How Karl Marx Predicted Our World Today

By Howard Zinn, In These Times

07 May 19

On the second centenary of his birth, Karl Marx remains as relevant as ever.

n the September 2000 issue of In These Times, Howard Zinn wrote this review of a book about the life of Karl Marx by Francis Wheen. On the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, we present Zinn’s review in full, in which he discusses how “Marx predicted the world of today, with ever increasing concentrations of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, with capitalism roaming the globe in search of profits, with a deepening contradiction between the colossal growth of production and the failure to distribute its fruits justly.”

It takes some courage to write still another biography of Karl Marx, especially if the writer has dared to go through the 40 volumes of his writings and his correspondence. Francis Wheen seems to have done that research scrupulously, open to both colorful stories and thunderous ideas.

The time is right for a new appraisal of Marx because ignoramuses and shitheads (the spellcheck on my computer rejected this, suggesting instead “hotheads, catheads, whiteheads, skinheads”) on all parts of the ideological spectrum have distorted his ideas in ridiculous ways. Forgive me, but I want to give you the flavor of Marx's personality, which included frequent insults directed at those, whether bourgeois or left intellectuals, who drove him to distraction by disagreeing with him—not, I agree, an admirable trait, but we must be honest about people we otherwise admire.

Marx has been stupidly (there, I've caught the virus of virulence again) linked with Stalin, by both Stalinists and apologists for capitalism. So this is a good time to set the record straight. The reviewer of Wheen's book in the New York Times Book Review seemed to think that the lack of Marxists in departments of economics, history and philosophy is somehow proof of the inadequacy of Marx's theories and, absurdly, wonders “why the rest of us should bother with Marx's ideas now that the Berlin Wall has fallen.”

Wheen lets you know immediately where he stands on this matter: “Only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag; but there is, alas, a ready supply of fools.” Marx “would have been appalled by the crimes committed in his name.” He has been “calamitously misinterpreted.” And the misinterpretation has been bipartisan, as “all these bloody blemishes on the history of the 20th century were justified in the name of Marxism or anti-Marxism.”

This is a worthy enterprise, to distinguish Marx himself from the actions of the so-called Marxists (who led an exasperated Marx at one time to say: “I am not a Marxist.”), as well as to keep alive his still-accurate critique of capitalism.

Wheen provides a colorful romp through Marx's life. Marx grew up in a middle-class German family, with rabbi ancestors on both sides, but his father converted to Christianity for practical reasons. (Karl in fact was baptized at the age of six.) At 18 he was engaged to the beautiful Jenny von Westphalen, whose aristocratic family admired the young Karl for his remarkable intellect, and whose father took long walks with him, reciting Homer and Shakespeare.

Marx studied first at the University of Bonn and then the University of Berlin, as a rather wild and fun-loving student even while seriously pursuing the teachings of Hegel and writing a doctoral dissertation on Greek philosophy. His thesis, comparing the ideas of Democritus and Epicurus, is a ringing declaration of freedom from false authority, insisting that the true purpose of philosophy was to deny “all gods of heaven and earth who do not recognize man's self-consciousness was the highest divinity.”

Hegel also saw the historical development of man's self-consciousness as the human march toward freedom. But Marx was soon to go beyond that, to turn Hegel “on his head,” to see freedom as requiring, not simply a change in consciousness, but a revolutionary change in the material conditions of life. Early on, Marx's extraordinary intellectual power was evident. His friend Moses Hess said that Marx “combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one man, and you have Dr. Marx.”

Marx was 24 when he moved to Cologne, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. He soon began challenging the sacred laws of private property, denouncing the arrest of peasants who were using firewood from private forests, and writing editorials against the Prussian censors. What can be more infuriating to censors than to rail against censorship? They castigated the Zeitung for “impudent and disrespectful criticism of the existing government institutions.” And proved it right by shutting it down.

Wheen enjoys showing the inanity of Marx's detractors, as when they reduce his complex view of religion to unconditional hostility, quoting repeatedly his statement that religion is “the opium of the people.” The full quotation, from his 1843 essay, “Toward a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,” shows a more nuanced and sympathetic understanding of the social role of religion: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions, it is the opium of the people.”

Driven from Germany, Marx went to Paris, where he and Jenny found a little flat on the Left Bank, and where their first child, Jennichen, was born in 1844. It was in the cafes of Paris that Marx met an extraordinary group of other young radicals: Proudhon (“property is theft”); Heine, the brilliant poet; Bakunin, the wild man of anarchism and spontaneous revolution; Stirner, the supreme individualist; and, most important of all, Frederick Engels.

Engels was two years younger than Marx, but already more aware of class oppression and class struggle, having witnessed a general strike in Manchester, England, where his father owned textile mills. In 1845, at 25, Engels would write eloquently and powerfully of working-class lives in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England. He described one Manchester slum as follows: “Masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here.”

Marx and Engels, meeting for the first time in August of 1844 in the Cafe de la Regence (Voltaire, Diderot and Benjamin Franklin were among its famous patrons), hit it off from the start, intellectually and personally. Engels then visited Marx's flat, and there followed 10 days of intense and wide-ranging discussion, which Wheen, seeing this as the beginning of an extraordinary relationship, with immense historical significance, calls “ten days that shook the world.”

It was in Paris, at the age of 26, that Marx wrote his famous “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” which remained unpublished until the 1930s, but which contain some of his most profound ideas. The central concept was alienation, but Marx saw the source of this alienation not as a problem of consciousness, as Hegel put it, but in the material conditions of capitalist society. Under capitalism, human beings led a nonhuman existence, being alienated from their work, from the product of their labor, from one another, from nature, from their own true selves. The solution was not in the realm of ideas, but in action to overturn these conditions.

Driven from Paris, Marx met Engels again in Brussels, and, commissioned by the Communist League of London, they (mostly Marx, it seems) fashioned one of the most influential documents of modern history, The Communist Manifesto. It appeared in French just before the 1848 revolution. The first English edition, in 1850, started with the sentence: “A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe.” In the 1888 translation that became: “A spectre is haunting Europe— the spectre of Communism.”

The Manifesto demolished the idea that capitalism was a natural and eternal condition. It was a stage in history, which came out of feudalism and would give way to a more humane society. Capitalism brought about an enormous development in technology and production: “The bourgeoisie has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” But workers were now nothing more than commodities, their lives subject to the domination of the market. And as capitalism becomes more and more obviously inadequate to control its own enormous growth, the working class will become the instrument for its replacement.

As workers become “a ruling class,” representing the vast majority of the nation, they will sweep away the conditions for the existence of all classes, “and will therefore have abolished its own supremacy as a class.” The climactic sentence of the first part of the Manifesto is profoundly important, repudiating any notion of a police state, and insisting on the ultimate goal of individual freedom: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Expelled from the continent and finding refuge finally in London, Marx labored for years in the library of the British Museum on his epic work, Capital. All this, while living with Jenny in the miserable conditions of Soho, and grieving as three of their children, two boys and a girl, died in the first years of life. Two girls, their first-born Jennichen and Laura, had survived, and a third, Eleanor, was born in London. (Eleanor was a remarkable child, politically precocious at the age of 8; Yvonne Kapp's two-volume biography of Eleanor Marx is a wonderful description of the life of the Marx family in London.)

Wheen is unsparing in his depiction of Marx's nastiness, directed against Ferdinand Lassalle (including anti-Semitic barbs, although anti-Semitism was not part of Marx's philosophy or political behavior), Proudhon and other intellectuals of the left. He was unmoved by Proudhon's plea that they should not become “the leaders of a new intolerance” and responded caustically to Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty with his own diatribe, The Poverty of Philosophy. He referred to another refugee from the 1848 revolution in Germany, one August Willich, as “an uneducated, four times-cuckolded jackass.” Willich challenged him to a duel, which he wisely declined.

Yet Wheen also recognizes that Marx was a loving husband and deeply affectionate father who, despite being unable to pay bills and depending on Engels for financial support, bought a piano for his daughters and sent them to the seashore to get them away from the rancid air of Soho. He read Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes to Eleanor, whose love and devotion to him were expressed throughout her life. His enemies may have seen him differently, but her father, Eleanor said, was “the cheeriest, gayest soul that ever breathed, a man brimming over with humor.”

It is to Wheen's credit that, despite his sometimes obsessive attention to the comic elements in Marx's life, he treats the man's ideas with great respect. He doesn't insist that Marx's analysis in Capital is flawless, but sees it as “a work of the imagination,” its purpose “an ironic one, juxtaposed with grim, well-documented portraits of the misery and filth which capitalist laws create in practice.”

He points out how Marx predicted the world of today, with ever increasing concentrations of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, with capitalism roaming the globe in search of profits, with a deepening contradiction between the colossal growth of production and the failure to distribute its fruits justly. Wheen says that “the more I studied Marx, the more astoundingly topical he seemed to be.”

Those who would doubt Marx's commitment to a truly democratic society should study his eloquent (second in literary brilliance only to his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) description of the 1871 Paris Commune. The Commune abolished rents and debts, equalized wages, hailed culture and education, made leaders subject to immediate recall by the people, destroyed the guillotine. Women played a crucial role in all of its activities (see Gay Gullickson, The Unruly Women of Paris). It was, Marx said, “the most glorious achievement of our time.”

Bernie Sanders Decides to Play Rough This Time

By Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast

06 May 19

The senator is playing to win, drawing sharp contrasts with his opponents far more quickly and aggressively than he did four years ago.

n just the last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) unloaded a blistering attack on a leading Democratic think tank. He went after former Vice President Joe Biden on a number of policy fronts. And one of his top congressional surrogates accused Mayor Pete Buttigieg of intellectual dishonesty.

It’s a new, more aggressive look for Team Sanders. The senator who four years ago was known as a gruff but endearing candidate running a democratic-socialist, ideas-driven campaign has decided to bare his fangs more quickly this time, in hopes that it may actually win him the nomination.

“[T]he senator learned… many lessons from 2016,” Nina Turner, a national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 campaign told The Daily Beast, “and one of those lessons is to show what separates you very clearly from the rest of the people running.”

It’s an effort, aides and associates say, born from the new role he occupies in Democratic politics. With his name ID having skyrocketed after his last run—and having assumed the role of the ideological pied piper of the left—Sanders himself said he no longer feels he needs to take the time to introduce himself or his ideas to voters.

“I think we start off with the advantage that many people know where I’m coming from,” the Senator told The Daily Beast in a recent interview, “that all of these issues—health care is a human right, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, addressing climate change, dealing with a broken criminal justice system and a broken immigration system, protecting a woman’s right to choose—these are not new ideas for me.”

Four years ago, Sanders faced a far different landscape. When he entered the presidential contest in 2015, he was seen as an also-ran; the improbability of his bid underscored by the oddity of its launch: a press conference off to the side of the Capitol building.

Though he was an insurgent, Sanders early on often declined to go on the attack, particularly on topics he deemed superficial. During the first debate in October 2015, he was asked about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while serving as Secretary of State.

“Let me say something that may not be great politics,” he said, in what would become one of the early defining moments of the primary. “But I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”

As the primary wore on, the soft touch disappeared. Sanders took jabs at Clinton for her paid speeches to Wall Street, her praise of Henry Kissinger, and her vote for the Iraq War, among other things. But within the larger Sanders’ orbit, some questioned whether the primary contest—and even the general election—would have played out differently if he had gone after Clinton earlier and more aggressively.

“Inside the campaign, we were all in agreement,” Mark Longabaugh, a top strategist on the 2016 campaign, told The Daily Beast. “[But] there were commentators on the outside of the campaign, other political players who criticized us for not criticizing her on emails. There were people on the outside who were basically saying, ‘You need to engage her on this and take her down on this because if she’s our nominee, the Republicans are going to kill her on this.’ And that was the flak we were getting from the outside.”

Four years later, there is no candidate with email issues for Sanders to address. But there is a much deeper field, with a group of nominees all seeming to gravitate toward similar ideological planks. And, unlike with Clinton, Sanders seems inclined to mix things up even earlier.

Among his campaign hires are a number of veterans of the online left who led the efforts in the early aughts to challenge the Democratic Party from within. They include veterans of the anti-war movement and of now-Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont’s unsuccessful campaign to unseat Joe Lieberman in the 2006 election (Lamont won the primary but Lieberman won the general election as an independent). They also include David Sirota, an unapologetic liberal known for challenging the ideological commitment of fellow Democrats, including fellow presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, whom Sirota sharply criticized before formally joining the Sanders campaign.

Sirota has kept quiet since then. But the Sanders campaign has not. Last month, it sent a scathing letter to the Center for American Progress accusing the think tank of “using its resources to smear” him and two of his Senate colleagues in the race. Shortly thereafter, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a congressional ally who serves as a campaign co-chair for Sanders, tweaked Buttigieg on Twitter for a comment he made seeming to draw comparisons between Sanders and Trump supporters. Buttigieg, who famously wrote an essay praising Sanders when he was a high-school student, subsequently said the two politicians have “radically different” philosophies.

But the biggest contrasts Team Sanders has drawn so far have been with Biden. In the past week, the Senator has gone after his fellow septuagenarian for his record on trade and his support for the Iraq War. He said in a recent CNN interview that Biden had failed to stand up to China on trade and had facilitated some of the trade deals that had—in Sanders’ estimation—led to the hollowing of American manufacturing.

This Sunday, in an interview with ABC News, Sanders dismissed the idea that Biden could match his progressive bona fides. “I don’t think there’s much question about who’s more progressive,” he declared.

Sanders and Biden haven’t always been at odds. The two men shared kind words about each other in the past and have found themselves recently agreeing on the need to end U.S. involvement in the civil war in Yemen. And Sanders’ defenders note that his critiques are statements of fact and that he’s not the only one to jab the former VP. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), has similarly gone after Biden in the past.

But Sanders’ willingness to go so directly at Biden so early in the campaign also speaks to his team’s desire to send an early message that he is not simply running a feel-good style campaign this time. It’s a message that came from the candidate himself, according to campaign manager Faiz Shakir.

“It is important, especially in a field as large as this field this time around, for the Senator to lay out for the American people why he is uniquely situated and what makes him different than all the candidates running in the race,” Turner said. “He is by far the only presidential candidate where we have consistency. It is important that people not get totally caught up on who like and more caught up on who is going to be the one to unrig the rigged system.”