MARX STILL EVOKES STRONG EMOTIONS

Germany, especially his hometown Trier, is divided over his legacy as a Chinese-gifted statue is unveiled to mark his 200th birth anniversary

It’s one of history’s great ironies that the most influential writer of the 20th century lived his entire life in the 19th. But if there was anyone who could appreciate a good historical contradiction, it was Karl Marx. May 5 marked the 200th birthday of Marx, whose ideas defined the political and economic landscape of the previous century. The day affords the opportunity to ask to what extent, if any, those ideas are relevant today.

Marxism has always been polarising, but perhaps the political anomie of 2018 leaves the debate over its relevance less ideologically encumbered than previous milestones. Soviet-style communism has settled into the ash heap of history, and yet, for many, capitalism’s victory has been less than decisive, particularly following the economic crash of 2007, an event that has driven a small but growing number of citizens in advanced industrial nations to question the very foundations of our economic system.

“Marx was the first great critic of capitalism,” says Richard Wolff, a visiting professor at the New School in New York and one of the few Marxian economists in American academia. “And nothing has for certain guaranteed the presence and future of Marxism than the existence of capitalism, of which it is, you might say, the critical shadow.”

A central thesis of Marxism is that capitalism has given rise to two hostile classes: the workers, who in order to survive must exchange their labour for wages; and the bourgeoisie, who own the businesses that pay the workers. The bourgeoisie generate profit by paying their workers less than the entire value of the goods that they produce, keeping the rest for themselves.

Born on May 5, 1818, Marx arrived in the world amid a tumult of conflicting ideas about who ought to hold power and why. His early journalism, which he took up after completing a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin and failing to secure a professorship, shows the glimmer of an academic discipline that would one day count Marx among its founding fathers: social science.

In 1843, writing for radical newspaper the Rheinische Zeitung he quickly discovered that attempting to wield the scientific method against Prussian state power is a surefire way to be kicked out of the country. Marx and his wife chose Paris. “Like Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai, and Pol Pot, it was only in Paris that Marx became a communist,” says Jonathan Sperber, a University of Missouri historian and author of the 2013 biography, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. Prussian authorities pressured France to exile Marx from the country in 1845. He eventually end up in London in 1849, where he spent the rest of his life.

Marx died in 1883 without witnessing a proletarian revolution. But in 1917, revolutionaries inspired by his words toppled Russia’s government and established history’s first workers’ state. Within 50 years, more than a third of humanity would come to live under an officially Marxist government. Seven decades after those first shots were fired in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks’ grand and bloody experiment came to an abrupt halt with economic collapse and dissolution. To many, communism’s collapse in 1989 signaled the end of Marxism’s relevance.

But something unexpected happened along the way to what should have been capitalism’s triumph. In late 2007, the global economy imploded in a spectacularly Marxian fashion, leaving the banks themselves suddenly beggared and in need of a public bailout. The central myth of neoliberal capitalism, that market economies are inherently self-regulating, had been punctured, observers say.

But this popularity might have more to do with a discontent with capitalism than with an embrace of Marxism.

To Professor Brown, the question of Marxism’s contemporary relevance has two answers: yes and no.

“He has tremendous relevance for our time. And I think there are limitations that have to do with his 19th-century context,” she says, noting that Marx never predicted the central role financial institutions would play in industrial economies.

Yet critical tradition that Marx spawned, which extends across the humanities and social sciences, makes it impossible to contain Marxism entirely in a 19th-century context. — The Christian Science Monitor

But this popularity (of Marxism) might have more to do with a discontent with capitalism than with an embrace of Marxism