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| Marx statue in Trier |
by Alex Steiner
On May 5th the world celebrated the 200th
anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx in the German city of Trier. It is
hardly an exaggeration to say that the ideas of no one person of the past two
centuries has had a larger influence on the course of history than Marx.
It is also just as true to say that no one since Jesus has had his ideas so
bastardized and misused as Marx. Marx's philosophy of emancipation was
turned into an apology for state repression and social inequality at the hands
of the Stalinists. Hundreds of millions of people had their impressions of
Marx and his thought colored by that upside-down caricature. It is impossible
to make an objective assessment of Marx and his work without that
consideration.
As with all anniversaries of prominent
figures, one can expect a litany of Op Ed pieces and academic forums. Marx’s 200th birthday is no
exception. It has dawned on the powers
that be in his native country, Germany, that Marx can be commodified and turned
into a tourist attraction. The most publicized of these rituals took place in
the city of Marx’s birth, Trier, where a 15-foot-tall statue of Marx, presented
to the city by the government of China, was unveiled on May 5. The BBC reported that on the day prior to the
unveiling,
President Xi Jinping on Friday gave a high-profile speech
praising Marx as the greatest thinker of modern times.
He urged China's ruling Communist Party
to go back to the roots of Marxism, and said the party would forever remain the
"guardians and practitioners" of its theories.
Students and most civil
servants in China must complete mandatory courses in Marxism.
The irony of this was not lost on the BBC
reporter, who commented,
Despite this, China's capitalist system
is home to hundreds of billionaires and a widening gap between rich and poor. [1]
Yet another news source not know for its
radicalism, CBS, was also moved to comment on this strange event,
Promoting Marx is seen in part as a way for
the Chinese president to strengthen ideological control and counter critics
within the ruling Communist Party unhappy with his move in March to eliminate
presidential term limits. Xi is also general secretary of the ruling Communist
Party, an official that is also not term-limited. [2]
There is historical precedent for a revolutionary
movement being transformed into a doctrine rationalizing
oppression. It should not be forgotten that Christianity, beginning
as a messianic movement of slaves revolting against their oppressors, was in
the next three centuries transformed into the state religion of the Roman
Empire.
One of the consequences of the
bastardization of Marx at the hands of Stalinism has been the reaction against
Marx from the rebellious generation of the 60’s who were disgusted by Stalinist
scholasticism and conflated that with the ideas of Marx. The New Left embodied these contradictions
between a revolutionary impulse and theoretical confusion. But the New Left’s
adoption of what it considered a left alternative to Marx ran aground on the
wreck of the protest movements of the 1960s.
Nevertheless, those impulses from the 1960’s, while theoretically
misplaced, at least had an emancipatory goal, a new world free of
exploitation. The same cannot be said
for some of the mutations of 1960’s era radicalism that we see today. These take the form of an identity politics
hostile to the working class, a revival of ethnic nationalism and an
overarching conviction that nothing fundamental can be done about
capitalism.
Many of these retrograde tendencies were on
display at a celebration of Marx’s 200th Birthday at the Goethe
Institute in New York. The Goethe
Institute is sponsored by the German government and is the organization tasked
with publicizing German culture internationally. While it is a positive development that Marx
is no longer ignored by official German cultural institutions, he cannot be so
easily assimilated.
Unlike other icons of German culture such
as Goethe and Schiller, Marx was a revolutionary whose heritage cannot be
reconciled with the agencies of a bourgeois state. It is hardly surprising
therefore that none of the speakers at the Goethe Institute panel on Marx had
anything to say that would have been remotely recognizable by Marx had he
dropped in. One panelist, a retired law professor claimed that the best
examples of the socialist experiment in recent years could be found in the
“Global South”. She mentioned in that connection Allende’s tenure in Chile
before he was murdered by a CIA inspired coup, as well as certain attempts to
institute “African socialism” by some of the nationalist leaders of Africa such
as Julius Nyerere. This panelist did not seem very curious about why these
experiments failed, while at the same time being dismissive of the far larger
and longer experiment in socialism, the Russian Revolution, which she
considered something primarily of interest to “white people”. Another panelist, a graduate student in
feminist studies, barely concealed her hostility to Marx and Marxism as she
went into a long diatribe on ‘gendered economics’. To his credit another member of the panel,
the Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh, tried to gently correct the muddle
introduced by the feminist student that we must start with gender as a primary
category in all theorizing about society. He pointed out that you cannot start
with gender until you have determined where gender lives. In other words,
gender has a historical context and you cannot conceive of the emancipation of
women without theorizing what an emancipated society looks like. But this was a
minor note in a largely confused symposium in which the ideas of Marx were for
the most part either ignored or conflated in an eclectic manner with all sorts
of other notions that Marx would not have recognized as his own. Nevertheless,
the fact that the Goethe Institute staged a celebration of Marx’s 200th
birthday does indicate a recognition that Marx can no longer be ignored or
dismissed as an alien presence.
It has not always been the case. The
fortunes of Marx’s legacy in his native country has waxed and waned depending
on the political climate. In the latter
years of the 19th century when the Social Democratic Party of
Germany was the largest socialist party in the world and commanded millions of
devoted followers, it was a common practice for workers who passed away to be
buried with a copy of the Communist Manifesto in their coffin. And during the years of the Weimar Republic
Berlin boasted of a street named after Marx. On the other hand, during the Nazi
era, Marx’s connection to German culture was completely eviscerated. He became a prototypical “dirty Jew” in Nazi
propaganda and therefore an alien presence in the German soil seeking to
destroy its greatness. A tract of Nazi propaganda published in 1944 for the
Hitler Youth stated,
Remember how Karl Marx falsified the German
conception of socialism as a natural order of life, based deeply in German
blood, and turned into the phantom of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This
doctrine so deeply mirrored the nature of its Jewish inventor that the world
knew only to connect it to his name: “Marxism.” [3]
In the post-war years Marx was lionized in
East Germany, particularly in films. (Until the release of Raoul Peck’s ‘The Young Marx’ earlier this year,
practically the only films that dealt with Marx or his ideas were produced in
East Germany.) This served the interests of the Stalinist regime in the East
who tried to legitimize their rule at the same time as they suppressed any
dissent to their repressive regime. On the other hand, in West Germany during the
Cold War years, Marx was ignored and marginalized. This only began to change with the rise of
the student movement in Germany in the 1960’s. [4]
The Goethe Institute forum, while
indicating an attempt to come to terms with Marx, could not escape the broad
intellectual climate of our time, which is still largely deaf to that great
thinker. In academia, Marx's scientific
work, laying bare the mechanism of the capitalist mode of production, was
all but ignored and rarely been taken seriously, even by left economists. For
example, the Marxist geographer David Harvey wrote recently,
It is widely believed that Marx adapted the labour theory of value from
Ricardo as a founding concept for his studies of capital accumulation.
Since the labour theory of value has been generally discredited, it is then
often authoritatively stated that Marx s theories are worthless. But nowhere,
in fact, did Marx declare his allegiance to the labour theory of value. [5]
While it may be surprising for an economist
who considers himself a Marxist to dismiss one of the pillars of Marx’s
understanding of capitalism, the labour theory of value, almost in passing, it
is not unusual. He is joined by many
other economists and social scientists claiming to be Marxist or
“post-Marxist”.
On the question of the whether the labour theory of value has been
discredited, Paul Cockshott wrote a good response,
Harvey
claims that the labour theory of value is generally discredited. But in what
sense?
It is
correct to say that the theory is not viewed with favour in economics
departments, but that is for political reasons – the labour theory of value
came, since Gray and Marx, came to be associated with socialism. Since academic
economists, in general, did not want to be tainted with the socialist label
they were at pains to distance themselves from the theory.
But none of
them ever adduced any empirical evidence to refute it. It was socially
discredited but not empirically refuted. [6]
Harvey has also objected to Marx's theory of the falling rate of
profit. He wrote in 2014,
"...those who attribute the
difficulties of contemporary capitalism to the tendency of the profit rate to
fall are, judging by this evidence of labour participation, seriously mistaken.
The conditions point to a vast increase and not a constriction in surplus value
production and extraction."
Harvey was answered by Andrew Kliman
writing in the blog New Left Project,
Harvey’s chief complaint is that the
LTFRP [the law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall] and the theory
of crisis based on it are mono-causal: it ignores other causes of crisis as
well as counteracting factors, and its current proponents typically present it
in a way that ‘exclude[s] consideration of other possibilities’. I will argue
that this is just a strawman.
The real issue is not that anyone has
advocated a mono-causal theory, but that Harvey is campaigning for what
we might call an apousa-causal theory, one in which the LTFRP plays no
role at all (apousa is Greek for ‘absent’). He is the one who is trying
to exclude something from consideration. In light of his emphasis on
capitalism’s ‘maelstrom of conflicting forces’ and its ‘multiple contradictions
and crisis tendencies’, one might expect that he would urge us to consider all
potential causes of crisis, excluding nothing. However, Harvey is not merely
suggesting that other potential causes of crisis be considered alongside the
LTFRP. He seems determined to consign it and the theory of crisis based on it
to the dustbin of history. [7]
I select Harvey as an example not because I think he is a
particularly bad interpreter of Marx, but because he is one of the most widely
recognized Marxist economic theorists working today. He is in fact one of the few people
who take the study of Marx’s Capital seriously and has made important academic
contributions to its dissemination. But
he is typical of many of his colleagues in dismissing the theoretical heart of
Capital.
Marx's theories were also vulgarized by
many of his admirers who turned it into a doctrine of inevitable
collapse. This remains a popular, though completely misunderstood
explanation of Marxism today.
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| Marx's signature on a slip from the Reading Room of the British Museum where he worked on Capital. |
I should add that the Marxian dialectic
remains an enigma to even the devoted few who will defend Marx's economic
theories. This is a topic about which I have written extensively. [8] Nor has there ever been an
honest coming to terms by Marx's followers about the need to extend critical
and dialectical thinking into areas that Marx barely touched. They forget that
Marx’s original project called for 6 volumes and he was only able to complete
the first volume of Capital. And that
was just Capital. Had he lived long enough he undoubtedly would have had
something to say about other areas of life. But the fact that Marx never did
develop his ideas on psychology or art in any systematic fashion has led some
of his followers to proclaim that these topics are either unimportant or
irrelevant.
There is also the question of whether
Marx’s early “humanist” writings can be reconciled with his “mature” scientific
work. I have always considered that
debate something of an intellectual fraud. There is no question that as Marx
matured his understanding deepened and he even reversed his ideas on a number
of questions. But I think it is just as wrong to speak of some break between
the early Marx and the later mature Marx, as if Marx stopped being a humanist
in his mature years or that his scientific work was irreconcilable with his
theory of alienation. That dichotomy was introduced by the work of the French
‘structuralist-Marxist’ Louis Althusser, who defended a “scientific” Marx shorn
of the Hegelian dialectic. Althusser had his counterpart in the school of
Marxist humanists, many of whom prospered in Yugoslavia, Poland and other
Eastern European countries in the 1960’s. This group was looking for a source
of opposition to Stalinist Scholasticism in the early writings of Marx.
Unfortunately, they tended to identify the later writings of Marx with their
Stalinist bastardization. These thinkers championed the early Marx’s writings
on alienation which they viewed as completely divorced from his later
“scientific” work and his theory of revolution.
Many of these defenders of Marxist humanism later embraced nationalism
and anti-communism.
The topic was introduced tangentially at the
Goethe Institute forum when one of the panelists proclaimed her allegiance to
the “humanist” Marx and rejected the interpretation of Marx as
“scientific”. Had I had the opportunity
I would have corrected her by pointing out that there is nothing inconsistent
between humanism and science. The issue however is complicated by the common
misconception that what Marx meant by ‘science’ was something like the
positivist notion of science. [9]
Finally, the Marxian political project is
resting on hard times. The only mass political movements willing to
identify with Marx are Stalinist parties representing the interests
of tiny cliques of oligarchs. The Soviet Union is gone as are all
the deformed workers states of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Political
movements that try to carry out the project envisioned by Marx are practically
without exception tiny grouplets cut off from any mass movement. And
these groups tend to veer off into increasing bouts of sectarianism while
others dissolve their Marxist principles into opportunist cheering of
militancy.
Nevertheless, Marx remains key to
understanding the 21st century. [10] Of course, Marx did
not and could not have anticipated the complex paths and detours taken by
history in the 135 years since his death. Nor was Marx some kind
of biblical prophet whose every prediction turned out be true. To be
scientific is not the same as being infallible. It is necessary to supplement
Marx with the work of other theoreticians, Lenin and Trotsky to be sure, but
others as well, if one is to make sense of phenomena such as imperialism, the
Soviet Union, fascism, the colonial revolution and the age of neo-liberal
austerity.
In the final analysis, it is impossible to
understand our world today without resting on the shoulders of Marx. That
is the basic ground for any theory of political and social emancipation.
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| May Day 2018 in Bangladesh. This worker is depicting the status of the working class still in chains. |
[5] David
Harvey. Marx’s refusal of the labour theory of value, 2018.
[8]
For instance, see my ‘Case study of the neglect of dialectics’,
Unfortunately, most of what
I have written in this area is in the form of a polemic against one sectarian
group and their abandonment of dialectics.
Nevertheless, I think there are some general lessons to be learned from
those polemics for those with the patience to go through them.
[9] See my essay Alienation and Revolution: A Defense of Marx’s Theory of Alienation,
I have also written on this topic as part of an ongoing
polemic against David North. See my defense of Marx’s theory of alienation in
Chapter 6 of ‘Downward Spiral’, pages
155-159;
[10]
Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin,
someone with whom I have profound political differences, nevertheless nicely expressed the views of a new generation when he wrote in an essay titled, ‘Why the ideas of Karl Marx are relevant to the 21st
century’,
For many in
my generation, the ideological underpinnings of capitalism have been
undermined. That a higher percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30
have a more favorable opinion of socialism than capitalism at least signals
that the cold war era conflation of socialism with Stalinism no longer holds
sway.
