Karl Marx

From Hobson's Choice

Political philosopher and critic of both capitalism and orthodox economics. Born 5 May 1818 in Trier (modern Germany); died 14 March 1883 in London. Organized the International Workingmen's Association, out of which emerged the Communist International (Comintern).

1 Some Misconceptions of Marx
- 1.1 Marx's "Invention" of Communism
- 1.2 Idealized Communism
2 See Also
3 External Links

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Some Misconceptions of Marx

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Marx's "Invention" of Communism

Karl Marx did not invent Communism, and would probably have been disgusted with such a notion. What he did do was contribute massively to a systematic critique of capitalism and the then-prevailing principles of Classical Economics. In 1867, his first volume of Das Kapital (Capital) was published; three years later, economics underwent a dramatic shakeup commonly referred to as the Marginalist Revolution. Thereafter, while much of his criticism was obsolete, a good deal remained very trenchant.

Marx was formally trained in philosophy, which was much more important a field of research in early 19th century Germany than in other times and places. At the time, the most prominent German philosopher was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831); one of his students, a Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), developed a devastating critique of Hegel's outlook, and this was a strong influence on Marx.^[1] Hegel was a political conservative and defender of religious orthodoxy; Feuerbach was a political liberal and atheist; Marx and Engels were political radicals and materialists whose radicalism stemmed from the new "Hegelian" (actually, "Feuerbachian") intuition of historical progress. From the analogy of ideas to historical progress, the Marxists developed the idea of a progression from feudalism to capitalism to Communism.

As mentioned above, there was no prospect of inventing Communism in 19th century Europe, since the ideology tended to occur naturally to observers of the day. Communal living played a prominent role in the New Testament accounts of the apostles, and through the Middle Ages was regarded as an ideal social organization. In contrast, capitalism was regarded by nearly everyone in the early 19th century as a shocking new perversion of the social order. Among the socialists of his day, Karl Marx was unusual in rejecting the business of designing a Communist society since he believed such a society would arise in accordance with conditions he could not properly anticipate. More properly, Marx's collected works reflect the prevailing attitudes of the day among the literati, the aristocratic, and the intelligentsia towards the great social challenges posed by economic conditions.

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Idealized Communism

Marx was not Lenin; and the form that Communist regimes eventually took was not exactly his fault. However, it must be conceded that Marx believed his analysis explained the whole of the social order, and that a powerful, centralized, and conspiratorial Communist party would need to transform society once it seized power. This was to require a period known as the dictatorship of the proletariat, about which Communists were deeply divided. Some, such as the Social Democratic parties of Western Europe, rejected this component of Marx's ideology and patiently endured his excoriations about it; others, including Engels, argued that a class dictatorship was very different from the usual concept of junta rule, and therefore did not imply any form of authoritarianism, police state, or tyranny; and still others, such as Lenin, argued that any diffuse notion of power under the aforementioned proletarian dictatorship was absurd. In other words, while Marx had been willfully vague about what a dictatorship of the proletarian class was, his admirers split over whether such a dictatorship implied a dictatorial political order, or could have been democratic (from the point of view of the proletarian class).

Efforts to square the circle, including by Engels, have been woefully lacking. For example, Marx personally had served as a correspondent in the USA during the US Civil War. Marx was unusually and profoundly pro-US for the time, to the point of doubting that the USA would require a revolutionary transition to Communism. He might have analogized the Union (with its majority of the US population) to the proletarian class, democratic but waging a war to achieve a "Union dictatorship" over the Confederacy (or over the entire USA). However, the problem with the analogy is that the USA had evolved all of the elements of "bourgeois democracy" well in advance of the Civil War; it seems unlikely that the USA could have survived as a democracy if the 1861-1865 Civil War had erupted in, say, 1786 (as the states met to draft a constitution). But Marx's idea of a revolution to destroy the bourgeois state, followed by a civil war during which the proletarian class establishes a monopoly of power, precludes the formation of a "proletarian democracy" except under miraculously favorable conditions.

Hence, it is fair to say that Marx did lent his immense prestige to the dogma of Jacobinist totalitarianism.

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External Links

The Marxist Internet Archive has an immense trove of the writings of Marx & Engels. Of special interest are:

Karl Marx, Capital, vol 1 (1867); vol 2 (1885), & vol 3 (1894); Marxist Internet Archive
Rudolf Hilferding, Böhm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx, Socialist Labour Press, Glascow, (1904?/1920)

By Duncan K. Foley, Graduate Faculty, New School University