COMES, COMRADE, THE REVOLUTION…

There are very few positive portrayals of capitalists in Western culture, especially literature and film. Off hand,

I can think of only a couple of cases.

Many of Dickens’ small employers are improbably benevolent – figures such as the Cherryable brothers in “A Christmas Carol” are really more like surrogate parents than employers. And Dickens’ belief in employer goodness didn’t really survive the era of industrialization – the mill owners of “Hard Times” are exceedingly grim agents of destruction. The only other exception I can think of would be Ayn Rand, but her following is limited by a romantic view of individual enterprise that is many, many cows deep onto the territory of “Rancho Cowdung.”

From the oblivious bourgeois mine owners of Zola’s “Germinal,” to the rapacious railroad barons of Frank Norris’ “The Octopus,” there is no shortage of stock figures that put profit above all other considerations. But the point is that these people are uniformly considered to be evil, not simply performing a neutral economic function. In fact, in the latter two books (and dozens of others), the capitalists who grind their employees are the subjects of violent attacks, which the authors clearly consider to be justified.

Perhaps the most extreme elaboration of this theme can be seen in the Roman Polanski film “Chinatown.” For those of you who have never seen it, John Huston plays a Los Angeles land developer in the 1920s whose manipulation of the area’s water supply not only enriches him but destroys thousands of innocent farmers. His internal corruption and greed is portrayed as being so extreme that it leads him to impregnate his own daughter and force her to have the child. It’s a portrait of capitalism that borders on the satanic.

misunderstanding marx

So who are the good guys? Who are the people that our culture holds up as business heroes? This is the only time you’re ever going to read these two names in the same sentence: Jimmy Stewart and Karl Marx.

Marxism is far more neutral in assessing the moral role of the capitalist than is commonly understood. Marx realized quite early that capitalism meant the overthrow of all static economic relationships and the development of constant economic warfare between economic enterprises on an increasingly global scale. Or as he put it, capitalism “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production.” So, Marx would actually consider the employer who slashed wages or resorted to mass firings as acting wholly in accord with the demands of the economic system and being morally neutral. Of course, Marx considered the system that would cause its agents to act in such a matter to be a moral abomination, so we’re not talking about much positive reinforcement for the slash-and-burn school of management.

There is one genuine culture hero in all this gloom – Jimmy Stewart in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Most of you have seen it: Stewart’s character, George Bailey, risks all he has financially and personally to save his building and loan society, his depositors and his employees from a greedy old local banker who engineers a run on the thrift. The point is that Bailey is a hero not because the thrift is a success but because he is willing to face impoverishment to save the people whose lives are entwined with it – employees and customers.

We’ve come a long way from Jimmy Stewart. Not only do we no longer live in such a world, we may have gone so far in the opposite direction that we don’t even sympathize with the impulse.

I find that every bit as terrifying as I find it sad beyond measure.

Ted Tyson is chief investment officer of Mastholm Asset Management LLC in Bellevue, Wash. This article was excerpted from his View from the Mast newsletter.