What Happened To Karl Marx?

Marx’s revolution never happened; at least, not as he envisioned. After Marx and Engels wrote their theories, argued with their critics, oversaw or influenced the beginnings of numerous fledging Communist parties and movements, and finally passed awenvisioned and wrote about. When Lenin emerged as leader of the USSR it was through his own adaptation of Marxism, one meant to hasten the inevitable triumph of the proletariat and avoid the capitalist stage altogether; he did not follow Marx’s blueprint (although Marx did write that Communist revolutions could take place in agrarian societies, provided other criteria were met). The Communist regimes which followed, from Stalin’s Russia, Tito’s Yugoslavia, and Mao’s China to Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Castro’s Cuba, not to mention a host of other countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America which adopted its tenets to some degree, all failed to achieve what Marx had envisioned. Indeed, all those which showed any permanency were marked by similar characteristics. They did not allow for rival political thought. They did not allow or seeked to subvert religion. They centralized power. They forced dissidents to work in labor camps. They set up vast internal spy apparatuses. Inevitably, they moved towards handling people merely as a resource, which could be mobilized as needed, and who were valued merely for how they fit into the great machinery of the state. The worst of them brought about some of the greatest horrors mankind has seen, from Stalin’s gulags to the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge. With the fall of the Soviet Union and its client states, Communist as an alternative ideology has virtually disappeared from planet, and the few remaining cases are connected more by their poverty and repression than by any successful realization of Marx’s ideology.

Any interaction with Marxist ideology must address its failure to manifest itself as a workable political system.

To those who would defend him still, the meaning in his writings were subverted, the revolution came too early, or was never fully or energetically implemented. For those who see the innate contradiction and incoherence of his ideology, what happened was the inevitable result of a flawed theoretical construct of the world, based less on the science it claimed to be a product of than on the flawed writings of an admittedly brilliant man, whose attempt to reduce the entirety of human existence, past, present, and future, to a simple calculation of economic progress and process was ultimately unachievable.

The lack of success in achieving Marxist society, and the abuses and hardships which resulted from attempting it are a direct product of the flaws within his original theory. Marx believed that the state would ultimately ‘wither away.’ In order to achieve the goal, however, he espoused centralization, increasing the government's power. Marx’s theory claimed to explain the entirety of human existence; however he left out many specific policies and ways of achieving them, often explaining that these would become clear only through experience. He wanted to liberate the working class; but to do this he argued for a strict hierarchical structure of revolution under tight central control. He supported the use of terror by the Jacobins in France; he argued for the violent assumption of power by the proletariat. His depiction of economics as the primary factor within which history flowed was overly simplistic, and his denial of the importance of religion and culture, and his own vision of a future free of them, led to further oppression wherever Communism took root. Communism did not manifest itself as totalitarian despite Marx’s views; it did so because of them.

This is not to say Marx’s ideas did not have value; the very scale of his vision is stunning, and he exhibited instances of prescience. His depiction of economic globalization was dead-on. His vision of economic activity as ever-increasing was accurate. His view of capitalism as rewarding those who minimized labor costs through innovation and increased efficiency was brilliant (His theory of the value of labor does not account for technological innovations or efficiency gains as an alternative means from which the entrepreneur could extract the surplus however, as he maintained it was always at the expense of the laborer).

In a different sense, the ideas he espoused were interpreted in ways which increased the power of labor vis-à-vis employers. Strikes, collective bargaining, and unions all came about as a result of leftist pressure and organization, from intellectuals and activists who often had read Marx. Similarly, pension plans and social security blankets were adopted by government in order to defang Marxist critics. Although Marx himself would surely be furious at those interpretations of his writings, seeing them as a betrayal of his uncompromising vision, they have surely benefited the world and its inhabitants. This seems to be the remnants of Marxism today. Well, that and its use as a critical framework to examine the negatives of capitalism. Pointing out negatives, however, does nothing besides pass the time if it is not used as a tool to search for solutions, and Marx left it to others to accomplish that.