Rethinking Marx

By Michael O. Powell

My colleague Brad Warbiarny at The Liberty Papers wrote a piece in which he defended Marx, though not a fan of his, from wrongful detractors. I’d like to do the same, though I may wind up being a bit more defensive of the bearded one from Germany. In his book Why I Write, George Orwell said that those who are intelligent to actually understand the theories of Karl Marx are doomed to some degree of obscurity, so the need to reassess the thinker is fairly constant.

Marx’s theory of a collectivized society is very complicated, abstract and contradictory. The popular discourse, in the United States especially, is unfortunately reduced to the sort of nonsense I saw on a debate between Michael Moore and Sean Hannity on Fox News. In that debate, Moore actually took the offense that “capitalism is bad” while Hannity took the defense that “capitalism is good. No wonder this country is falling behind. With that sort of thinking on critical issues, Marx will be easily cast aside as something only evil commies and their hippie fanbase will read.

In the book African Politics and Society by Peter A. Schraeder, Marxist economic evolution is explained as thus: “…a revolutionary situation emerges when advances in technological, scientific, and other forms of material development (the forces of production) outgrow an outmoded system of ownership of property among classes (the relations of production) such that the dominant class finds it increasingly difficult to maintain control over the rest of society through its traditional means. Because no “civilized” society ever forfeits its material level of development, the net result of the growing contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production is a heightened class struggle in which the ruling class is eventually overthrown. According to Marx, such revolutionary events are part of a general historical trend in which all societies are moving along the same path of development…Marx suggests that all societies have to pass through ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production (the combination of the forces and the relations of production) on the path to achieving what he percieves as the inevitable and desirable final stage of revolutionary development: a socialist (communist) society in which the proletariat reigns supreme.”

One thing to keep in mind is that “revolution” does need to be an armed revolt. A “revolution” can be a gradual or sudden shift in the means by which we go about our lives and operate economically. The internet and globalization is certainly a revolution, and one that has worked in an egalitarian process, through both state and free market means, to shift wealth in the world in a way that is more equitable among developing countries such as India and China. Globalization is increasingly making us more dependent upon one another and, if we continue down this path, a collective society in which people co-operate not out of coercion but because it’s in their own self-interest is not out of the question.

In order to reach a collectivized society in which an egalitarian ethos is high, there must be a high degree of capital to fund that society. One of my best friends, a brilliant local political activist, gets this perfectly and has advocated overall budgetary cuts and a higher tax on the rich as a means to equalize California.

Socialist revolutions in underdeveloped countries, which continue to be fueled by the naïve and well-wishers, are emblematic of a misunderstanding of a most critical fascet of Marxism. With an absolute state takeover in an arena where development has not yet occurred, the resulting military dictatorship is sad and predictable. The success of many socialized European states (the underdeveloped Greece an exception) are likewise explained by Marxist theory.

Leon Trotsky, a revolutionary thinker who was exiled by Josef Stalin, was against the Bolsheviks initially before the 1917 Russian Revolution really kicked into action. Trotsky rationalized his participation in the revolution by theorizing that Russian feudal society had developed enough that it could catapult itself into a socialist utopia. He was wrong, as has been every smart thinker since who has advocated a collectivized society in an undeveloped country since. Without market incentives in place, the rulers of such economies have had to use violence.

For further reading on Marx, I recommend an article that Christopher Hitchens did entitled “The Revenge of Marx: What the author of Das Kapital reveals about the current economic crisis.”