens could be free not only of physical but of spiritual want. It at least held on to the hope, in other words, that man can improve his lot without taking for granted that this improvement must come at the expense of others.

In capitalism, on the other hand, we have established a power base which answers to no rational authority but rather to the forces of "the market", a blind force which has none of the nobility of "blind nature" but which derives from the whim, unhinged thrill-seeking, naked greed and kneejerk fears of individuals who have traded in compassion for the illusion of power and wealth.

If the masked ideology of capitalism contains anything that still counts as truth, it is that human nature directs us to oppose the status quo.

Yet, sadly, it seems precisely to have been the forces of capitalism that keep us imprisoned in the status quo, taking what we already have and selling it back to us under the guise of change and progress.

Surely, during the little break from rampant growth the next two years promise to offer us, some effort could be made to come up with some fresh ideas?

Can't we put at least one tiny portion of that vast expanse of intellectual effort, presently consumed entirely by the effort to get something from nothing, to the task of getting something out of the realisation that it can't be done?