{"id":110875,"date":"2018-05-14T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2018-05-14T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=110875"},"modified":"2018-05-10T17:13:34","modified_gmt":"2018-05-10T16:13:34","slug":"is-marx-still-relevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/05\/is-marx-still-relevant\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Marx Still Relevant?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx\u2019s birth on May 5, 1818, it isn\u2019t far-fetched to suggest that his predictions have been falsified, his theories discredited, and his ideas rendered obsolete. So why should we care about his legacy in the twenty-first century?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Project Syndicate<\/p><\/div>\n

1 May 2018 – <\/em>From 1949, when Mao Zedong\u2019s communists triumphed in China\u2019s civil war, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall 40 years later, Karl Marx\u2019s historical significance was unsurpassed. Nearly four of every ten people on earth lived under governments that claimed to be Marxist, and in many other countries Marxism was the dominant ideology of the left, while the policies of the right were often based on how to counter Marxism.1<\/a><\/p>\n

Once communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and its satellites, however, Marx\u2019s influence plummeted. On the 200th anniversary of Marx\u2019s birth on May 5, 1818, it isn\u2019t far-fetched to suggest that his predictions have been falsified, his theories discredited, and his ideas rendered obsolete. So why should we care about his legacy in the twenty-first century?<\/p>\n

Marx\u2019s reputation was severely damaged by the atrocities committed by regimes that called themselves Marxist, although there is no evidence that Marx himself would have supported such crimes. But communism collapsed largely because, as practiced in the Soviet bloc and in China under Mao, it failed to provide people with a standard of living that could compete with that of most people in the capitalist economies.4<\/a><\/p>\n

These failures do not reflect flaws in Marx\u2019s depiction of communism, because Marx never depicted it: he showed not the slightest interest in the details of how a communist society would function. Instead, the failures of communism point to a deeper flaw: Marx\u2019s false view of human nature.<\/p>\n

There is, Marx thought, no such thing as an inherent or biological human nature. The human essence is, he wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, <\/em>\u201cthe ensemble of the social relations.\u201d It follows then, that if you change the social relations \u2013 for example, by changing the economic basis of society and abolishing the relationship between capitalist and worker \u2013 people in the new society will be very different from the way they were under capitalism.<\/p>\n

Marx did not arrive at this conviction through detailed studies of human nature under different economic systems. It was, rather, an application of Hegel\u2019s view of history. According to Hegel, the goal of history is the liberation of the human spirit, which will occur when we all understand that we are part of a universal human mind. Marx transformed this \u201cidealist\u201d account into a \u201cmaterialist\u201d one, in which the driving force of history is the satisfaction of our material needs, and liberation is achieved by class struggle. The working class will be the means to universal liberation because it is the negation of private property, and hence will usher in collective ownership of the means of production.<\/p>\n

Once workers owned the means of production collectively, Marx thought, the \u201csprings of cooperative wealth\u201d would flow more abundantly than those of private wealth \u2013 so abundantly, in fact, that distribution would cease to be a problem. That is why he saw no need to go into detail about how income or goods would be distributed. In fact, when Marx read a proposed platform for a merger of two German socialist parties, he described phrases like \u201cfair distribution\u201d and \u201cequal right\u201d as \u201cobsolete verbal rubbish.\u201d They belonged, he thought, to an era of scarcity that the revolution would bring to an end.<\/p>\n

The Soviet Union proved that abolishing private ownership of the means of production does not change human nature. Most humans, instead of devoting themselves to the common good, continue to seek power, privilege, and luxury for themselves and those close to them. Ironically, the clearest demonstration that the springs of private wealth flow more abundantly than those of collective wealth can be seen in the history of the one major country that still proclaims its adherence to Marxism.<\/p>\n

Under Mao, most Chinese lived in poverty. China\u2019s economy started to grow rapidly only after 1978, when Mao\u2019s successor, Deng Xiaoping (who had proclaimed that, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice\u201d) allowed private enterprises to be established.\u00a0Deng\u2019s reforms eventually lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty, but also created a society with greater income inequality than any European country (and much greater than the United States). Although China still proclaims that it is building \u201csocialism with Chinese characteristics,\u201d it is not easy to see what is socialist, let alone Marxist, about its economy.5<\/a><\/p>\n

If China is no longer significantly influenced by Marx\u2019s thought, we can conclude that in politics, as in economics, he is indeed irrelevant. Yet his intellectual influence remains. His materialist theory of history has, in an attenuated form, become part of our understanding of the forces that determine the direction of human society. We do not have to believe that, as Marx once incautiously put it, the hand-mill gives us a society with feudal lords, and the steam-mill a society with industrial capitalists. In other writings, Marx suggested a more complex view, in which there is interaction among all aspects of society.<\/p>\n

The most important takeaway from Marx\u2019s view of history is negative: the evolution of ideas, religions, and political institutions is not independent of the tools we use to satisfy our needs, nor of the economic structures we organize around those tools, and the financial interests they create. If this seems too obvious to need stating, it is because we have internalized this view. In that sense, we are all Marxists now.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, Laureate Professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, and founder of the non-profit organization <\/em>The Life You Can Save<\/a>.\u00a0His books include <\/em>Animal Liberation<\/a>, Practical Ethics<\/a>, The Ethics of What We Eat<\/a> (with Jim Mason),<\/em> Rethinking Life and Death<\/a>, The Point of View of the Universe<\/a>, co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, <\/em>The Most Good You Can Do<\/a>, Famine, Affluence, and Morality<\/a>, One World Now<\/a>, Ethics in the Real World<\/a>, and<\/em>\u00a0Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction<\/a>, also with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. In 2013, he was named the world’s third “most influential contemporary thinker” by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 project-syndicate.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx\u2019s birth on May 5, 1818, it isn\u2019t far-fetched to suggest that his predictions have been falsified, his theories discredited, and his ideas rendered obsolete. So why should we care about his legacy in the twenty-first century?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":110876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-socialism-marxism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}