Two
hundred years ago this month, Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany, a
small town in the western part of the country. To celebrate his
bicentennial, the People’s Republic of China donated a larger-than-life
statue of the founder of Communism to the city of his birth, which the
Trier City Council voted to accept. It goes without saying that this
memorialization was controversial, not only because of the devastation
caused throughout the world during the twentieth century in the name of
Marxism, but also because of the still living memory of Communist rule
in East Germany. Henceforth when one thinks of Trier, one should
remember Tiananmen Square.
As if the China connection were not sufficiently provocative, the
Marx commemoration in Trier included a panegyric delivered in the town’s
cathedral by none other than Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the
European Commission and effective head of the European Union. Juncker is
hardly known as a deep philosophical thinker and his efforts to present
Marx as a “philosopher who thought into the future” were the insipid
ramblings of a career Eurocrat. But his very presence at the event
became a scandal because he casually dismissed the letters of protest he
admitted having received from concerned members of the public in
central and eastern Europe—the territories which had suffered most under
Communist rule and where the memory of that dictatorship is still very
much alive.
In Juncker’s telling, Marx was a mild social democrat. But Juncker
failed to explore the implications of what was done in Marx’s name. What
was it in Marx’s writings that lent itself to the interpretations—or
misinterpretations, according to Juncker—of his Stalinist followers?
There is of course a legitimate tension between judging a work—Marx’s
work—on its own merits and judging it based on its impact. But Juncker
cannot praise Marx for “thinking into the future” while simultaneously
trying to insulate Marx from his own legacy.
As we approach the thirty-year anniversary of the collapse of the
Soviet Union, it is astonishing that Marx continues to be a popular
figure, and not just among people like Juncker. Of course, there are the
dogmatists in the few remaining Communist countries such as China
and Cuba, who continue to cling onto his sclerotic ideas. But there are
also, closer to home, intellectuals and academics who purvey versions of
Marxism in the humanities departments of many college campuses.
Meanwhile outside of the universities, popularized versions of Marx’s
ideas circulate among left-wing populists, like those of the “Occupy
Wall Street” movement.
All the more reason to review what was rotten about Marx’s
ideas—ideas that gave rise to brutal dictatorships and the killing
machines of the gulags.
If you read nearly any passage in Marx’s oeuvre, it’s hard not to be
struck by his sense of absolute certainty. He pronounces statements in
an apodictic manner, laying claim to an unquestionable sense of truth,
with no opportunity to doubt. He is therefore always on the attack as he
decimates opponents with unyielding polemic—and he was a master of
polemical style, to be sure. Meanwhile there is no self-reflection, no
interrogation of his own views, and no sense that he might possibly be
wrong.
Marx channels a voice of infallibility, making sweeping claims with
no margin of error and no exploration of evidence: “All history is the
history of class struggle ” begins the Communist Manifesto, which he co-authored with Friedrich Engels. All
history? Was there really nothing else than conflicts between different
economic groups? For Marx, apparently, there was never any other
dimension of human experience worthy of independent consideration: no
history of technology, of ideas, of culture, or faith. He comes to this
one-dimensional schema by deflating the philosophy of history he had
found in his teacher, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. In place of
Hegelian complexity, he offered simplistic claims to predict the future
in the form of “developmental laws of capitalism.”
Perhaps the kindest judgment on Marx is that he was just one more
economist who thought he could predict the future. His delusion about
his own predictive capacities is what made Marx so distasteful to a
thinker like Friedrich von Hayek, who recognized that humans can get
things wrong, so best not to endow any single human with too much power,
and certainly not the government. Not so Marx, who claimed direct
access to incontrovertible insights into the logic of history. For that
reason he could conclude his Manifesto with a series of
crushing verdicts on competing radical movements, denounced and
condemned, without a shadow of doubt. These concluding diatribes against
other socialist currents that dared to differ from Marx’s Communism are
perhaps the most symptomatic elements of his work, setting up a pattern
of defaming one’s opponents, especially those closest to him. Marx’s
Bolshevik heirs would transform that confidence in condemnation into
rationale to send political competitors to their deaths. On the long
list of victims of Marxism, companions on the left figured prominently.
While we might associate Marx with politics, in fact he lacked any
real appreciation for a political sphere in which one would interact
productively with advocates of varying programs. While for others,
politics represents a realm of compromise and negotiation, for Marx, it
was really the pursuit of power and the obligation to command. He
described the state simply as “the executive committee of the
bourgeoisie,” meaning that politics was secondary to the economy.
Moreover he promised to abolish the state, and therefore politics, once
Communism would eliminate class difference—or so the story went, as the
ultimate outcome of Communism would be a libertarian utopia of
statelessness.
Nothing, however, would be further from the truth. In practice, what Communism provided for was the development of a nomenklatura,
a new class elite which talked the egalitarian talk while claiming for
itself the privilege of dictators. The Communist cadre always knew
better than the unenlightened populace, and therefore the cadre would
claim the power to impose their views and programs on the rest of
society. The real political legacy of Marxism was not the abolition of
the state but, on the contrary, the expansion of the state over society,
and the elevation of a Marxist elite over the populace. No wonder the
East Germans calling for the end of their Communist government in
November 1989 chanted, “We are the people,” a people which the
Communists, when all is said and done, simply deplored. Marxism was not
about achieving an egalitarian society: it was the vehicle through which
party activists and thugs could pursue their own will to power. (For
this reason, the young radical Max Eastman described the Communist
revolutionaries in Russia as “Nietzschean.”)
The Marxist pursuit of power also meant denouncing all religion,
which Marx described as an opiate, a drug intended to lull its consumers
into passivity and false consciousness, so as to keep them from the
truth (his truth). Because Marxism emphasized labor and the primacy of
human experience, it could appeal to various twentieth-century
philosophers, existentialists among others, who emphasized the problem
of alienation. Yet Marxism, which treated all thought in a reductionist
manner as an expression of economy, could never shake its own
anti-intellectual legacy, famously expressed in Marx’s Eleventh Thesis
on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point
however is to change it.”
Discussion of the meaning of life—interpreting the world—turn out to
be of negligible import for Marxists, easily dismissed as only
“epiphenomenal.” Marx’s alternative to reflective thought was changing
the world, but without any room for the sort of ethical guidance that
philosophical thinking might offer: change at all costs, change with no
limits. The result was a modernizing fantasy of thorough-going
transformation with scant attention to the human costs. As Hannah Arendt
showed a century later in her Origins of Totalitarianism, this
would lead to systematic violence in “experiments” to fashion a “new
man,” no matter how much suffering would ensue. Ultimately, Marx had
offered a false alternative: philosophical thinking or changing
the world. In fact, what defines the human condition is the ability to
engage in both, deep thinking and intentional action, and indeed we
should prefer action to be guided by thinking, just as thinking should
be informed by the experience of prior action.
The claim of infallibility, the will to political power, and the
dismissal of ethical thought: such was the legacy that Karl Marx
bequeathed to the Communist movement that once ruled half the world.
President Juncker, in his celebration of Marx, recalled none of this,
revealing himself to be just one more of Marx’s defenders who still
insist on the fantasy of a good Marx motivated by sympathy for the
poverty of the workers during the industrial revolution.
But Marx was hardly the only thinker to write about nineteenth
century social conditions, and he was surely not the most interesting. A
page of Dickens is worth a volume of Das Kapital. Wherever
Marxism dominated working class movements—by suppressing competing
reform movements or manipulating unions—blue collar workers fared worse.
Had Marx not been appropriated as the ideological figurehead of the
Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 in order to justify the dictatorship in
Russia, he would be barely remembered today. (A Google N-gram search
shows that “Marxism” only takes off as a term after Lenin came to
power.) Instead, he has become the symbol of decades of terror.
For those who want to talk about Marx, to erect statues in his memory
or to defend him as a philosopher, it is high time to discover some
intellectual integrity and face up to the crimes committed in his name.
It is wrong to say, as one commonly hears in some circles, that his
program of Communism was a good idea, but poorly implemented. On the
contrary, it was a bad idea from the start and the brutality that always
accompanied it was a consequence of its core character.
