“The revenge of Marx begins now.”
--Masahiro Mita (translation from Japanese mine)
Those on the Right today are quick to call those said to be on the Left Marxists, and those on the Left are quick to deny it. In American politics, “Marxist” is an insult and Marxism is the bogeyman. I always think this is funny, because as far as I can tell, everyone believes that most of this bogeyman’s most fundamental concepts hold true for America today. We are all in some ways Marxists, we just use different terminology.
The first thing anyone ever learns about Marx’s thought is his belief that societies split into two opposing groups, with one always having the advantage. In the Middle Ages, those two groups were the lords and serfs. Marx called the two groups in the capitalist societies of his day the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie is the class that possesses the means of production and the proletariat consists of those who do the work. Today, we talk about the haves and the have nots, and just as in the dichotomies of times past, one group has all the power and wealth, and one group has precious little.
Another fundamental concept of Marxism is the accumulation of wealth. Marx noticed that the bourgeoisie employs its money to make ever greater amounts of money for itself, while conditions for the proletariat tend to worsen. This is no different than what we today describe as the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Report after report for years has described a middle class falling in ever greater numbers into the ranks of the poor, while the rich become the super rich. A quote from a recent article by Nobel Prize-winning American economist Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:
“The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.”
The wealth is accumulating, comrades.
And a great part of Marx’s greatest work, Das Kapital, is dedicated to describing exploitation of labor, terminology which has survived unchanged to our own day—long hours, little pay, no benefits, wretched work environments, and so on. You know the litany of workplace horrors visited on employees by their employers, because they are all too common in America today. Some of the worst conditions may have improved here thanks to regulations (although companies often avoid these regulations by setting up sweat shops overseas), but workers continue to undergo continuous degradations at the hands of their employers.
In Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism, English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) discussed the ways that Marx’s philosophy had fallen short, among them the way capitalist societies were demonstrating a graduated class structure rather than two starkly different classes and the absence of working class revolutions in most capitalist nations, and these criticisms are valid, but it seems to me that Marx got an awful lot right. British literary theorist Terry Eagleton appears to agree, since his latest book is called Why Marx Was Right.
But I am not just saying that much of Marx’s analysis of capitalism holds true today, but that everyone—from politicians to news analysts to businessmen to the “average American”—seems to have drawn many of the same conclusions, they just don’t call it Marxism, don’t want to call their beliefs by what has become a dirty name, or don’t know that that is what their beliefs are called.
The form of today’s economic and social dialectic may be different than it was in the 19th Century, but the content is essentially the same. And while revolutions may have failed to appear or to take hold, it is well past time that we lend an ear (a critical ear, of course) to this thinker from the past, whose voice has in many ways proven prescient, and look for a means to address the inequalities of our day.
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