Jan
8
What did Karl Marx know that we need to learn?
Who were the 100 most influential people in history? Astrophysicist Michael H. Hart gave the world his list in a 1987 book, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History.
It’s an interesting read of short essays, beginning with Hart’s number one choice, Muhammad, and ending with Leonardo da Vinci, who came in as an honorable mention/near miss. (Remember, this book pre-dates Dan Brown.) Jesus came in #3 on Hart’s list and people I’m ashamed to admit I don’t even recognize fell into the bottom 50. People like Ashoka (#52), Mani (#83) and Niels Bohr (#100).
Of course, Hart might make changes in his list based on the 25 years since his book was published. Steve Jobs, anybody?
In 11th place is Karl Marx, who developed economic theories that became the basis for Communism. Of course, Communism has taken quite a hit since 1987. But at the time the book was written, Communism seemed to have carved out a permanent place in the world economy.
Still, Hart made the point that not all of Marx’s predictions proved to be true; he zeroed in on two. Marx apparently predicted that in capitalist economies:
- working people would become progressively poorer as time went on;
- the middle class would be eliminated, with only a few rising into the capitalist class.
Hart wrote, in 1987, that neither of these predictions about capitalism had proven to be accurate. In 2012, I can only say, “Wow.”
Maybe it’s time to read Das Kapital again, if only to find out what we might be up against as capitalism lurches into at least two of the very pitfalls Karl Marx predicted a century and a half ago.
As Pink Floyd aptly noted, there are always “Pigs on the Wing”. What Pink Floyd failed to note is that Communist Pigs are no better than Capitalist ones. The album, “Animals”, which I will play on my radio show this afternoon with commentary, was based on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Which, in turn, was based on Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”.
“The first chapter of the Manifesto, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, examines the Marxist conception of history, with the initial idea asserting that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. It goes on to say that in capitalism, the working class, proletariat, are fighting in the class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the bourgeois, and that past class struggle ended either with revolution that restructured society, or “common ruin of the contending classes”.
It continues by adding that the bourgeois exploits the proletariat by “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones”.
The Manifesto explains that the reason the bourgeois exist and exploit the proletariat with low wages is because of private property, “the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the formation and increase of capital”, and that competition amongst the proletariat creates wage-labour, which rests entirely on the competition among the workers!