[Xmca-l] Fwd: Happy Birthday, Karl Marx

[mike cole]

Greetings on the International workers day
Mike
*THE NEW YORK TIMES*


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THE STONE <https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-stone>
Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!
By Jason Barker
Mr. Barker is an associate professor of philosophy.
April 30, 2018
Image
CreditRalf Hirschberger/European Pressphoto Agency

SEOUL, South Korea — On May 5, 1818, in the southern German town of Trier,
in the picturesque wine-growing region of the Moselle Valley, Karl Marx was
born. At the time Trier was one-tenth the size it is today, with a
population of around 12,000. According to one of Marx’s recent biographers,
Jürgen Neffe, Trier is one of those towns where “although everyone doesn’t
know everyone, many know a lot about many.”

Such provincial constraints were no match for Marx’s boundless intellectual
enthusiasm. Rare were the radical thinkers of the major European capitals
of his day that he either failed to meet or would fail to break with on
theoretical grounds, including his German contemporaries Wilhelm Weitling
and Bruno Bauer; the French “bourgeois socialist” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
as Marx and Friedrich Engels would label him in their “Communist
Manifesto”; and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

In 1837 Marx reneged on the legal career that his father, himself a lawyer,
had mapped out for him and immersed himself instead in the speculative
philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel at the University of Berlin. One might say that
it was all downhill from there. The deeply conservative Prussian government
didn’t take kindly to such revolutionary thinking (Hegel’s philosophy
advocated a rational liberal state), and by the start of the next decade
Marx’s chosen career path as a university professor had been blocked.
If ever there were a convincing case to be made for the dangers of
philosophy, then surely it’s Marx’s discovery of Hegel, whose “grotesque
craggy melody” repelled him at first but which soon had him dancing
deliriously through the streets of Berlin. As Marx confessed to his father
in an equally delirious letter in November 1837, “I wanted to embrace every
person standing on the street-corner.”

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As we reach the bicentennial of Marx’s birth, what lessons might we draw
from his dangerous and delirious philosophical legacy? What precisely is
Marx’s lasting contribution?

Today the legacy would appear to be alive and well. Since the turn of the
millennium countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular
biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its
enduring relevance to our neoliberal age.

In 2002, the French philosopher Alain Badiou declared at a conference I
attended in London that Marx had become the philosopher of the middle
class. What did he mean? I believe he meant that educated liberal opinion
is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis —
that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the
ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class
majority as profit — is correct. Even liberal economists such as Nouriel
Roubini agree that Marx’s conviction that capitalism has an inbuilt
tendency to destroy itself remains as prescient as ever.
But this is where the unanimity abruptly ends. While most are in agreement
about Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism, opinion on how to treat its
“disorder” is thoroughly divided. And this is where Marx’s originality and
profound importance as a philosopher lies.

First, let’s be clear: Marx arrives at no magic formula for exiting the
enormous social and economic contradictions that global capitalism entails
(according to Oxfam, 82 percent of the global wealth generated in 2017 went
to the world’s richest 1 percent). What Marx did achieve, however, through
his self-styled materialist thought, were the critical weapons for
undermining capitalism’s ideological claim to be the only game in town.

In the “Communist Manifesto,” Marx and Engels wrote: “The bourgeoisie has
stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to
with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest,
the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”

Marx was convinced that capitalism would soon make relics of them. The
inroads that artificial intelligence is currently making into medical
diagnosis and surgery, for instance, bears out the argument in the
“Manifesto” that technology would greatly accelerate the “division of
labor,” or the deskilling of such professions.

To better understand how Marx achieved his lasting global impact — an
impact arguably greater and wider than any other philosopher’s before or
after him — we can begin with his relationship to Hegel. What was it about
Hegel’s work that so captivated Marx? As he informed his father, early
encounters with Hegel’s “system,” which builds itself upon layer after
layer of negations and contradictions, hadn’t entirely won him over.

Marx found that the late-18th-century idealisms of Immanuel Kant and Johann
Gottlieb Fichte that so dominated philosophical thinking in the early 19th
century prioritized thinking itself — so much so that reality could be
inferred through intellectual reasoning. But Marx refused to endorse their
reality. In an ironic Hegelian twist, it was the complete opposite: It was
the material world that determined all thinking. As Marx puts it in his
letter, “If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became
its center.”

The idea that God — or “gods”— dwelt among the masses, or was “in” them,
was of course nothing philosophically new. But Marx’s innovation was to
stand idealistic deference — not just to God but to any divine authority —
on its head. Whereas Hegel had stopped at advocating a rational liberal
state, Marx would go one stage further: Since the gods were no longer
divine, there was no need for a state at all.
The idea of the classless and stateless society would come to define both
Marx’s and Engels’s idea of communism, and of course the subsequent and
troubled history of the Communist “states” (ironically enough!) that
materialized during the 20th century. There is still a great deal to be
learned from their disasters, but their philosophical relevance remains
doubtful, to say the least.

The key factor in Marx’s intellectual legacy in our present-day society is
not “philosophy” but “critique,” or what he described in 1843 as “the
ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not
being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as
little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” “The philosophers have
only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,” he
wrote in 1845.

Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class
exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo,
owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic
targeting of the “eternal truths” of our age. Such movements recognize, as
did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling
class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary
progress.

We have become used to the go-getting mantra that to effect social change
we first have to change ourselves. But enlightened or rational thinking is
not enough, since the norms of thinking are already skewed by the
structures of male privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the
language we use. Changing those norms entails changing the very foundations
of society.

To cite Marx, “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive
forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior
relations of production never replace older ones before the material
conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old
society.”
The transition to a new society where relations among people, rather than
capital relations, finally determine an individual’s worth is arguably
proving to be quite a task. Marx, as I have said, does not offer a
one-size-fits-all formula for enacting social change. But he does offer a
powerful intellectual acid test for that change. On that basis, we are
destined to keep citing him and testing his ideas until the kind of society
that he struggled to bring about, and that increasing numbers of us now
desire, is finally realized.

Jason Barker is an associate professor of philosophy at Kyung Hee
University in South Korea and author of the novel “Marx Returns
<http://www.zero-books.net/books/marx-returns>.”