Another worthwhile point from Harper:
But I think what you’re getting at, though … Marx talks about capitalism as the icy waters of egotistical calculation that dissolve all traditional boundaries and faith and religion, etc. It’s always worth noting, because I think this is something that always gets lost when people talk about Marx. Marx admired that about capitalism. He admired that it created this profusion of new technologies that have bolstered industry, and he admired too, that it broke down what he saw as religion, which he viewed as the opiate of the masses, broke down traditional culture, et cetera, because he thought all of those things are barriers on the road to socialism. We will leave all the trappings of traditionalism, religion or whatever behind and live in the flowering communist utopia of milk and honey or whatever.
But I think what a lot of Marxist accounts get wrong is not understanding [that] tradition is the brakes on capitalism. The brakes on the economic forces that you are rightly angry about is tradition, in many cases is religion. Who is a bigger problem for the American economy? Somebody who is single into their 30s because they just want to have fun and they live in a big city, and when their job transfers them to San Francisco, they can pack up and move and they have no attachments and they have kids late, etc. Or is it somebody who gets married in their 20s, is religiously conservative and does not want to move to the big job in the city and wants to stay in the town they grew up in? Obviously, the second person is a much bigger problem for capitalism than the socially progressive, enlightened, living out my truth first person. So Marxists in general have been insufficiently appreciative of the way in which Tradition, Etc. is a really, really important check on the unfettered forces of market expansion and the turning of everything into a commodity.…
The left imagines you can have an anti-traditionalist society or whatever that also is anti-capitalist, and I’m not sure if that is true or not. I mean … there’s a French Marxist named [Michel] Clouscard, who always jokes that the cultural world view that governs America and the West is left libertarianism. And, he says, it’s a world in which everything is permitted, but nothing is possible, right? You can do whatever you want, you can love whoever you want, you can live however you want, et cetera, but economically nothing is possible.
This is, I think, essential if still debatable. For something like it, see Alan Jacobs on “metaphysical capitalism.”