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  • Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow. Yet were also

  • often keen to dismiss the ideas of capitalism’s most famous and ambitious critic, Karl Marx.

  • This isn’t very surprising. In practice,

  • his political and economic ideas have been used to design disastrously planned economies

  • and nasty dictatorships.

  • Nevertheless, we shouldn’t reject Marx too quickly. We ought to see him as a guide whose

  • diagnosis of Capitalism’s ills helps us navigate towards a more promising future.

  • Capitalism is going to have be reformed - and Marx’s analyse are going to be part of any

  • answer. Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany.

  • Soon he became involved with the Communist

  • party, a tiny group of intellectuals advocating for the overthrow of the class system and

  • the abolition of private property. He worked as a journalist and had to flee Germany, eventually

  • settling in London.

  • Marx wrote an enormous number of books and articles, sometimes with his friend Friedrich Engels

  • Mostly, Marx wrote about Capitalism, the type of economy that dominates the western world.

  • It was, in his day, still getting going, and Marx was one of its most intelligent and perceptive critics.

  • These were some of the problems he identified with it:

  • Modern work isalienatedOne of Marx’s greatest insights is that

  • work can be one of the sources of our greatest joys.

  • But in order to be fulfilled at work, Marx wrote that workers needto see themselves

  • in the objects they have created’. Think of the person who built this chair:

  • it is straightforward, strong, honest and elegant

  • It’s an example of how, at its best, labour offers us a chance to externalise

  • what’s good inside us. But this is increasingly rare in the modern world.

  • Part of the problem is that modern work is incredibly specialised. Specialised jobs make

  • the modern economy highly efficient, but they also mean that it is seldom possible for any

  • one worker to derive a sense of the genuine contribution they might be making to the real

  • needs of humanity. Marx argued that modern work leads to

  • alienation = Entfremdung

  • in other words, a feeling of disconnection between what you do all day and who you feel

  • you really are and would ideally be able to contribute to existence.

  • Modern work is insecure Capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable;

  • just one factor among others in the forces of production that can ruthlessly be let go

  • the minute that costs rise or savings can be made through technology. And yet, as Marx

  • knew, deep inside of us, we don’t want to be arbitrarily let go, we are terrified of

  • being abandoned. Communism isn’t just an economic theory.

  • Understood emotionally, it expresses a deep-seated longing that we always have a place in the

  • world’s heart, that we will not be cast out.

  • Workers get paid little while capitalists get rich

  • This is perhaps the most obvious qualm Marx had with Capitalism. In particular, he believed

  • that capitalists shrunk the wages of the labourers as much as possible in order to skim off a

  • wide profit margin.

  • He called this primitive accumulation = ursprüngliche Akkumulation

  • Whereas capitalists see profit as a reward for ingenuity and technological talent, Marx

  • was far more damning. Profit is simply theft, and what you are stealing is the talent and

  • hard work of your work force.

  • However much one dresses up the fundamentals, Marx insists that at its crudest, capitalism

  • means paying a worker one price for doing something that can be sold for another, much

  • higher one. Profit is a fancy term for exploitation.

  • Capitalism is very unstable

  • Marx proposed that capitalist systems are characterised by series of crises. Every crisis

  • is dressed up by capitalists as being somehow freakish and rare and soon to be the last one. Far from it, argued Marx,

  • crises are endemic to capitalism - and theyre caused by something very odd. The fact that

  • were able to produce too much - far more than anyone needs to consume.

  • Capitalist crises are crises of abundance, rather than - as in the past - crises of shortage.

  • Our factories and systems are so efficient, we could give everyone on this planet a car,

  • a house, access to a decent school and hospital.

  • That’s what so enraged Marx and made him hopeful too. Few of us need to work, because

  • the modern economy is so productive.

  • But rather than seeing this need not to work as the freedom it is, we complain about it

  • masochistically and describe it by a pejorative wordunemployment.” We should call it freedom.

  • There’s so much unemployment for a good and deeply admirable reason: because were

  • so good at making things efficiently. Were not all needed at the coal face.

  • But in that case, we should - thought Marx - make leisure admirable. We should redistribute

  • the wealth of the massive corporations that make so much surplus money and give it to

  • everyone.

  • This is, in its own way, as beautiful a dream as Jesus’s promise of heaven; but a good

  • deal more realistic sounding.

  • Capitalism is bad for capitalists

  • Marx did not think capitalists were evil. For example, he was acutely aware of the sorrows

  • and secret agonies that lay behind bourgeois marriage.

  • Marx argued that marriage was actually an extension of business, and that the bourgeois

  • family was fraught with tension, oppression, and resentment, with people staying together

  • not for love but for financial reasons.

  • Marx believed that the capitalist system forces everyone to put economic interests at the

  • heart of their lives, so that they can no longer know deep, honest relationships. He

  • called this psychological tendency

  • commodity fetishism = Warenfetischismus

  • because it makes us value things that have no objective value.

  • He wanted people to be freed from financial constraint so that they could - at last - start

  • to make sensible, healthy choices in their relationships.

  • The 20th century feminist answer to the oppression of women has been to argue that women should

  • be able to go out to work. Marx’s answer was more subtle. This feminist insistence

  • merely perpetuates human slavery. The point isn’t that women should imitate the sufferings

  • of their male colleagues,it’s that men and women should have the permanent option to

  • enjoy leisure.

  • Why don’t we all think a bit more like marx?

  • An important aspect of Marx’s work is that he proposes that there is an insidious, subtle

  • way in which the economic system colours the sort of ideas that we ending up having.

  • The economy generates what Marx termed anideology”.

  • A capitalist society is one where most people, rich and poor, believe all sorts of things

  • that are really just value judgements that relate back to the economic system: that a

  • person who doesn’t work is worthless, that leisure (beyond a few weeks a year) is sinful,

  • that more belongings will make us happier and that worthwhile things (and people) will

  • invariably make money.

  • In short, one of the biggest evils of Capitalism is not that there are corrupt people at the

  • topthis is true in any human hierarchybut that capitalist ideas teach all of us to be

  • anxious, competitive, conformist, and politically complacent.

  • Marx didn’t only outline what was wrong capitalism: we also get glimpses of what Marx

  • wanted the ideal utopian future to be like.

  • In his Communist Manifesto he describes a world without private property or inherited wealth,

  • with a steeply graduated income tax, centralised control of the banking, communication, and

  • transport industries, and free public education. Marx also expected that communist society

  • would allow people to develop lots of different sides of their natures:

  • in communist societyit is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow,

  • to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after

  • dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

  • After Marx moved to London he was supported by his friend and intellectual partner Friedrich

  • Engels, a wealthy man whose father owned a cotton plant in Manchester. Engels covered

  • Marx’s debts and made sure his works were published. Capitalism paid for Communism.

  • The two men even wrote each other adoring poetry.

  • Marx was not a well-regarded or popular intellectual in his day.

  • Respectable, conventional people of Marx’s

  • day would have laughed at the idea that his ideas could remake the world. Yet just a few

  • decades later they did: his writings became the keystone for some of the most important

  • ideological movements of the 20th century.

  • But Marx was like a brilliant doctor in the early days of medicine. He could recognise

  • the nature of the disease, although he had no idea how to go about curing it.

  • At this point in history, we should all be Marxists in the sense of agreeing with his

  • diagnosis of our troubles. But we need to go out and find the cures that will really

  • work. As Marx himself declared, and we deeply agree:

  • Philosophers until now have only interpreted

  • the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow. Yet were also

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