Happy Birthday, Karl

Though wrong on many counts, Marx continues to be relevant

Karl Marx, who was born on May 5, 1818, did not have a middle name. It is not known whether that made him feel deprived but he did spawn a philosophy that was intended solely for the benefit of the deprived. He came at their problem from three different angles: A theory of history, a theory of sociology and a theory of economics. No one had done it before in such an integrated way. Marx also got his timing right. When his siren call to the workers of the world to unite against their exploiters, called The Communist Manifesto, was published the good people — Charles Dickens and William Gladstone amongst them — were beginning to recoil in horror at the ruthlessness of industrial capitalism. Dickens wrote novels about it and Gladstone brought in reforming Bills. But it was Marx who said revolt, throw this system out of the window, and hand over all productive assets (that is, capital) to labour. No one took a blind bit of notice for half a century until a bunch of disaffected and maladjusted men in Tsarist Russia adopted Marx in the same way as the nine apostles had adopted Jesus. One of them had a middle name: Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Another also had a middle name — Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. But where Jesus’s apostles preached love to change the world, Marx’s follower’s preached violence. The Tsar, no slouch at violence himself, retaliated with knobs on and thus the seeds were laid for the violent streak in Communism. This was stated most succinctly by another apostle, Mao Zedong, who, in 1927, said political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

The creed of violence did not end with the violent overthrow of the ancien régime. It permeated every pore of Communism, culminating with the horrors of Pol Pot in Cambodia in the late 1970s. Even Marx would have been utterly mortified with what had been done in his name between 1917 and 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev overthrew Communism in a non-violent revolution. In 1990 the USSR collapsed and China adopted ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. Marx was finally dumped on what a third apostle of his, Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, better known as Leon Trotsky had called the ash-heap of history.

Or was he? It seems not, at least if one goes by what Thomas Piketty, a French economist, has pointed out — that the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, and it is evident that capital is gaining over labour. To that extent, Marx continues to be relevant. But Marx failed to foresee that millions of poor have also become richer constituting what Max Weber called the Middle Class. It is this class — which Marx had derisively called the petit bourgeoisie — which undid Marxian economics and thus Marxian sociology. Frightened by the Soviet revolution of 1917, and led by their own prophet called John Maynard Keynes, the capitalist class fought back and created the welfare state paid for by taxing the rich. Marx had not anticipated what game theorists would prove a century later — that people cooperate in ways that reduce their individual welfare a little if it enhances their collective welfare. Benjamin Franklin had put it more simply before signing the American Declaration of Independence: If we do not hang together, he said, we shall surely hang separately.