Why marxism works

Marxism is the theory that draws on class relations and the socioeconomic fabric of society, pitting class as the culprit behind everything evil. Socialism is a transition stage. It requires all citizens to be unified so government institutions can control the means of production for society. However, under the guise of standing against capitalism and inequality, Communism has stood against basic human freedom.

For every Communist government has shown how artists and free thinkers are hunted down, imprisoned and how dissent and the right to an opinion is suppressed. Happy th birthday, United States Marine Corps. What would you say he is most reacting against in his initial writings?

Every great thinker is a product of his or her age, but this seems especially true of Marx. Marx is formed intellectually by the 19th-century critiques of religion and Christianity in particular. He really latches on to the idea that God doesn't create man but man creates God. The subject and object, in other words, are inverted.

Marx's innovation is to say that this could be applied not just to God but to other abstractions, like the state or the economy: Man creates these things in the course of history but they appear to him as having independent force, as though he is the creature of them and not the other way around. Why was this idea that man creates God, not the other way around, such a politically destabilizing declaration?

Marx changes the nature and implications of the critique of religion. Instead of challenging the claims of the Bible or Christianity, he says we have to understand religion, like everything else, in terms of the evolution and history of mankind; that these things we take to be divine or eternal are merely products of human beings, and that by ignoring that fact we allow ourselves to become objects rather than subjects.

So when he's critiquing religion it's not because it's untrue but because he thinks it strips people of their sense of agency. That's quite right. Whether it was true or not would have been something already sort of debated by David Strauss and Bruno Bauer and various others before them and indeed in the 18th century.

So he extends his criticisms to the social and political realm. In other words, human activity led naturally to capitalism.

But, over time, we became chained to its progress and thus forgot that we were the creators and that there is always the possibility of creating something new or better or more just. I'm more interested in where Marx gets to by the s, which is to argue that revolution is not so much an event but a process, that it's cumulative. I think he invents a language of social democracy which really spreads in the following 40 or 50 years.

His language and ideas spread, but they also get co-opted and transformed. In the s, Marx still thought that capitalism was an organism, so it would have a birth, a growing up, a maturity, and a death. But he gradually becomes aware that capitalism is more resilient than that, that it could adjust to overproduction and overpopulation and bad harvests and all the rest.

So he actually pivots and starts to believe that primitive communism can somehow survive and bypass capitalist development. Why is this evolution not reflected in doctrinaire Marxism at the turn of the century? This leads to a kind of religious fidelity to the idea that capitalism is in crisis and revolutions are necessary in order to hasten its collapse. This sort of thinking is what produces the Bolsheviks in the 20th century. Marx was influenced by the German philosopher Hegel, who claimed that history was driven by ideas and the evolution of human consciousness.

I think there's a tendency to overestimate how sensational of a claim he is making. You can go back to the 17th century and see that natural law theorists are already making similar claims about the relationship between property, production, and society.

Marx simply says that you start with hunting and gathering and then you have pasture then you have agriculture and then you have commercial society, and that political arrangements correspond to these developmental stages.

Marx, as you say, was wrong about many things, but he understood the pathologies of capitalism, even though he failed to construct a viable alternative. I think that this is one of his most brilliant insights. He shows that what you have is not just a reproduction or extension of the division of labor, but you have a whole system that is producing novelty at the same time that it is creating new systems of social relations which are, in turn, creating new needs.

It does not take much imagination to draw a link between this idea and the Gulag. The gap between Marxist political theory and the observed behavior of Marxist regimes is tissue-thin. Their theory of free speech gives license to any party identifying itself as the authentic representative of the oppressed to shut down all opposition which, by definition, opposes the rights of the oppressed.

In the contemporary United States, these ideas are confined by the fact that only in certain communities like college campuses does the illiberal left have the power to implement its vision, and even there it is constrained by the U. If illiberal ideas were to gain more power, the scale of their abuses would widen. It would be the biggest boost of federal aid to Amtrak since Congress created it half a century ago.

Flynn said in an interview Monday. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn't airbrushed its Marxist past. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans.

Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You'd think. Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism , a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party.

It's an annual event, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover very Mao, very now in which he rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea the previous two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in to the massacre of the Paris communards in , and from to the collapse of Mao's Cultural Revolution in Isn't this all a delusion?

Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in ? But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east.

And today's popular movements — Greece or elsewhere — also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people. That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? Think of what's happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring.