Karl Marx turns 200: are his ideas still valid? (2023)

Saturday marks the 200th birthday of one of history's most controversial and influential thinkers, Karl Marx. One would think that almost three decades after the end of Soviet-style communism and the untold human suffering that accompanied it, Marxism would be as relevant to contemporary politics as astrology. Instead, the ideas of the German national economist are experiencing a revival. One reason for this could be the Great Recession, which disproved the notion that markets were inherently self-regulating. "The crisis has awakened the desire to examine old, unsolved questions anew, especially in the disruption of conventional ways of thinking," says Richard Wolff, visiting professor at the New School in New York and one of the few Marxist economists in the American Academy. "Marx was the first great critic of capitalism," he says. "And nothing guaranteed the present and future of Marxism with greater certainty than the existence of capitalism, of which it is, so to speak, the critical shadow."

It's one of history's great ironies that the most influential writer of the 20th century spent his entire life in the 19th century, but if anyone could spot a good historical contradiction, it was Karl Marx.

Saturday marks the 200th anniversary of Marx, whose ideas shaped the political and economic landscape of the last century. The day provides an opportunity to ask how these ideas are still relevant today.

Marxism has always been polarizing, but perhaps the political anomie of 2018 leaves the debate about its relevance less ideologically fraught than past milestones. Soviet-style communism sat on the ashes of history, and yet for many the victory of capitalism was less than decisive, especially after the 2007 economic crisis, an event that prompted a small but growing number of citizens in advanced industrial nations to take it all to question the fundamentals of our economic system.

"Marx was the first great critic of capitalism," says Richard Wolff, visiting professor at the New School in New York and one of the few Marxist economists in American academia. "And nothing guaranteed the present and future of Marxism with greater certainty than the existence of capitalism, of which it is, so to speak, the critical shadow."

Matthias Rietschel/Reuters

Left-wing activists rest at the foot of the Karl Marx monument after a protest against a demonstration by far-right groups in Chemnitz, Germany, May 1, 2018.

A central thesis of Marxism is that capitalism has produced two hostile classes: the workers, who must trade their labor for wages in order to survive; and the bourgeoisie, owners of the companies that pay the workers. The bourgeoisie makes a profit by paying their workers less than the full value of the goods they produce and keeping the rest for themselves.

This extraction of "surplus value" from workers, Marxists say, creates a fundamental contradiction. Employers need to maximize profits by keeping wages as low as possible, but they also need to keep selling products, which becomes increasingly difficult as workers' purchasing power is constrained by low wages. From the employer's point of view, the ideal would be to have low-paid employees and high-paid customers, but this ideal becomes unattainable when everyone pursues it. According to Marxist theory, the system inevitably feeds on itself.

"Capital is scouring the world for the cheapest labor it can find, working as hard and as cheaply as possible," says Wendy Brown, a political theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Marx could have explained that to you 200 years ago."

Marx was born on May 5, 1818 to a wealthy Jewish family who hold power converted to Lutheranism in the Rhenish city of Trier, a Roman Catholic city claimed by Prussia from France four years earlier and why. His early journalism, which he took up without a professorship after earning a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin, points to a scientific discipline that Marx would one day count among its founding fathers: the social sciences.

Em 1843,writes for the radical Rheinische ZeitungMarx called for an "objective approach" to the economic situation of the winegrowers in his native Moselle valley, which would analyze society and its conditions "with about the same certainty as the chemist uses to determine the external conditions under which substances with affinity are bound, to form a connection.

He quickly realized that trying to use the scientific method against the Prussian state power is a sure way to be expelled from the country. Marx and his wife, a beautiful and rebellious aristocrat named Jenny von Westphalen, chose Paris, which at the time was teeming with activists from across the political spectrum: royalists, anarchists, and a group envisioning a society where property was common was.

"Like Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai and Pol Pot, Marx only became a communist in Paris," says Jonathan Sperber, a historian at the University of Missouri and author of the 2013 biography."Karl Marx: A Life in the Nineteenth Century."

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Activists with flags march behind a banner representing former German philosopher and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx during the traditional May Day demonstration in central Paris, France.

In 1845, the Prussian authorities pressured France to ban Marx from the country. He landed in London in 1849, where he spent the rest of his life.

Marx died in 1883 without witnessing a proletarian revolution. But in 1917, inspired by his words, revolutionaries overthrew the Russian government and established the first workers' state in history. Within 50 years more than a third of humanity would be living under an officially Marxist government.

“The regimes that used his name,” says Professor Sperber, “have little to do with Marx's ideas. They were very centralized and bureaucratic. And Marx deeply hated bureaucrats.”

But even when Marxist regimes failed to implement their ideas, those ideas spread. "Marxism has permeated in one form or another the history and culture of every country on earth," says Professor Wolff. "It merged with every language, culture, stage of historical development, and set of economic conditions and circumstances."

Seven decades after the first shots in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks' great and bloody experiment in economic collapse and dissolution came to an abrupt end. For many observers, the collapse of communism in 1989 spelled the end of Marxism's topicality.

But on the way to what should have been the triumph of capitalism, something unexpected happened. In late 2007, the world economy imploded in spectacular Marxist fashion, suddenly leaving the banks themselves destitute and in need of a public bailout. The central myth of neoliberal capitalism, that market economies are inherently self-regulating, has been debunked, observers say.

"The crisis has awakened the desire to re-examine old, unsolved questions, especially in the upheaval of conventional ways of thinking," says Wolff.

After the crash, booksellers across Germany reported that sales of Marx's seminal work, Das Kapital,increased by 300 percent. Marxism, it seems, is making a comeback.

"Since 2009 I have held more public guest lectures than in the 40 years before," says Wolff, who is committed to thisdemocratically run workers' cooperativesthat could coexist with capitalist corporations. "The audience ranges from 200 to 500 people and the interest is electric."

But this popularity may have more to do with dissatisfaction with capitalism than with acceptance of Marxism. "If you look at what is relevant to Marx today, people can often only deliver sentences," says Sperber. "They can say things like 'crisis', 'globalization', 'inequality' and they're literally almost like slogans and words."

For Professor Brown there are two answers to the question about the actuality of Marxism: yes and no.

“It has enormous relevance for our time. And I think there are limitations that come with the 19th century contextindustrial economies.

However, the critical tradition produced by Marx, which stretches across the humanities and social sciences, makes it impossible to place Marxism fully in a nineteenth-century context.

"Marx has become, in a way, part of the air we breathe and the water we swim in, even where he has been denied," says Brown.

“[Marxism] is everywhere,” says Wolff. "And it won't go away."

Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters

A man looks out of a vehicle at a picture of Karl Marx during a May Day demonstration organized by the Frontline Socialist Party in Colombo, Sri Lanka May Day.