When he was a child, Adam Smith was once kidnapped by some shrewd gypsies. After a few hours of holding the boy captive, the gypsies left him on a roadside, and he was returned to his family. A biographer remarked that the naive, absentminded economist would not have made a good gypsy. One might also say that it’s a good thing Karl Marx was never kidnapped by capitalists. He would not have made a good capitalist. Nor was he a good consumer. Marx was always in debt.
In powerful words and an incendiary manner, Marx foretold the collapse of capitalism. But not before he performed a penetrating inquiry into the laws of capitalism and the hidden code that rules the development of civilization.
Marx’s place in the history of economic thought is difficult to locate. In many ways, mainstream economists today banish Marx to bourgeois cocktail conversation. Yet a billion people have struggled to survive under regimes that have claimed to be Marxist. Along with Freud and Darwin, Marx had a tremendous impact on the twentieth-century mind. But during his own lifetime, Marx found little fame and little following. John Stuart Mill, the most erudite man of Marx’s era, never heard of him.
Marx the man enjoyed a bourgeois beginning in the German town of Trier in the Rhineland. Born in 1818, he mixed with the upper and middle classes of Trier. Marx later expressed pride that his father, Heinrich, a distinguished lawyer, also owned a vineyard. Marx’s childhood friend and future wife, Jenny, lived nearby. Her father, Baron von Westphalen, became like an uncle to young Marx.
After his older brother died at the age of four, Marx inherited the role of eldest son and began terrorizing his younger and less brilliant sisters. A favorite game included “driving” his sisters like horses through the streets of Trier at full speed. In addition to equestrian events, Marx also forced his sisters to enter cake-tasting tournaments, in which they would eat cakes he would bake with dirty dough and unwashed hands. Nonetheless, the Marx sisters admired Karl for his intelligence and entertaining stories. Marx’s schoolmates also loved and feared the boy, who brought smiles with pranks and shudders with sarcastic verse.
All his life Marx had a facility and proclivity for biting criticism and ad hominem abuse. He saved some of his most vicious attacks for Jews. Both Marx’s parents were descended from eminent lines of rabbis; his uncle served as chief rabbi of Trier. Yet anti-Semitic laws persuaded Marx’s father to convert to Christianity, even if he spoke of Jews as his “fellow believers.” His son, however, rejected his Jewish ancestors with almost perverse pleasure. Scholars may debate whether he was really anti-Semitic. But undoubtedly Karl Marx uttered numerous venomous insults.1
Like John Stuart Mill, Marx imbibed both rationalist and romantic potions. His father provided eighteenth-century French rationalism mellowed by British empiricism, advising his son to “submit” to “the faith of Newton, Locke, and Leibnitz.”2 Meanwhile, the highly cultured Baron von Westphalen enchanted young Marx by strolling through idyllic woods and telling stories of Shakespeare, Homer, and the romantics. Ironically, it was the aristocratic baron who first introduced Marx to classless, utopian socialism. Without the influence of his father’s sharp, discerning mind, Marx might have believed the fuzzy, wistful notions of the utopians. But where they would see bliss, he would see struggle.
At the University of Bonn, the biggest struggle Marx faced was against his eagerness to drink and to spend his father’s money. He lost the struggle, and Heinrich lost a lot of money. Marx studied law and gained some practical legal experience when he was imprisoned for drunkenness. Since the university had its own drunk tank, imprisonment wasn’t severe—visitors could play cards and continue drinking with the condemned man. The escapade proved useful. Marx’s first political victory left him president of the Trier Tavern Society.
After a year of Bonn parties, Heinrich transferred his son to the University of Berlin, a more sober place, he hoped. Heinrich lost hope rather quickly: “As though we were made of gold my gentleman-son disposes of almost 700 thalers in a single year, in contravention of every agreement and every usage, whereas the richest spend no more than 500.”3 Creditors sued Karl several times, forcing him to move at least ten times during his five years at Berlin.
Heinrich complained of more than profligacy: Karl was a slob, a patron saint of unwashed, unkempt college students. His swarthy complexion earned him the nickname “the Moor,” later used affectionately by his children and friends. With dark skin and long, matted hair, he appeared a shaggy excuse for a student.
Heinrich also objected to Karl’s academic meanderings through philosophy and law. If Karl wandered, he certainly did it outside the classroom. During his last few years he took only a few courses and became a “bohemian student, who merely regard[ed] the university as his camping ground.”4 Nonetheless, Marx learned philosophy on his own and joined the Young Hegelians, radical critics of religion and eclectic followers of G. W. F. Hegel, the Berlin philosopher who had died only a few years before Marx’s university career began. Marx would ingeniously adopt the Hegelian method and prove to the world that skipping classes sometimes pays (though not financially).
Unfortunately, Marx would never prove this to his father, who died in 1838. Marx retained strong affections for his father, whose photograph he always carried. Incidentally, Marx never showed such affection for his mother, seeing her merely as a stingy source of funds. He neither attended her funeral nor shed a tear when she died.
After his father’s death, Marx thought it prudent to finish his studies. Suddenly eager to leave academia, he refused to submit his thesis on Greek philosophy to the rigorous Berlin procedures. Instead he sent it to the University of Jena, a noted diploma mill. A six-week correspondence course would have taken longer. In just a few days, Jena took out its well-worn rubber stamp and awarded a doctorate.
With diploma in hand, Marx meandered into journalism, writing and then editing the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal middle-class newspaper. Ironically, he bridled in its more radical writers, who tended toward communism. The repressive Prussian government eagerly censored criticism, and Marx often dealt with nearly moronic officials. One censor forbade an advertisement for a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Why? In Prussia, thou shalt not mock divine subjects through comedy.
An observer of Marx’s tenure at the newspaper left a striking portrait of the young editor:
Karl Marx from Trier was a powerful man of 24 whose thick black hair sprung from his cheeks, arms, nose and ears. He was domineering, impetuous, passionate, full of boundless self-confidence, but at the same time deeply earnest and learned, a restless dialectician who with his restless Jewish penetration pushed every proposition of Young Hegelian doctrine to its final conclusion and was already, then, by his concentrated study of economics, preparing his conversion to communism. Under Marx’s leadership the young newspaper soon began to speak very recklessly.5
The government responded to Marx’s brashness by presenting a choice: either the newspaper shuts its doors or Marx walks out of them. Marx resigned.
He had lost a job, but in the meantime he had gained a wife, Jenny von Westphalen. Her relatives thought that the nobleman’s daughter had married beneath her, but they had no idea how far down she would descend.
In 1843 the Marxes moved to Paris, where Marx edited a new political review, began to flirt with communism, and mingled with other young, arrogant radicals whom Heinrich Heine described as a “crowd of godless, self-appointed gods.”6 The journal published only one issue, after which Marx and his new communist friends broke with the co-editor Arnold Ruge. Ruge also learned to despise the godless crowd: “They wish to liberate people . . . but for the moment they attach the utmost importance to property and in particular to money. . . . To free the proletariat intellectually and physically from the weight of its misery, they dream of an organization that would generalise this misery and make all men bear its weight.”7
Among the crowd was Friedrich Engels, who would become a critical part of Marx’s life and livelihood. The son of a wealthy factory owner, Engels led a double life. By day he worked in his father’s business and earned a substantial salary as a capitalist. By night he read Hegel and communist literature. Although a German, Engels lived in England for several years, running the family textile business. After some time in Manchester, he wrote a scathing exposé of British poverty, The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844. Not that Engels volunteered his capitalist earnings to the poor or renounced his bourgeois habits. In fact, he seems not to have been psychologically torn by his double life. He felt rather comfortable fox hunting, sipping sherry, and fencing. He could raise a glass of the finest champagne and elegantly toast the proletariat. When he wasn’t chasing foxes, he chased women, declaring: “If I had an income of 5,000 fr. I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces. If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living.”8 Quite a leap from Socrates’s “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
In the 1840s Marx began to mold the doctrines that would change the world. Not everyone approved, of course. The Prussian government registered its opinion of Marx’s writings by declaring him guilty of treason. When France deported him a year later, he fled to Brussels.
What were these perfidious writings that forced Marx and his family to move from one European country to another? In the 1840s Marx built the historical and philosophical foundations for a study of capitalism. What did these theories prove? That the foundations of capitalism were quickly crumbling, and that the masses would soon erupt in revolution and shake the owners until they tumbled from their pedestals.
Marx’s philosophy and history used Hegel’s terms, but he was no parrot. Marx may have used the same words, but he changed the order. To understand how he did so, let us first examine a major precept of his mentor.
Hegel taught that philosophy aims at knowledge of the unfolding of ideas. The human spirit and ideas guide history. The material world, the stuff we see and touch, and the institutions in society follow the path of ideas. The German sociologist Max Weber would also employ this thesis in his famous work, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Quite simply, Weber alleged that the rise of Protestantism led to capitalism; that is, a belief about God transformed economic institutions.
According to Hegel, we can trace the path of history by dominant nationalisms: the Age of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and so on. A patriot, Hegel thought Prussia was the leader of its age.
Marx rejected Hegel’s idealism. Following the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx looked to materialist forces in history. God, according to Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, is simply a projection of human desires, needs, and attributes. Man created God; God did not create man. The real stuff, man, led to the idea of God. (Feuerbach’s writings led Marx to later denounce religion as the “opium of the people.”9 As long as people could project their longings onto God and a hereafter, they would passively accept material conditions and injustices in the real world.)
So far Marx sounds more like a dropout from the Hegelian school of thought than a Young Hegelian. But Marx retains the key to the Hegelian method, the dialectic. Hegel insisted that history, like reality, does not follow a smooth, gradual pattern. Nor does it consist of a series of independent accidents. History consists of struggle between opposing forces. Every idea includes its opposite. Philosophers often summarize Hegel’s dialectic by stating that every thesis or idea is confronted by its antithesis. The battle between these ideas produces a synthesis, a new thesis. The new thesis then faces its antithesis. The world is ever changing. History never repeats itself—although windy historians may repeat themselves.
Compare the dialectic method to the Newtonian approach to economics, which sees unchanging cause-and-effect relations. The only thing immutable in Hegel’s vision is the presence of change.
Marx fuses the dialectic method with materialism. Engels later termed the alliance dialectical materialism or historical materialism. If Hegel’s head was in the clouds, Marx wants to rub our noses in the ground. History takes place on earth, he said. Forget about studying religion, ethics, or nationalism. Simply look out the window and see how man grapples for the bare necessities of life. There is no history without men. And there are no men without food. Thus, “the first historical act is . . . the production of the means to satisfy these needs.”10 Idealist historians might as well write the history of Oz.
Marx plots the course of history from slavery to feudalism to capitalism to socialism. The path lies not in the stars or the laws but in production—and more specifically in the relationship of people to production. Each system of production creates ruling and ruled classes. Each epoch is marked by a particular way of extracting income for the rulers. In Roman times, whoever owned a slave owned a claim on his output. In feudal times, lords owned a claim on the output of serfs. Under capitalism, owners of factories and land own a claim on the output of their wage laborers. The survival of the master class rests on the work of the serving class. Does this give the workers great bargaining power? No. The workers must cooperate with the ruling class, for the rulers control the means of production. The workers cannot just “take their marbles and go home.” They don’t own the marbles.
Thus, a mutual dependency exists. Nonetheless, the rulers strive to appear as if they do not need the workers as much as the workers need them. If successful, they extend their dominance.
How do they try to ensure their status? Here’s where Hegel’s concern for ethics, nationalism, and ideas enters. The ruling class develops the beliefs, laws, culture, religion, morality, and patriotism that support the production process. A patriotic worker whistles while he works and doesn’t cheat the owner by taking too many coffee breaks. Today, car manufacturers and breweries love to link America with a “good, honest day’s work.” The American dream once burst forth in the jingle “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” Chevrolet actually displaced Mom. (Would the American oedipal dream include lust for Dad’s car?)
Our ethical and legal system teaches us to feel guilty if we shirk our work. Why are owners entitled to profits derived through our sweat? Because they own the property, we respond. But why should we accept the legal system? Marx asks.
According to Marx, rulers who have a stake in the private property system hypnotize the masses. The power of suggestion and persuasion leads Americans to dream of stocks, bonds, and BMWs. Of course, the individual thinks the dreams are his own and internalizes the suggestions. Marx calls the supportive ideas, laws, and ethos the superstructure.
Marx’s classic statement appears in the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “The mode of production of material life conditions the general character of social, political and intellectual life. . . . It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”11
The serf bows and shows fealty to the lord. The journeyman serves the master craftsman with pride. The wage laborer strives for promotion by working harder. They all toil and seek a better life within the reigning system.
Marx did not argue that the ruling class knowingly conspires to construct the superstructure. Owners may truly believe in their religion and not view it instrumentally. The superstructure emerges because the productive process skews and frames the perception of people. According to Marx, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”12 (Incidentally, Engels later admitted that Marx and he sometimes overstressed the causation from production to superstructure. Ideas occasionally had real consequences.)
If an ethos and a culture automatically arise to buttress the class system, why does Marx announce in the opening thrust of The Communist Manifesto that the “history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”?13 Why should anyone struggle? How does anyone know to struggle in the first place? The owners simply squeeze the workers, and the workers accept the squeeze as contentedly as a mesmerized Moonie giving away daisies at an airport. As long as the Moonie/worker gets token benefits, the economy rolls on, and the profits roll into the bank accounts of owners.
The rebellion takes place when the technology of the productive process changes. A new technology or method alters the quantity or quality of land, labor, and capital. Through discovery, invention, education, and population growth, the material forces of production are dynamic. With a new mix of material forces, the old productive process becomes obsolete. For example, slavery might have produced farm profits when the ratio of land to worker was high. But if tractors and reapers work more efficiently than slaves, or if the population of workers rises, slavery may be less profitable. The future lies in the new process.
Do not forget, though, that a whole political, ethical, and legal system rested on the old method. Ministers preached that serfdom led to God’s kingdom. This was an eternal truth etched in the mind and on the stones of the medieval cathedral. Thus, the superstructure appears static.
The struggle occurs when the old ruling class barricades itself from the dynamic course of history by clutching the old ideas and blocking new economic developments. Marx writes that the hand mill begets the feudal lord, while the steam mill announces the industrial capitalist. But the feudal lord battles his successor, the industrialist. Later the guild master brawls with the factory owner. Forget tales of Sir Lancelot and Galahad. The real jousting with the sharpest lances took place not between knights but between lords and commercial forces.
The ruling class always faces a threat when land, labor, capital, or technology shifts. They may tumble down from the penthouse of the house of cards while screaming the “eternal truths” of their philosophy. History reshuffles the deck, and he who held the king may be beheaded.
A story might help here. Once upon a time, swift sentries warned a devout feudal lord of a flood. The lord rushed to his cathedral and prayed to God for salvation. As the water reached the steps of the holy building, a serf in a small boat rowed to the steps and asked the lord to come aboard. “No, thanks. I believe in God, and I believe in justice. God will save me.” As the water rose, the lord walked up to the pulpit. This time a motorboat rushed toward him. As the water sloshed against the pew, the driver yelled, “I’ll save you. Jump on!” Again the noble lord replied, “Do not worry. I believe in God. He will save me. I don’t need noisy machines.” Finally, the water engulfed the cathedral. As the lord clutched the very top of the highest spire, his body thrashed by waves, a helicopter flew overhead. The pilot screamed, “Please, my lord. Take hold of this ladder.” Again the lord replied, “Do not worry. I believe in God. He will save me.” Moments later, the water rose higher and the lord drowned.
In heaven (he was, after all, a good lord), he confronted God. “God,” he said, “I believed in You all my life. I followed every parable my priest ever told me. When others doubted and turned to machines, I believed You would save me. But you let me drown—”
“Schmuck!” God interrupted. “Who do you think sent the rowboat, the motorboat, and the helicopter!”
He who doesn’t go with the flow of historical materialism drowns in it. Marx depicted the flow:
At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations. . . . These relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinctions should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.14
Because capitalism rested on a class system, revolution and victory for the workers was inevitable. Marx’s masterpiece, Capital, portrayed “tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.”15 Only a classless society could avoid revolution. And in Marx’s vision, a classless society would eventually arrive. Rotten capitalists would finally be annihilated. After centuries of theft, workers would finally be free.
If capitalism must with “iron necessity” collapse into socialism, didn’t feudalism have to collapse into capitalism? Wasn’t capitalism a necessary stop on the way to communism? If so, it was not a gratuitous slaughter, or a stroke of very bad luck for mankind, as many utopian socialists saw it. Marx was repulsed by unscientific romantics who depicted capitalism as a wicked accident contrived by evil men. In fact, Marx composed some of the most eloquent paeans to the capitalist, since his view was that capitalism liberated man from even worse conditions. Marx’s Communist Manifesto had no time for fuzzy-headed nostalgia-mongers:
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations, even the most barbarian, into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. . . . The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.16
Marx may have criticized the bourgeoisie, but he saved his most poisonous attacks for fellow socialists who veered from his vision. No coalition builder, he was at his friendliest a coiled python. Marx would have hated the Green Party and dreamed of its members choking on their Grape-Nuts. Capitalism, he wrote, “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”17 He would have sent “back to nature” advocates back to their history books to learn how terrible preindustrial life was. Marx acidly responded to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty with The Poverty of Philosophy. Intelligent people do not try to erase or “recall” stages of history and send them back to God’s little factory for repair.
Capitalism is a necessary precondition for socialism. Because capitalism produces so much, it permits a less driven system, socialism, to follow. Precapitalist nations have no business hoping for communist revolutions to overthrow feudal lords or czars. Marx did not look to Russia. He did not expect communism to come soon even in Germany, since only 4 percent of the male labor force worked in factories at the time. The shackles would burst open first in England and France, strongholds of advanced capitalism. France would signal when Germany was ripe for communism: “When all internal conditions are fulfilled, the day of German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.”18
Marx did not just arrogantly wait for the cock to crow. Instead he arrogantly wrote his definitive dissection of capitalism, Capital. In the 1850s, Marx buried himself in piles of economics texts in the British Museum in London. His family starved while he analyzed the abstract suffering of the proletariat. The Marxes lived in a sleazy apartment in one of the poorest parts of London. A police spy investigating Marx provided an extraordinarily vivid portrait of the squalor his family endured:
When one enters Marx’s room, the eyes get so dimmed by coal smoke and tobacco fumes that for the first moments one gropes as if in a cave. . . . Everything is dirty, everything full of dust, sitting down becomes a truly dangerous business. Here stands a chair with only three legs, there the children play and prepare food on another chair which happens to be still whole.
As for Marx himself, “he is a highly disorderly, cynical person, a poor host; he leads a real gypsy existence. Washing, grooming, and changing underwear are rarities with him; he gets drunk readily. Often he loafs all day long, but if he has work to do, he works day and night tirelessly.” Jenny, though raised on aristocratic fare, “feels quite at home in this misery.”19
The Marxes lost three children to pneumonia, bronchitis, and tuberculosis in five wretched years in London. Most horrifying, undertakers would not extend credit. Jenny, driven to depression, once had to beg for the two pounds for a child’s coffin. Although Marx was often nasty to outsiders, his children had brought out the humane side of his personality. He, too, was broken when they died:
Bacon says that really important people have so many relationships to nature and the world, so many objects of interest, that they easily get over any loss. I do not belong to these important people. The death of my child has deeply shattered my heart and brain, and I feel the loss as freshly as on the first day.20
Marx, of course, blamed his plight on the bourgeoisie and promised to make them pay for his family’s calamities and for his own ailments, including carbuncles.
Marx seldom blamed himself. He should have. Marx had an infantile sense of home economics. Someone once described an infant as a canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other. If one counts gifts from Jenny’s family and from Engels, and payments for articles in the New York Daily Tribune, the Marxes “earned” an adequate sum of money for a lower-middle-class family. In their poorest years, they enjoyed roughly three times the income of an unskilled worker. A radical German poet, also banished from his homeland, reported that an income similar to Marx’s always bought him “the luscious beef-steak of exile.”21
But instead of regularly feeding his family, Marx invested money in political journals and in piano, music, and dancing lessons for his children! Although the wife of a revolutionary, Jenny continued to print posh stationery calling herself “Baroness von Westphalen.”
To compound his problems, Marx impregnated the maid (she was a gift from the von Westphalens). Again Marx denied responsibility. He told Jenny that Engels was the father. The maid left for a while, then returned with a rather swarthy, hairy child who was subsequently whisked off to foster parents.
It comes as no surprise, given such a home life, that during 1850 and 1851 Marx spent more time at the British Museum than at home. He read almost everything available on economics. He spent months filling notebooks with lengthy passages from about eighty writers. Engels tried to hurry him along, but Marx kept to a painfully slow, pedantic pace. Marx also had a tough time finding a publisher willing to accommodate his proposed format for Capital. Engels admonished the stubborn communist: “Show a little commercial sense this time.”22
By the time Marx finished his research, writing, and editing, and recovered from several illnesses, the calendar read 1867. Volume 1 finally came out. An additional three volumes would appear posthumously.
To describe Capital, one might as well choose a page from Roget’s Thesaurus and read random adjectives aloud. It includes 2,500 pages with citations to more than 1,500 works. Some pages are literary masterpieces. Some gleam with lucid logic. And some are so technical, picayune, and boring they recall Truman Capote’s swipe at writer Jack Kerouac: “This isn’t writing. It’s just typing.”
Let us take Capital in three steps. First, we will discover the key to capitalism, Marx’s idea of labor exploitation. Second, we will look at the laws of capitalist motion, which inevitably lead to its downfall. Third, we will look at the psychological costs of capitalism.
Marx does not take the easy route. He does not simply point to domineering businesses and proclaim that the era of entrepreneurs and perfect Smithian competition is over. Remember, he is a Hegelian; he wants to show that even the ideal form of capitalism must fail on its own. He starts with classical tools.
Like Smith and especially Ricardo, Marx “proves” that the value of a product is determined by the amount of labor needed to produce it. Machines are just past labor stored up in metallic form. A stereo that takes ten hours to make is twice as valuable as one that takes five hours.
If this is true, there can be no profits unless labor is exploited. The following simple syllogism would be sound:
The value of a product (price) is determined by the amount of labor.
Workers receive the full value of what they contribute to the product.
Therefore, the value of a product equals the amount workers receive.
But the selling price of a product is not just split among the workers. The owner seizes a share, his profits. Forget the invisible hand. The intrusive, visible hand of the capitalist grabs a piece of the action. Where does the profit come from? Premise 2 must be wrong. The workers must not receive the full value of their contribution. They must be exploited. (Critics of Marx argue that premise 1 is flawed.)
How do capitalists cheat the workers? Instead of paying them the amount by which they enhance the value of the capitalist’s business, the capitalist pays them only a subsistence—what it takes to keep them alive and working. The capitalist buys labor power as if it were any other commodity. Then he puts it to work X hours per day.
Let’s use Marx’s terms. Marx portrays capitalists providing factories and equipment, called constant capital. They also pay for labor, called variable capital. When production takes place, the capitalist must ensure that the value of the final product surpasses the sum of constant plus variable capital. The extra value (profit) comes from paying workers less than the value they produce. In other words, the value that workers add to the product exceeds the variable capital they get paid. Marx calls this loot robbed from the laborer surplus value.
For example, Jasmine works as a seamstress for the Radio City Music Hall stage show. Audiences generally don’t like torn costumes. So her sewing boosts the value of a performance by $10. But she only gets paid $6. The bosses squeeze a $4 surplus from Jasmine for each daily performance. The ratio of surplus value to wage (4:6) is the ratio of exploitation.
Why doesn’t Jasmine charge $10 and get her full value? Capitalism leads to unemployment and a reserve army ready to take Jasmine’s place if she demands more money. She does not own the sewing machine, the costumes, or the stage. The bosses do. By controlling the means of production, they dominate the labor market.
How do the bosses set Jasmine’s $6 wage? Bosses need to pay workers only enough for them to survive. Jasmine gets $6 because $6 will keep her alive. She receives a subsistence wage. If she got $1 per hour, six hours of work would provide a subsistence. But the bosses do not let her stop at six. They force her to work a longer day, mending more torn costumes. They spread her $6 wage over ten hours, for example. The result: She works six hours for herself and an extra four hours for the bosses. The four-hour surplus goes right into the bosses’ pockets. They need not lift a thimble.
Why do workers get paid only a subsistence wage? We said earlier that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor that went into it. Labor supply is also a commodity. Therefore, the price of labor is the amount of money needed to produce and maintain a human being: the subsistence level.
In general, bosses do not pay workers enough to buy what they produce. Workers struggle for just a portion. In our example, Jasmine cannot afford a $10 ticket to the performance, even though she adds $10 of value to it. Perhaps the bosses would let her buy a ticket for $5, but only if she promised to watch the performers from their waists up.
If profit comes from exploiting labor, we can define the rate of profit as the ratio of surplus to the sum of variable plus constant capital (s/[v + c]). The capitalist can boost profits if he squeezes a longer workday out of his employees. Or he can raise profits by exploiting the labor of women and children in addition to men. During the era when Marx wrote, hours did increase and more women and children had entered the industrial workforce.
Now we see how profits rest on exploitation. But why can’t this go on? What are the laws of capitalism that finally deliver workers from despair and drive the capitalists to their knees? Marx did not merely announce that a social revolution would burst forth. He carefully depicted the economic inconsistencies of capitalism. We will examine five “laws” or “tendencies” that point to an economic implosion. Far from applauding capitalism, the invisible hand ultimately smashes it.
1. Falling Profit Rates and Accumulation of Capital. Like Adam Smith, Marx sees the capitalist confronting competition. If one company expands its scale of production, it may produce more efficiently. The innovative company forces its competitors to expand. They hire more workers. But this drives up the wage beyond subsistence. What do the bosses do? They substitute equipment for labor. If they do not, their profits plunge, for higher pay halts their exploitation. Competition coerces them to substitute.
But here the bosses outsmart themselves and stumble into a dilemma. Surpluses can only be squeezed from human beings. Capitalist machine sellers can charge the full, fair value for the products. (If a high-speed film-developing device increases a company’s income because it can develop more photographs per hour, the equipment manufacturer will probably charge the photography company appropriately.) Look again at Marx’s formula for the profit rate, s/[v + c]. By adding machines (c), the capitalists drive down their profits. On the other horn of the dilemma, if they resist adding machines, no one will buy their uncompetitive products:
The development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it. . . .
Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! . . . Therefore, save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital!”23
The same result occurs if one capitalist improves a machine. The owner who builds a better sewing machine can charge a lower price for admission. Since bosses must keep up with one another, competitors must save the surpluses extorted from labor and invest in the new sewing machinery.
The “boundless greed” of capitalists forces their destruction. To delay the loss in profits, bosses may try to exploit labor even more. How? They will speed the pace of work. And they will stretch the working day even further. Of course, these tactics only stretch the patience of laborers dangerously further.
2. Increasing Concentration of Economic Power. With capitalists driven to expand and develop, a battle rages. The largest firms, which produce more cheaply, triumph. The bloody battle “always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish.”24 Survivors soon dwarf the vanquished.
3. Deepening Crises and Depressions. “Childish babble . . . claptrap . . . humbug.” Marx used these words to describe Say’s argument for capitalist stability. As capitalists substitute for labor, unemployment rises. Who buys the goods when the bosses expand output? No one. The goods sit. Bankruptcies vault. Panic engulfs. Financiers dump their holdings. Investment dives. Investors dive off their balconies.
The cycle, of course, turns up again after prices drop. The survivors again pick up the pieces of broken businesses and hire desperate workers. Surpluses and profits reappear. But only to fall faster and farther the next time.
4. Industrial Reserve Army. Through substitution and depression, the capitalists throw more and more people out of the factories and into the streets. The “army” is no more militant than the Salvation Army—at first. As long as the army remains peaceful, it remains a good source of low-cost labor. An abundance of workers helps the capitalists stay in control—at first.
5. Increasing Misery of the Proletariat. Along “with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages . . . grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation.”25 Longer workdays and less vacation bring more misery for the downtrodden laborers. Marx’s earlier writings argued that their absolute standard of living falls. But in Capital, written in the face of indisputable evidence that workers were better off than they had been, he retreats, claiming only that workers have a smaller share of the wealth than they did before.
Finally, after unemployment, crashing profits, inhuman despair, and misery, the proletariat will see their plight. The mask of the superstructure is ripped off. The ugly monster called capitalism is revealed. The oppressed lot rebel: “The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”26
The proletariat gain more than factories. They regain their humanity. The capitalists robbed more than proletariat pockets. They also robbed hearts and minds. To Marx, work plays a special role in human life. Human beings are impelled to create and enhance their lives through nature and through relationships with other people. The human personality cannot develop without creative work. Under capitalism, labor becomes just another commodity. People are forced to accept routine, dull jobs. They become animated tools. They feel alienated from themselves, the world, and each other. Alienation becomes a prominent theme in Marxist and in existentialist critiques of modern society.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels urged the proletariat to capture the economy and liberate themselves:
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Workingmen of all countries, unite!27
With the publication of Capital, nearly twenty years later, the proletariats could back up pithy slogans with trenchant analysis.
But what happens after the revolution? Does everyone simply kiss and luxuriate in newfound humanity? Does everyone sit in a circle before a campfire, hold hands, and sing “Kumbaya”? Some contemporary Marxists might lead one to think so.
Surely, Marx scorned autopian socialism and sneered at rustic simplicity. He was not sentimental. He disdained wistful longings for a “fair” distribution of income or a massive redistribution of wealth. Workers, even under socialism, would not get the “full value” of their work. The surplus would, however, go to the “people” for collective services.
What would communism really mean? We do not know. Marx deliberately avoided leaving “recipes” for the “cook-shops of the future.”28 Without a recipe, Marxism as a governing system became the political equivalent of sausage: a cheap way to squeeze a committee’s goals into a shape that can be fed to others.
Marx suggested that ultimately the state would “wither away.” In the meantime a dictatorship of the proletariat would rule. The Communist Manifesto includes a ten-point plan that would carve “despotic inroads into the rights of property”:
Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Abolition of all right of inheritance.
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of child factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.29
Future Marxists would have to figure out how to implement the plan. Not entirely optimistic about the splintered socialist movements in Europe, Marx once declared that he was no longer a Marxist.
In the Bible, God prevents Moses from entering the Promised Land. But the Marxists, unlike the Israelites, had no Joshua to take them forward when Marx died, in 1883.
How can we comprehensively critique Marx’s ingenious analysis? The task is intimidating. Over the past century, intellectuals have filled millions of pages with praise, insults, and blab. Here is a modest agenda for assessing Marx: (1) How does Marx’s materialist history deform the idea of surplus labor? (2) What about the prophecies of misery, unemployment, and the fall of capitalism? (3) What did Marx give to modern economics? (4) What did he give to modern politics?
1. How does Marx’s materialist history deform the idea of surplus labor? In Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Jean Valjean continually confronts the same nemesis: Inspector Javert. And life keeps dragging Javert inexorably back to Valjean. The literary dialectic creates the dramatic struggle for each. Without the other character, life is too simple for each.
The trouble with Marx’s history is that the master dialectician ignores the most dramatic dialectic: between idealist causes and materialist causes. For the most part, Marx portrays material factors as causal. They establish and periodically change the ideas or superstructure of a society. But in assuming this relationship, Marx too often slights idealist forces. And this flaw infects his economics.
The notion of surplus labor supports the whole Marxian theory of capitalism. Recall the simple syllogism. Why must labor be exploited? Because Marx embraces the “labor theory of value” by which capitalists collect profits. According to Marx, “not one single atom” of value comes from the capitalist.30 Marx easily envisages Jasmine the seamstress or the blacksmith pounding at the anvil. They create value.
What does Marx miss? He ignores imagination and entrepreneurship. To create wealth requires more than tangible inputs. The development of streaming videos did not require new types of raw materials or more drastic ways of exploiting labor. The video industry required two things: invention and entrepreneurship—the willingness to take risks with investments. Why did Russians living under communism beg for American-made denim jeans? Not because the Soviet Union lacked the cotton or the workers to produce high-quality clothing. But because they lacked the imagination, motivation, and discipline. These intangibles separate the successful companies and countries from the others.
Marx’s materialism unfortunately leads him to scorn every kind of capital, including human capital: the knowledge, knack, and management skills so crucial to profits. How can the labor theory of value account for flashes of brilliance or insight like in the following example?
Some years ago, as a man walked through the woods, a burr caught in his wool sock. The man’s bank account now overflows with money. He invented Velcro. Are all his profits stolen from the workers?
In the next chapter we’ll see that Alfred Marshall attacks Marx for ignoring the value to society of risk-taking and “waiting.” By investing, the capitalist gives up the immediate gratification of buying goods. His return on investment pays him for waiting, for delaying his pleasure. If everyone consumes everything now, society will produce nothing new. Thus, profits play a crucial and perfectly legitimate role. (Incidentally, the marginalist “revolution,” which Marshall helped lead, demonstrates that value comes from demand, as well as from production or supply. By the time volume 2 of Capital appeared posthumously, the marginalists had savaged the supply-side focus of Marx and the classicals.)
By assuming the labor theory of value, Marx snubs too many dynamic, idealist factors. Ricardo avoided this problem because he saw the labor theory of value merely as a tool for approximation, not as the definitive cause of value. When Marx tried to prove the theory mathematically, he fell into so many burrs, it’s surprising he didn’t discover Velcro in the nineteenth century.
2. What about the prophecies of misery, unemployment, and the fall of capitalism? Marx did not intend to prophesy. He aimed at scientific prediction, projecting the course of history based on identifiable tendencies. But as history swerved from his predictions, his posthumous followers created a pseudo-religion from his works. Thus his “laws” conformed to history. Having molded the laws, his disciples could proclaim the correctness of the prophecies. Although it started as atheistic science, Marxism in the twentieth century came to resemble a stained-glass window that selectively admitted the sun and seldom admitted error. Once the laws became religious scripture, the effort to test Marxism scientifically was lost.
Marx lived long enough to see some of his supporters extrude and exalt his laws, erect pulpits, and perform sacraments. The anarchist Proudhon warned Marx against bestowing a catechism:
For God’s sake, after we have abolished all the dogmatisms a priori, let us not of all things attempt in our turn to instill another kind of dogma into the people. . . . Let us have decent and sincere polemics. . . . But simply because we are at the head of the movement, let us not make ourselves the leader of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostle of a new religion—even though this religion be the religion of logic, the religion of reason.31
Even if we cannot disprove Marx’s predictions, we can observe a few developments in capitalist economies since his time. First, the standard of living for workers has risen dramatically in the past hundred years as home ownership and automobile ownership rates have soared. By today’s definition of “poverty,” the rising bourgeoisie of Marx’s time were impoverished and “immiserated,” to use Marx’s term. And using the conventional definitions of Marx’s time, today’s workers are ostentatiously wealthy. No one denies a rise in the “absolute” standard of living of workers.
Yet the Communist Manifesto forewarned workers that “the modern labourer . . . instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper.” But Marx soon noticed that the pocketbooks of workers grew fatter. He even admitted that in the ten years following the Communist Manifesto, agricultural wages soared by 40 percent.32
For this reason Marx switched definitions and warned that workers would become poorer relative to capitalists. The apocalyptic plight of the laborer fades: The rich get richer, and the poor get richer. But the rich get richer more quickly.33
Marx squeezed the new definition into Capital by declaring “subsistence” a relative term, dependent on contemporary lifestyles. Presumably in the twentieth century, bare subsistence requires a color television, since the average “wage slave” in manufacturing can afford one. By retreating to the relativist argument, Marx surrenders passion and the feeling of desperation in the workers’ plight. As long as the poor keep getting richer, the scenario even passes philosopher John Rawls’s test of social justice (which allows the rich to gain only if the poor also benefit).34
Modern Marxists therefore emphasize psychological misery and alienation. They may be right; workers may often be bored and disgusted. But Marx does not tell us, for example, how socialism will make trash collecting exciting. If happy laborers work better, then, at least under capitalism, owners have strong incentives to satisfy their employees.
Moreover, how should we define happiness in laborers? If wages are relative, why isn’t happiness? Should we ask the absolute question: Are workers today happier than they were one hundred years ago? Or should we ask the relative question: Are they growing happier at as fast a rate as capitalists? Consider: The rich are getting happier, and the poor are getting happier. But the rich are getting happier more quickly. Once we begin construing happiness so that we can test “scientific” Marxism, it’s a sad day for Marxists and non-Marxists alike.
Marx also prophesied the collapse of capitalism, a system that provides its own “gravediggers.” But capitalism does not seem dead yet. The unemployment rate is slightly higher than it was in the beginning of the 1900s, but if we consider the percentage of the population working, and especially the addition of women to the workforce, employment is higher.
Furthermore, capitalism often produces a middle class that indirectly owns some of the means of production through the stock markets. In the late 1980s, millions of lower-middle-class Britons bought shares in “privatized” companies such as British Telecom, British Steel, and British Airways. Most union pension funds in the United States invest heavily in corporate stock.
Some of Marx’s defenders point to the growth of government in capitalist nations as the surprising savior of capitalism. Social welfare spending protects the capitalists from deeper depressions and revolution. Marx’s defenders are probably right. But remember, Marx predicted that the political system and superstructure would stay static, resistant to change. Inflexibility would destroy it. If, in retrospect, the superstructure bowed to save capitalism, then Marx was wrong on two counts.
Finally, Marxists explain capitalism’s surprising success by pointing to foreign nations. Capitalists began exploiting foreign workers in lesser-developed countries, they say, and these exploited workers abroad sustained the domestic economies. Again, even if the argument has merit, it takes us far astray from Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s internal, dialectical ruination.
In sum, Marx devised a scientific system in Capital. He confidently predicted the path of capitalism. With slippery and generous interpretations, he may have been right on occasion. But one thing is certain: Marx so despised religious sentimentalists, he would have angrily rejected the effort to win the argument by intellectual charity.
3. What did Marx give to modern economics? In mocking the relevance of a colleague’s theory, the economist Joan Robinson used to say: “Imagine a dog running through the meadow chasing a fox. The dog follows the fox’s trajectory. My colleague’s theory is the flea on the back of the dog.”
To most mainstream economists in the United States and Britain, Marx’s economic theories are fleas. Within the mainstream, the defiance of Marx is just as loud left of center as it is right of center. Paul Samuelson depicts the labor theory of value as either definitional or metaphysical chicanery.
During the Great Depression, George Bernard Shaw tried to persuade John Maynard Keynes of Marx’s virtues. Keynes resisted:
My feelings about Das Kapital are the same as my feelings about the Koran. I know that it is historically important and I know that many people, not all of whom are idiots, find it a sort of Rock of Ages and containing inspiration. Yet when I look into it, it is to me inexplicable that it can have this effect. Its dreary, out-of-date, academic controversialising seems so extraordinarily unsuited for this purpose. But then, as I have said, I feel just the same about the Koran. How could either of these books carry fire and sword round half the world? It beats me. Clearly there is some defect in my understanding. Do you believe both Das Kapital and the Koran? Or only DK? But what ever sociological value of the latter, I am sure that its contemporary economic value (apart from occasional but inconstructive and discontinuous flashes of insight) is nil. Will you promise to read it again, if I do?
Shaw did. Keynes did. Did Keynes see the light or the Mecca? He did not:
“I prefer Engels of the two. I can see that they invented a certain method of carrying on and a vile manner of writing, both of which their successors have maintained with fidelity. But if you tell me that they discovered a clue to the economic riddle, still I am beaten.”35
Since that genius Keynes was beaten, most modern economists have given up the fight and have stopped studying Marx. According to Frank Hahn, a distinguished critic of laissez-faire capitalism, “Most Marxists have never even read Marx. Of course, you really can’t blame them.”
Still Marx lurks behind the arguments of several thousand radical economists who publish the Review of Radical Political Economics and have a strong voice at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The etymological root of “radical” is radic, meaning “root,” as in “radish.” Like Marx, radical economists believe that the very root of modern economic theory is rotten in its analysis of capitalism. Nonetheless, radicals do not want to be responsible for every sentence Marx uttered or for every prediction he pronounced.
A few radicals do still embrace Marx’s labor theory of value. All radicals, though, stress the issue of control under capitalism. The bosses strive to “divide and conquer,” and maintain control in the workplace and in the polling booth. The Polish Marxist Michał Kalecki argued in the 1940s that governments deliberately ignite inflations and recessions to smother the demands of workers. The contemporary radical Stephen Marglin claims that businesses often welcome recessions. If Marglin is right, a lot of people operate under a Marxian “false consciousness.” Consider Marglin’s reading of the presidential election of 1980: Ronald Reagan promised lower inflation without recession. Foolishly, he thought the bosses disliked recessions. But the bosses voted for Reagan anyway. Why? They knew he would fail and inadvertently incite a recession. He did, and, under Marglin’s thesis, they were happy to see their stock prices fall.36
The modern radicals fight many battles—against the models of their economist colleagues, against the government, against the capitalists, and sometimes against the memory of their mentor, Karl Marx. So far, their victories are hard to count.
4. What did he give to modern politics? The loudest cry in any debate about communism today comes from the Marxists who excoriate the politics of the former Soviet Union and its satellites. This is not the communism of Marx, they shout. Of course, they are right. For a start, Marx restricted communism to countries that had been industrialized (although in his last years, he cautiously considered an eventual revolution in Russia). Stalin had a difficult task in accelerating agrarian Russia into the industrial era. In accordance with the Communist Manifesto’s proposals 1 and 9, Stalin forced farmers to join collectives and state farms. During the winter of 1932–1933, he deliberately starved millions to death to break their resistance, especially in Ukraine.37
Before Stalin, Lenin had faced similar political troubles in reshaping the Russian mind. During his reign, the dictatorship of the proletariat emerged as a dictatorship of the party—a dictatorship that would not soon wither away.
At the end of the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to cure a sclerotic economy that had suffered through, its defenders say, seventy years of bad weather. At times Gorbachev seemed ready to jettison Marx and accept some free-market mechanisms, including long-term leases of farmland and manufacturing shops to profit-seeking, private cooperatives. Gorbachev could not hold on, though, as the free market forces singed the communist hands that held on to the economy. Arguably, the fax machine played as big a role in ending the Cold War as any military technology, by permitting democracy organizers to spread their messages. Russian president Boris Yeltsin struggled to push the Russian economy forward but was thwarted by corruption, an emergent mafia, and an elderly population that found little advantage in a new economy. For pensioners, communism guaranteed them a sum—a paltry sum—but at least a dependable ration. Capitalism guarantees them nothing but turmoil. In contrast, younger Russians jumped at the opportunity to build new businesses, to travel freely, and to try their hand at entrepreneurship. This dangerous social split—a deeper schism than the “capitalist versus worker” rift that Marx and Lenin exploited—looked nearly impossible to heal. In July 1998, Yeltsin attended a burial ceremony in Saint Petersburg for Czar Nicholas and his family, whose remains had been burned and left buried for decades. Yeltsin denounced the heinous butchering of the czar by the Leninists, hoping to find an issue that young and old could agree upon. At the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s long reign, he vowed to retain Soviet retirement promises that kept old people in grubby but sturdy concrete buildings. Now retired people make up nearly one-third of the population, and more than three-quarters of them believe the breakup of the Soviet Union was a bad thing.38 In 2018, Putin blotted out his expensive pledge to keep up old Soviet retirement schemes and announced that he would raise the retirement eligibility age from sixty to sixty-five years for men and from fifty-five to sixty-three years for women. Though videos of his old pledges went viral on YouTube, he likely calculated that the older critics are dying off fast.
The Chinese worshipped Marx after their 1949 revolution. They soon became polytheists, placing Mao Zedong on the same altar. But in the late 1970s under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese began to move quickly toward free enterprise in many sectors, chiding Marx and scolding Mao. Deng, who had been thrown into prison by Mao during the bloody 1960s Cultural Revolution, was a pragmatist, stating that “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.”39 He permitted shopkeepers to keep their profits and farmers to sell their own crops. What did they call this movement? They transliterated the term “free market.” Millions of Chinese think “free market” is a Chinese term. After some ten years of liberalization, however, conservative forces reasserted themselves in 1987 (although they did not dismantle the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant located on the other side of Mao’s tomb in Beijing). The backlash was temporary, though. After Deng’s death, new prime minister Zhu Rongji and President Jiang Zemin committed to sparking more private business and cutting the reach of publicly owned businesses. In 1998, Jiang even took on the army, whose fingers reach into every sector, from hotels to refrigerator plants to karaoke bars. Chinese businessmen have woven themselves into the world economy. Most of the toys at your local Target were made in China, as are components of your iPhone and pills in your medicine cabinet. Meanwhile, more Chinese wash their hair with Procter &Gamble shampoo than any other brand! The odds of Zhu’s, Jiang’s, and Xi Jinping’s successors managing to foster more free enterprise, while still keeping the Communist Party in power, are daunting. In recent years, pro-market Chinese economists and businesspeople have complained that leaders are freezing them out of future planning. There is little doubt, though, that this is not your father’s Communist Party.
The Soviet Union and China were the last of the large communist nations that claimed to be Marxist. As the Iron Curtain melted along the borders of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, more workers achieved the freedom to unite—against Marx’s ideas.
Thus far, no country has conformed to the Marxism that his admirers envision. Even the kibbutzim of Israel evolved from tending to socialist farms to capitalist technology missions. Perhaps no country will ever fulfill the Marxist’s dream, which promises more than the real world, filled with scarcity, egoism, and evil, can deliver. It is a dream that resembles a kind of heaven or paradise lost, better suited for angels than for proletarians. Unfortunately, the yearning grows so strong that good people have been mesmerized into supporting vicious regimes that preach but do not practice the Marxist gospel. George Bernard Shaw, who shook Stalin’s hand, saw years of Soviet oppression before shaking his head.
To many people today, Marx reminds us that economic change can be excruciating, that power can transform into oppression, and that the subservient sector of a population should be protected from exploitation. But these warnings apply even more crucially in communist regimes. Marx’s admirers laud the younger, less scientific Marx. Rather than a cogent economic theorist or a charismatic political leader, Marx becomes an ever-present voice for humanistic social justice. He becomes like Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath:
“I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. . . . I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad . . . An’ when folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See?”40
Given the abuses and atrocities wreaked under the name of Marx, this is probably the best place for him.