Is Marxism Relevant Today?

Marx is definitely dead for humankind."

Quotations like this come up all the time when questions of radical political and social change are discussed. They can be found in the corporate media, especially the blowhard punditocracy. They can be found in textbooks and academic journals. And they can be found--actually, more often and with greater acrimony--in discussions on the left, among people who agree on many points. A variety of arguments are put forward as evidence--that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels predicted that capitalism would collapse, and it hasn't; that the fall of the Berlin Wall exposed the failure of Marxism; that class struggle can't survive in a world of cable television, the Internet and SUVs. What connects them is the desire to bury Marx and Marxism--historically interesting, maybe, but an irrelevancy in the modern world.

But there is one point worth making about the specific quotation cited above. It wasn't written in the last year or the last decade. It's nearly a century old--the words of Italian intellectual Benedetto Croce from an article in 1907. Croce was declaring that Marx and Marxism were irrelevant in the new century--the 20th century, that is. As Daniel Singer, the socialist journalist and writer who sadly died a year and a half ago, put it (citing Croce's words during a 1997 talk that was reprinted in Monthly Review): "I have quoted it to remind you that gravediggers of Marx--the new philosophers, the Fukuyamas--have plenty of ancestors and will have plenty of successors, and it's not worthwhile spending much time refuting their paid or unpaid funeral orations."

Croce had the misfortune of passing judgement on Marxism a decade before the Russian Revolution of 1917--the great revolt against one of the world's cruelest dictators, the Tsar; the most thorough expansion of democracy and freedom known to the world to that point; and the first glimpses of what a society run by the majority of people might look like. The fact that this first experiment in socialism survived for only a brief few years before the bureaucratic counterrevolution of Stalinism doesn't change the fact that Marx and Marxism were very relevant indeed--viewed as a guide and a framework by masses of people who hoped to make a new society, with themselves as the collective masters.

Likewise, during the upheavals across the world following the First World War--from the revolution in Germany that toppled the Kaiser, to the short-lived establishment of workers' governments in Bavaria and Hungry, to even the U.S. and its "Great Red Year" of 1919, when one in five workers were on strike--many of those who could justly be called the most active in the struggle looked to Marxism as the best explanation of what they were fighting against and fighting for.

Though the years after the First World War marked the highest point of the influence of Marxism--or at least the genuine Marxist tradition, before the distortions caused by its association with Stalinism, in both Russia and other countries--its impression can be seen to some extent in all the great struggles since. Even, for example, the 1980-81 Solidarnosc revolt in Poland, which pitted the 10 million-strong Solidarity union against a dictatorial regime that ruled in the name of Marxism. Nevertheless, leading figures in the uprising and veterans of past struggles in Poland, such as Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, looked to an anti-Stalinist version of Marxism, with democracy and workers' self-activity at its core.

Every time Marxism is buried, it seems to rise from the dead, whether a decade or a few years or even a few months later--to become recognized, by supporters and opponents alike, as an important influence on a new generation concerned with the issues of justice, equality and resistance. If this is the case, then there must be something about Marxism that draws people to reexamine it time and again. If so, then the version of Marxism put forward by its critics in order to dismiss it--of dusty, old-fashioned ideas, obsessively focused on economic developments to the exclusion of all else--must be inaccurate. Marxism must be a living set of ideas that helps to better understand the world--and more importantly, how to change it.

Marxism and capitalism

Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall--when both defenders of the free market and many people on the left viewed the collapse of Stalinism as the signal of Marxism's long-foretold death--Marx's name keeps popping up. In 1997, in an article marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy discovered "The Return of Karl Marx." "Many of the contradictions that he saw in Victorian capitalism and that were subsequently addressed by reformist governments have begun reappearing in new guises, like mutant viruses," Cassidy wrote. He reported a conversation with an investment banker: "To my surprise, he brought up Karl Marx. 'The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,' he said."

More recently, editorial writers at the Allentown, Pa., Morning Call dusted off their Marx in the wake of the Enron scandal: "For several years, we have been told that Marxism is now a defunct doctrine. However, the apparent collusion of our 'democratically elected' leaders in the deceitful (though quite profitable) methods of the firm called Enron should lead us to be less hasty in dismissing Marx as a total lunatic. At least one of the statements of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto prompts renewed attention. 'The executive (the top level of government) of the modern state,' they wrote in 1848, 'is merely a committee for arranging the affairs of the (capitalist) bourgeoisie.'"

It's a telling statement about the continuing power of Marxism when supporters of the status quo feel the need to measure themselves and the society they champion against ideas that are supposed to be irrelevant. After all, it's not immediately clear why Marxism--a body of ideas whose essential core, though developed over the years, was expressed with only a few exceptions more than 150 years ago--should be relevant today.

When the Communist Manifesto--Marx and Engels' agitational pamphlet stating the principles of their version of scientific socialism--was written in 1847, capitalism as we recognize it today was confined to a few countries on the northwest edge of Europe. Only a small fraction of the world's population living in parts of Europe and North America were in the early stages of a different