15
KARL MARX (1818–1883)
Genius and illusion
It is impossible to know what to believe about Karl Marx. For those on the right of the political spectrum he is the inventor and promoter of communism, an utterly wrongheaded set of economic ideas that in the 20th century resulted in death and misery for millions of people. For them, his ideas have nothing whatsoever to offer the modern world.
For those on the left, Marx is only loosely associated with the horrors of communist Russia and China. He would, they say, have been utterly appalled by the atrocities that were carried out in his name. But more than that: he is the person who sees most clearly the inherent contradictions at the heart of capitalism. Marx’s works, and in particular, the first volume of Das Kapital [Capital], published in 1867, contain within them irrefutable evidence that, sooner or later, capitalism will collapse. For this group, Marx’s writings have everything to offer the modern world.
Whom do you trust? The question of what to think about Marx is complicated by the fact that the man led a double life. We have what you could call the “pamphleteer Marx”, who co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with his sidekick, Friedrich Engels, in 1848, and who delivered rousing speeches to left-wing groups across Europe. Then we have what you can call the “British Library Marx”, a man who spent hours a day by himself, critiquing the works of political economists such as David Ricardo and Adam Smith. The “British Library Marx” came up with complex theories about how capitalism had evolved, and where it was going next.
Understanding Marx’s thought is especially difficult because he changed his mind over the course of his life. Ideas that are raised in early books do not make it into later ones. Some philosophers delineate between a “young”, optimistic Marx and an “old”, pessimistic Marx. Add to that the difficult style in which Marx often wrote, which leaves plenty of room for different interpretations. Meanwhile, rarely is it possible to find a single idea–even those considered foundational to Marxist thought–explained in one place.
The upshot is that Marx is probably the most contested figure in this book. There are entire schools, and sub-schools, and sub-sub-schools, of Marxist thought. Google Scholar finds around 140,000 scholarly papers or books ever published that refer to “Malthus”, and approaching 1 million for “Adam Smith”. There are 2.6 million mentioning “Marx”. There is no single interpretation of any Marxist idea with which everyone agrees. Towards the end of his life, Marx complained that his arguments were being lost in the babble. “What is certain”, he said, “is that I myself am not a Marxist.”
Contradictions and confusions
What, then, was Marx really about? Start by assessing the man. Marx was born in 1818 in what is now Germany. He completed a doctorate in philosophy in 1841 at the University of Jena. (It is said that he chose that university because its fees were the lowest.)
He was interested in the question of what causes historical changes. Did ideas cause change, or were changes in economic structure in fact responsible? G. W. F. Hegel is the archetypal “idealist” philosopher, who basically argued that ideas determined historical change. Marx, so the story goes, “turned Hegel on his head”, in that he came to propose that material circumstances determined things like ideas and social structure. (The extent to which Marx actually believed that the “base” determines the “superstructure” is one of the longest-running arguments in Marxist scholarship.)
All this sounds rather abstract. Consider this by way of example to illustrate the idealist/materialist split. In the past 40 years, across the rich world trade unions have gone into retreat, with fewer and fewer workers represented by one. What is the cause of this significant historical change? Hegel, from the idealist perspective, might have argued that changing ideas are the cause of declining unions. Perhaps people feel less of a sense of class solidarity with other workers; instead they are more individualistic. Marx, from a materialist perspective, might look at how the structure of the economy had changed. He might point to the disappearance of big factories and mines, which were once the heartlands of unionism.
Over time, Marx moved away from ultra-theoretical academic pursuits towards making a living as a journalist. In 1849 he moved to London, and from 1852 to 1862 was the European correspondent of the New York Tribune. Neither that nor his revolutionary activities paid well. He spent much of his life in abject (if genteel) poverty. Gareth Stedman Jones, in a recent intellectual biography, says that Marx was known to work three or four days straight without sleep. He always seemed to be ill (his unhealthy diet, based on “highly seasoned dishes, smoked fish, caviar and pickled cucumber together with Moselle wine, beer and liqueurs”, may have been one cause of that).
Most accounts of Marx portray him as a difficult person. Francis Wheen, in his brilliant and amusing biography, refers to Marx as “undoubtedly a tremendous show-off and a sadistic intellectual thug”. The first person that Marx cites in the first chapter of Capital is… himself. As “Young Marx”, a play performed in London in 2017, illustrates well, he was not especially nice to Engels. Marx was constantly leaning on his friend for money. The two often went out boozing together, smashing streetlights as they went from pub to pub. Meanwhile Marx was not much of a family man. In 1851 Helene Demuth, the housekeeper for Marx and his wife, Jenny, gave birth to a boy. Most scholars believe that Marx was the father. Ferdinand Mount quips that the term “long-suffering wife” could have been invented for Jenny. Not to mention that Marx was an anti-Semite (though he was born Jewish).
The populist and the professor
Let us look first at the “pamphleteer Marx”. This person was a rabble-rouser who wished to incite the working classes to revolution. Though the Communist Manifesto failed to achieve its objective, to this day it is stirring. “Workers of all lands, unite” is a pretty good phrase (and one that appears on Marx’s headstone in Highgate Cemetery). Marx had a knack for snappy lines. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” is another classic of the Communist Manifesto, referring to the supposed tendency of capitalism to destroy traditional ways of life. Capital (machines, tools and the like) was in Marx’s view nothing more than “dead labour”, since workers of the past had produced it. Capitalism was, Marx said, creating “a disposable industrial reserve army” of impoverished people. History repeats itself, said Marx, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Marx is a bit like William Shakespeare: every day people use his phrases without realising it. “Religion is… the opium of the people” is another classic Marx-ism. As is “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
But the “pamphleteer Marx” did not just write: he spoke, or, rather, bellowed. Wheen calls Marx “a good performer in pubs”; in the 1840s Pavel Annenkov, a Russian traveller, described Marx thus: “With a thick mop of black hair on his head, his hairy hands, dressed in a coat buttoned diagonally across his chest, he maintained the appearance of a man with the right and authority to command respect, whatever guise he took and whatever he did.”
Marx did not shy away from trying to fire up the crowd, as Gareth Stedman Jones amply demonstrates in his recent biography. Perhaps most notorious is what he wrote following the end of the Paris Commune, a radical–socialist government that briefly ruled the city in 1871. The Communards had executed two generals, Thomas and Lecomte. But according to Marx’s interpretation of the events, the violence was more than justified, says Stedman Jones. Marx insisted that “[t]he Central Committee and the Paris working men were as much responsible for the killing of Clément Thomas and Lecomte as the Princess of Wales was for the fate of the people crushed to death on the day of her entrance into London.” (In other words, they brought it upon themselves.) Similarly, because the execution of an Archbishop had come after a refusal by Versailles to exchange him for a revolutionary, Marx claimed that “[t]he real murderer of Archbishop Darboy is [Adolphe] Thiers”, the man in charge of the army. These accounts suggest that Marx was not quite as horrified by political violence as his supporters usually argue. Were it for a just cause, violence might be justified.1
Whatever the truth of that, Marx is not famous today because of his pamphleteering. Instead it is the “British Library Marx” who has had enduring influence on the world. This character attempted to provide an overall account of how capitalism worked–and more specifically, how it would inevitably fail.
Myth and ideology
It may be helpful to sweep away a few Marxian myths. First things first: Marx did not “invent” communism. Communistic ideas go as far back as Ancient Greece. Nineteenth-century radicals, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) and the Chartist movement in England, used phrases that modern-day readers might believe to be Marx’s–“to enjoy political equality, abolish property”, for instance. (Marx, as it happened, had fierce arguments with Proudhon, whom he accused of being bourgeois.)
It is also wrong to argue that Marx hated capitalism–at least without major qualifications. For one thing Marx was clearly impressed by what he saw around him as he travelled across Europe. The first wave of globalisation, according to Marx and Engels, “has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended…”. Marx, indeed, was writing at a time of frenetic capitalist development. From 1849, the year in which he moved to London, to his death in 1883, the real value of Britain’s “capital stock”–machines, factories and the like–more than doubled. The number of railway passenger journeys per year grew six-fold.
Marx had another reason to like capitalism. As we will see, under his theory of history, the transition to socialism/communism required society to pass through capitalism first. So Marx was itching for capitalism to continue to develop, since it brought the world ever closer to the Promised Land.
In sum, Marx did not conceptualise a new type of society–communism–and nor did he simply reject capitalism outright. His contribution was subtler than that. He studied the writings of the political economists and found that their works were racked with inconsistencies and gaping theoretical holes–which only he had spotted. He speaks of the “absurd contradiction[s]” he has discovered in John Stuart Mill’s oeuvre. Thomas Malthus, meanwhile, had produced “nothing more than a school-boyish, superficial plagiary”. As Marx saw it, he was put on Earth in order to produce what he called “a critique of political economy”. Marx was like a secret agent; someone who would infiltrate the enemy camp and bring it down from the inside. That is the central motivation of Marxism. Everything important about Marx flows from this idea.
Thinking like a Marxist
The enormous mass of writings that comprise Marx’s critique can, roughly speaking, be divided into three themes. First, Marx establishes that no social system that has existed hitherto has survived for very long, and he deduces that there is no reason why capitalism should be any different. It will eventually fall. Second, Marx explains the mechanism by which capitalism will fall. Third, he asks what will replace capitalism when it falls. He asserts that everyone will move to socialism/communism.
We will take each of these themes in turn. However, it is really the second one–the mechanism by which capitalism will fall–that we are most interested in, since Marx wrote most on this question and it has had the most influence on others. So, initially, we will discuss the first and third issues.
Start with history. Reading the classical economists it can sometimes feel as though they are describing processes which have existed for millennia. David Ricardo has his “iron law of wages”. Adam Smith says that there is “a certain propensity in human nature… to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”.2 It is easy to forget that, at the time the political economists were writing, capitalism was in fact a very new system (and, indeed, it barely existed when Smith was around).
Marx, however, did not think that capitalism was eternal. One very clear lesson from history–explained in great detail in the work of Sismondi (Chapter 12) as well as that of Hegel–is that no social system can last for all that long. Edward Gibbon had shown just that in 1776, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The most powerful social organisation of all time had crumbled. There were plenty of other examples. In the 1300s it may have seemed as though feudalism would last for ever; by the 1400s, after the Black Death, it was on its last legs. The aristocracy once used to wield tremendous power, but when Marx was writing, a rising class of capitalists was gradually usurping them. Why should capitalism be any different?3 It had risen, and in turn it would fall.
Once Marx has established the principle that capitalism will not last forever, he then asks: what shall replace it? Marx thought that socialism/communism would be the next stage. He doesn’t exactly justify that prediction. If capitalism crumbled, couldn’t it just as easily be replaced by, say, violent anarchy, or a return to feudalism? And even if communism did emerge, doesn’t the logic of Marx’s own argument imply that would eventually morph into something else, such as a return to feudalism? Marx simply asserts that communism will result, at which point history comes to an end and there is no evolution beyond communism.4 That judgement was, I believe, determined by Marx’s radical-left instincts. Deep down, he wished that communism would result and then endure. But obviously he could not argue rationally that such an outcome was assured.
The bulk of Marx’s thought focused on the second of the three themes identified above: explaining the mechanism by which capitalism will fail. I now turn to this.
Here is where it gets tricky
The Marxist theory of capitalism flows from an important judgement: capitalism is inherently exploitative. This is a point worth emphasising. Marx does not merely believe that capitalism is a bit grubby, like Sismondi, Mandeville or Mill. Instead he believes that it is fundamentally, irreconcilably unethical no matter the form it takes. To understand how Marx builds his enormous, complex argument you have to go back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and their understanding of value.
The question of “value” occurs time and again in the writings of the earliest economists. Essentially the question to be answered is this: “why are strawberries pricier than apples?” Is it merely because strawberries are more desirable than apples? Or is there something deeper going on? Could it, for instance, be to do with the different ways in which different commodities are produced?
As we saw in the chapter on Ricardo, by the time Marx was writing, the “labour theory of value” was popular. The thinking goes that what determines the value of something is how much labour time goes into it–ie, how many hours somebody has spent making that thing. Something that has a lot of labour time going into it will be worth more than something that has little labour time going into it. Marx’s approach, as Gareth Stedman Jones puts it, “relied heavily upon his reading of Ricardo’s labour theory of value”.
Historians quibble over whether Marx had properly understood Ricardo. Let’s not get bogged down in that debate. According to Marx, Ricardo’s theory hid within it something terrible: the exploitation of the working classes that was inherent to capitalism. (As the chapter on Ricardo showed, the “Ricardian socialists” had already noticed this.) At its simplest, this is to do with what the worker receives when they go to work, versus what a capitalist receives when their workers show up. Take the worker: he or she labours and produces value. The worker takes some of that value in the form of wages. The level of that wage, says Marx (following others, including Smith, Ricardo and Malthus), is determined by what is the bare minimum to keep the worker semi-decently fed, clothed and housed.5 It is a subsistence wage.
Now let us move on to the capitalist. The capitalist also takes some of the value created by the worker, in the form of profits. That can only happen if the worker produces more value than is necessary to keep them fed and watered. That extra value, in Marxist terminology, is called “surplus value”. That is what Marxists mean by exploitation: the capitalist has appropriated value that is “really” the worker’s.
At this point, those new to Marxist theory are usually bursting with questions. Why don’t workers just do the work for themselves, cut out the capitalist, and take for themselves all of the value that they have created? The labour theory of value appears to imply that the value of what they would be producing would be the same–after all, the same amount of labour would be going into it. “In that original state of things, which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer”, Adam Smith says. But once capital is introduced, he continues, “profit makes a… deduction from the produce of the labour which is employed”. Marx, however, does not think that going back to the “original state of things” would be a step forward.6 Capital investment allows society to be a lot richer; labour time is more valuable. What he wants, though, is for workers to get what he thinks is owed to them.
Another question: are capitalists not entitled to some of the value created by their investments in “capital”: machinery, factories and the like? The classical political economists (and I bet most readers) assume “yes”. People who invest their money in machinery, instead of spending it on consumer goods, need some reward. The capitalists may also create value themselves, via good management and clever deployment of capital. Marx disagreed. For one thing, capital does not create value–only the worker does, he says. And anyway, how was capital created in the first place? With exploited labour! Capital is little more than “dead labour”, according to Marx.
So that’s settled then
We are left with a situation in which capitalists snatch surplus value from the workers. It is a complicated argument, one that has just taken me a few hundred words to explain. Marx is ready for the counter-arguments. To someone who does not find this theory particularly intuitive, he says, in effect, “that’s because capitalism does a good job of concealing exploitation”. Stedman Jones argues that Marx “purported to prove the reality of workers’ exploitation behind the supposed equality of exchanges”. In other words, you are being hoodwinked into believing that capitalism is fair when in fact it can never be so.
In this regard, the influence of Mandeville (see Chapter 3) seems pretty clear. It may look as though the ritual of workers turning up to the factory every day is something freely chosen and fair. There is no slavery, after all. How deceptive appearances can be. Workers must turn up to work every day in order to survive, and when they are there they must do as they are told. They are, in Marxist jargon, “alienated”. And as Engels argued, “even if the capitalist buys the labour power of his labourer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for.” A friendly boss may pay a good wage but he is still exploitative. The upshot is that workers are no less exploited under capitalism than they were under slavery or feudalism. “The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave labour, and one based on wage labour,” explained Marx, “lies only in the mode in which this surplus labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.”7
Marx’s predictions about capitalism flow from his theory of surplus value. Capitalism must, he says, collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. To reach that stark conclusion, he brings in another bit of jargon: the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall”. This supposed trend is generally accepted by Marxists “as the pivot around which the whole Marxian theory of… crises revolves”, as Paul Sweezy puts it. Joan Robinson notes that, for some Marxists, “if there is no long-run tendency for the rate of profit to fall there is no case for socialism”. Marx himself called it “the most important law of modern political economy”. So what is it?
The first thing to say about this “tendency” is that it is not the first time we have come across this sort of idea. As we saw in Chapter 9, Ricardo worried that the profits of capitalists were going to decrease. In Ricardo’s telling, population growth would lead to landlords employing more marginal land; that would lead to the price of grain rising; that would lead to rising wages; and that would lead to higher costs for employers. Ricardo, in turn, was developing ideas that had appeared in Adam Smith.
So Marx was not the first person to believe that profits were going to fall and fall as capitalism matured. But he arrives at this conclusion via a different route. Over time, capitalists invest more and more in capital–machines and the like–in order to increase the division of labour and extract more surplus value from their workers. But recall that Marx argues that only labour can produce value and profits. In other words, you have increasing amounts of capital, relative to the amount of labour. Therefore, the rate of profit must decline.8 As Marx puts it, the “gradual growth of… capital in relation to [labour] must necessarily lead to a gradual fall of the general rate of profit”. So what we have here is an example of a very Marxist motif–a contradiction of capitalism. The capitalists’ desire to improve efficiency by investing in capital ends up with overall profit rates falling. At some point, capitalism will reach what Marx calls a “dormant state”, where capitalists have no incentive to invest any more because no profits at all can be made.
Is there any evidence that the rate of profit does decline? Certainly there have been long periods of recent economic history where overall profit margins in an economy have drifted downwards. But this certainly does not describe what has happened in, say, America in the past few decades–there, profits as a share of GDP have risen to close to all-time highs. (The response of some Marxists, which is to claim that the definition of “profits” used by “bourgeois” statistical offices is not in accordance with Marxist theory, is pretty lame.)9
Marx, confronted by evidence of rising profit rates, might say: “Well, that is because capitalists have done all they can to fight the tendency of profits to fall.”10 Consider the bit above where Marx says that profit rates “must necessarily” decline. Then Marx makes a huge qualification to that statement: “… so long as the rate of surplus-value, or the intensity of exploitation of labour by capital, remain the same.” In other words, capitalists will try all they can to increase “the intensity of exploitation of labour by capital”, which will allow them to keep profit rates from falling. And here lies the big problem. The exploitation of the working classes will have to get worse and worse.
As capitalists desperately try to prop up their profits, they will divide labour more and more, making workers more productive. “The greater division of labour enables one worker to do the work of five, ten or twenty… labour is simplified. The special skill of the worker becomes worthless,” as Marx puts it. Capitalists will also try to push down wages, even below subsistence level if they can get away with it. They will increase the length of the working day. Working conditions will deteriorate. Marx goes on: “Labour becomes more unsatisfying, more repulsive, competition increases and wages decrease.” We are left with a miserable, impoverished working class–and an ever-richer capitalist class.
The question, of course, is how long capitalists can stave off the inevitable tendency of the rate of profit to fall. What we know is that they will not be able to do it for ever. As capitalists fight harder and harder to maintain profits, some will be forced out of business. Over time, only the biggest, most ruthless firms will survive. Former members of the bourgeoisie will become members of the working class that they once exploited. The conditions for the growing mass of the working class may get so bad that they “have nothing to lose but their chains”. Revolution follows. The destruction of capitalism, and its replacement by socialism/communism, ensures that people will finally be able to live comfortable, meaningful lives.
So that’s it
Does Marx’s theory of capitalism stand up to scrutiny? The first thing to say is that Marx cannot provide any evidence that communism will be better than capitalism. He simply assumes that it will be. Workers will no longer be exploited and alienated, he says. But can he be sure that, under communism, people will not be exploited in a different way? He seems to believe that communism will work in perfect harmony with “human nature”. But what is human nature? Do we trust Marx’s conception of human nature over others’? In sum, his belief that communism is superior to capitalism is really an intellectual leap in the dark.
But let’s assume that Marx is right and communism is, actually, great. Does he provide a convincing account of how we will eventually get there? Recall that Marx’s theory of capitalist collapse flows from his labour theory of value. As it happens, while Marx was writing, the intellectual tide was turning against that theory of value. In 1848 John Stuart Mill hammered the nails into the coffin. His Principles of Political Economy put forward an explanation of value that included both supply and demand (see Chapter 13).
The fact that the labour theory was falling out of fashion was a problem for Marx. If there is no labour theory of value, then there is no surplus value.11 Exploitation is no longer a necessary part of capitalism.12
Marx, therefore, tries to rescue the labour theory of value. For one thing he largely ignored Mill’s contribution, and instead relied on what Béla Balassa calls “the outdated Ricardian formulation”. Marx found it easier to stick with the version of political economy which best suited his critique, rather than the most up-to-date version.
But he also tried to convince himself that the labour theory of value could be saved. Here he gets into all sorts of tangles. He creates the idea of “socially necessary” labour time. It is not the case, the thinking goes, that any old person working counts as labour time. Only work that is “socially necessary”–that is, has some social value–truly “counts” towards value. But this undermines the labour theory of value, rather than strengthening it. It turns out that Marx believes that there is a subjective component to value–it is in part determined by what people demand. Murray Rothbard generally takes an extremist approach to economic history but this time he is on the money: “This is a cop out, and evades the issue by begging the entire question… what is ‘socially necessary’? Whatever the market decides.” Philip Wicksteed, writing in the 1880s, argues that the “socially necessary” qualification “in reality surrenders the whole of the previous analysis”.
Their point is that Marx, faced with problems of the labour theory of value, tries to smuggle in demand-side factors in order to keep the show on the road. So it’s not really a labour theory of value any more–it’s a theory of value that says “supply and demand determines the value of a product”. But Marx cannot admit that. Marx must maintain a labour theory of value because his theory of exploitation requires it.
Marx got away with that bit of rhetorical trickery without many people noticing. But then a bigger problem came along. People pointed out an interesting fact about the economy: the rate of profit between different industries tends to converge. So, for instance, the amount of profit made by investing £100 in mining, over time, equals the amount made by investing £100 in publishing. (Both Ricardo and Malthus had also noticed this.)13
The convergence of profits undermines the idea of the labour theory of value. How can, for instance, consultancy, which uses large amounts of labour relative to capital, make only the same rate of profit as mining, which uses large amounts of capital? A lot more labour is going into the consultancy industry, so shouldn’t it be far more profitable? This example suggests that something else, apart from labour, determines value.
In sum, there was a lot of evidence that the labour theory of value did not hold water. But Marx did not panic. When he had had time to gather his thoughts, he announced that he would embark on two further volumes of Capital in which he would sort out the mess. He thought long and hard about whether the equality of profit rates between different industries undermined the labour theory of value. But as Stedman Jones shows, in his later years Marx time and again pleaded illness, which prevented him from working on those volumes. (Such illness did not stop him from doing other sorts of study, however.) Marx died in 1883, before he could provide a satisfactory defence of the labour theory of value.
So it was up to Engels.14 In the preface to Volume II of Capital he notes: “Equal capitals, regardless of how much or how little living labour is employed by them, produce equal average profits in equal times.” He then coyly says that the solution to this problem “will be provided in Book III”. But what Engels says next strongly suggests that he is bluffing. He declares that if anyone “can show in which way an equal average rate of profit can and must come about, not only without a violation of the law of value, but on the very basis of it, I am willing to discuss the matter further with them”. No such economist did come forward; and the problem was not resolved in Book III. Marx and Engels, in other words, were unable to save the labour theory of value.
Take a look around
Empirical evidence also undermined Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx was the very opposite of Sir William Petty (see Chapter 2). He found abstract theorising to be more enjoyable than looking at the world around him. There is a lively historical discussion about whether Marx actually ever visited a factory. Francis Wheen says that Marx was “often curiously oblivious to his own immediate surroundings [and] preferred to rely on newspapers or Royal Commissions for information”. Marx does incorporate some empirical evidence into his works, especially in Capital. But facts about the real world are secondary to the theoretical investigation.
This is a big problem. At the time Marx was writing, pretty much everything was moving in the opposite direction to the way that his theory predicted. Data are poor but profits, expressed as a share of the stock of capital, rose in the 1850s and showed no sign of falling thereafter. And there was not much evidence that exploitation was getting worse. From 1849, when Marx moved to London, to 1883, when he died, the average working week fell from 64 hours to 58 hours. Over the same period the average wage did not stay at subsistence level, as Marx predicted. In fact it rose by fully 35% in real terms. Marx, who published Capital in the late 1860s, either did not know about the clear improvements in living standards that were happening all around him or chose to ignore them.
Events since Marx’s death have further undermined his theories. Communism did emerge in many countries across the world, of course. But perversely, that fact undermines rather than supports Marx. Marx’s theory held that communism would bloom in the places where capitalism was most developed, such as Britain and France. In fact communism emerged in places where capitalism was least developed–places like Russia and China. Marx’s stage-by-stage theory of social development proved to be wide of the mark.
The critique of the critique
Is there anything worthwhile to salvage from Marx? People before him, such as Sismondi and Mandeville, also have a claim to be “capitalism’s conscience”. On the other hand, the sense of outrage that pervades much of Marx’s writings is compelling. How can it be that so many Britons, then living in the richest country in the world, were mired in poverty? And his emphasis that capitalism was just one of many possible economic systems, and that things are always changing, is always worth keeping at the back of one’s mind. There is also something to be said for the revolutionary potential of Marx’s theories. Unlike many of the other economists in this book who also espoused garbled and imperfect theories, Marx advocated for (and got) a world-transforming revolution on the basis of his. That makes it important to understand what Marx was arguing. Nonetheless, the myth surrounding Marx is a lot more impressive than the reality.