David CapenerWe are midway through the 200th anniversary of one of the greatest thinkers of recent centuries, Karl Marx. This I contend is cause for celebration and also reflection. In this piece, published here at Northern Slant, Sam Allen is highly critical of Marx. In what follows I want to offer an alternative perspective.
My argument — one that is not uncommon — is that there is ‘Marx’, Marx and ‘Marxism’. ‘Marx’, is what happens in Marxian scholarship, which falls broadly into two strands. The first strand is an almost religious impulse to recover the doctrines of the so-called original and pure Marx — of which there isn’t one. The second tries to update Marx for our age by rereading him through other more current thinkers — Marx through Foucault or Derrida etc.
Marxism, as presented by Allen, using the all-too-familiar and unfortunately reductionistic, throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater-along-with-all-of-the- bathroom-fittings-fixtures-and-accessories argument, is something altogether very different; something totally unrecognisable from what you find in Marx’s vast corpus of work. It’s like deciding you don’t like the Beatles because you once saw a really bad Turkish funk-fusion Beatles cover band.
And then there is Marx…
Put very simply the project of Marx can be broken into three interconnected phases: the revolution of the proletariat (working class); the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state. The first phase is — as Marx and Engles wrote in their masterpiece The Communist Manifesto — the worker breaking free from the oppressive chains of the capitalist overlords. For example, if the illegal Chinese workers hired by Amazon (see The Observer Sunday 10th June 2018) took control of the factory in which they are being subjected to unfair and illegal working conditions and implemented fair working conditions for all then they would be trying to break free from chains that unfairly bind them.
For Marx, if this were to happen not just in the one factory but multiple factories, and as he wrote, the workers of the world united — or more accurately “proletarians of all countries, unite!” then it might be possible that a government of the proletariat could be formed. But, and this is important, this newly formed government is not the culmination of the process, it is merely a transitionary phase towards something much more revolutionary — the withering away of the state; what would later get called “autogestion”. A difficult phrase to translate, but in essence, it means grassroots management.
This, as post-Marx thinkers like Henri Lefebvre pointed out, is essential to understanding the ways in which so-called communism has been used as an oppressive form of governmentality throughout the 20th century — the revolutionaries, as philosopher Gilles Deleuze once said, find that the uniform fits all too comfortably, and what started as a revolution quickly turns into that which it was seeking to over-through — sound familiar?
What would Marx have said about 20th-century communism? Probably something similar to what he was reported as saying to the French socialist journalist and politician Jules Guesde “ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas marxiste” (“what is certain is that [if they are Marxists], [then] I myself am not a Marxist”). In short: there are Marxism’s and there is Marx. Do we do away with Friedrich Nietzsche because Eva Anna Paula Hitler introduced his works to her husband who then totally misinterpreted them?
Let’s return for a moment to this idea of the withering away of the state. ‘A totally absurd idea! An impossible utopian ideal! A socialist fantasy!’ Says the capitalist while conveniently forgetting that since Keynes and Hayek this has been precisely the trajectory that free-market ideology has been on. Thus the history of neo-liberal economic ideology can be framed as such: the revolution of the market; the dictatorship of the capitalist and the withering away of the state so that the market, with the sate in its service, can an operate in an unregulated fashion — if this is not so, why is the U.S Treasury populated with executives from Goldman Sachs? Have we forgotten the unregulated practices of the worlds global banks as they pumped more and more debt into the hands of people whose wage packets would never be big enough to pay the debts back. Were we deaf to the sound of the economy imploding in 2008?
At the risk of oversimplifying the matter free-market capitalism works around two core principles: trade and competition. The market is open, everyone, supposedly has the free right to trade (it’s just that some are freer than others), but for this to succeed in its goal —creating maximum profit in the form of surplus value that can be reinvested back into the market— it must take place in a competitive market. This is important to understand; competition inevitably creates inequality thus free-market capitalism only works where there is inequality. As one writer put it, it is “only inequality [that] has the capacity to produce a dynamic that pushes [people] to compete one with the other.”
Are we blind to the inequalities and injustices of aggressive free-market capitalism? With the global precariat conveniently out of sight and out of mind, hidden in some corner of the world, in vast warehouses, working long hours for — if they are lucky — a minimum wage, where their rights can be viciously exploited, we in the west can continue to live under the pretence that capitalism is working. It isn’t. As Marx would put it, in a capitalist society, exchange value will always inevitably trump use value. In a free-market capitalist society, the use value of people, cities and the environment must always submit to exchange value.
Marx’s ideas are far from perfect but they were driven by a profound sense of the injustices present in the world. He vigorously sought a better possible world. Not a world tethered to imaginary transcendent ideologies of gods, fairytales, and monsters, but real, tangible, concrete practices. He was, as Ernst Bloch wrote “a prophet of the asphalt.” He wanted a world where the marginalised and the poor would not be exploited. Where the economy would not be rigged towards inequality and where communities of people would be able to manage their own affairs. Not under some kind of pseudo-Marxian communist dictatorship but as individuals working together in communities for the greater good of society.
Marx was one of the greatest thinkers of recent centuries. To suggest that “there is nothing to celebrate” at this 200 year anniversary is a mistake. I agree with Allen, this anniversary should also be a memorial day. A memorial to the many millions of victims of aggressive free-market capitalism. It is capitalism that we must challenge not Marx.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” — Karl Marx
For an excellent book on the life and work of Karl Marx I would recommend this published by Verso.
