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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Wednesday, May 9, 2018
A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx
“Marx can come almost painfully close to describing our current world. Today, a brutal economism dominates many minds to the extent that it has become invisible for them”
An edited excerpt from Sven-Eric Liedman’s A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx.
( May 6, 2018, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) When
I was young, it was my good fortune to make the acquaintance of an old
German Jew who was dying, here in London, from the effects of long
hardship and privation, of overwork and poverty. I did what I could to
save, to prolong his life. I got him sent to Algeria, to the south of
France, and got the most brilliant young physician on Harley Street to
look after him. But it was too late. In the short time I knew him, he
taught me more than all other teachers, dead or living. He saw more
clearly than any other man the disease that was killing the world. His
name was Karl Marx.
The man who spoke these words was named E. Ray Lankester. He was one of
Great Britain’s foremost biologists at the turn of the twentieth
century, and one of the few present at Marx’s funeral.
Karl Marx lived from 1818 to 1883. By the autumn of 1850, half of his
life had passed. He was truly a man of the 1800s, rooted in his century.
Today he belongs to the distant past, yet his name constantly crops up.
The collapse of the Soviet Empire at rst appeared to bury him in its
rubble, in the oblivion that surrounds the hopelessly obso- lete. Marx
was only the rst in a series of repugnant gures who now, fortunately,
had been consigned to the history books: every- thing that had been
realized in the Soviet Union and China had been designed rst in Marx’s
imagination.
This is a notion that is still widely prevalent. But it soon turned out
that Marx had an active afterlife, independent of the disinte- gration
of empires. More than a few regretted his demise.
The most in uential of these was Jacques Derrida, the French
philosopher, who played an important role in the intellectual life of
the twentieth century. In 1993, he published Specters of Marx, in which
he conceded that Marx was indeed dead, but neverthe- less haunted a
world of growing injustices like a ghost.
Another French philosopher, Étienne Balibar, also published an ingenious
little book in which he asserted that Marx’s thought was extremely
relevant to today’s world, while the philosophy trumpeted from the
Soviet Union had no actual connection with Marx.
A few years later, around the turn of the century, Marx became topical
in a more spectacular fashion. The New Yorker named him the most
important thinker of the coming century, and in a vote organized by the
BBC, he came out top among philosophers as the greatest thinker of the
last millennium. In his last book, How to Change the World (2011), the
great Austro-British historian Eric Hobsbawm spoke about a meeting with
George Soros, the famous investor. Soros asked him about his position on
Marx; anxious to avoid a quarrel, Hobsbawm responded evasively,
whereupon Soros replied: ‘That man discovered something about capitalism
150 years ago that we need to take advantage of.’
These
anecdotes may seem trivial. Someone who is a celebrity, a public gure
people readily refer to, does not need to be in u- ential in a serious
sense. It is more telling that Marx is constantly part of the discussion
of the fateful questions of our time. When French economist Thomas
Piketty caused a sensation in 2013 with his voluminous Capital in the
Twenty-first Century, Marx’s name dominated the ood of commentary the
book gave rise to. Traditional economists ascribed to Piketty all the
sins for which they routinely blame Marx, and enthusiasts took the
promise in the book’s punning title quite literally: a new Capital for
the twenty-first century. In fact, the distance between Piketty and Marx
is quite large. Piketty is not interested in the duel between labour
and capital; his focus is on finance capital. The similarity lies in the
long historical perspective, as well as in the attention paid to the
growing – and in the long run catastrophic – division between the few
who hold more and more power through their riches, and the many who are
thereby rendered powerless. Piketty himself is eager to emphasize Marx’s
significance. Marx’s thesis on the unending accumulation of capital is
as fundamental for economic analysis in the twenty-first century as it
was for the nineteenth, Piketty says.
Sociologist Göran Therborn attacks the growing division in the world
from another direction in his 2013 book, The Killing Fields of
Inequality. He points out that the growing inequality cannot be measured
only by widening gaps in income and wealth. Differences in health and
lifespan – and people’s opportunities in general to develop in an
adequate manner – are also appearing. Therborn perceives a particular
existential inequalty that concerns rights, dignity, respect, and
degrees of freedom, for example. It turns out that this inequality, in
all its aspects, is now rapidly accelerating even in Europe, especially
in the Nordic countries.
Therborn himself has a background in Marxism and, by all appearances,
now considers himself a post-Marxist – that is, remaining in the
tradition but free from all ties to previous groups. Indeed, one of his
later books, from 2008, is titled From Marxism to Post-Marxism?
In the face of another fateful question of the age – the environmental
crisis in general and the climate crisis in particular – Marx’s name
sometimes comes up. This may seem surprising: the empire that had its
ideological origins in Marx – the Soviet Union – caused unparalleled
environmental destruction. But those who go directly to Marx without
detouring through Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev nd that he certainly
cared about the environment. Material production for him was an
interaction between nature and humanity that had been eliminated as a
result of capitalism. The person who has most emphasized this (and to
some extent overemphasized it) is American sociologist John Bellamy
Foster, above all in his 2000 book Marx’s Ecology. Foster’s perspective
turns up in Naomi Klein’s 2014 grand general scrutiny of the
relationship between capitalism and climate, This Changes Everything.
Marx is also present in discussions about the new class society that
developed in the decades around the turn of the twenty-first century.
British economist Guy Standing perceived a new social class in the world
of that era. He published a widely discussed book about it in 2011: The
Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. He considers people of today who
are living in an incessantly uncertain nancial situation as belonging to
the precariat. He perceives three different layers: workers who,
through de-industrialization, have lost their jobs and have no prospect
for employment; refugees from the world’s hotbeds of crisis who have
been forced out into the margins of society; and, nally, well-educated
people who are reduced to temporary, equally uncertain, positions that
are interspersed with periods of unemployment. This is a diversity that
is perhaps entirely too large for the term to be manageable. But there
is an important unifying link here that has to do with the labour market
and the conditions of employment. More and more people are relegated to
a diffuse borderland between temporary jobs and no jobs at all. The
relative security that the workers’ movement fought for is becoming more
and more restricted, and the social safety net is growing thinner or
being torn to shreds in recurring crises.
It is natural that the crisis that crossed the world in 2008 and 2009
aroused a new interest in Marx, and for Capital in particular. With the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many said with pleasure that not only
the Soviet Empire, but Karl Marx too would thereby lose all relevance
they had had so far. It is fitting that the Soviet Union was sent to the
past once and for all after 1991, but not Marx. And why not Marx?
To approach the question, we must first take a step back. The societal
change that characterized Marx’s work more than any other was
industrialization, and with it the development of a workers’ movement.
Today, those developments appear distant and close at the same time. In
countries where mass production once began, we have entered into a
post-industrial society. The nineteenth-century sweatshops that Marx had
in mind are now found chiefly in countries such as China, Indonesia,
and the Philippines. In Europe and the United States, other class
divisions than those of the 1800s and 1900s are getting wider and
deeper.
A large number of economists who portray the reality of the early
twenty-first century as the best – indeed, the only natural – one are
doing everything they can to convince ordinary people that they belong
to the great capitalist community of interest. ‘It’s everyone’s money
that’s at stake,’ they chant. Their own theory is built on the notion of
an eternal equilibrium in a world of restless change. We could call it a
new kind of more prosaic Platonism. Something eternal exists beyond the
chaotic diversity that the senses (and the charts) bear witness to.
What could be more natural in a situation like this than to summon Karl
Marx back from the shadows? No social theory is more dynamic than his.
No one speaks more clearly about widening class divisions than he does.
It is impossible to read the introductory, stylistically razor-sharp and
rhetorically perfect first pages of the Communist Manifesto without
recognizing the society that is ours. The bourgeoisie ‘has drowned the
most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm,
of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical
calculation’.
Are we not again living in that society? Have we not come back to the
reality of the 1840s, even if more globalized and technologically more
advanced? The free flow of commodities is the norm that forces other
norms to shrink into insignificance.
Marx can, sometimes, come almost painfully close to describing our
current world. Today, a brutal economism dominates many minds to the
extent that it has become invisible for them. It is often called
neoliberalism, after the school that Milton Friedman became the symbol
of in the 1970s. But the name does not matter. The important thing is
that many of Friedman’s ideas have become everyday life; the market
dominates every detail, and even states and municipalities are run like
businesses.
Friedman’s spiritual forefathers – the representatives of the Manchester
School – lived in Marx’s time, with John Bright and Richard Cobden
leading the way. For them too, free trade would solve all problems. Marx
harboured a reluctant admiration for the Manchester liberals, seeing
them as heralds for a development that had to precede the society he
himself was ghting for. At the same time, he attacked them heatedly when
they claimed to represent the whole of the people – the workers as well
– against the aristocracy.
Marx wrote much about Cobden and Bright and their followers, especially in his articles in the New York Daily Tribune.
The Marx of the twenty- rst century must brace himself against the reality that has been created since the 1980s.
Today, Marx may be discussed and often cited, but he has only a fraction
of the influence he – apparently, at least – had fifty or a hundred
years ago. In a way, this is paradoxical. His vision of society would
seem to appear less pertinent then than it does now. The Soviet Union,
which was supposed to be following in his footsteps, was characterized
by many things, from censorship, forced labour camps, and rule by the
bosses to schools and univer- sities for everyone and guaranteed support
for a non-modernistic culture – indeed, a ‘philistine sentimentalism’,
to use the words of the Manifesto. In the other Europe, where Marx is
also found in the family tree, certain politicians could talk about
democratic socialism, and there – despite many shortcomings and injus-
tices – moderate social security prevailed for most. The economy
blossomed, preparing the ground for reforms that made life more
tolerable for ordinary folk. Of course, there were still class
divisions, but not as precipitous as a hundred years earlier.
Marx’s analysis of his time thus makes better sense today than it did
fifty years ago. Its accuracy applies, above all, to the way capitalism
works.
But Marx had not counted on capitalism’s ability to constantly renew
itself and develop new productive forces. Today, capitalism appears more
dominant than ever. In the only large country where Marx still has a
place of honour – China – he has to put up with constantly being
drenched in the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’. Communism has
become the ‘Sunday best’, tight as a straitjacket. Everyday life is
marked by a race for market shares, as ruthless as it is successful.
Marx’s analysis of the way capitalism works is being brilliantly
confirmed. But for him, it would have been inconceivable that a country
that quotes him would drive capitalism to its utmost extremes.
It is in this paradoxical situation that entering deep into the study of Marx becomes important.
An epic new biography of Karl Marx for the 200th anniversary of his
birth. Building on the work of previous biographers, Liedman employs a
commanding knowledge of the nineteenth century to create a definitive
portrait of Marx and his vast contribution to the way the world
understands itself. He shines a light on Marx’s influences, explains his
political and intellectual interventions, and builds on the legacy of
his thought. Liedman shows how Marx’s masterpiece, Capital,
illuminates the essential logic of a system that drives dizzying
wealth, grinding poverty, and awesome technological innovation to this
day.