Happy birthday to Karl Marx
MAY 5 is the birthday of Karl Marx, author of Capital.
When I first took an interest in socialist politics, I came to it from an anarchist perspective, determined not to repeat the totalitarian mistakes of the left's past. I saw engaging with Marx as a very slippery slope. Merely reading him would result in a Bolshevised version of The Santa Clause effect, turning me into a Stalinist overnight, developing a penchant for military regalia and unfortunate facial hair.
Noam Chomsky--who would be my socialist Father, Son and Holy Ghost--was dismissive of the man, saying: "If the field of social and historical and economic analysis was so trivial that what somebody wrote a hundred years ago could still be authoritative, you might as well talk about some other topic. But as I understand Marx, he constructed a somewhat interesting theory of a rather abstract model of 19th century capitalism."
For too long, I took his word for it. Chomsky, I think, grew up in an era when coherent structural critiques of capitalism were common. So it was easy to think of Marx as superfluous. I was not so lucky. The anarchist writers I drifted toward were so anti-ideological as to provide little help. And my thinking, which could have been so much clearer, suffered from putting off Marx.
For instance, most people know intuitively that capitalists, those upstanding members of society we call "business leaders," are parasites. Marx's theory of surplus value explains exactly how this is so.
His biographer Francis Wheen wrote, "Not since Jesus Christ has an obscure pauper inspired such global devotion--or been so calamitously misinterpreted."
The more I read Marx, the more I believe this. That foreboding I had regarding certain elements of his thought was unfounded.
For instance, as I understand it, Marx's infamous phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" was an unfortunate rhetorical choice. It carries a sense of totalitarianism which it did not have in the 19th century. After all, Marx referred to the capitalist republics of his time as "dictatorships of the bourgeoisie," and, perhaps most tellingly, his close collaborator Frederick Engels referred to the Paris Commune of 1871, which enjoyed universal suffrage, as a model of the "dictatorship of the proletariat."
I think it's high time we reappraise the legacy of Karl Marx to reflect, not simply the "poet of commodities" that philosopher Slavoj Zizek says Wall Street would reduce him to, but the revolutionary thinker he was. I think it's time we realize that we have not reached, as Francis Fukuyama has said, "the end of history." One day we will live in a more equitable, democratic society and have Marx partly to thank.
Happy Birthday, Karl!
Jon Hochschartner, Lake Placid, N.Y.
