Peter N. Kirstein

I was in Sarasota which is a Florida city on the west coast, south of Tampa and not far from Clearwater on the Gulf of Mexico where the N.F.L. players embarked prior to their demise during their fishing excursion.

My hotel was empty. The palm tree lined thoroughfare where I parked my Avis-rented VW Bug had no other cars on it for hours at a time. The pool had no swimmers; the chairs and lounges around the pool were in neat parallel lines to the pool, with no customers. The hotel beach was empty and the cabanas and other chairs were not used. I was virtually the only one there.

Siesta Key Beach, one of the great beaches in the world, was jammed pack with  sun worshippers. I was there on a Wednesday afternoon and it was humming on a weekday, prior to Spring Break when people are working presumably. Well, public beaches are full of unemployed people looking for a diversion from the dreary landscape of unbridled, monstrous capitalism. Hotel beaches lay desolate; public beaches are teeming with folks. In fact I could barely find a place to park as cars whisked in and out of free parking areas.

One evening I went to O’Leary’s Tiki Bar and Grill a modest restaurant that was reviewed by the New York Times. {See below photo from the Times.} As you can see it is rather unpretentious. I was waiting in line to place my dinner order when I noticed the woman in front of me was pleading for a job. While she was alone, she said her son had been laid off, she had lived “in town for thirty-one years,” and would they hire her son? The order taker said they don’t have servers, people take their food to the tables and return their trays. The woman said, “Oh, my son can cook, can clean, he is a hard worker.” Then she was given a form to fill out. I then ordered my two veggie burgers but despite the austral winds and the shimmering Sarasota Bay, dinner was more contemplative than pleasant.

The day after I returned to Chicago there was a message on my machine from the hotel general manager thanking me for staying there. I had never received a follow up call before from a hotel that is testimony to the depression sweeping Florida which has one of the highest home foreclosure rates in the nation.

This may not be a statistically accurate economic analysis of Sarasota but I believe my experiences and encounters are testimony enough that the depresssion that began in 2008 under the Bush administration has come to placid Sarasota.

The economic bailout package of the Bush-Obama presidencies is pure Keynesian economics. Yet no one calls it that since the Laffer Curve simplistic macroeconomic nonsense of the Reagan Era which postulated tax cuts ALONE stimulate economic activity and greater revenues. John Maynard Keynes was the true architect of the New Deal, rarely mentioned by historians including the fraudulent, plagiarising, corrupt, faux historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. The British Cambridge-educated economist wrote the seminal General Theroy of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936 which is probably the single most important book in economics since Marx’s Das Kapital.

Only in post-Reagan America would there be fear of describing the great Democratic Socialist’s economic strategy of governmental activism for what it is: The roadmap of the current order. Keynes attempted to put finality on the discredited classical, Smithian world of economic laissez-faire capitalism. Yet he did not wish to eliminate the market, but to manage it. “Market” refers to private economic activity of suppliers, producers and consumers like you and me. Keynes believed that governments must play a pivotal role in transforming market capitalism by regulating and indeed subsituting government capital for private capital in times of economic stagnation.

Keynes believed three major fiscal policies should be applied during depressions. Fiscal policy refers to the tax and spend decisions of a governmental authority.

1) Increase deficit spending: Governments should spend themselves out of depression. When the private sector fails to adequately address issues of employment, then the government must. Balancing budgets and attention to the deficit should become marginalised in importance while economic stagnation is at hand. Governments don’t have credit cards but they issue treasury notes and bonds which pay interest to the lender. That is basically how governments borrow money when in deficit. Issue I.O.U.s to lenders which are governments, central banks, currency speculators and private citizens.

2) Tax reduction: Governments should be smart and not burden a distressed population with more taxes. The Bush plan of tax cuts was actually part Keynesianism if only for the well to do. In times of economic challenges, tax cuts should be widely implemented. Whether Barack Obama will extend the Bush tax cuts through 2010 for incomes above 250,000 or repeal them before then in order “to level the playing field” is unknown. Yet Keynesian economics would reject tax increases during a depressionary cycle of unemployment, decline in industrial activity, credit seized and growing destitution in general.

3) Public Works: If one combines the first two components of Keynesian economic activism, there is inevitably a huge deficit: Increase spending and tax reduction means less money for the treasury and, therefore, growing deficits. A deficit is when income is exceeded by spending. Keynes believed that public works is the best application of fiscal policy. Create jobs, hire the unemployed, pay them. They will spend, create effective demand, stimulate the need for production, reduce the unemployment rate and pump money into the system.

Combined, this triad of welfare-state capitalism is “priming the pump.” This is what is contemplated with a $750 billion minimal stimulus package. So let’s call it what it is. The return of Keynesian economics and a rejection of free-market unregulated capitalism: at least for the short term. If neo-classical economics is dead, I will provide the casket since Keynes provided the shovel and dirt.

Vladimir Lenin was the chief mover of the Russian Revolution in 1917 that overthrew the Czars, the final ruler being Nicholas II. Following the initial 1917 February revolution, Lenin returned to Russia by sealed railcar through Germany, and in somewhat counterevolutionary fashion takes aim at the erstwhile revolutionary ally–the provisional government of Aleksandr Kerensky. This culminates in the second Russian revolution, the transformational October Revolution, that brought communism, or at least a centralised Leninist revisionist model of it, to the first nation-state.

In Lenin’s, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), the epoch figure was clearly influenced by John A. Hobson (1858-1940), Imperialism (1902) and of course the monarchial decadence and capitalist slaughters of the Great War. Lenin described how capitalism in its mania for production and irrational pursuit of profits is unable to find adequate domestic demand to consume its products. The slave labour of the proletariat is worked ]with greater efficiency as it produces a cornucopia of products that sit unsold in warehouses as the immiserated masses cannot consume the products they themselves produced through the labour theory of value.

To find new markets, capital seeks new colonies, new navies to protect sea lanes, new markets on a global basis. Indeed imperialism has always been chiefly motivated by pursuit of wealth. I am not an economic determinist and hardly an advocate of the centrality of power under Marxist-Leninism and willing to concede that imperialist urgings are also motivated by religious, cultural and nationalist impulses. I do agree, however, with the Marxist-Leninist critique that construes profit and wealth enhancement as the driving force behind war, grotesque standing armies and imperialist, racist colonialism. The monster Christopher Columbus had on his ship masts the cross, but his primary reason for sailing west was a short cut to the riches of India.

Capital in its business formation develops monopolies that utterly devastate and control the mode of production, the financial and credit markets and of course the supine, sycophantic governments of the superstructure. As Lenin put it so succinctly: “[I]mperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.” Free competition which is the sine qua non of capitalism is eviscerated by proletarian labour and monopolies that thwart open competition in and between firms.

The result of desperate monopoly capital is a global coordinated effort to seek farflung new markets. But this is not consummated with free trade but through cartels that dream of controlling the Earth’s riches; this is war, conquest and subjugation in order to develop GLOBAL MONOPOLIES. Conflicts result, subject peoples resist, capitalist nations turn on each other as they compete for diminishing returns from Asia to America.  Capitalist internecine wars lead to the destruction of capitalism and the emergence of a socialist mode of production.

While this model obviously is imprecise as we witness the possible impoverishment of America and the decline of the global hegemony of capitalism, wars have ruined our nation in pursuit of profit. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the permanent deployment of American soldiers in Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany, Turkey and at sea are chiefly the result of economic imperialism and are plundering the financial solvency of the country. Yes other factors induce such extravagance but economic factors appear to be dominant.

Capitalist governments from America to Iceland to Canada to Indonesia to Germany are frantically trying to rationalise their economic order of greed, rapacity and aggressive free trade. Trillions of dollars are flooding the dying insurance industry, the banks, the financial markets, as the system is disintegrating. Of course in America, such ersatz socialist tendencies do not touch the masses. The people on food stamps, on minimum wage, in emergency rooms for health care are increasing. No relatively few dollars goes to people to pay their mortgages, their credit card debts but primarily to the malefactors of great wealth such as AIG, Citigroup and other multinationals.

Yes, Marx and Lenin knew such a system would fail. I am not advocating a socialist system on the Russian-state model from 1917-1992 but a socialist system in which the people rule, more economic equality is realised and the use of force vastly diminished.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was frequently ridiculed, except in Dr Howard Zinn’s classes, as an idealist with a faulty vision of the future. Even though he was not an idealist but a scientific socialist and his vision is spot on, these liberal professors who did so much to try to dissuade me from a progressive viewpoint, simply did not understand the Marxian worldview.

As we see the crisis of global capitalism, the most retrogressive and punishing force in human history, the Marxian contours of history come into focus. The growth of financial behemoths and other capitalist firms are intertwined with government officials; immense suffering and immiseration emerges with growing unemployment of the industrial reserve army as the richest nation in the world has 6.1% unemployment. Marx predicted that capital would become so concentrated in the hands of an elite bourgeoisie that the proletariat–working class– would rise up and overthrow capital. While bloody revolutions are anathema to me, one wonders if social instability will increase during this period of severe economic stagnation.

In a way we are witnessing non-violent resistance. Millions of Americans got mortgages but could not pay them as housing prices plummeted and unemployment through deindustrialisation skyrocketed. The Wall Street titans in a frenetic effort to increase their productive forces–in this case not industial modes of production but bizarre derivatives, credit default swaps and  mortgage-backed securities in order to increase their financial bottom lines–bet that real estate prices would never decline but always increase. The prols stopped paying their mortgages and ironically the edifice of capital began to crack. Such institutions as Lehman, Bear, Stearns, AIG either liquidated or received from the Treasury or Federal Reserve hundreds of billions in bailouts.

Marx envisioned international capital as a very transient if revolutionary and dominant force. It gets richer off the backs of the poor–try the 47 million without health insurance in the wealthiest nation on Earth. It develops an international class of elite investment bankers, government officials, insurance companies and industrial tycoons. Yet it disappears as profit seekers act irrationally in producing more for diminishing consumer demand. The bourgeoisie goes broke–bye, bye Wall Street capitalists–who sink into the growing proletariat–labour class.

I do not know if the demise of capitalism is at hand but it certainly looks like it as the Dow crashes, the S&P 500 plunges and the NASDAQ approaches lows not seen in four years. While Marx emphasised the growing poverty of industrial robber barons, his prescience in seeing the growing chasm between rich and poor, the growing gluttony of indulgence at the expense of the workers and the dialectical inevitability of  the downfall of capital has accentuated. This should cause liberal professors who did not have the courage or freedom to teach Marx, according to Marx, to pause and recognise his epoch brilliance, his transcendent ethical vision of justice and his capacity to see the future which hopefully is now!!! I make of course the distinction between theory and practice. Theoretical Marxism is vastly disparate than the monstrosity of communism that was practiced in the 20th century.

Dr Karl Marx and quotation from The Communist Manifesto (1848).

In the only issue of the Paris-based Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, appeared a monumental series of articles by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This 1844 momentous publication included Marx’s Letters to Feuerbach, On the Jewish Question, Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction, Engels’s, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy and a review of Thomas Carlyle’s, Past and Present. An extraordinary single issue that combined original writings and “critique” of others works, it revealed a proto-Marxism in which the young Marx (25) was evolving from his Young Hegelian days at the University of Berlin into a more systematic ethical world view that would shape much of the modern temper of the world and endure for the ages.

He rather explicitly for the first time calls for the proletariat to recognise its historic mission as a class and develops a general theoretical assessment of the workers. Religion was, of course, a component of the derivative superstructure which contained the non-materialist and frankly non-decisive forces of society. This superstructure rested upon the base or substructure which contained the materialist forces of society: namely economic variables from raw materials, level of technology, interplay between manufacture (originally meant hand produced) and indeed labour intensive work, organisation of labour, prevailing demonic corporate structure and the social classes that derived from the mode of production. These were the productive forces that determine the class structure and the DNA of the current order.

To Marx, economic variables were paramount in determining all aspects of a society’s culture and contained the glorious contradictions that would lead to revolution and the displacement of the exisitng ruling class: under capitalism that would include the bourgeoisie, the factory owners, the organisers of the economic system of capitalism. Religion to Marx was not an independent entity but a manifestation of bourgeois dominance which reinforced among the proletariat (factory workers) submission and enervating passivity.

In the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right appears one of Karl Marx’s most popular phrases: “Religion is the opium of the people” but that is rather simplistic. More significant to Marx was the dehumanising nature of religion in which humans were self-alienated from themselves in the construct of a Supreme Being. Alienation or entfremdung was a life-long preoccupation of Marx. It resulted from the monotony, exhaustion and rigours of the proletarian mode of production and was viciously reinforced by religion’s capacity to obscure, frighten and diminish the ability of the workers to recognise their humanity and liberate themselves as “appendages of the machine.” [Non-religious alienation is further developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and perdures in the immortal Das Kapital].

In the Critique of the dialectical idealist Hegel, Marx wrote:

“Man makes religion; religion does not make man…Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering…The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticsm of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” [All emphases from original.]

Religion was a human-made component of culture that was not determined or molded by desperate, impoverished and dying workers. The absurdity of religion is its not being grounded in materialism or reality according to Marx. Humankind, or more precisely suffering humankind, is force fed religion by capital as a palliative to create obedience and non-resistance. Religion is also counterintuitive because, and Marx was greatly influenced by Feuerbach, in the process of creating an all wondrous, and perfect God, humanity is diminished in the process. Taking the architecture but not the substance of Hegelian idealism, Marx demands the abolition of God in order to reclaim the unwarranted projection of humanity’s own virtues; ending the god delusion would restore a sense of virtue that humanity surrendered, and recapture a materialist view that will lead to revolution and the destruction of the evil monstrosity of capitalism.

Marx’s theories were grounded in the belief that culture, including religion, was not independent of economic, materialist forces and for social change to occur, the cobwebs needed to be removed and the clear light of economic suffering as the result of bourgeois oppression revealed. Religion to Marx did not inspire greatness or motives of liberation, which it frequently has, but the gatekeeper’s lock and the capitalist’s chain of dependency, pauperisation  and immiseration.

Religion is not sacred beyond its human origins. It is not divine because it emanates from the human mind and whether it is a liberating or regressive force depends on its particular adherents and their commitment to social justice and international peace and security. It is used for both progressive and regressive purposes.  It gave us the Iraq War in large measure, the destruction of Gaza and we are paying a terrible price. It also gave us the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Selma and derivatively the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

XI Thesis on Feuerbach

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” 

Ludwig Feuerbach had a significant impact on Marx’s critique of religion. The transformational criticism of Feuerbach emphasised the alienation of humanity from its virtuous nature and its needless effort to seek penance from an artificially constructed, perfect, supreme being. God was created by humanity as the transmogrified idol representing the antithesis of perceived human depravity. The reclaiming of human’s virtue and the process of healing required removing the phantasmagorical invention of God and the substitution of a human-centered, not God-centered world. 

While Marx was steeped in the philosophic tradition, he had serious disputes with some such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The latter wrote The Philosophy of Poverty and Marx’s critique was The Poverty of Philosophy. Proudhon was an anarchist who eschewed government and Marx’s provisional stage of socialism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, was theoretically the penultimate epoch prior to the liberation of the human spirit and the commensurate “withering away of the state.”

Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895): German authors, socialists, sociologists, friends, pioneers of social justice, discoverers of dialectical materialism and advocates of revolutionary class consciousness.

Collective puts Marx's Das Kapital on stage

Jess Smee in Berlin
Thursday November 9, 2006
The Guardian

The poverty rate is 12.6% in the United States. The so-called richest nation in the world has one of the worse records, among liberal democracies, in economic redistribution of income. Thirty-seven million Americans live in destitution below the poverty line. The so-called poverty line for a family of four is $19,971. So those making $19,972 are not poor presumably. A poor family of two has an income below $12,755. So if the happy couple is making $13,000 combined they are not included in the poverty figures. Clearly the poverty level must be closer to 15% if one were to use reasonable figures of assessing impoverishment in the other America.

The American people are one of the sickest, least healthy national-population groups in the "Western world." This immoral country and let's be honest, it is, has 46,600,000 citizens without health insurance. That means no prescription medicines, no doctors, no preventive medicine, no annual physicals, no required surgeries, no psychological counseling but only a haphazard trip to an emergency room that may take six hours to see a E.R. physician.

We are told that abortion is murder; stem-cell research is murder; any abortafacient is murder; yet many, not all of these advocates, say nothing about the millions of children who are without medical insurance. Where are the Democrats, the party of war and Machiavellian realism, advocating a single-payer health system? They are still stung by the Clinton presidency's failure to achieve greater universal health care and remain silent.

Oh, but we are told we must fight international terrorism. Oh, we are told the enemies of Israel, a state-sponsor of international terrorism and murderer of our brave sailors on the U.S.S. Liberty, are terrorists. Oh we are told Americans must be spied upon, financial transactions monitored and library computer habits or even books checked out may be subject to possible monitorng. Innocent Americans such as José Padilla are arrested as "enemy combatants," but not one word from the evil men and women, who in the name of American freedom and democracy destroy other countries, about the growing poverty and misery in the United States. They don't care because they are killers.

Friedrich Engels: Advocate for the workingperson, exponent of class struggle and liberation of labour from capital. German author, confrere and collaborator with Karl Marx, and major figure in socialist thought and praxis. This is a stamp that commemorates the 40th year of his death. It was issued by the Soviet Union that so courageously contained American power from 1945 until its demise on December 25, 1991 when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned the presidency.

Yes poverty levelled off after four years of steady growth. Yes the unemployment rate is historically rather low at 4.7%, and the economy has been growing in a macroeconomic sense: more jobs, rising stockmarket, growing profits, dramatic increases in compensation for C.E.O.s and senior management. However, the wealth has not "trickled down," but capital has flowed upwards, off the backs and the brow of the proletariat, as we move toward a nation of rich and working/unemployed poor. The rich get richer with their tax cuts and war profits and the people get killed, wounded in war or die slow deaths of malnutrition or hunger in America. The other America cannot be ignored on this Labour Day or any other day and this is a reminder that I will stand by and support any figure, foreign or domestic, historic or contemporary that seeks to radically alter the injustice that grips our ethnocentric and xenophobic country.

This is the hypocrisy of the leader of the "civilised" world. Unlimited wealth and an endless financial commitment for imperial hegemony and war and nothing for those in need. The lack of government intervention to succor the needs of the Hurricane Katrina evacuees was a symptom of a nation drunk with power, flags, empire and utterly remorseless in its policies of greed and capital accumulation. Labour Day for me is a recognition of the rights of labour which are so marginalised in this country.

                                    "Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth," 1920 Communist poster.

Vladimir Lenin was the chief mover of the Russian Revolution in 1917 that replaced the Czars, the final ruler being Nicholas II. Following the initial 1917 February revolution, Lenin returns to Russia through Germany and battles the provisional government of Aleksandr Kerensky culminating in the transformational October Revolution that brought communism, or at least a Marxist-Leninist variant, to its first nation-state.

The reason for the subtitle: Lenin in the White House. With Lenin's rise to power came a reassessment of the brutal, profligate and senseless war with Germany then raging on the Eastern front during the Great War (WWI). Lenin knew that the war was fought for capital formation, imperial dynastic expansion and from a mindless, senseless balance of power strategy on the continent. It was the great Lenin that authorised Leon Trotsky to negotiate with the Germans and sign the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in March 1918. President Wilson of course tried to keep the Russians in the war so they would sacrifice their youth and kill German youth and reduce the military prowess of Germany in the west. The much maligned treaty that was revoked after the war I believe was quite magisterial. Russia surrendered Poland, the Baltic states and recognised the independence of the Ukraine, then with a "the," Georgia and Finland. They even paid a large indemnity.

Few leaders have been willing to surrender territory for peace and there is a certain greatness to Russia's decision to leave the war. That is my point recognising the eventual consolidation and subjugation by the Soviet Union of many of the lands surrendered in the March 1918 treaty. To have a president today leave the war, the crusade in Iraq, would be Lenin–like in spirit if not in precise replication of terms. Mr Bush started this war; Lenin was not involved in the Guns of August of 1914–the outbreak of the Great War.

Communism remains, despite the egregious bombast of end-of-the-Cold War triumphalism, a vibrant system in the People's Republic of China, Vietnam and Cuba. Those three nations will remain communist for the duration of this century but will probably evolve into mixed economies, such as China and an incipient Vietnam, and continue their path of international engagement and constructive dialogue on issues of war, peace and economic justice.

Communist nations do not currently invade or occupy other countries, use cluster bombs, kill babies in their mothers' arms in distant lands and act as if they are morally, RACIALLY and culturally superior to other peoples. I am not glorifying state communism for it was too centralised, too harsh, and antagonistic to individualism and liberal democracy. Yet compared to the Axis of Evil: the United States, Israel and the United Kindgom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, contemporary communist nation-states compare favourably in their external affairs and the adoption of restraint in deploying military force to resolve international disputes.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.” Marx,  #11 “Thesis on Feuerbach.” These were written in 1845 but undiscovered until sometime after Marx’s death in 1883 when they were encountered in a notebook by Friedrich Engels. They were published in 1888 by Engels, the friend, patron, co-author and caring compatriot of the great Marx.

In its simplest sense, Marx is stating that the intellectual should do more than merely analyse but participate as a change agent in the social order. Today the right and even so-called liberals are quite critical of activist philosophers or if you will academics. Stanley Fish for years in the New York Times has proclaimed political activism as inappropriate activity for professors. David Horowitz has stated that it is “unprofessional” for academicians in the United States to even join advocacy organizations such as Historians Against the War.

Marx of course is correct and the critics of academic activism are just wrong. The  Ivory Tower is not where professors belong but in the streets. The Ivory Tower was a pejorative term that referred to the Ivy League or cloistered professor who sits around all day talking about Aristotle and Hegel and never really experiences the real world around them. I have no criticism of that activity and certainly would support it. Yet, most professors don’t teach at elite schools and have never seen ivy-covered campus buildings.

Professors should return to society her knowledge, skills of analysis and capacities of articulating ideas by becoming fully engaged in the issues of the day. The classroom is not enough; it is too confining; it is too static for a professor who wishes to make an impact either through service learning with her students or through other forms of direct action. Indeed the bulk of student learning is outside of the classroom, and professors can join them outside in protest or demonstrations or working for some social action.

Marx was a thinker, a scholar, a habitue of the British Museum where he wrote his epic works such as Das Kapital. He was a scholar and a brilliant intellectual. Yet he participated in the praxis and dynamism of the social order. As a journalist he was frequently expelled from European countries. His first forays into journalism were articles on the oppression of peasants gathering wood for heat from private spaces. An arrest warrant was issued in April 1844 by Prussia; he was expelled from Paris in 1845 for his incendiary writings. He was a founder of the Working Men’s Association in London in 1864 and very active in its General Council until 1871. Such activities represent the archetypal scholar-activist.

A risk taker and a heroic figure in his call for revolution and proletarian justice was Marx, although I prefer peaceful outcomes to societal contradictions. Any analysis of economic oppression begins with Marx. Any analysis of contemporary criticisms of social classes begins with Marx. Any analysis of 19th Century European socialism begins with Marx, taking into account the utopians such as Fourier and Owen. Any analysis of contemporary revolution begins with Marx particularly class-based popular uprisings. Any analysis of communism begin with Marx.

His greatness, his courage, his ethics, his magisterial writngs place him in the front ranks of human beings who changed the world.

A source: Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1089275.ece

The Independent (London, UK) June 16 2006

Politics and principles: Marx: does he still matter?

In a letter to former Labour leader Michael Foot, written in 1982 and published yesterday, Tony Blair reveals that reading Karl Marx 'irreversibly altered' his outlook. He even agreed with Tony Benn that Labour's right-wing was politically bankrupt. We asked nine commentators – including Mr Benn – whether Marxism still has anything to offer today

Eric Hobsbawm Historian

I think there has been a substantial revival of interest in Marx in recent years, and this has been largely because what he said about the volatility and shape of capitalism was correct – even some business people now seem to recognise this. Marx is once again somebody that you can quote, and this in part is due to the end of the Cold War.

In terms of Marx's legacy, as the Chinese are reported to have said following the French Revolution: "It's too early to tell." What we do know, though, is that Marx and his disciples were massively responsible for the shaping of the 20th century, for good or for bad, and Marx was an extraordinarily important thinker.

In this era of neo-liberal globalisation, Marxist thinking is still important in showing that while capitalism is enormously dynamic, that dynamism creates crises. We need to address these crises, not by free markets, but by controlling the system or changing it altogether. Whether or not that is possible in the short term is a different story.

Matthew d'Ancona Editor, 'THE Spectator'

Marx is certainly relevant. As Francis Wheen's very good biography shows, he was on to the idea of globalisation long before right-wing economists started writing about it. Beyond that, his way of thinking is still pervasive.

One of the fascinating things about the Labour Party is that there has been what you might call a Marx-size hole in it, a quest for a sense of destiny. Blair has tried to fill that: his critics would say with religion, his apologists would say with Europe. Blair is someone with a pretty strong sense of destiny, and he has tried to extend that to the Labour Party. He is no Marxist but in a funny way he has that sense of destiny Marx had.

Marx was wrong about lots of things, but he is still somebody you have to know about. He is one of a very small number of people – Marx, Freud and Darwin are, I suppose, the three big ones – who completely changed the way we see mankind.

Jack Straw Leader of The House of Commons

Karl Marx's legacy – not just for the Labour Party but for intellectual development – is his development of Hegel's more scientific approach to historical analysis and his elevation of the dialectical process. Both are, I think, enduring. Much of his analysis is accurate and his analytical tools are still respected by many historians.

His prescriptions were often widely off-beam, as we now know, and played down non-economic forces to a point where I think he made some grievous historical and political errors – for example, ignoring the role of nationalism and religion as political forces.

What we saw in 1989, with the collapse of theSoviet system, was that the Marxist-Leninist approach to running not only economies but also societies was unenduring. The point of Francis Fukuyama's book The End of History was not that history had ended but that we had reached a point of ideological hegemony which I think we probably had. So Marxist Leninism is not relevant in that respect but the analysis is still worth having.

Hilary Wainwright Editor, 'Red Pepper'

For all the abuses of his work, Marx's view of society was far from being mechanical and determinist. His notion of people "making history but not in conditions of their own choosing" and his idea of "the social individual" points to that crucial balance between recognising the capacity of individuals to choose to transform rather than reproduce the social relations that depend on them and on the other hand the enduring nature of these social relations.

There is in Marx a powerfully grounded belief in human creativity combined with a strong belief in individual fufilment. It's there in his theory of alienation: the way in which the capitalist labour market depends on workers' alienation from their creative capacity. It's there in his vision of socialism: not as a command economy but as the association of free producers. It is a cruel irony his name should have been used to justify authoritarianism and new, state, forms of alienation.

Tony Benn Labour Politician

It's the teachers, including the prophets of ancient times, the founders of the great religions, along with Galileo, Darwin, and Karl Marx, who explain the world and our place in it.

I always think of Marx as the last of the Old Testament prophets who wrote a brilliant book about capitalism but also condemned it because of the oppression by one class of rich and powerful people.

Marx was no more responsible for a Stalinist tyranny than Jesus was for the Inquisition or the recent war of aggression waged by a Christian president and a Christian prime minister. Without the Marxist analysis, it is impossible to understand capitalism and globalisation, to reach a moral judgement, and it is even harder to explain the crude use of that power and the need for it to be held to account. There is nothing in the Marxist analysis to prevent us from thinking things out for ourselves and working to build a genuine democracy, where the polling station replaces the marketplace, and the ballot replaces the wallet as a source of political and economic power.

Alexei Sayle Comedian and Writer

I think that the Marxist historical analysis is an accurate account of how society has developed. Although perhaps a little wide of the mark, it is definitely still relevant. When Marx spoke about the differences in society being based on economic structure he definitely had a point.

Marxism should be seen as a tool and therefore a method of analysing society and that can be relevant today. You can certainly be right-wing and still be a Marxist.

It is a historical analysis of the class struggles and a prediction of the way our society would be, and it isn't wrong. Yes, it is a complex set of ideas, but it makes sense.

Norman Tebbit Former Conservative Party Chairman

I read bits of Marx, though in a way when I grew up what seemed more relevant was Mein Kampf. I read that because I wanted to know about the bugger who was dropping bombs on me. I don't think Marx is relevant, except to show up the folly of people who believe in what is now shown to be an absolute failure of a political system. Blair is right that it purports to be a total system. You can be a Conservative without being a capitalist, you can be Labour without being a socialist, but if you buy Marx, you have to buy the lot. It's like a religion in that respect, and very harmful. So, for once, Tony's right….

There have been many experiments with communism in the manner it was actually envisioned by Marx, even if some antedated his theories, in small, relatively homogeneous communities. Some were religious and others were socialist in formation: New Harmony in Indiana, Oneida in New York, some of the Shaker and Amana Society experiments. They generally failed due to disaster, economic challenges in adequate production and receipts, disaffection from members and maladministration. Certainly Fourier and Saint Simon, so called utopian socialists, who Marx vitriolically denounced due to their lack of understanding materialism, were neverthelss quite creative in their effort to construct communities that could escape from the ruthless exploitation of industrial capitalism. George Rapp left Germany and Robert Owen left Britain to carve out a Zion in the wilderness at New Harmony, Indiana in the 1820s.

Brook Farm in Mass. was a collection of writers and other transcendental thinkers who were to drift in and out but the notion of intellectuals and workers living in a shared state of communal experience was greatly influenced by the French socialist Charles Fourier.

What impresses me is not the failure but the heroic attempts in the 19th century to escape from the vicious horrors of European capitalism and its murderous emphasis on materialism and dominance by the few of the means of production for the many. Little did they know that America, which was then in early industrialisation, would in the late 19th and early 20th centuries replicate the Manchesters of Engels’s day with the New Yorks, Chicagos, Pittsburghs and other places of murderous capitalist exploitation of the proletariat or if you prefer America’s underclass of immigrant and minority labour.

A system that developed without conscience, without responsibility, without a sense of “community” is the opposite of communism. Communism sees the individual as fulfilling her maximum potential within the context of replacing absolute individualism and the adoration of unfettered competition with the notion of cooperation and communal love. The family is not restricted to the patriarchal, two-headed household but the family both sexually and emotionally extends to others who make up the communal unit.

Communism believes that society benefits when there are fewer validations and rewards for those who exercise power over the masses and argues that humankind can be a self-sustaining and mutually supportive collective. Again the communism that must capture America is not to be associated with the state-capitalist models that emerged in Russia and China after their great revolutions. Those societies were not without virtue, despite the obscene Manichaean bipolarity of the Cold War, but I am not recommending those models for America particularly with their emphasis on command economies, at least in the case of the Soviet Union, and the dominance of thought and action by the apparatchik.

Yet we need to transform capitalism which continues to create massive poverty in a land of great abundance. We need to constrain with taxes, confiscation and other methods the tyrannical and obscene wealth of large corporate units with their demigod C.E.O.s whose wealth defies even a modicum of reasonableness. The lack of social responsibility among America’s corporate elites alone would justify the end of capitalism as we know it and the development of a socialist consciousness that would harness the wealth in a more appropriate COMMUNIST manner.

Clearly with poverty spreading, with health care beyond the reach of almost 50 million Americans, with the casualties of war emanating from a working class subject to an economic draft due to few alternatives other than military, cannon-fodder service and the greed in acquiring for only 5% of the world’s population other’s oil and vital natural resources, I disavow the notion that mere tinkering reform is desirable. Only substantive change, a new revolution of values, morals and leadership, can alter this excessively competitive, militant state that America has become and move us toward a path of love, righteousness and respect for our fellow woman and man.

The term “communism” in imperial America is equated in the public imagination with the state-capitalist regimes that formed in the 20th Century in Eurasia. It is identified with atheism, which is certainly unexceptionable if one subscribes to the democratic notion of freedom from religion as well as freedom of religion. Yet communism did suppress open religious expression in some, but not all of its political units: a non-theocratic theocracy if you will.

America hopefully will be communist and the current order transformed through peaceful, non-violent social tumult as was evidenced in the final days of the Cold War and in other areas of the Russian “near abroad.” By “communist” and by embracing a communist America I am referring to the term in its purest context. Community, decentralisation of power, the absence of class exploitation, the purging–recognising the Stalinist emotive overtones of the term–of the odious features of unbridled, senseless, irrational competitive capitalism as it emerged in 18th century Britain.

Karl Marx’s notion of communism would be wondrous for America in some but not all manifestations of the concept. Marx was quite utopian in his call for an association of things that would replace the brutal state of industrial capitalism. His call for a withering away of the state is actually a non-revolutionary notion of an evolutionary reduction in state bureaucracy that would gradually unfold after the proletarian revolution. I concede I never quite understood the logic of this sequence between revolution of the industrial reserve army followed by a slow evolutionary diminution in the role of government but as a theory I know what Marx was suggesting. He believed that humankind could live in peace and justice without the devastating impact of social class and without requiring ruling elites that were derived from bourgeois control. Essentially the architecture would be the same as under laissez-faire capitalism, minimal state, no command economy, extreme decentralisation of power but without the savage, brutal results of unbridled, unregulated capitalism.

For Marx, communism was NOT a coercive system but a voluntary one, again an “associative one” where individual freedom would reign, the absence of class or governmental tyranny would vanish and humankind would be transformed into cooperation and not competition. I am not entirely convinced that the absence of state power or governmental responsibility is compatible with freedom–or more precisely with the notion of equality–but I believe many of the communist views of Marx, while subtle and suggestive, are worthy of implementing in America. I think a communist America, or at least many of the characteristics of communism as developed by the great Marx would be useful to implement as social policy in the United States.

Of course what is the appropriate balance between freedom and equality? Communism subscribes to the notion that absolute freedom will emanate from a transformed human consicousness emphasising equality. That is beautiful, utopian and wonderful for America. I am not sure that I would trust humankind to establish equality and eliminate the death sentence of class stratification without some polity establishing limits to freedom. Yet as a concept, it is worthy ruminating about and incorporating into the public dialogue on how America can be transformed from its current violent, ruthless, aggressive posture into a more irenic nation that sees the value of economic-distributive justice.

I will say more about this in due course as we pursue academic freedom, the need for critical thinking and appreciate the value of open dialogue on issues that may prove controversial.

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This visitor from the air force had Googled "Karl Marx theory of stratification" and I was one of the entries listed under Google. Stratification is a sociological term that refers to social class and the degree of social mobility or lack thereof. Marx's grand theory emphasised class and the inevitable class struggle as the predetermined outcome of dialectical change and contradictions.

It is nice to know that military personnel are consulting all sorts of ideological points of view.

An earlier post on Karl Marx and America was kindly linked on the Karl Marx blog site with nice graphics and colour. I will have to learn this stuff but I am just lucky to keep my blog online. I take it one day at a time and will continue to remain direct, progressive, informed and provocative. Keep hope alive!!

One of Karl Marx’s greatest contributions to sociology and contemporary labour theory is his exploration of alienation. In fact this emerges before he fully embraces socialism or “Marxism” for that matter. Alienation clearly catapaults him on his path of destiny and a materialist conception of history. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, were written while Marx was in Paris and were not even published as they lay in notebook streams until they appeared in German in 1932. It is here where he examines the impact of industrialisation on the worker and develops his theory of alienated labour. An excerpt from the Paris manuscripts:

“The object produced by labour, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. He or she does not fulfill herself in her work but denies herself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely, her mental and physical energies, but is physically exhausted and mentally debased.”

He describes the repetition, the exhaustion, the robotic state of the worker and the dehumanisation of the work process. The worker becomes essentially alienated from herself and loses her sense of humanity. Alienation which is a psychological concept leads to the worker feeling alienated from himself, from other workers and becomes as Marx writes in Das Kapital, a “crippled monstrosity.” This monster is subjected to meaningless, devastating labour and is indistinguishable from machinery.

The Division of Labour, although developed in the writings of Adam Smith, becomes in Marx’s writings a magisterial concept in which profit-driven capitalism creates increasing economies of scale and greater efficiency. Yet the worker’s increasing efficiency comes at the expense of pride and purpose. The worker is highly specialised and contributes portions of the product and loses that sense of responsibility, of pride, of architect of an object. Transforming quantity into quality means the former is the maniacal object of capital and the latter is removed from worker consciousness. The worker is not supposed to take pleasure in her labour but to labour without pleasure relentlessly. Worker alienation is the ultimate degradation of the industrial work force and the supreme humiliation of the proletariat.

Marx took much of the Hegelian architecture but constructed a different edifice. Hegel saw alienation as a philosophic concept in the emerging idealism of alienated humankind from the Absolute Spirit. Marx borrowed the concept but applied it to work, capitalism and a materialist (economic) centered theoretical universe.

The Marxian interpretation of alienation is obviously relevant to any class or occupation as it examines the relationship between work and mental health; work and well-being; work and personal fulfillment; work as an enabler for a better life. To Marx, proletarian alienation resulted from poverty, interminable hours at work and a psychological prison from which the only ultimate exit would be revolution.

I think the theory of alienation is yet another Marxian concept that has practical application and enormous ethical relevance in today’s world of globalisation, exploitation of labour, and the de-skilling of work that obtains in many places due to technological innovation.

WORKINGPEOPLE OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!!

If one were sympathetic to Marxism and believed in the majesty of his writings, would that constitute anti-Americanism or a radical perspective? Should that trigger, to be a little sardonic, a National Security Agency warrantless wiretap to insure non-involvement in planned operations against the U. S.? I do not believe it should unless one has a vastly different view of America than it claims for itself. Three brief examples:

1) Marx was an advocate of proletarian revolution. The labour component of society would develop a class consciousness at the appropriate dialectical moment and sweep the bourgeoisie from power. For sure this is not going to be embraced by those in power but the revolutionary ideal certainly was advanced by Jefferson, Madison, Henry, Sam Adams and other founders. In fact much of British social contract theory is predicated on the revolutionary option as a response to arbitrary and ineffectual government. While no one is attempting to conjoin John Locke with Dr Marx, nevertheless the revolutionary underpinnings of American democracy are there and in a sense are somewhat compatible with Marx. For sure Marx was skeptical of government and even considered it marginal to the sweeping economic forces that drive history but American and Marxian founding ideologies are not resistant to the idea of changing regimes that exhibit cruel and repressive characteristics. I recognize the American revolution was not proleterian but upper class inspired as one elite wished to replace the economic constraints imposed by another elite (British). Personally, I prefer an irenic alternative to revolution unless, like some in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall, could be effectuated without violence and harm to others. Revolutions may topple states without mass violence.

2) Marx was obsessed with working class squalor and poverty. He frankly devoted his life to this issue. One cannot dismiss the “liberal” component of his views that emphasise the need for class equality, distributive justice and the equalisation of conditions. In fact many unions, many politicians, including President Lyndon Johnson, who would never claim a Marxian thread in their ideological tapestry, bemoaned the lack of justice in which an underclass of poverty prevailed. Call it socialism, call it democratic socialism, call it left liberalism but I think Marx’s affinity to working class justice is hardly anathema to the so-called American motto of “equal justice under law,” and the notion of equal opportunity, a social security safety net and affirmative action for minorities and women.

3) Karl Marx was one of the first investigative journalists. He wrote about peasant work conditions; he wrote about those impoverished who were arrested for trying to gather wood for heating fuel. Friedrich Engels, his great friend and compatriot, wrote a pioneer sociological inquiry into the working class in England. One should celebrate those who use their scholarship to explore, analyse and critique “the under class.” This I think is hardly incompatible with democracy or with what many journalism students are invited to pursue.

Make no mistake. Marx was opposed to capitalism; opposed to private ownership of the means of production; opposed to wage labour; opposed to religion which he saw as a means of class rule; opposed to government, at least ultimately, and envisioned in a somewhat vague manner a withering away of the state. Marx was radical and the greatest critic of contemporary western societies but my point is to avoid making rash generalisations that the writings of Marx are without exception ideologically opposed to all principles and manifestations of the American ethos. David Brooks wrote a rather surprisingly complimentary op-ed piece in the New York Times on Marx last year.

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harrassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851)

Actually government at its best is quite effective. Look at the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the belated but significant passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Cradle to the Grave social security system in Scandinavia and other EU countries–recognising it is not utopia and that it is no guarantee against unemployment and economic stagnation.

Karl Marx was influenced and quite aware of Proudhon’s writings and in particular The Philosophy of Poverty. In typical Marxian fashion, he wrote a polemical attack with the ironic title of The Poverty of Philosophy(1847). Marx was not very accepting of fellow intellectuals and social critics who discussed inevitable change, the right of revolution, the evil of poverty, unless they subscribed to a strict dialectical materialism–inevitable change with the motive force of economic determinism. To Marx human history was driven by immutable change within the substructure with its forces and relations of production. As technology changed, it spawned new social relations, new classes that would rise and fall as the new technology swept away the old fetters of production. Social classes of the old order would be transformed due to the technological changes attendant with different rulers and subalterns. Eventually communism with much of the structure, or lack thereof, of Proudhon’s anarchism would rise triumphant and dialectical materialism would complete its historic journey. He saw as counterrevolutionary even strongly proletarain writing that did not sense or adopt the economic determinism which so gripped and gave power to Marx’s vision of social and revolutionary tumult.

This is one of Marx’s greatest achievements. The analysis of economics as a socially pivotal concept. While he may have ignored unduly other factors of change, other factors of consciousness, other factors that drive human behaviour, clearly the application of economic forces that influence war, lobbyists, form class stratification, create power arrangements is a major intellectual triumph of the 19th century.

Capitalism emphasises competition and individualism.

Socialism empahsises group identity and cooperation.

Capitalism emphasises profit, material advancement and virtually no restraints on freedom of individual accumulation.

Socialism emphasises abundance for all, material advancement in a collective manner (not Stalinist) and places restraints on individual advancement if it results from wage slavery or constrains appropriate economic redistribution.

Capitalism emphasises a state with limited power–at least in terms of corporate regulation–and worships the market as the arbiter of goods and services and the invisible hand of pricing and supply.

Socialism emphasises a state with considerable power–within the framework of democracy–that construes the market as requiring significant regulation and restraint to insure an appropriate distribution of resources to the community. Socialism is based on Social, on Society, on shared communal objectives.

Capitalism worships empire and expansion in its search for new markets, new areas of penetrating market access and generally results in considerable interaction with other nations and economic systems.

Socialism may indeed be global, may indeed sustain significant economic interaction with third countries, but conceptually is driven by a globalisation that is more international than nationalist in outcomes.

Capitalism developed in a strict laissez-faire conceptual world that saw government’s role as virtually non-existent.

Socialism developed as a response to industrialism in 19th Century Europe and saw government’s role as persistent and robust.

Capitalism has evolved in some ways from strict laissez-faire capitalism to a warmed over Rooseveltian welfare state in which some provisions are provided the masses or corporate elites. Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, Student Loans, corporate welfare.

Socialism, at least in developed nations, does have a significant component of private property, but also confers an extensive,
economically costly cradle-to-grave or womb-to-tomb social security coverage that includes education, housing, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, old-age assistance and especially national health care for all its peoples: citizens and legal immigrant populations. Some components of this are burdensome but national health care insurance is the crown jewel in socialist states whether it is the United Kingdom or Norway. Admittedly Britain’s is far less extensive than in Norway.

Adam Smith was the chief architect of capitalism and its greatest theorist and economist. His work on the labour theory of value unwittingly set the table for Marxian analysis of the preeminent value that workers contribute to the worth and value of a product.

Karl Marx was the chief architect of socialism and its greatest theorist and economist. Marx did advocate a withering away of the state that would create an essentially capitalist architecture–laissez-faire government or even no government–but with different outcomes that emanate from a transformed human character that seeks equality, peace and non-exploitation.

The U.S. needs to move much more vigorously toward a democratic socialist model with national health care, national day care, guaranteed education for all students: a social security essentially for all citizens throughtout the life cycle.

The obsession with the military and the suicidal expenditure of our resources on this dimension is one of the reasons that 37 million Americans live in poverty and the absence of either a Democratic or Republican party commitment to stop the babbling about the middle class and focus on the tragedy and unfairness of poverty in this country. Shame on this country and its one party state with two wings that are utterly immoral in their lack of interest in poverty reduction.

Think socialism, think freedom and think outside the box. Ideas confined to boxes are nothing more than an intellectual Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo. Also socialism is not communsim so no one should misconstrue this and further paeans to socialism as advocating a Soviet or Rumanian style communism. That was more of a state-capitalist model with the rhetoric, but not the reality of class consciousness and freeing labour from the chains of servitude and commodity fetishism. I am not a communist in the operational sense of supporting a return to Soviet style central command economies, although, I embrace intellectually some of the communist ideals of Marx and Engels. More on that as we struggle for freedom–ACADEMIC and otherwise in this Prussian State of war and empire.

I will conclude by saying that America was and is a much greater threat to the international community than communism was and is since 1917. I am not equating the levels of liberal democracy in state communism and western democracies. Yet I stand by my beliefs that socialism is better than capitalism, recognising they are frequently intertwined, and that the U.S., a liberal democracy, is a greater threat to global stability than state-communism was.

V. I. Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) assessed the underpinnings of world war as basically a result of capitalist nations striving to maximize profit in an insatiable search for new export markets. To Lenin, as capitalism matured, it required increasingly numerous markets to penetrate and war was frequently the preferred means of doing this. To Lenin, one of the 20th Centuries greatest figures, “imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.” Although capitalism grew out of a laissez-faire competitive environment, it eventually transforms into fewer economic units dominating entire cartels on a global basis. Actually Lenin got many of his ideas on the linkage between capitalism and imperialism from the British writer John A. Hobson, Imperialism (1902).

Karl Marx certainly critiques the expansive revolutionary nature of capital, and posits his theory of crisis in which capital, desperate to find new markets, lays off workers and introduces mechanisation as a means of sustaining profits in an ever diminishing market. He also acknowledged the revolutionary nature of capitalism and its desire to break down or overcome trade barriers. Yet Lenin gave it a more time specific focus as he surveyed the competitive capitalist world with its thirst for colonialism which would propel the world into the Great War.

While one may indeed construe economic determinism, a singularly Marxist-Leninist trait, as oversimplification and reductionist in attempting to understand the causality of war and colonialism, it is certainly part of the landscape. To ignore the economic component of war’s urgings would be highly restrictive in assessing the thirst for power which frequently catapaults nation’s national-security elites to send the children of the working class to kill and be killed in the interests of the powerful. Then they build memorials to trick the public into believing their sacrifice was for the “fatherland” when it was actually for power maximizers who see the planet as a toy to be dominated and controlled. Whose twin daughters are nowhere to be seen in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, much less in the uniform of a branch of the United States of America’s armed forces?

I doubt if the United States would have invaded Iraq in an immoral and almost Nazi-like manner under Mr Bush, had its vast oil reserves not existed. That is not to infer that other reasons, which I have chronicled, were not in play but it is to aver that wealth and economic motivations play a role in most decisions to go to war. I recall some war supporters were overtly defending this notion because oil is such a vital resource and the U.S. must insure its accessibility to adequate reserves. This is rather unseemly that a nation that purports to be the City on the Hill, is simply an outlaw terrorist state that thinks only of itself and burns babies, children and other innocents to satisfy its insatiable appetite for markets, raw materials and other accoutrements of national wealth: wealth by the way that is reserved for the few in this country. How about Kyoto and the American criminals who refuse to ratify that sacred and beautiful treaty. What a country!! How could this happen?

The importance of Marxism-Leninism is that it is the most vibrant critique of the west and its mania for capitalism, free markets and slave non-white labour in developing countries. It is essential for any nation, any group, any ideological cohort to reexamine itself and to submit itself to robust introspection. One does not have to be an adherent of Marxism, and certainly not a devotee of Leninism, to benefit from the questions and insights it raises about ourselves and what we stand for. A confident nation, a confident people should be able to tolerate and even embrace criticism. America’s history is one of savage repression as seen most starkly with McCarthyism where ideological auto da fes were unleashed on those even remotely construed as being communist.

In classical Marxism, the notion of a god is dismissed as a human-made invention. Greatly influenced by the transformational criticism of Ludwig von Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Marxists believed that humans created god and not the reverse. The only intelligent design was in the mind of the human; god does not exist independently from human projection of this entity.

According to classical Marxism: In the process of creating god, humans became self-alienated and projected their virtues onto this abstraction of perfection. They created a God-centered universe where the alleged sinfulness and evil of humanity would be contrasted to and lay prostrate before this wondrous entity. To end the alienation, to free humankind from the shackles of guilt and self-degradation, God must be destroyed in order to reclaim the virtues that humankind innocently surrendered to the notion of a supreme being. There must be a “human-centered” world. Perhaps a Ptolemaic revolution in reverse!! Camille Paglia once said that God is the greatest invention in the history of humankind.

I asked a class last semester what they thought about this notion of god being created by humans. Some felt that was not accurate: God created humanity. Some did not believe in a god; others thought, and I was so impressed by their originality, that God created humans but humans created religion!! I told them that was one of the more original and provocative ideas I had ever heard from a class. The course was on “Capitalism and Socialism” and most were Roman Catholic students with a variety of opinions!!

I also believe that gods, there are many differences between monotheistic religions and those that are pantheistic, are invented by humans. Yet it seems to be an instinctual cultural trait that is part of being human. The European invaders of America encountered religions among the native discoverers. Religion appears in almost every human culture ever chronicled. So clearly the belief in some higher order has immanent application. I have never understood what god means and have found the concept beyond my range of understanding and belief.

What is astonishing is the gravity of believing in God and its motive power on this planet: Wars, enormous expenditure of human and natural resources, masses of people deeply moved and organized around the concept of a deity. I do not underestimate its significance. I find it difficult to believe that the world was created by a spirit or that a god, independent of humanity, is present in our lives. Humans must guide and direct their own destinies. However, for those who sense or deeply believe in a Supreme Being, then for them that belief and presence is real and significant.

Finally, one can be “religious” and a monster and war criminal. One can be a non-believer and committed to virtuous works and societal uplift. It is not relevant whether one believes in a god(s) or not in terms of assessing one’s morality or virtue. It is how one lives and interacts with other persons, and how one behaves as a citizen. Presidents Jefferson and George W. Bush were quite different in their beliefs in a god or a heavenly engineer and yet their contributions are vastly different as well.

Marx wrote in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion “is the opium of the people.” By this he meant it was a tool of ideology used by capital to enslave and narcotise the proletariat. It was part of the superstructure, the cultural components of a society that were part of the armamentarium of oppression that capital used to pursue profit and commodity fetishim.

During American chattel slavery, religion was used as a means to insure slave compliance. Slaves were promised their heavenly reward if they would accept and obey current rules and conditions of the peculiar institution. It is hardly surprising that religion like all other major institutions of a society is controlled by the ruling elites. Tithing, established churches, crusades, etc. were methods of class control fueled by religious activism.

Look at it from Marx’s perspective: He sees in Western Europe, primarily in Britain, an almost indescribable world of proletarian misery and dysfunction. Therefore, all institutions, law, religion, art, letters, press, medicine etc. are seen as tools of class domination. These are components of the superstructure that rests on a base or substructure of economic forces that determine the fate and eventual revolutionary direction of a given order. To Marx, religion was not central but merely an appurtenance, a tool, in which dominant economic classes ruled over their subalterns.

Certainly one can identify in American history, the use of religion as a progressive force as well. The clergypersons who ended American apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s were motivated by Christian love and a religious inspiration to end Jim Crow and American racism. So Marx’s ideas, while arresting and certainly significant, can be used in a comparative sense to either confirm or to contest his conclusions.

When one thinks about Communism and laissez-faire Smithian capitalism, one can discern many similarities but with vastly different results due to a transformation of the human temper. Marx envisioned communism as a highly decentralised community where individual actions would be governed by a communal impulse in which governmental regulation and control would be a mere “association of things.” Individuals would be transformed through a passage of revolutionary dictatorship in which the state would wither away.

Leaving aside the practicality of his dialectic, communism is opposed to force; opposed to governmental excess; opposed to poverty; opposed to class oppression and believes such refoms are possible without state intervention. It is predicated on the notion of progress and that humans can be essentially self-governing. Laissez-faire capitalism also prayed at the altar of governmental minimalism but as a means to accrue property and to grow an economy without the alleged fetters of bureaucratic rule and incompetence.

Yet Marx ultimately believed the freedom that laissez-faire capitalism demanded could be possible but without the avarice and greed that marked industrial capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries: particularly the latter. Freedom was abused by capitalism in its mania for competition and wealth. To Marx, freedom under communism would not be abused and humankind would live with virtually no social stratification and in peace.

I really believe those who assume that Marx was an advocate of totalitarianism and autocratic rule should read his works. There is beauty to communism in which the freedom that laissez-faire capitalism demanded would have entirely different consequences for liberty and equality. The practicality of communism is not of concern. We need to have ideals and attempt to attain them. Communism in many ways, not all, possessed ideals that should be pursued avidly by a world wracked by war, social class, mass misery and oppression.

If I had the choice of naming Washington’s National airport after President Reagan or Karl Marx, I would call it Marx-National. I think America’s workers should consider the difference between a president who savagely destroyed P.A.T.C.O. by firing those patriotic air traffic controllers and a philosopher-economist whose entire life was to end proletarian misery and elevate workers to a status of equality. I would prefer Dr Marx over President Reagan any day.