This is a repost from January of last year. Donald Trump insists on invoking the name of Karl Marx, so I thought I’d attempt to provide clarity. I don’t get the feeling the Republican nominee has read a single paragraph of Marx.
Read time: 2:45
There are two Karl Marx’s. There is the one that folks pontificate about and then there’s the one who actually existed. His work is rich, illuminating, and offers a rewarding opportunity for study. As a professor of mine told me about thirty years ago, “World history is incomprehensible without understanding Marx.”
He is commonly associated with Soviet Russia. This is ludicrous. Marx did talk about revolution and maintained that revolution would take place in those countries where capitalism was in its most advanced stages—maybe England or Germany. Russia was, at the time, feudal and somewhat backward. Moreover, the communists, that is, Lenin and company, rammed that system into place and imposed on Russia a top-down single-party monopoly. Marx felt revolution would be fomented bottom-up by the proletariat, that is, the workers, not a bunch of power-hungry intellectuals. So, what happened in Russia in 1917 was nowhere near what Marx envisioned. He would have been head in hand observing those events.
Marx did not spend a lot of time talking about communism. Even in the Communist Manifesto, he does not lay out a blueprint for a communist society. He spends thousands of pages elsewhere talking about and analyzing capitalism. This was his focus: the industrial/factory system in the nineteenth century. In his masterwork, Capital Vol. 1 (Das Kapital), he spends about 900 pages talking about capitalism. He does mention communism in about half a dozen sentences; but, it’s in passing, and he doesn’t dwell on the subject. If you have not read this book, then it follows, you do not know what’s in it. I apologize if this sounds elitist or pompous, but I’m not going to apologize for having read it. One does not have to be smart to read an enormous book; you just need a lot of time on your hands. That was my summer. You roll out of bed, open the book, and close it when it’s dark out. You bring it to the pool. That is your whole summer. Period.
I would also recommend the Communist Manifesto, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and his essay “On the Jewish Question.” These are much shorter works and not terribly hard to read. Like I said, they are rich. In a course I taught on political philosophy, a student of mine entered the Marx segment with trepidation. Two weeks later, he was like “This bears no resemblance to what I have heard!” Told ya. He became fascinated with Marx’s thought.
So, the communist stuff is nonsense, the Soviet stuff is nonsense, and Marx is not responsible for the shortcomings of the communist world, for example, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and so on. He was an analyst whose work focused on factory capitalism; he did talk about revolution, but not what the world saw in Moscow. Give Karl a read. You might be surprised. Actually, you will be surprised. And if you read Capital, get the Penguin edition (the Ben Fowkes translation), and don’t skip the footnotes! That’s where the delicious bits are.
Ooh, also check out the film, The Young Karl Marx, directed by Raoul Peck. So good. They did their homework.
