The European bureaucracy radiating out of Brussels, with no link to ordinary people, would seem discouragingly familiar to Marx, who considered bureaucracy the most essential part of the modern state apparatus. According to British historian David McClellan, a Marx biographer: In 1843, "Marx described how the bureaucracy had eventually become a caste which claimed to possess, through higher education, the monopoly of the interpretation of the state's interests. The bureaucracy, finding itself challenged by the very spirit of equality it had fostered, had turned itself into a medieval corporation, taking refuge in the trinity of mystery, hierarchy and authority."¹⁶ He would have been enormously pleased by the shock the people of Denmark administered to this bureaucracy with their rejection of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, as its hocus pocus was designed to aggrandize and centralize the bureaucracy's control over all of Europe. On the other hand, Marx would have been moderately impressed with the 1979 ascendance of a British shopgirl, Margaret Thatcher, to Prime Minister, as well as her defying the vested, mercantilist interests of Britain by releasing the pent-up forces of production. Ms. Thatcher, of course, opposed the Maastricht Treaty for precisely the same views on bureaucracy attributed to Marx.

As noted earlier, Marx would have cheered the collapse of the Soviet Union, a grotesque inversion of his ideas, built for the convenience of the nomenklatura, the socialist bureaucracy. His insistence that only active democracy could produce a classless society was proven in the negative with the total absence of meaningful suffrage. The historic forces of production had been strangled in Moscow by this bureaucratic elite. Nor would Marx be surprised by the further destruction of Russia's productive forces by the "shock therapy" administered by the international oligarchs of the west -- the bureaucrats of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writing in The Wall Street Journal, had the same thought recently: "Russia today is reproducing the very conditions that led Marx and Engels a century and a half ago to write 'The Communist Manifesto.' If capitalism had remained stuck in those Victorian conditions, Marx's prediction of intensified class warfare and capitalism destroyed by its internal contradictions might very well have been fulfilled...The big-bang enthusiasts forget the lessons of history when they call on governments in the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to leap to an uncontrolled market without regard for the human debris left in the wake. By reproducing the evils of Victorian capitalism, they carelessly prepare the ground for neo-fascism."¹⁷ Schlesinger could have noted that every known political leader in the west, liberal and conservative, along with the Establishment press, stood by while the international bureaucrats who serve them counseled the Russian leaders toward the big-bang abyss. Moreover, when Boris Yeltsin tore up the Russian constitution and blew up the Parliament, on the grounds that they were interfering with his big-bang reforms, western political leaders and the Establishment press celebrated Yeltsin's victory for democracy.

What would Marx observe unfolding in China, which is, of course, still technically a communist state? First, it would please him enormously that China is now the fastest growing economy in the world. Just as he greatly admired the United States of the 19th century, with a government subservient to a fluid society and its own brand of untrammeled, klondike capitalism, he would see China at a similar stage of development. The western intellectual aristocracy remains befuddled, transfixed by China's explosive breakout. What is going on under their noses is a rampant, democratic capitalism developing from the bottom up, with Beijing's Communist Party standing aside to keep from being trampled by the unleashed energies of 1.2 billion ordinary people. Marx and Ludwig von Mises would both cheerfully observe that there is no Big Business in China! The remnants of the Chinese business class escaped to Taiwan years ago, just at the point it was congealing into a new oligarchy. The political oligarchy of the "Gang of Four" that fostered Mao's cultural revolution was itself humbled by the social collapse of manic egalitarianism. These are young Chinese who are starting fresh, advised to get rich! by an 89-year-old admirer of Marx and the historic forces of production.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the principal Establishment voices in America, are horrified by all this. China is setting a bad example, its ordinary citizens actually getting rich by paying no attention whatever to the IMF, World Bank, the U.S. Treasury, or the British colonial interests in Hong Kong. When Deng Xiaoping looks for outside advice, he draws upon the Chinese diaspora in Singapore and Hong Kong, now patching things up with the Taiwanese. The Times frets and worries that every adult Chinese will soon own a car, spewing gases into the atmosphere and enlarging the ozone hole. The Journal huffs and puffs about a handful of "political prisoners" in China whose "human rights" have been violated, in that they were not permitted by the administrative authorities to break laws or overthrow the existing government. Marx would certainly predict that unless the Communist Party gives way to universal suffrage and active democracy, China will eventually produce a new commercial and intellectual aristocracy that will lead to another round of class struggle.

Indeed, the only argument left to an embarrassed American Establishment is in the suggestion that China is growing like hell because it is being run by an elite. Charles Horner of Washington's Madison Center spins this out in the January 1994 Commentary: "Indeed, it may be that the growing fascination of Western intellectuals with China reflects their recognition that, with the end of socialism, Confucianism in action is the last remaining thing around that demonstrates what rule by the 'best and the brightest' can achieve. No wonder, then, that intellectuals seem to suffer so much less from the uneasiness that has come to afflict others as 'Western liberalism' confronts the new power of the 'Confucian ethic' and begins to retreat from it."¹⁸

These western intellectuals had for years trumpeted the glories of modern Japan, where the "best and the brightest" ignored the interests of ordinary Japanese and planned out a kind of elite capitalism that would soon swallow up the world. Suddenly, Japan not only looks mortal, but also exudes a sense of panic, as the "best and the brightest" have lost control of their money-making mechanism. In looking at the Japanese, Marx would probably observe that their political mechanisms are deficient, that the ruling class is unable to understand that its problem is class congestion. He would sympathize with newly-elected Prime Minister Hosakawa's attempts to subdue the elite bureaucracy, which looks after the interests of the corporate oligarchs who for decades fed at the trough of the Liberal Democratic Party that Hosakawa defeated. Marx and Von Mises would easily understand that the heart of Japan's current economic distress is a system of taxation designed to serve the top at the expense of the bottom. Marx and Engels were passionate advocates of a progressive income tax, but not one that would strike hardest at the masses while protecting the wealth of Japan's corporate nobility. They would be horrified to find shop clerks and teenage apprentices around the world facing steep income tax progressions that they intended for the plutocrats.

In Latin America, Marx would see the ranks of ordinary people everywhere stirring, via nascent democracy, against the privileged oligarchs of the region -- the commercial and intellectual aristocracy that patterned its rule after that of Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain and Portugal's Salazar. In pondering the "Marxist" revolution in Cuba, Marx would probably view young Fidel Castro as a positive force, leading the exploited peasantry against the entrenched elite. He would, though, be as critical of Castro's economy-by-decree, authoritarian rule, and international adventurism as he would have been of the Soviet elite. Marx would not have rushed into Cuban socialism any more than he would have leaped from Russian feudalism to Soviet communism, skipping entirely the dynamism of capitalism. He would have instead advised young Castro to secure the revolution against the return of the oligarchs, now exiled in Florida, by designing a radical, grass-roots democracy and subjecting his own whims of governance to a vote of the people.

In contemplating the United States he so much admired 150 years ago, Marx would still see signs of the rough-and-tumble, fluid political economy in which the mighty can still fall when competing with people born of ordinary means. He would also see telltale signs of aging, though, of a state that now sees itself as pre-eminent, not the subservient instrument of the masses he observed during America's youthful heyday. He would be pleasantly astonished at how thoroughly the ownership of the means of production had been dispersed among the general population, through financial instruments and markets that scarcely existed in his day. He would not find the classless society of his ideal, though, but an underclass beneath an overclass. He would find a corporate and social establishment grown long in the tooth, using all its political weight to protect itself -- with armies of lawyers and accountants, a paid-for intellectual aristocracy in the schools and the news media, and effective control of all the organs of government.