Why do people like karl marx

But all-powerful regimes quickly became ends in themselves. In , Soviet dictator Josef Stalin decreed the death penalty for any theft of state property. As millions of Ukrainians were starving due to the brutal collectivization of farms, even children poaching a few ears of corn could be shot. The presumably omniscient, benevolent State. Abolishing private property left people hostage to petty government officials who punished anyone who failed to kowtow to the latest dictates.

More: Trump election anniversary and progressives' delusional race to save democracy. Marxist regimes felt entitled to inflict unlimited delusions on their victims — for the good of the people, or at least proletariats.

East Germans were told the Berlin Wall existed to keep fascists out — even though all the killings by border guards involved East Germans heading West. Marxism promised a utopia , and that unsecured pledge sufficed to treat subjects like serfs bound to endlessly submit and obey.

Anyone who tried to escape was treated as if they were stealing government property. Communism is still often portrayed as morally superior to capitalism because it banishes greedy corporations poisoning people for profit.

But East Bloc regimes became a vast graveyard for Mother Nature. He also perceived, perhaps as well as anyone, the inherent contradictions of capitalism and the volatility of business cycles. Marx got plenty of things wrong, too. He assumed that human nature was plastic and malleable, capable of assuming any form given the right conditions.

In addition to being untrue, this was a ready-made justification for grotesque experiments in social engineering. Marx, foolishly, believed that history had a discernible direction: The progression toward a classless utopia was inalterable and self-evident.

This was Marx at his worst, elevating ideas over experience, hope over logic. In his early writings, he is convinced that capitalism is destined for death. Later, Marx backed off this claim, realizing that capitalism was far more resilient than he initially supposed. By the time his book Capital is released in , more than two decades after The Communist Manifesto was published, he is already imagining communism as a competitor to capitalism rather than its inevitable replacement.

But the revolutionary gusto of early Marx was too seductive for the doctrinaire Marxists that followed in his footsteps. Are the words of Marx responsible for the actions of Marxists?

How do you tell his story in a way that recognizes what he got right as well as what he got wrong? There are countless biographies of Marx — probably too many. But the latest one by Gareth Stedman Jones, a historian of ideas at the University of London, is a remarkable addition. I sat down recently with Jones to talk about the book. I think that we first have to separate Marx from Marxism. I think Marxism is demonstrably wrong in various ways. Whatever we think of him, he gave an amazing picture of the developmental logic of capitalism itself — how it creates world markets, how it invents new needs, how it subverts inherited cultural practices and disregards hierarchies and so on.

What would you say he is most reacting against in his initial writings? Every great thinker is a product of his or her age, but this seems especially true of Marx. Marx is formed intellectually by the 19th-century critiques of religion and Christianity in particular.

He really latches on to the idea that God doesn't create man but man creates God. The subject and object, in other words, are inverted. Marx's innovation is to say that this could be applied not just to God but to other abstractions, like the state or the economy: Man creates these things in the course of history but they appear to him as having independent force, as though he is the creature of them and not the other way around.

Why was this idea that man creates God, not the other way around, such a politically destabilizing declaration? Marx changes the nature and implications of the critique of religion.

Instead of challenging the claims of the Bible or Christianity, he says we have to understand religion, like everything else, in terms of the evolution and history of mankind; that these things we take to be divine or eternal are merely products of human beings, and that by ignoring that fact we allow ourselves to become objects rather than subjects. So when he's critiquing religion it's not because it's untrue but because he thinks it strips people of their sense of agency.

That's quite right. Whether it was true or not would have been something already sort of debated by David Strauss and Bruno Bauer and various others before them and indeed in the 18th century.

So he extends his criticisms to the social and political realm. In other words, human activity led naturally to capitalism. But, over time, we became chained to its progress and thus forgot that we were the creators and that there is always the possibility of creating something new or better or more just. I'm more interested in where Marx gets to by the s, which is to argue that revolution is not so much an event but a process, that it's cumulative. I think he invents a language of social democracy which really spreads in the following 40 or 50 years.

His language and ideas spread, but they also get co-opted and transformed. In the s, Marx still thought that capitalism was an organism, so it would have a birth, a growing up, a maturity, and a death.

But he gradually becomes aware that capitalism is more resilient than that, that it could adjust to overproduction and overpopulation and bad harvests and all the rest. So he actually pivots and starts to believe that primitive communism can somehow survive and bypass capitalist development.

Why is this evolution not reflected in doctrinaire Marxism at the turn of the century? This leads to a kind of religious fidelity to the idea that capitalism is in crisis and revolutions are necessary in order to hasten its collapse. This sort of thinking is what produces the Bolsheviks in the 20th century. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor.

It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only [ Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on.

To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal MARX, , p. An unequal right, in the Marxian sense is specifically related to the superior phase of communism, when the contradictions of bourgeois society inherited by the phase of transition of the capitalist to the communist order would have completely disappeared. For this to take place, although Marx recognizes the limitations of the first phase of communism to in fact realize equality and liberty - or equalitarian liberty, to use Della Volpe's expression - he affirmed that in this phase, these contradictions, born in capitalist society after a long and painful labor, are inevitable.

The law, he maintains, "can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby" MARX, , p. These are the first steps in the direction of an egalitarian society, towards well-being, in which, beyond the transformations of the means of production into common property, realized in the first phase, all of the disparities in the division of the social product are also eliminated and of the inequality of bourgeois law.

Thus, according to Marx , p. In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

This makes it clear that, for Marx, the society of well-being would not be confined to the limits of an economic revolution, that is, of a revolution solely concerned with the socialization of the means of production. In more than one text, in both the young and the mature Marx, political participation is contemplated as an important requirement for transformation, aimed at substantive equality. This thinking is present from his criticisms of the Hegelian ideas of the state MARX, , to his theories about society and political economy, passing through analyses of specific events like those of the revolution of in France, the dictatorship of Louis Napoleon, and the Paris Commune.

Marx between false antitheses: economic versus political and reform versus revolution. It is in his writing on the Paris Commune, which is considered the prelude to his theory of revolution, that his position became clear concerning the problematic discussed until today about: a the priority, or not, of economic over political premises, in social transformation; b the exclusivity, or not, of the participation of workers in this process; and c the rejection, or not, by Marxian theory of the anti-capitalist reformist changes within capitalism.

Concerning the priority of economic premises, Marx affirmed that although the general context of France in did not exhibit the material conditions needed to overthrow the ruling classist monarchical regime, it did not fail to have exceptional super-structural conditions that politically facilitated this intent. Given the weakening of the state apparatus by the French-German War, the workers, even if insufficiently organized, were able to implant, through spontaneous action, forms of direct democracy, which were essential to the emancipatory political action of the proletariat.

Here becomes clear the importance Marx gave to the strategic political struggles for the conquest of power, that is, to the action of individuals. It is this attitude, although it does not disregard economic determinations, in the final instance, that belies the stigma that Marx overemphasized economic factors that is affirmed by those who are restricted to a mechanical interpretation of his reference to "natural laws of capitalist production" in the preface of the first edition of Capital.

Related to this clarification is also the Marxian position concerning the workers participation in revolutionary progress, which reveals once again a refutation of the idea that for Marx, the sole protagonist of history is the proletariat. Effectively, although Marx begins with the principle that only the independent struggle of the proletariat can lead to workers' liberation from the yoke of capital, his analysis of the Paris Commune gives a vote of confidence to the participation of popular groups in the struggle for structural transformation.

Thus, in relation to this event, he demonstrates acceptance of all resources and tendencies that contribute to the reconquering of political power by the popular masses, considering to be most important, in the Republic implanted by the communards of Paris in addition to the substitution of the permanent army by the "armed people" , the creation of an executive committed to the people and administeed by it.

This is what can be inferred from the following statement:. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune.

So were the officials of all other branches of the Administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen's wages. Nevertheless, in terms of the historic importance of the political form assumed by the Commune, which was characterized by alliances between the working class and broad sectors of the French population - the urban petty bourgeoisie and peasants - and by universal suffrage in the election of the directive councils, Marx still did not see this as a socialist revolution, but as a necessary preparatory phase to achieve this goal.

For this reason it is understood that for Marx the Paris Commune represented a concrete example of anti-capitalist reform within capitalism, which took shape in the transition from a monarchy to a republic, and as such, was a prerequisite to a later and more radical transformation. The Commune - an uprising of the discontented masses of the proletariat and petty-bourgeois against the French monarchy - before realizing the transformation of the social and political organization of France into a federation of autonomous municipalities, began to support the route to communism, supported in formulas that, according to Lenin's criticism , signified a petty-bourgeois democratic government; or that is, a popular government that, despite its radical break with the bourgeois state and the implantation of direct democracy, did not outline, as Marx foresaw, the route to future proletarian revolutions; and this is because, among other problems, the revolutionaries confused the struggle for the republic with the struggle for socialism.

Nevertheless, despite the contradictions and obstacles experienced by the Commune, it was the successful preamble to a socialist revolution; and as a process of popular political participation, it continues to be the most significant example of the action of anticapitalist movements linked to Marxian thinking.

In addition, the history of the Commune awoke strong interest among Marxist intellectuals in the West, who came to recognize, according to Mommsen and Meschkat, that Marx's thinking had only become converted into the Marxism that is known today thanks to his reflections about the experiences of the Paris Commune. Moreover, the rebellions of , in France, not only revived even if temporarily the experience of the Commune, but also came to demand a deeper theoretical analysis of political participation, conceived by Marx, in the current revolutionary process, with an eye on a "society" of well-being.

Therefore, the tracing of the concept of well-being in Marx's work will also have to consider his writings on economics and detect in them the reaffirmation of his interest in the conquest of social equality found in his political writings.

Therefore, to detect Marx's involvement with some aspect related to the regulatory action of the state in the social field, and then draw inferences about his position concerning the conquest of well-being by workers at the heart of capitalism, what should be examined is the factory legislation discussed in Capital.

Here, unlike any of the classical theoreticians or even the old and modern socialists, Marx analyzed laws that regulated factory activities the Factory Acts ; reports of the public health authorities; factory inspections; and the various investigative commissions established by the English Parliament. Even so, the study of the factory legislation as an institution for worker protection, assumed a limited scope in his theory.

The analysis merely collaborated with his broader proposal to better understand the social relations of production in its multiple determinations and in its more evolved form of representation and control under capitalism. Therefore, in terms of Marx's contributions, both to the study of legal regulation of capitalist labor processes, and to issues related to the living conditions of workers, and to social programs as in the case of accident prevention, healthcare and education , the profile of his concept of well-being must be detected in passages spread throughout his work.

This is not to say that Marx's analysis of English factory legislation and about equality and liberty cannot indicate elements of a Marxian sociology of well-being. What is to be emphasized is that this sociology, because it is not easily perceivable, becomes fallacious if it is restricted to isolated interpretations of Marxian thought about the theme.

It is in the attempt to avoid this fallacy that I intend to relate Marx's analysis of factory legislation with his positions about political participation inscribed in his reflections on the Paris Commune. And based on this relation, identify the common thread that articulates the philosophical, scientific and political principles that serve as a basis for his transformative vision.

Actually, it is not possible to differentiate the political and scientific limits of Marx's theory and praxis, or of his intellectual and ethical posture, given that these spheres are inseparable. Therefore, it is valid to affirm that there were never breaks between the young and the mature Marx, nor between Marx the philosopher, scientist or political activist.

In reality, Marx's great originality consists essentially in his impressive ability to articulate, with critical creativity, the multiple aspects of social life and the multiple intellectual supports of various thinkers from different tendencies. This fact is substantiated in his analysis of factory legislation, a type of case study within the realm of his theory about labor, in which can also be identified his position in relation to social reform, to the bipolar confrontation of classes and to the priority of the economic over the political, already detected in his writings on the Paris Commune.

Effectively, in his study of factory legislation, Marx reaffirmed his regard for the struggle of workers within capitalism, with the goal of improving their living and working conditions and their salaries.

This, in his perspective, is perfectly compatible with the correlation of forces existing in the realm of the productive system and with the disputes related to the confrontation between the antagonistic interests of the fundamental classes bourgeois and proletariat. Thus, he understands that the effort to achieve the factory legislation to be one of the first conscious reactions of the working class against the exploitation to which it was submitted, and for which they had the support of other groups and class factions, who were also harmed by the privileges and domination of the industrial capitalists, as was the case of the agrarian aristocracy.

Without underestimating the importance of these adhesions to labor's cause a fact that once again indicates his predisposition to emphasize all the forces that contribute to the success of the worker's struggle, and his non-alignment to an orthodox concept of bipolar class conflict , what appeared to him to be more significant in this process was not so much the conquest of this legislation, but the restriction this conquest imposed on the despotism of capital.

This is related to a position counter to the thesis of absolute pauperization, which was incorrectly attributed to Marx. In the understanding that salary is composed of two elements - the physical and the social-historical - Marx affirmed that: the latter element is susceptible to alterations that can result both from spontaneous factors, related to the ups and downs of the economic cycles, as well as the political action of the workers against the reduction of the real salary to that needed to meet their real physiological needs.

It is thanks to the historic-social element of salary that it is possible for the working class to conquer not only salary increases, but to also impose legal restrictions that, beyond the economic "iron law" of salaries, check the propensity of this law to limit the remuneration of the labor force to the absolute minimum.