by Christopher Chantrill
Instead of the One Collectivist Ring to rule them all, Ayatollah Khomeini came up with One Religious Ring to rule them all.
Back in the day rich kid Chuckie Marx -- son of the leading lawyer in Trier -- and rich kid Fritzi Engels -- son of a cotton mill owner in today’s Wuppertal -- declared that capitalism would fail because of its “internal contradictions.”
What were the contradictions? Mainly,
The fundamental contradiction between socialized production (workers collaborating in factories) and private appropriation (owners taking the profit).
Like monks back in the Middle Ages, Marx & Engels couldn’t get their brains around the fact that, in the market economy, humans endeavor to sell labor and goods for more than they paid for them, and everybody benefits.
In The Mind and the Market Jerry Z. Muller goes into the long story about how the Church and Society gradually came around to the idea that making a profit was not such a bad thing after all. Especially if it pours tax money into the coffers of politicians and helps build medieval cathedrals.
Chuckie and Fritzi were dead wrong about capitalism. Soon after their One True Prophecy was proclaimed from the altar of the Church of Educated Expertise, capitalism entered its strongest growth period ever and created so much wealth that the politicians decided to spend it all on a nice cozy world war in 1914.
The really embarrassing thing was that their solution to capitalism went beyond logic-chopping about internal contradictions into ideological madness. As the Russians and the Chinese and the Cubans and the Eastern Europeans that shivered under the warmth of collectivism well know.
What was the problem? The communists decided to combine the political, the moral, and the economic in One True System run by the educated ideologues at the top of a political hierarchy. It turns out that there is a reason why God decided that politics, morality, and the economy were separate things. So He sent Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt into the world to teach us:
The political is about friend vs. enemy.
The moral is about good vs. evil.
The economic is about useful vs. harmful.
And ne’er the triplet shall meet (See quantum mechanics).
Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism wrote how, back in the Middle Ages, politicians and clerics all meddled in the economy. The politicians also liked to dabble in morality while the Church dabbled in politics. Wrote Novak:
It is a distinctive invention of democratic capitalism to have conceived a way of differentiating three major spheres of life and to have assigned to each relatively autonomous networks of institutions.
I like to make things Real Simple, so I called Novak’s idea “The Greater Separation of Powers” in my book An American Manifesto, meaning that the Founders’ separation of powers was good, but we can do better.
Really, what could be more obvious? You politicians stick to your world wars; you moralists stick to burning heretics; and you businessmen go ahead lawyering, running cotton mills, developing Internets and reusable rockets and Occupying Mars. And creating jobs.
Unfortunately, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the experts still didn’t get the message. Meanwhile the mullahs in Iran decided to give totalitarianism one last college try. They subordinated the ancient culture of Iran to brutal tyranny. Only, instead of the One Collectivist Ring to rule them all, Ayatollah Khomeini came up with One Religious Ring to rule them all.
Now, Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt says that politics needs an enemy. And religion needs an Evil One. No problem! The mullah-cratic regime in Iran after 1979 decided to make religious war on the U.S. as the Great Satan and Israel as the Little Satan.
Politics gotta have an enemy.
For the mullahs, the evil ones and the enemies are Israel and the United States. A double two-for-one special.
Let’s not forget our liberal friends, for whom the enemy is Trump. And not just Trump. There are also the racist-sexist-homophobe-transphobes of which you’ve heard tell.
These folk, bless their hearts, have an “internal contradiction” in their understanding of the nature of human life. We humans are social animals, not soldier ants. Nearly all the time we do best if we cooperate with each other. In lefty Jürgen Habermas’s critique of human mechanics, we soften the ruggedness of political and religious systems with the intersubjective warmth of the lifeworldliving mostly in community with other humans with whom we communicate and develop moral agreement. We hesitate to call the Other an Enemy or an Evil One until our Presidents call on us to fight the war to end all wars, or Indivisible calls nice liberal women out into the street to hate on Trump.
Hey mullahs! Hey liberals! Do you get it? It’s not that your ideas are shot through with “internal contradictions.” It’s worse than that. Your belief systems reduce human life to a war against the enemy, or a crusade against the heretics. Or both.
As the Southern ladies say: “I can’t believe you think that.”
Image: AT via Magic Studio
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/03/updating_marx_s_internal_contradictions.html
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