10. The Capitalist Road: The Riddle of the Market from Karl Marx to Ben Okri

¹“The Crisis of Contemporary Culture,” An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on November 27th 1992 (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 9-10.

²The Famished Road (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 162. Songs of Enchantment, a sequel to The Famished Road, appeared in 1994.

³Fredric Jameson, “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Marxism,” in Francis Mulhern, ed., Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (London: Longman, 1992), p. 172. Jameson here is alluding to Georg Lukács's suggestion that the fundamental category of Marxist thinking is Totality. For Jameson,

bourgeois ideology, or, in our present terms, the middle-class method of repressing reality, is not so much an affair of distortion and of false consciousness in the sense of out right cynicism or lies... but rather, primarily and constitutively, of leaving out, of strategic omissions, lapses, a kind of careful preliminary preparation of raw material such that certain questions will never arise in the first place. (p. 172)

⁴If examples are needed, the Soviet gulags and the Chinese Great Leap Forward should suffice.

⁵Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), vol. 3, p. 152.

⁶Ibid., p. 154.

⁷Ibid., p. 164.

⁸Leszek Kolakowski, “The Myth of Human Self-Identity: Unity of Civil and Political Society in Socialist Thought,” in C. Kukathas, D.W. Lovell and W. Maley, eds., The Transition from Socialism: State and Civil Society in the USSR (London: Longman, 1991), p. 48.

⁹Quoted from Lewis S. Feuer, ed., Basic Writings on Politics & Philosophy: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), p. 43.

¹⁰See for example, G.A. Cohen, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfree dom,” in Alan Ryan, ed., The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 9-26.

¹¹For an historical account which attempts to explain just what Austrian economics is, see Karen I. Vaughn, Austrian Economics in America: The Migration of a Tradition (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For a helpful investigation of selected topics in Austrian economics, see Nicolai Juul Foss, The Austrian School and Modern Economics: Essays in Reassessment (Copenhagen: Handelshøjskolens Forlag, 1994).

¹²“Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” in F.A. Hayek, ed., Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies in the Possibilities of Socialism (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1935), p. 96.

¹³Ibid., pp. 98-100.

¹⁴Don Lavoie, Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 60.

¹⁵For a fuller account of the theoretical inadequacies of their solutions, see Lavoie, Rivalry and Central Planning, chap. 5.

¹⁶Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: Midway, 1980), p. 77.

¹⁷See Hayek, “The Non Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect,’” Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), pp. 313-17.

¹⁸The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason (Indi anapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1979), p. 163.

¹⁹Allen Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 86; emphasis added.

²⁰The Famished Road, p. 3.

²¹Ibid., p. 5.

²²Ibid., p. 115.

²³Ibid., p. 1.

²⁴Ibid., p. 329.

²⁵For two interesting views of the Tower of Babel, see Michael Oakeshott's essays of that name, the first in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1992); and the second in On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).

²⁶The Famished Road, p. 329.

²⁷Ibid., p. 330.

²⁸Ibid.

²⁹Ibid., p. 149.

³⁰Ibid., p. 167.

³¹Ibid., p. 166.

³²Ibid., p. 168.

³³Ibid.

³⁴Ibid., p. 161.

³⁵“Learn to drink, my son,” Dad tells Azaro. “A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life” (p. 35).

³⁶This is clear, for example, in Okri's poem “Darkening City, Lagos 1983,” in his An African Elegy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 38, where he writes:

Acids boil outside
Crooked towers of state

Where politicians disgorge our lives
In vomitoriums of power.

We rush through heated garbage day
With fear in morbid blood-raw eyes:

Mobs in cancerous slums
Burn the innocent and guilty

At no on.

³⁷The Famished Road, p. 81.

³⁸Ibid., p. 123.

³⁹Ibid., p. 198.

⁴⁰Ibid., p. 203.

⁴¹Ibid., p. 449.

⁴²Ibid., pp. 449-50.

⁴³Ibid., p. 451.

⁴⁴Ibid., p. 492.

⁴⁵Ibid., pp. 492-93.

⁴⁶Ibid., p. 493.

⁴⁷The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 41.

⁴⁸The Famished Road, p. 487.

⁴⁹Ibid.

⁵⁰Ibid., p. 488.

⁵¹Ibid., p. 495.

⁵²For Soyinka's perspective on West African developments, see his The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).