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Cheers, Mr Revolution

Was Karl Marx history's greatest optimist? Paul Foot finds that he is hated for all the wrong reasons Karl Marx, by Francis Wheen (432pp, Fourth Estate, £20)

Saturday October 9, 1999
The Guardian

There were only 11 people huddled together in Highgate Cemetery for the burial of Karl Marx in March, 1883. At the end of a short speech his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels described Marx as 'the best hated and most calumniated man of his times.' That hate and calumny had a specially persistent quality.

For most rebels, socialists and even revolutionaries, death brings relief from high-born abuse. Hated though they were by top people in their lifetime, after their death men like Aneurin Bevan, Keir Hardie and even James Connolly were treated with sympathy and even appreciation. Detestation of Karl Marx, however, has persisted for over a hundred years. Again and again his works are denounced as poisonous, irrelevant or obscure. In a passage quoted by Francis Wheen the former Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, who had spent much of his youth poring over dull footnotes about the British railway system, remarked that he had only got as far as page two of Marx's Capital. 'I felt that two sentences of main text and a page of footnotes was too much,' he explained.

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The most decisive counter to Marx was by Karl Popper who simply took Marx's predictions and, one by one, showed how he was wrong.

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The most decisive counter to Marx was by Karl Popper who simply took Marx's predictions and, one by one, showed how he was wrong.

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Hasn't that been done with Popper ?

I recall around the time of the Communist Manifesto's sesquicentenary a few years ago there were quite a number of articles in the Economist and other conservative publications conceding that Marx was remarkably prescient and that his analysis of how capitalism works merits study to this day.

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The prophet of capitalism
Dec 23rd 1999
From The Economist print edition

LIKE most professional writers, Karl Marx worked best up against a deadline. The “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was written in a few days of round-the-clock creative inspiration in Brussels in January 1848. This intensive, adrenalin-fuelled, intellectual focus produced what was to become the world’s best-selling political pamphlet.

The comrades of the Communist League back in London had imposed the deadline the previous December, after a ten-day brainstorming session in a room above a pub, the Red Lion in Soho. Marx was charged with getting their new-year resolutions down on paper. He missed January 1st, but, with input—though none of the actual writing—from his friend Friedrich Engels, the German text was in print by February.

And then? This pamphlet that was to have an impact on politics worldwide raised barely a quiver of immediate interest. The French revolutionaries of 1848 never saw it. It did not appear in Russian until 1869. It took the Russian revolution of 1917, 34 years after Marx’s death, to make the world take note.

It has been Marx’s misfortune that what he wrote as a tract for the times has been taken (by his supporters) as eternal truth or (by his critics) as an attempt thereat. But the Communist manifesto was in fact rushed out to try to rally the forces of the proletariat in the “year of revolutions”, 1848. The year saw major revolts against the reigning imperial monarchies in France, Germany and Austria. Even in England, the Chartists, feted by Engels as the world’s first organised working-class movement, threatened the bourgeois order with a monster demonstration, which promised to bring insurrection to the heart of London. Alas for Marx and Engels, the Chartists got no farther than Kennington Common, in south London, where they were halted by the forces of law and order under the aged Duke of Wellington.

The status quo survived the year of revolutions in mainland Europe too, if not without the odd casualty. Marx enjoyed a boisterous year in Germany, the land of his birth, trying to turn the nascent democratic movement in a more revolutionary direction. He failed, and made his home in London for the rest of a studious life, spent mainly in the reading-room of the British Museum, though punctuated with occasional rumbustious pub-crawls. The first volume of “Das Kapital” appeared in 1867; its author died in 1883; and 1894 brought the land of his refuge its first stab at a Labour party which, like today’s version, owed little to either.

Communism did better elsewhere, but not as Marx had predicted in its manifesto. It did not prove “inevitable”. The Russian revolution was imposed ruthlessly from above, the Chinese one by guerrilla war. As a guide to the sworn enemy, capitalism, however, Marx was more prescient. His account of the reasons for the survival and prosperity of capitalism has never been bettered. In a famous passage, he wrote that

"Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air."

And not just in capitalism’s homelands:

"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilisation."

And so capitalism evolved into globalisation. All other systems, communism included, found themselves chasing shadows. For once, Marx was proven right.

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Books on Marx aimed at undergraduates and non-specialists continue to sell steadily in Western Europe and the United States. And new ones keep coming. For instance, Verso has just published, to warm reviews, “Marx's Revenge” by Meghnad Desai, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics. Mr Desai argues that Marx was misunderstood and that the great man was right about far more than he is given credit for. In August, Oxford University Press published “Why Read Marx Today?” by Jonathan Wolff. It too is an engaging read. The author, a professor at University College London, is a particularly skilful elucidator of political philosophy. In his book, he argues that Marx was misunderstood and that the great man was right about far more than he is given credit for.

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The core idea that economic structure determines everything has been especially pernicious. According to this view, the right to private property, for instance, exists only because it serves bourgeois relations of production. The same can be said for every other right or civil liberty one finds in society. The idea that such rights have a deeper moral underpinning is an illusion. Morality itself is an illusion, just another weapon of the ruling class. (As Gyorgy Lukacs put it, “Communist ethics makes it the highest duty to act wickedly...This is the greatest sacrifice revolution asks from us.”) Human agency is null: we are mere dupes of “the system”, until we repudiate it outright.

What goes for ethics also goes for history, literature, the rest of the humanities and the social sciences. The “late Marxist” sees them all, as traditionally understood, not as subjects for disinterested intellectual inquiry but as forms of social control. Never ask what a painter, playwright, architect or philosopher thought he was doing. You know before you even glance at his work what he was really doing: shoring up the ruling class. This mindset has made deep inroads—most notoriously in literary studies, but not just there—in university departments and on campuses across Western Europe and especially in the United States. The result is a withering away not of the state but of opportunities for intelligent conversation and of confidence that young people might receive a decent liberal education.

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Alot of what Marx & Engels wrote about the nature of capitalism is still very relevant today...sometimes I think even more relevant.

Where they got it wrong was what to do about it.

[ 11 August 2003: Message edited by: radiorahim ]

[ 11 August 2003: Message edited by: radiorahim ]

[ 11 August 2003: Message edited by: radiorahim ]

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Regardless of ideology people will still be using Marx to understand the world long after Popper's been forgotten.

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According to Popper, none of them came true. So, is Marx worth studying if his methodology doesn't work?

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I agree with that, but think that Marxism has a substantial value as a social science, which I take to be a methopd of understanding humans and their relationships with other humans. Obviously, given the idea of free will, these relationships cannot ever reduce themselves to the careening of hard atomic pieces around a box.

But I do not think Marx thought that such a reduction was possible, either.

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Originally posted by marcy:
In fact, as I learned from some pretty impressive professors (including Martin Nicolaus, who translated Marx's "Grundrisse") a long time ago, it was Marx who put the politics (meaning the imperative of subjectivity, or conscious political action) back in "poltical economy." His later writings demonstrate that he was not, as he is often accused of being by those who don't know, an economic 'determinist.' Of course, he was not consistent through his life but, always, he was an optimist, believing in the fundamental goodness of human beings and in their (eventual) capacity to pursue, freely, the highest intellectual, artistic and moral goals. We're still waiting, of course - and only in doing is there possibility. His life and times, particularly the London years, are absolutely fascinating. Has anyone read a biography of one of his daughters - Eleanor Marx Aveling - and her (totally) ne'er do well husband, Richard?

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It is in this sense that Marx is such an interesting figure to me. On the one hand, you have someone bound and determined to subvert the traditional heirarchy of metaphysics - placing human action at the centre of the world. In this he was wholly revolutionary (and in some ways the 'friend' of that other iconclast, Neitzsche.) for his time. On the other hand, we have someone deeply steeped in the Enlightenment vision of the steady progression of 'mankind' toward an evermore rational, politically and intellectually unfettered, individualistic way of being based on principles of reason.

So what of Marx in a supposedly post-Enlightenment age? What this leads us to is the work of the Frankfurt School and other modern leftist critical theorists. Their pursuit of Marxian theory lead them to question that Enlightenment narrative in which Marx's position was based. This has lead to a host of interesting results. One of those is the Enlightenment-affirming position of Habermas. In fact, some of us are planning to start a reading and discussion of Habermas as he relates to Marx's social theories. . Please feel free to join, one and all.

[ 12 August 2003: Message edited by: Courage ]

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Class war is the sine qua non of Marx. But the class war, if it ever existed, is over. In western democracies today, who chooses who rules, and for how long? Who tells governments how companies will be regulated? Who in the end owns the companies? Workers for hire—the proletariat. And this is because of, not despite, the things Marx most deplored: private property, liberal political rights and the market. Where it mattered most, Marx could not have been more wrong.

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Right. I'm provoked.

Marx's monument, even more than the grave in Highgate Cemetery (that's New Highgate Cemetery, too -- you should see the Old one ), is his analysis of capitalism, a reductive form of which even the capitalists have swallowed.

It's funny, y'know: when I was a kid, the respectable captains of industry I used to stare at in my church would never have called themselves capitalists -- that lingo would, in the 1950s, have identified one immediately as a pinko fellow-traveller.

But sometime in the intervening decades, the bourgeoisie gave up trying to pretend that they were anything other than what they are. Even they now shamelessly use the terms of Marxian analysis. As the Economist article shows, they are still in denial about class -- but they otherwise all speak Marx, most of them without even knowing it.

"When philosophy begins to paint grey in grey, a form of life has grown old ..."

I haven't read anything by Habermas and nothing from Marcuse in years (no wonder he's been dead since the late 70's).

Christopher Caldwell's Illusion and Reality is another interesting book. All deal with the idea that culture is the product of our social relations and reciprocally these relations are in turn modified by culture. Herein lies the hope for social change...

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Anyone else want to have a discussion about the guy who invented every worthwhile idea (there are a few) the "post-modernists" claim as their own?

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That would be Nietszche, of course.

I attended that same Marcuse lecture! I do not remember any flowers, (which I think is a Soviet custom, not particularly anti-feminist) but I also do not remember a word he said. Also, it was at the University of Wisconsin, not in California!

I was sympathetic to the fact the conciousness of those workers was not able to formulate and organize such a plan. These workers Marcuse would describe as the lumpen proletariat perhaps. they are just fed enough to keep them from rebelling and taking the system. Capital is aware of the contradictions and does the minimal amount to ensure any social pressure for change is released.

This is why a social movement is important because it can aid in the development of ideological pathways to different levels of conciousness. Recognizing these difficulties is essential to get a correct overview or perspective on the problem.

I am planning to read some of Habermas' stuff, Gramsci too. But it seemed that I was too much into existential ennui (i.e. couldn't be bothered) back when I was dabbling in critical theory...