AS the world either celebrated or denigrated Karl Marx on his 200th birth anniversary on May 5 for his ideas that shook the world and changed history, the debates on whether he was right or wrong continue to reverberate among Marxist followers and even among his nemesis—free- market capitalists.
- Resurrecting respect? Despite failures of many of his ideas that triggered the rise of party dictatorships, fascists, famines, Siberian gulags, genocidal massacres, etc., Marx remains a monumental figure,” says the Economist, a British publication and mouthpiece of liberal democracy.
Even Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, visited to Trier, Germany, Marx’s birthplace, where his statue donated by China was unveiled. In England, the bastion of capitalism, where Marx believed was supposedly the first country to collapse to communism, held exhibitions, talk shows, book launchings about Marx. Locally, UP Diliman held simultaneous activities on Marx.
Marx’s critics have tried consigning Marx to the dustbins of history, but he seems to have risen from the dead. More so, after liberal-democracy apologist Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, which arrogantly defended “Western liberal democracy” as the “endpoint of humanity’s social cultural evolution and final form of human government,” failed to prove its worth.
After Fukuyama asserted no new economic philosophy could evolve after market liberalism, the markets burst into the 2008 global financial crisis, and remain unstable to date.
This triggered rethinking of globalized free markets by noted economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and Thomas Pickety’s book Capital in the 21st Century.
- “Ides of Marx” remain. If Julius Caesar was slain led by Brutus in the “ides of March,” the non-realization of many of Marx’s ideas can be dubbed the “Ides of Marx.”
Marx thought the first to turn socialist was Great Britain—the No. 1 capitalist country facing imminent structural collapse. However, socialism took root elsewhere, first in Russia led by Lenin through the vanguard party, the Bolsheviks which mobilized people or the “subjective forces” to victory; and China’s Mao Tse Tung, who applied Marxist-Leninist thoughts to a peasant economy through “protracted war from the countryside.”
Marx did not foresee his ideas will trigger the rise of Marxist fascists, and genocidalist dictators (i.e., Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao) and the rise of “welfare states” (i.e., Scandinavia) or how capitalism adopted socialist welfare ideas and adapted to changing realities that crippled people’s movements.
Marx was also wrong when he over-valued the proletariat (collective worker) as the true source of value, but devalued them as heteronomic, or devoid of individuality and the capability to think creatively towards lofty and noble historic goals of agape, or selfless love for mankind.
Appalled by atrocious capitalist factory conditions, Marx believed “alienation” happens when workers don’t get their rightful share of their labor. For him, without workers, capitalists were nothing, and that workers had no other choice, but “to unite as they have nothing to lose but their chains.”
But he did not foresee the decline of industries, the rise of innovative micro enterprises, independent from shackles of big capital, the entry of contractual labor, or the rise of services now sharing 60 percent of Philippine economy, all of which weakened all the more the collective proletariat.
His prediction of falling rates of profit did not happen, which puzzled him and made him doubt later his own analysis. He did not foresee the Power of Reforms that enabled capitalism to improve and reduce poverty from 1.85 billion poor people in 1990 to 767 million in 2013, says World Bank records.
When Marx was not a Marxist? Ironically, Marx distanced from his own ideas when convenient and once said “I am not a Marxist.” Part of him was a humanist as he wanted to change the world for the better, but ironically opposed reforms like health care and shorter workhours claiming these made workers more bourgeois and less radical to push for real change.
This absurd thinking was carried on by some revolutionaries who wished for worst dictatorship conditions to anger and radicalize people, without realizing the dumb-downed hoi polloi will tend to give up liberty for blind obedience, docility and conformity in exchange for security and stability. This happened under Mao, Stalin, North Korea, or even under Hitler’s fascist Germany.
Marx was partly humanist as he was against ultra-left anarchists, particularly the Jacobin Reign of Terror after the French Revolution of 1787 that was infiltrated by British imperialist agents leading to the slaughter of thousands of the sons and daughters of the revolution, including progressive intellectuals of Ecole Polytechnique like famous chemist Lavoisier. Ironically, he was silent when revolution leader Maximilien Robespierre, a Jacobin leader, was executed without trial. Marx partly lost his humanism when he tolerated the eye-for-an-eye justice in the law of the jungle.
- Zillionaire makes Marx relevant? Nick Hanauer, a “zillionaire” owning over 30 companies, including being a partner of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man today, is alarmed by the disconcerting widening inequality, despite massive reductions in global poverty.
He claims the gap between rich and poor is widening. In 1980 the top 1 percent controlled 8 percent of US national income, while the bottom 50 percent shared 18 percent. By 2914 the top 1 percent shared 20 percent; while the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.
In his message to fellow “plutocrats” (richest people representing 0.01 percent of population), he said the 99.99 percent of Americans are fast lagging behind. “The inequality is getting worse daily and the country rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies are changed dramatically, the pitchforks will come to us,” he added, referring to pitchforks as the medieval farmers’ symbolic weapons of revolt.
So, if I may modify Marx’s battle cry for Hanauer’s prognostication, which made Marx relevant again, it goes this way, “Capitalists worldwide, unite as you have a lot to lose, if you don’t change.”
E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com