What Marx Was Right
and Wrong About
I suppose that Karl Marx isn’t as big a deal as he was back
when the Soviet Union was a major world power and opponent of the United States
in the world and was ruled by a political party that espoused a
Marxist-Leninist ideology that it claimed justified all of its domestic and
foreign policies. Still, the major world power China still espouses
Marxism-Leninism even though its economic policies hardly comply with that
philosophy, and North Korea and Cuba still claim to be Marxist states. Marxist
philosophy and economics have had a large impact on the politics of western
Europe today, where political parties that were once truly Marxist are now
democratic parties that are part of their country’s political mainstream.
Marxism, and the related words communism and socialism, are buzz words of
hatred for most Americans even though very few of them know what those words
actually mean. Karl Marx, for everything
he got wrong, is a major figure in the intellectual history of Europe. For us
historians at least, that makes him worth paying attention to.
Karl Marx (1818-1983) was a German-born philosopher who did
most of his work in England. He was a disciple of both Auguste Comte and Georg
Friedrich Hegel, both of whom led him astray in significant ways. From Hegel he
took the notion that history progresses through what both Hegel and Marx called
a dialectic. Dialectic is the notion that history progresses in a certain way.
It posits that history progresses through a succession of an original sort of
structure called a thesis, the arising of a response to the thesis called the antithesis,
and a resolution called a synthesis. A classic example is the way the ancient
world had economic systems grounded in slavery, the medieval world had economic
systems grounded in feudalism, and the modern world has economic systems
grounded in capitalism. Marx accepted this view of history, as oversimplified
as it may be. From Comte he took philosophical materialism. Comte (1789-1857)
was a French philosopher who contended that only the material is real. Marx
combined these two ideas into a system he called dialectical materialism. For
him, only the material was real, but the real progressed through history
through a metaphysical process of dialectic.
Marx lived and wrote at the height of the Industrial
Revolution of 19th century. In his world, economics were
capitalistic, and the regulation of capitalism for the benefit of the workers
and the environment that we more or less take for granted was unknown. Rather,
the economy worked almost exclusively for the benefit of those who owned the
means of production, that is, those who owned the factories and the land from
which wealth was produced. Capitalists, some of them very wealthy, operated the
means of production for their own benefit. Marx saw that the capitalists could
produce no wealth without their workers, but he also saw that the life of most
workers was bleak to say the least. The capitalists paid them as little as they
could and still keep their factories working and producing wealth for them.
For Marx, “class” determined everything. Everything
economic, political, social, and cultural was determined by the class
relationships between those who owned the means of production and those who did
not. Even religion was, for Marx, a tool the dominant class (in his case the
capitalists) used to suppress the other classes, especially the proletariat,
Marx’s term for the working class.
Poverty was endemic among the working class. Working
conditions for them were, for the most part, horrific by any decent human
standard. Marx saw how the unregulated capitalism of his day worked to enrich
the capitalists and impoverish the proletariat. He set out to create a
philosophy that asserted that eventually all of that would change. Eventually,
the workers would rise up against the capitalists to create a “socialist” economic,
political, social, and cultural order. He insisted that the dialectic nature of
history made this socialist revolution inevitable. The means of production
would belong to the state in this socialist order, and the state would
represent and advance the interests of the proletariat. Eventually, this
socialist order would put itself out of existence by eliminating all class
distinctions within the society. Socialism would evolve into communism, an
economic, social, political, and cultural system in which everyone would
receive according to their need not according to how much a dominant class was
willing to give them. Cf Acts 4:32-37. Though he was Jewish, Marx’s “communism”
was, in theory, very much the realization of at least some of the principles of
the realm God from the Christian tradition.
Marx got some things right and some things wrong. His
philosophical materialism is simply wrong. Philosophical materialism is the
belief that only the physical, the material, is real. It denies the reality of
any spiritual plane of existence. Only that which we humans perceive with our
ordinary physical senses is real. This notion led Marx to reject all faith
traditions, including his own Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition. Philosophical
materialism is an ontology, that is, it is a philosophical system that makes
certain assertions about the nature of what is real. Human civilizations across
the globe and across the millennia have all sensed that there is more to
reality than meets the eye. The great Joseph Campbell said that there is a
reality behind perceived reality that supports perceived reality. I have said
elsewhere that there is a spiritual plane of reality that both transcends and
inheres in the world of our ordinary senses. Over the millennia, people of all
cultures have had personal experiences of the reality of the spiritual. I have
no doubt that the spiritual is real. We would all see it if we did as Campbell
suggests, namely, take the materialistic shades off our eyes and see what is
really there. Marx was simply wrong when he said that only the material is
real.
Marx saw the world’s great spiritual traditions as nothing
but shams that the dominant class (the capitalists) used to suppress the
subordinate class (the proletariat). Tragically, the Christianity of his day
made, and ours makes, it ridiculously easy for Marx to make this assertion and
for a great many people to accept it. At its beginning, Christianity was called
“the Way.” It was a way of life. It was about living this life the way God
calls us to live it. It was not at all about getting souls to heaven. In fact,
the earliest Christians believed in a resurrection of the dead at the end
times, not that an individual immortal soul is judged and either blessed or
condemned upon a person’s death. After it became the established religion of
the Roman Empire in the 4th century CE, the way Christianity
diverted the attention of the faithful away from this earth and toward a
supposed life somewhere else after death played right into Marx’s hand with his
contention that faith is a tool of the oppressors. Marx would have had a much
harder time condemning Christianity if he had understood it the way Christians
understood it in the first three centuries of the faith’s existence.
Marx was right, however, more or less at least, in his
analysis of the plight of working people in his context (and to a lesser extent
in ours). He was right that capitalists, when left to their own devices,
operate the economy for their own benefit, the wellbeing of the proletariat be
damned. In Marx’s day, this aspect of capitalism was seen in the way the
capitalists of industrial England did everything they could to stop the
government from enacting and enforcing regulations of industry designed to
protect the safety and wellbeing of society’s working class. In our day,
despite our having more regulation of capitalism than England had in Marx’s
day, we see the same dynamic in the way the wealthy among us manipulate our
political system to limit what the government can do to protect the workers and
to have the federal government enact tax cut after tax cut for the benefit of
the wealthy who, frankly, just don’t need those cuts.
Marx asserted what he called a “labor theory of value.” He
believed that it was the work of the workers, and only their work, that
generated wealth for the capitalists. He contended that the capitalists, that
is, the owners of the means of production and the employers of the workers,
expropriated value that the workers alone had created. In effect, they stole value
from the workers that rightfully belonged to the workers because they created
it. Most economists today replace the labor theory of value with a market
theory of value. Value is determined not by what labor it takes to produce a
good but by the law of supply and demand. When the supply of some good is low
but the demand is high, the value of the good goes up. When the demand is low,
whether the supply is low or not, value goes down. Not for Marx. For Marx, the
capitalists were simply robbing the workers of the value the workers produced.
This robbery was, for Marx, a primary example of the way capitalists exploited
and oppressed workers. He was right that capitalists oppress workers, but his
labor theory of value was just wrong.
Marx taught that the dialectic of history progresses through
revolutions that are, usually at least, violent. Marx was no advocate of
nonviolence. He had before him the model of the French Revolution of the late
18th century and the various wars in England over succession to the
throne. He may have been taken by Acts’ vision of a world in which everyone
received what they needed for life, but he was not fan of Jesus’ teaching of
nonviolence. He issued his piece The Communist Manifesto in support of a
violent revolution taking place in France in 1848. He certainly believed that
violence was necessary if one class was to displace and replace a different
class. Lenin and the Soviet Communists certainly took this part of Marx’
teaching to heart. Was Marx right that progress requires violent revolution?
It’s hard to say, but the history of Europe in the 19th century
certainly supports the notion that it does. Nonetheless, nonviolence remains a
core and essential Christian teaching.
Marx was right in one crucial way. In unregulated capitalism
of the type that prevailed in England and in other industrialized economies of
the 19th century, including the economy of the United States,
capitalists will exploit workers to the fullest extent allowed by law. They
will work within a country’s political system to broaden the scope of their
control over their workers and limit the scope of governmental regulation of
wages and working conditions. They will work to reduce the government’s
regulation of the environmental impact of the capitalists’ businesses. They
will work to limit the extent to which the government may enact policies of
social welfare for people in need. That’s because governmental social welfare
programs require tax money, and capitalists, by and large, care about having
low tax rates more than they do about the welfare of people in need. They will,
and do, oppose governmental policies and actions designed to protect the
environment. They do that in part because those policies require tax money; but
mostly they do it because they believe, sometimes rightly and sometimes
wrongly, that environmental regulation interferes with their ability to make
money.
Marx’s fundamental assumption about the nature of reality
was wrong. History does not necessarily proceed in a dialectic fashion. More
importantly, there is more to reality than the material reality we perceive
with our ordinary senses. The function of religion is to connect people with
the spiritual reality within, behind, and beyond physical reality not to
exploit workers for the benefit of the capitalists. We must reject Marx’s
ontological contentions. They were, and are, just wrong.
We must not, however, therefore, completely reject Marx’s analysis
of the dynamics of unregulated capitalism. With very few exceptions,
capitalists, especially the capitalists behind big business, will always work
for their own benefit. They will always be willing to sacrifice the wellbeing
of ordinary people to their own increasing wealth. Capitalism does indeed favor
the well off and oppresses the working people. About that Marx was absolutely
correct. Without governmental regulation, wealthy capitalists will trample the
working people under foot in every way they can. Labor unions can mitigate the
capitalists’ ability to do so but only when the government’s law is behind
them. Consumers can mitigate the capitalists’ ability to do so through their
purchasing decisions and boycotts, but that hardly ever happens effectively in
large part because consumers are as narrowly concerned with their own wellbeing
as are the capitalists who make the things consumers buy do. Only the
government, and only a government grounded in and committed to the rule of law,
can limit the avarice of wealthy capitalists effectively.
There is much about Marxism that we must reject. It’s
ontology is all wrong. There is more to reality than the material. Its embrace
of violent revolution is immoral and unacceptable. These two aspects of Marxism
made it appallingly easy for Russian Marxists to introduce horror on a massive
scale in the USSR.[1]
After all, if only the material is real, then material beings like peasants and
people claimed to be opponents of the regime are perfectly expendable. Marxism
has no moral constraints to temper the murderous instincts of a Joseph Stalin
or Mao Zedong. Philosophical materialism is Marxism’s primary fault. It’s
wrong. It’s dangerous. It has led to mass murder and genocide in Ukraine,
China, and elsewhere. Marx was right that capitalists exploit and oppress
workers to the greatest extent they can get away with. About most everything
else, he was wrong.
[1]
Most Americans have heard of the Holocaust conducted by German Nazis. Far fewer
have heard of the Holodomor, the forced starvation of Ukrainians (and a few
others) by Soviet Communists that killed around four million people in the
early 1930s.
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