Where is marxism today

They do it because competition demands it. Marx was a humanist. He believed that we are beings who transform the world around us in order to produce objects for the benefit of all.

That is our essence as a species. Capitalism is fated to self-destruct, just as all previous economic systems have self-destructed. Marx was fanatically committed to finding empirical corroboration for his theory. It was a heroic attempt to show that reality aligned with theory.

Marx had very little to say about how the business of life would be conducted in a communist society, and this turned out to be a serious problem for regimes trying to put communism into practice. He had reasons for being vague. Marx was clearer about what a communist society would not have. The state, in the form of the Party, proved to be one bourgeois concept that twentieth-century Communist regimes found impossible to transcend. Communism is not a religion; it truly is, as anti-Communists used say about it, godless.

But the Party functions in the way that Feuerbach said God functions in Christianity, as a mysterious and implacable external power. Marx did not, however, provide much guidance for how a society would operate without property or classes or a state. A good example of the problem is his criticism of the division of labor.

Rather than have a single worker make one pin at a time, Smith argued, a pin factory can split the job into eighteen separate operations, starting with drawing out the wire and ending with the packaging, and increase production by a factor of thousands. But Marx considered the division of labor one of the evils of modern life. So did Hegel. It makes workers cogs in a machine and deprives them of any connection with the product of their labor.

Human beings are naturally creative and sociable. A system that treats them as mechanical monads is inhumane. But the question is, How would a society without a division of labor produce sufficient goods to survive? Nobody will want to rear the cattle or clean the barn ; everyone will want to be the critic. Believe me. As Marx conceded, capitalism, for all its evils, had created abundance. He seems to have imagined that, somehow, all the features of the capitalist mode of production could be thrown aside and abundance would magically persist.

In , it is harder to be dismissive. It uses data to show us the real nature of social relations and, by doing that, forces us to rethink concepts that have come to seem natural and inevitable.

One of these is the concept of the market, which is often imagined as a self-optimizing mechanism it is a mistake to interfere with, but which in fact, left to itself, continually increases inequality.

Another concept, closely related, is meritocracy, which is often imagined as a guarantor of social mobility but which, Piketty argues, serves mainly to make economic winners feel virtuous. Piketty says that for thirty years after a high rate of growth in the advanced economies was accompanied by a rise in incomes that benefitted all classes.

It now appears that those thirty years were an anomaly. The Depression and the two world wars had effectively wiped out the owners of wealth, but the thirty years after rebooted the economic order. We are approaching those levels again today. In the United States, according to the Federal Reserve, the top ten per cent of the population owns seventy-two per cent of the wealth, and the bottom fifty per cent has two per cent.

About ten per cent of the national income goes to the top two hundred and forty-seven thousand adults one-thousandth of the adult population. This is not a problem restricted to the rich nations.

Global wealth is also unequally distributed, and by the same ratios or worse. It can be difficult now to appreciate the degree of immiseration in the nineteenth-century industrial economy. In one period in , the average workweek in a Manchester factory was eighty-four hours. It appears that wage stagnation is back. And, as wages for service-sector jobs decline in earning power, the hours in the workweek increase, because people are forced to take more than one job.

The rhetoric of our time, the time of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, Brexit, and popular unrest in Europe, appears to have a Marxist cast. How useful is Marx for understanding this bubble of ferment in the advanced economies? That they are basically all the former may turn out to be a consoling belief of the better-off, who can more easily understand why people who have suffered economic damage would be angry than why people who have nothing to complain about financially might simply want to blow the whole thing up.

Still, in the political confusion, we may feel that we are seeing something that has not been seen in countries like Britain and the United States since before people debating what Marx would call the real nature of social relations. Let a young woman dream.

After last year's riots and today with most of Britain alienated from the rich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would rule it out. For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, year-old poster boy of the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of , Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. He's on the train to Brighton to address the Unite conference. Indeed, he says, in the s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist society as being won by means other than violent revolution.

Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it. Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the s, held to the entryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organising working people to make sure that government delivered.

How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me to make it clear he's not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist.

Rather, he wants a Labour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He has in mind the words of Labour's February election manifesto which expressed the intention to "Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families". Let a young man dream. What's striking about Jones's literary success is that it's premised on the revival of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels's analysis of industrial society.

It's impossible to argue now as was argued in the s that we're all middle class. This government's reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect working people disproportionately, for instance. The professor argued that "one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?

There's another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. An analysis of contemporary bourgeois social relations based on the highest achievements of human thought in explaining the course of social development in the person of classical German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism allowed Marx to draw a fundamental conclusion about the historically transient nature of capitalism.

Moreover, the contradiction between productive forces and production relations as the driving spring of social change ultimately in any socio-economic formation, with the inevitability and necessity, will require, in his opinion, the transformation of capitalism into communism.

The essence of the matter is that under capitalism, the increasing social capital personified in capitalism is increasingly opposing the producers of this capital — the working class as an alien, enslaving force. Expressing the increasing socialization of production, social capital comes into conflict with the power of private owners — capitalists.

From the point of view of Marxism, this contradiction can only be resolved by the revolutionary transformation of the conditions of production into universal, collective, own conditions of production. Since the founders of Marxism lived and worked, capitalism has undergone such bizarre metamorphoses that it seems to be outdated as a way of reproducing social relations. Nevertheless, it is not only the main way of social being in the modern world, but also remains unchanged in its essence: the growing social capital personified in the capitalist, as in ancient times, is opposed to those who create it.

Many interrelated indicators prove this statement. An unambiguous conclusion follows from this — Marxism adequately reflects the nature of capitalism and, therefore, as a social doctrine, it is true in principle. It is in this regard that the position of Marxism is unshakable. In addition, none of the doctrines, however adequate to reality, is automatically realized.

Even when the theory takes hold of the minds of billions of people, there is no mirror coincidence between it and social reality itself, since the theory is turned by people into practice. And, therefore, the question of who and where, when and how is based on Marxism in order to influence social processes is quite natural Lichtheim: In principle, the answer to this question was given by the founders of Marxism as follows: a the proletarian movement should be led by the Communist Party b the party is structurally divided into leadership party leaders and party masses ordinary party members ; c inner-party life is built on the principles of democracy, camaraderie, criticism, and self-criticism Marx: Compliance with the provisions of the last paragraph in real time and space was difficult and, often, was very dramatic.

There was practically no time in the history of the international communist movement when the thought of R. And, as a result, the practice of communist transformations mainly demonstrated two mutually exclusive approaches to solving this problem: dogmatic and subjective-voluntaristic. The first approach required a mechanical, uncritical attitude to Marxism as a guide to action, chastising, arguing that one was correct by quoting certain provisions from the works of the classics of Marxism, and any attempt to creatively use it was declared revisionism, renegade Kitching: Perhaps the only exception concerned the leaders of the party, and even then during their lifetime, since after death, their contribution to the theory and practice of socialism, as a rule, was subjected to revision and obstruction.

The embodiment of literalism if you will — Marxist fundamentalism in the history of the USSR was the theory of proletarian culture, political and legal infringement, and even the persecution of citizens of non-proletarian and peasant origin, rejection of the new economic policy NEP proposed in exchange for the policy of military communism , Stalinism, and even practice of naming people Exchange: The manifestations of the second approach in the practice of Soviet socialism are vividly demonstrated by the activities of party leaders: almost every new leader of the CPSU this applies, in fact, to any Communist Party was regarded as the coming of Christ to Earth — his figure was deified.

This was one of the best texts the magazine ever published. Murray had drafted it while on holiday in the Lake District, sporadically discussing it on the phone with Jacques and receiving requests for rewrites via the postman. On the way back, we broke down. The AA had to come.

It was two in the morning. And my wife has a picture of me at some service station, sitting on a suitcase, correcting this document. A new party mission statement, titled Manifesto for New Times, was being put together.

Here were the ideas of New Times — indeed, the whole project pursued by MT over the previous 12 years — in the form of programmatic politics.

With its characteristic chutzpah, MT commemorated the end of European communism with a cover featuring an iconic portrait of Marx splattered with eggs and tomatoes. And it carried on for another two years, soon negotiating its financial independence from the party.

It was lighter than that. Apart from anything else, Jacques told me, it was finished off by the leaden weight of its associations with communism. It was very difficult to escape that. But also, I just wanted to stop. I was exhausted. Jacques says he instantly resigned his membership; Campbell is not sure there was any party left to leave by this point. It was a scalding shock. And the discovery of this sordid distribution of Soviet money … what it revealed was that what we had tried to do in the 70s and 80s had all been impossible.

Thatcher had been toppled by a Tory revolt in , but the Labour party went on to lose its fourth consecutive general election in April Meanwhile, Jacques and Turner spent a year working on a possible successor to Marxism Today. It was to be a monthly magazine with an international focus; the working title was Politics, but it came to nothing.

Jacques then helped Geoff Mulgan set up Demos , the thinktank that would attach itself to New Labour and supply it with no end of policy ideas. After a spell spent writing for the Sunday Times, Jacques then became deputy editor of the Independent between and When Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour party in , Jacques initially dispensed warm words. New Labour had attempted the first part, but replaced the second with a doctrine of surrender.

Marxism Today had floated policy ideas that New Labour had taken up. Blair and Brown had written for the magazine, and were now being advised by ex-Marxism Today writers. But its writers and thinkers now wanted to kill the idea that the magazine had anything in common what the government was up to. He also attended the MT seminar on Blair — and wrote an irate piece published in the one-off issue.

All that apart, Mulgan is now candid about the gap between what people like him had envisaged and what Labour actually did with power. One of the things we failed to do was to get a really active debate going about the shape and nature of the state. But that was combined with two things. One was a notion of branding, and discipline. But also, there was something that developed in the first term.

It was about delivery. You have to imagine how people can create social solutions in a different kind of way, with a different kind of state. He then turned his thoughts to more recent developments. I met Leadbeater in an elegantly shabby cafe on Highbury Corner in Islington, north London, where we spent 90 minutes considering the Marxism Today legacy, and the real-life politics he now saw echoing the ideas MT had explored.

I see it all over the place. Just not in the Labour party.