Why Marx Is
The Man Of The Moment
By Francis Wheen
29 July, 2005
The Observer
A
penniless asylum seeker in London was vilified across two pages of a
British right-wing tabloid last week. No surprises there, perhaps --
except that the villain in question has been dead since 1883. "Marx
the Monster" was the newspaper's furious reaction to the news that
thousands of BBC Radio 4 listeners had chosen Karl Marx as their favorite
thinker.
"His genocidal
disciples include Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot -- and even Mugabe. So why has
Karl Marx just been voted the greatest philosopher ever?" it asked.
The puzzlement is
understandable. Fifteen years ago, after the collapse of communism in
Eastern Europe, there appeared to be a general assumption that Marx
was now past his time. He had shuffled off his mortal coil and been
buried forever under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. No one need think
about him -- still less read him -- ever again.
"What we are
witnessing," Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold
War, "is not just the ... passing of a particular period of postwar
history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's
ideological evolution."
But history soon
returned with a vengeance. By August 1998, economic meltdown in Russia,
currency collapses in Asia and market panic around the world prompted
the Financial Times to wonder if we had moved "from the triumph
of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade." The article
was headlined "Das Kapital Revisited."
Even those who gained
most from the system began to question its viability. The billionaire
speculator George Soros now warns that the herd instinct of capital
owners such as himself must be controlled before they trample everyone
else underfoot.
"Marx and Engels
gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better
in some ways, I must say, than the equilibrium theory of classical economics,"
Soros writes.
"The main reason
why their dire predictions did not come true was because of countervailing
political interventions in democratic countries. Unfortunately we are
once again in danger of drawing the wrong conclusions from the lessons
of history. This time the danger comes not from communism but from market
fundamentalism," he warns.
In October 1997
the business correspondent of the New Yorker, John Cassidy, reported
a conversation with an investment banker.
"The longer
I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,"
the financier said. "I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach
is the best way to look at capitalism."
His curiosity aroused,
Cassidy read Marx for the first time. He found "riveting passages
about globalization, inequality, political corruption, monopolization,
technical progress, the decline of high culture and the enervating nature
of modern existence -- issues that economists are now confronting anew,
sometimes without realizing that they are walking in Marx's footsteps."
Quoting the famous
slogan coined by James Carville for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign
in 1992 ("It's the economy, stupid"), Cassidy pointed out
that "Marx's own term for this theory was "the materialist
conception of history," and it is now so widely accepted that analysts
of all political views use it, like Carville, without any attribution.
Like Moliere's bourgeois
gentleman who discovered to his amazement that for more than 40 years
he had been speaking prose without knowing it, much of the Western bourgeoisie
absorbed Marx's ideas without ever noticing. It was a belated reading
of Marx in the 1990s that inspired the financial journalist James Buchan
to write his brilliant study Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning
of Money.
"Everybody
I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation
of their material circumstances," Buchan wrote, "and that
changes in the ways things are produced profoundly affect the affairs
of humanity even outside the workshop or factory. It is largely through
Marx, rather than political economy, that those notions have come down
to us."
Even the Economist
journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, eager cheerleaders
for turbo-capitalism, acknowledge the debt.
"As a prophet
of socialism Marx may be kaput," they wrote in A Future Perfect:
The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization, "but as a prophet
of the `universal interdependence of nations' as he called globalization,
he can still seem startlingly relevant."
Their greatest fear
was that "the more successful globalization becomes the more it
seems to whip up its own backlash" -- or, as Marx himself said,
that modern industry produces its own gravediggers.
The bourgeoisie
has not died. But nor has Marx. His errors or unfulfilled prophecies
about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy
with which he revealed the nature of the
beast.
"Constant revolutionizing
of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones," he wrote in
The Communist Manifesto.
Until quite recently
most people in Britain seemed to stay in the same job or institution
throughout their working lives -- but who does so now? As Marx put it:
"All that is solid melts into air."
In his other great
masterpiece, Das Kapital, he showed how all that is truly human becomes
congealed into inanimate objects -- commodities -- which then acquire
tremendous power and vigor, tyrannizing the people who produce them.
The result of the
BBC poll suggests that Marx's portrayal of the forces that govern our
lives -- and of the instability, alienation and exploitation they produce
-- still resonates, and can still bring the world into focus. Far from
being buried, he may only now be emerging in his true significance.
For all the anguished,
uncomprehending howls from the right-wing press, Marx could yet become
the most influential thinker of the 21st century.