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Most people agree that we need to improve
our economic system somehow. Yet we’re also
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often keen to dismiss the ideas of capitalism’s
most famous and ambitious critic, Karl Marx.
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This isn’t very surprising. In practice,
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his political and economic ideas have been
used to design disastrously planned economies
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and nasty dictatorships.
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Nevertheless, we shouldn’t reject Marx too
quickly. We ought to see him as a guide whose
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diagnosis of Capitalism’s ills helps us
navigate towards a more promising future.
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Capitalism is going to have be reformed - and
Marx’s analyse are going to be part of any
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answer.
Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany.
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Soon he became involved with the Communist
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party, a tiny group of intellectuals advocating
for the overthrow of the class system and
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the abolition of private property. He worked
as a journalist and had to flee Germany, eventually
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settling in London.
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Marx wrote an enormous number of books and
articles, sometimes with his friend Friedrich Engels
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Mostly, Marx wrote about Capitalism, the type
of economy that dominates the western world.
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It was, in his day, still getting going, and
Marx was one of its most intelligent and perceptive critics.
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These were some of the problems he identified
with it:
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Modern work is “alienated”
One of Marx’s greatest insights is that
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work can be one of the sources of our greatest
joys.
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But in order to be fulfilled at work, Marx
wrote that workers need ‘to see themselves
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in the objects they have created’. Think
of the person who built this chair:
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it is straightforward, strong, honest and elegant
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It’s an example of how, at its
best, labour offers us a chance to externalise
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what’s good inside us. But this is increasingly
rare in the modern world.
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Part of the problem is that modern work is
incredibly specialised. Specialised jobs make
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the modern economy highly efficient, but they
also mean that it is seldom possible for any
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one worker to derive a sense of the genuine
contribution they might be making to the real
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needs of humanity.
Marx argued that modern work leads to
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alienation = Entfremdung
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in other words, a feeling of disconnection
between what you do all day and who you feel
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you really are and would ideally be able to
contribute to existence.
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Modern work is insecure
Capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable;
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just one factor among others in the forces
of production that can ruthlessly be let go
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the minute that costs rise or savings can
be made through technology. And yet, as Marx
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knew, deep inside of us, we don’t want to
be arbitrarily let go, we are terrified of
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being abandoned.
Communism isn’t just an economic theory.
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Understood emotionally, it expresses a deep-seated
longing that we always have a place in the
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world’s heart, that we will not be cast
out.
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Workers get paid little while capitalists
get rich
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This is perhaps the most obvious qualm Marx
had with Capitalism. In particular, he believed
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that capitalists shrunk the wages of the labourers
as much as possible in order to skim off a
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wide profit margin.
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He called this
primitive accumulation = ursprüngliche Akkumulation
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Whereas capitalists see profit as a reward
for ingenuity and technological talent, Marx
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was far more damning. Profit is simply theft,
and what you are stealing is the talent and
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hard work of your work force.
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However much one dresses up the fundamentals,
Marx insists that at its crudest, capitalism
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means paying a worker one price for doing
something that can be sold for another, much
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higher one. Profit is a fancy term for exploitation.
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Capitalism is very unstable
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Marx proposed that capitalist systems are
characterised by series of crises. Every crisis
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is dressed up by capitalists as being somehow
freakish and rare and soon to be the last one. Far from it, argued Marx,
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crises are endemic to capitalism - and they’re
caused by something very odd. The fact that
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we’re able to produce too much - far more
than anyone needs to consume.
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Capitalist crises are crises of abundance,
rather than - as in the past - crises of shortage.
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Our factories and systems are so efficient,
we could give everyone on this planet a car,
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a house, access to a decent school and hospital.
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That’s what so enraged Marx and made him
hopeful too. Few of us need to work, because
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the modern economy is so productive.
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But rather than seeing this need not to work
as the freedom it is, we complain about it
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masochistically and describe it by a pejorative
word “unemployment.” We should call it freedom.
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There’s so much unemployment for a good
and deeply admirable reason: because we’re
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so good at making things efficiently. We’re
not all needed at the coal face.
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But in that case, we should - thought Marx
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the wealth of the massive corporations that
make so much surplus money and give it to
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everyone.
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This is, in its own way, as beautiful a dream
as Jesus’s promise of heaven; but a good
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deal more realistic sounding.
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Capitalism is bad for capitalists
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Marx did not think capitalists were evil.
For example, he was acutely aware of the sorrows
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and secret agonies that lay behind bourgeois
marriage.
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idealized family: http://thephilosophersmail.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/730px-Lily_Martin_Spencer_-_Domestic_Happiness.jpeg
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Marx argued that marriage was actually an
extension of business, and that the bourgeois
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family was fraught with tension, oppression,
and resentment, with people staying together
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not for love but for financial reasons.
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Marx believed that the capitalist system forces
everyone to put economic interests at the
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heart of their lives, so that they can no
longer know deep, honest relationships. He
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called this psychological tendency
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commodity fetishism = Warenfetischismus
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because it makes us value things that have
no objective value.
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He wanted people to be freed from financial
constraint so that they could - at last - start
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to make sensible, healthy choices in their
relationships.
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The 20th century feminist answer to the oppression
of women has been to argue that women should
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be able to go out to work. Marx’s answer
was more subtle. This feminist insistence
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merely perpetuates human slavery. The point
isn’t that women should imitate the sufferings
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of their male colleagues,it’s that men and
women should have the permanent option to
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enjoy leisure.
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Why don’t we all think a bit more like marx?
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An important aspect of Marx’s work is that
he proposes that there is an insidious, subtle
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way in which the economic system colours the
sort of ideas that we ending up having.
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The economy generates what Marx termed an
“ideology”.
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A capitalist society is one where most people,
rich and poor, believe all sorts of things
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that are really just value judgements that
relate back to the economic system: that a
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person who doesn’t work is worthless, that
leisure (beyond a few weeks a year) is sinful,
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that more belongings will make us happier
and that worthwhile things (and people) will
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invariably make money.
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In short, one of the biggest evils of Capitalism
is not that there are corrupt people at the
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top—this is true in any human hierarchy—but
that capitalist ideas teach all of us to be
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anxious, competitive, conformist, and politically
complacent.
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Marx didn’t only outline what was wrong
capitalism: we also get glimpses of what Marx
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wanted the ideal utopian future to be like.
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In his Communist Manifesto he describes a world
without private property or inherited wealth,
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with a steeply graduated income tax, centralised
control of the banking, communication, and
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transport industries, and free public education.
Marx also expected that communist society
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would allow people to develop lots of different
sides of their natures:
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“in communist society…it is possible for
me to do one thing today and another tomorrow,
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to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,
rear cattle in the evening, criticise after
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dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever
becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
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After Marx moved to London he was supported
by his friend and intellectual partner Friedrich
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Engels, a wealthy man whose father owned a
cotton plant in Manchester. Engels covered
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Marx’s debts and made sure his works were
published. Capitalism paid for Communism.
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The two men even wrote each other adoring
poetry.
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Marx was not a well-regarded or popular intellectual
in his day.
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Respectable, conventional people of Marx’s
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day would have laughed at the idea that his
ideas could remake the world. Yet just a few
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decades later they did: his writings became
the keystone for some of the most important
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ideological movements of the 20th century.
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But Marx was like a brilliant doctor in the
early days of medicine. He could recognise
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the nature of the disease, although he had
no idea how to go about curing it.
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At this point in history, we should all be
Marxists in the sense of agreeing with his
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diagnosis of our troubles. But we need to
go out and find the cures that will really
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work. As Marx himself declared, and we deeply
agree:
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Philosophers until now have only interpreted
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the world in various ways. The point, however,
is to change it.