It's true. The "Communist Manifesto" co-author
has gotten a second life —and he has some advice for progressives
Karl Marx is on fire
right now. More than a century after his death, the co-author of “The
Communist Manifesto” still has the honor of being the first smear against ideas
slightly to the left of Hillary Clinton. (See: Thomas Piketty.) Marx also graced the cover of the National Review as recently ast last month. Few
other thinkers, and certainly few non-religious figures, can claim the honor of
being so widely misappropriated by the political rear-guard.
But, while most people consider Marx only as a sort of intellectual boogeyman,
the manifestation of everything evil on the left, he has much to offer a left
increasingly divorced from the working class. To that end, Marx actually
is enjoying something of a renaissance on the left these days. Jacobin, a
socialist publication that publishes many Marxist thinkers, was profiled by the the New York Times and
boasts Bob Herbert as a contributor. Benjamin Kunkel’s recent compilation of
essays, “Utopia or Bust,” earned that author a profile in New York magazine, and the title “The Lena Dunham of Literature.” And that’s not even
to mention Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster work, “Capital in the 21st
Century,” which harkens back to Marx’s multi-volume magnum opus, “Das
Kapital.” The wave has even extended so far as Capitol Hill, where Sen. Bernie
Sanders, D- Vermont, openly calls himself a “democratic socialist.” Marx most certainly wasn’t
right about everything, but he wasn’t wrong about as much as people think. A
revival of his thought is good news for progressive America. It can give the
left fresh arguments that were previously forgotten to history, and new
organizing strategies that they’ve long since abandoned. The first problem
with the left that Marx might have noted is the wholesale abandonment of the
working class. As Perry Anderson points out in his essay, “Considerations on
Western Marxism,”
The extreme difficulty of language of much of Western Marxism in the
twentieth century was never controlled by the tension of a direct or active
relationship to a proletarian audience.
Increasingly, the left is dominated by what the German
Marxist Rosa Luxemburg might support Cuomo or run its own candidate. “Manifesto”
co-author Friedrich Engels’s “The Condition of the Working Class in England” was
a pioneering study of the working class. He and Marx both clearly saw the
working class as the means to political power — and viewed persuading them as
the most important task the left faced. When Maurice Lachatre asked Marx if he
would be willing to serialize “Das Kapital,” Marx replied, “In this form
the book will be more accessible to the working-class, a consideration which to
me outweighs everything else.” One struggles, however, to imagine a latter-day
Marxist champion like Theodor
W. Adorno writing those words. The left abandoned the working class
and the working class then abandoned the left. That needs to change. Marx
and Engels also offer the left a new way to discuss ideology. In his brilliant
collection, “The Agony of the American Left,” Marx(ish) historian Christopher
Lasch writes, call Kathedersozialisten — or
“professorial socialists.” These thinkers, frequently drenched in
academese, talk and debate in a way almost entirely designed to alienate anyone
who does not already accept their conclusions. The professorial left seems to
have innumerable answers for those wondering what Lacanian psychoanalysis has
to offer us, but can give us little guidance as to whether the Working Families
Party should
The Marxian tradition of social thought has always attached great
importance to the way in which class interest takes on the quality of objective
reality… Lacking an awareness of the human capacity for collective
self-deception, the populists tended to postulate conspiratorial explanations
of history.
Lasch is arguing that, to a large extent, humans are
biased toward the state of affairs that currently exists and then work
backwards to justify it to themselves. That is, we’re more
likely to embrace a deeply unjust economic system, simply because it’s the one
we’ve always known. A recent study bears this out, finding that market competition serves to
psychologically legitimize inequalities that would otherwise be considered unjust. Because many on the left,
especially populists, do not understand ideology, they often write and argue as
though the entire American political system is controlled by a small cabal of
business or political leaders conspiring to fool the masses. The
implications of ideology are important and numerous. The left must not fall
into the trap of believing that all Americans actually do share our views, but
that a conspiracy of the wealthy, or the power of GOP framing, or the influence
of money are preventing us from succeeding. To some extent, these things may
indeed harm the left, but widespread ideology — the automatic assumption of
capitalism’s unmitigated merit, for example — is just as big a problem. We must
win the war of ideas before we can win the war of democracy. The great Italian
politician Antonio Gramsci was well aware of the lure of such cabalistic
conspiracies, but also of their limitations, and his idea about cultural
hegemony led him to advocate for educating the working class. This task is
difficult, but it will lead to more substantial progress than simply explaining
away failures by complaining about the influence of the wealthy. The rich
certainly have different interests than the rest of us, but Gilens
and Page note in an often overlooked passage of their oft-cited paper on “American oligarchy,”
The preferences of average citizens are positively and fairly highly
correlated, across issues, with the preferences of economic elites.
Groups like the Chamber of Commerce and other
business-oriented organizations, on the other hand, have preferences that do
not correlate with the interests of the middle class. But even with that
caveat, the left should not overstate the extent to which Americans agree with
the leftist economic critique. In an apt description of the American ideology,
John Steinbeck noted, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor
see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed
millionaires.” Finally, Marx’s moral critique of capitalism and
markets has never been fully comprehended or considered by anyone (other than
the socialists, of course) but the most ardent libertarians and a strain of
thinkers broadly called communitarians. Broadly speaking, Marx’s critique of
capitalism resembles the Catholic church’s critique: That by relying
on greed and self-interest, markets degrade humans and encourage our worst
impulses. Marx quotes Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens”:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench
Marx writes, riffing off of Shakespeare, “I am bad,
dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured and therefore so is its
possessors. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good.” Jesus
warned that the love of money is the root of all evil. This fact seems
self-evident. Religious critics of capitalism have noted this core delusion for
decades. Economist and Catholic E. F. Schumacher writes,
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation to man,
a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations:
as long as you have not shown it to be ‘uneconomic’ you have not really
questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
With the exception of libertarians, who have tried to
turn the immorality of capitalism into a sort of perverse morality (“greed is good”),
most politicians and economists are entirely unconcerned with the fact that
capitalism is based on a collective drawing upon our deepest desire: to
exploit. The underlying logic of
capitalism is that if we all take our most primordial impulses and mix them up
in the magical mechanism called “markets,” we are left with progress. Recent
history suggests we may be left with only more ugliness. As G. A. Cohen writes,
“the immediate motive to productive activity in a market society is (not always
but) typically some mixture of greed and fear.” The participants in market transactions
are not interested in fulfilling human needs — they are interested in making a
profit. Fulfilling human needs is one way to make a profit — exploitation, the
creation of desire through advertising or downright fraud are others.
Human progress is an ancillary consideration, individual profit is the goal.
Today, speaking in moral terms is not incredibly popular — inequality is seen
not as a moral issue in which a small class has a dangerous amount of power,
but instead as an inefficiency to be corrected with a technocratic
policy. We don’t know for certain what Marx would say about the modern
left. Its radicals often foster a poisonous aversion to pragmatism in favor of
pious purity, its politicians are guilty of wholesale abandonment of the
working class, and many of its leading thinkers have succumbed to a dreadful
technocratism. Marx failed to account for the adaptability of capitalism and
left little in the way of alternatives. In the end, this void was filled by
murderers and fools. Marx, a deeply humanistic thinker, would certainly have
abhorred the violence in his name some half a century after his death. But
rational people do not blame Christ for the Crusades, nor Muhammad for 9/11 nor
Nietzsche for the Holocaust. The taboo of Marx has prevented the left from
learning his most important lesson; in the words of Gil Scott-Heron, “the
revolution will not be televised.”
Sean McElwee is a Salon contributor and a research
associate at Demos. His writing may be viewed at seanamcelwee.com.
Follow him on Twitter at @seanmcelwee.
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