Who Needs Marx?

Part 1 of an Endless Series

After some house cleaning, I happened upon a doorstop of a book I’d forgotten I bought, “One Hundred Years of Socialism” by David Sassoon. It begins in the heyday of socialism, which was pre-war Europe in the early 1900s, especially in Germany. I realized the history might provide suggestions that help to explain our own sorry state.

An important question is what explained the prominence and prestige of Marxism in European socialist movements. Socialist doctrines of course predated Marx.

At bottom, Marx and Engels told a good story. Several, actually. Their story of historical evolution has since fallen apart. At the same time, the framework for understanding capitalism still has great merit.

By Marx, history proceeds in stages, from slavery to feudalism to capitalism, true enough, to be succeeded by socialism. Marxist description of the stages is rich in economic detail and insight, but regarding the final stage, there has been more than a hint of inevitability. Marxism has been described as Calvinism without God.

Second, Marxism was elevated to the level of a science of history. It had an ingenious, often impenetrable, not to say unfinished, economic explanation for how capitalist economies were bound to collapse in ruin. The instability of capitalist economies has been much in evidence, paralleled by the manifest irrationality and immorality of mass privation in the midst of abundance.

The popular idea was that capitalism couldn’t work because workers were paid less than the value of what they produced and would therefore be unable to “buy it back.” Surpluses of commodities would result. Consumer credit, of course, allows people to spend above their means, at least for a time. The expansion of the market beyond national boundaries also introduces complications.

The more salient matter, with the benefit of greater hindsight, is that the biggest economic disruptions have originated in the financial sector and have been associated with wild speculation — stock market crashes and the bankruptcies of big financial institutions. Moreover, governments have ways to deal with such crises and prevent utter collapse. In this vein, I’ve thought Hyman Minsky has more to offer than Marx. Minsky, whom I knew passingly, also had the benefit of more hindsight than Marx.

Third, backing up Marxist pretensions to scientific authority, was the prestige of German critical philosophy, particularly G.W.F. Hegel. The beleaguered workers of Europe could hardly have been expected to maintain any critical stance in the face of the obscurantism of “dialectical materialism,” described by no less than Noam Chomsky as blather.

Fourth, in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the rest of Europe saw a political juggernaut with genuine accomplishments in reform, especially universal (manhood) suffrage. The intellectual stature of its two leading theoreticians, Edward Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, dwarfed that of colleagues in other countries. Sassoon reports one striking bit I did not know, that these two in their prime were more widely read than Marx and Engels themselves. I’ve seen Kautsky referred to as “the Pope of Marxism.” I expect Bernstein and Kautsky have more to offer than the crudest takes on Marx and Engels. I’ve started reading Bernstein, haven’t gotten into Kautsky yet.

It is commonly thought that the advent of World War I, with the SPD itself abandoning the sacred principle of international working class solidarity, was the death knell of socialism. The SPD fell behind the German government’s drive to war against France, Russia, and Great Britain. The rationale for this horribly destructive war has always been murky.

Actually the Marxism story of history collapses along multiple dimensions, before and after WW1. Perhaps the biggest piece is the premise that economic breakdown is inevitable and impels the working class to take power and run the economy. Even absent an economic conniption, the development of productive relations was supposed to promote revolutionary class consciousness. This should have been happening in places such as England and Germany, with the most advanced industry, but it was not.

You could argue that wasn’t really what Marx said or meant, but I am not doing Marxology here. The popular implication, vulgar Marxism if you like, was plain and manifestly debunked by events, or lack of them. Every ideology and religion bears some responsibility for the delusions and deviations of its followers.

There was breakdown aplenty leading to revolution in Russia, but that proved to be a one-off. The Russian SPD could be credited with seizing an opportunity, but such opportunities have proven exceedingly rare. Of course we know what a botch it came to eventually in form of the USSR. It does no good to attribute subsequent failures to flawed or corrupt leaders. If socialism is such a powerful historical force, random individual deficiencies should not matter.

Of course economic breakdowns do occur, though not necessarily for the reasons proposed by Marx. SPD leader Edward Bernstein describes the obsession with economic collapse as “catastrophist” theory. It has remained rife among Lefts ever since, the triumph of hope over experience, inspired by the utterly atypical, uninstructive case of Russia. The obvious fact is that privation, even immiseration, does not lead inexorably to working class revolt, much less class consciousness. In fact, it seldom has.

The absence of mobilization points to a deeper question. Who is this working class that is supposed to get smart and rise up? I like Marx’s notion of alienation, as I understand it, derived from Hegel, that the worker’s existence is not his own. In economic terms, he produces a surplus over and above his means of subsistence (itself not necessarily pressed down to bare biological survival), and this estrangement points to a basic condition of oppression.

Gross inequalities of wealth and power that result are a bane to democracy, fundamental human rights, prosperity, and the common good. The disposition of the aggregate surplus, a fundamental choice for society, is left to undemocratic, self-seeking elites and anarchic capital market instability. The dominance of capital accumulation under the direction of private individuals outside of any meaningful democratic accountability, its habit of running roughshod over elementary communal well-being and family life, is to me the central, essential insight in Marx.

I don’t want to get into the roles of service workers or administrative staff who do not operate directly at the point of goods production. That the working class however defined does not act in concert for the promotion of socialism is obvious enough. That the lives of those not cast narrowly as production workers are diminished by the system is also clear.

My preference is keep things simple by denoting the working class as Humanity as a whole, minus those with undeserved, arbitrary title to the big means of production — to vast holdings of capital, property, and land. In practice, I would have expected the less well-off to be more susceptible to a socialist message, but this has not been the experience.

Sassoon notes that supporters of socialism in Europe were not at all confined to the working class, as defined under restrictive takes on Marxism. Nor did movements consistently reflect the extent of development of productive forces, as envisaged by Marx. As I mentioned above, England had the most advanced industry in Europe and a paltry socialist movement. France was substantially rural and agricultural but had a more vital movement. And so on.

The appeal of Marx among multitudes who hardly had a clue as to what he wrote stems from the simple themes running through his writing: concentration of wealth on one side and starvation on the other, an essential feature of capitalism, is just wrong. As the saying goes, it stinks in God’s nostrils. Capitalist economies often malfunction in their own terms, pointing to the value of collective self-defense, either in the form of worker associations or the benevolent stewardship of a State. The immorality is compounded by the dysfunction, and both destroy the moral and technical authority of the rulers. People of all sorts end up cheering when one of them gets shot.

Marx’s intellectual authority made some level of obeisance mandatory for any erstwhile socialist politician or worker militant. So too in the U.S. New Left in the latter 1960s. If you weren’t into Marx, you weren’t serious, and if you weren’t serious, you were just another hippie. The key sticking points were the appeal of lefty catastrophe theory and the delusion that particularly in a crisis, a working class would become a radical, coherent, unified political force.

These days, notional fealty to Marxism has become a necessary marker for left agitators, not unlike virtue signalling. It’s well past time to acknowledge that Marx had illuminating things to say about capitalism and bourgeois society, but he fell far short of providing a viable politics to support his militant calls for sweeping change. This shortcoming has cost the socialist movement dearly.

What it lacks in prediction and politics, Marxism makes up for in penetrating analysis. Of special interest is the analysis of racism as rooted in broader capitalist class relations. Hopes for class consciousness have waned, but the spectacle of class unconsciousness is evident. Marx is good on how Humpty Dumpty went to pieces. How to put him back together is another, bigger problem.

It’s possible that in the long run, in the grand scheme of things, the influence of Marx may have done more to retard socialism than advance it: endless waiting for a social cataclysm, and continual confusion between the maximum program of nationalization of the means of production versus reforms that benefit the working class in the here and now lead to a tendency to abstain from practical politics. Under current circumstances, it induces a failure to distinguish intelligently between Democrats and the likes of Donald Trump. It elevates dubious maverick characters like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and look where they are ending up. It gives us poor Luigi.

Really-existing socialist feeling, constructive reform, and associated political mobilization does not depend on comprehensive state control of the means of production, nor on irrelevant models in the Soviet Union or the Third World. In this respect, Bernie Sanders is spot-on. Socialism doesn’t need Marx. It just needs more people to decide that the way we do things is wrong and a better world is possible, and not necessarily possible all at once. As far as models go, the big, fascinating conundrum is the spectacular rise of the Peoples Republic of China. I don’t know enough about it to even speculate, but its importance is obvious.

I’ve been noodling with this post for a least a week, and given the subject it might never be done, but sooner or later you have to pull the trigger. This is where what I’m pleased to call my thinking is going right now.