The end of Marx

The word ‘end’ signifies two meanings -- termination and purpose -- and to understand the relevance of Karl Marx to our own times, and the inexorable purpose of his social enquiry, we must first rescue him from the communism and the State authoritarianism that followed in his footsteps, and from the long shadows of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. When Marx himself was accused of being a communist, his reply was unequivocal: “I do not know communism, but a social philosophy that has as its aim the defence of the oppressed cannot be condemned so lightly.” Marx’s work on the State, in fact, is pervaded by a powerful anti-authoritarian and anti-bureaucratic bias. Yet, his ideas have often been invoked in ignorance by detractors and proponents alike.

Karl Heinrich Marx, born on May 5, 1818, in Germany, authored a masterpiece -- a book for the future. Das Kapital (Capital), Volume I, published in 1867, centres on his theory of the capitalist system, its dynamism, and its tendencies toward self-destruction; and on the concept of the ‘surplus value’ of labour and its consequences for capitalism.

Marx expounds that it is not the pressure of population that drives wages to the subsistence level but rather the existence of a reserve army of labour. He analyses with cold logic, and not a sense of moral indignation, that within the capitalist system, labour is a mere commodity receiving only subsistence wages. The surplus value is appropriated by the owner of capital -- industrial, finance, or monopoly -- as in the present day. There is nothing Mephistophelean in how the miniscule number of the rich become richer or the vast majority of wage workers remain at subsistence wages. Two elements represent the inherent contradiction in capitalism: the owner-entrepreneur must accumulate, for in the competitive environment in which he operates, one accumulates or gets accumulated; and the propensity to crises -- what we today call business cycles -- not recognised until Marx wrote Capital.

Rather than being a self-correcting system that evens out its own worst -- negative externalities and tragedies of the commons like pollution, climate change, and rent-seeking behaviour -- capitalism as a system inevitably leads to capitalists seeking to control that system themselves; it’s a matter of when, not whether, they can acquire enough capital to do so. The end being that at some point, there’s enough capital accumulation among some holders of capital that they realise that the easiest way to acquire more capital is not to compete in a free market, but to capture and become the State itself.

In modern times, this often manifests in the form of regulatory capture -- sections of the government and institutions that are meant to govern and regulate industry and commerce instead become their captive handmaidens.

To dismiss Karl Marx would be a serious mistake because his contribution to the labour theory of value is fundamental -- distinguishing use-value from exchange-value -- and defines the objective conditions in which ‘labour power’ is reduced to a commodity. Worker precariousness is an unconscionable problem today, more than in the 19th century world that Marx inhabited. Labour is increasingly being drawn into the low-paid sectors, and into underemployment and unemployment. The growing informalisation of labour, in the absence of a social security system, manifesting in the enormous growth of part-time, temporary, and contingent work, constitutes the new, more perilous structural condition of the labor market extant.

So, why must we read Marx? What makes Capital extraordinary is that it remains the still-unrivalled critique of political economy and provides a vivid picture of the dynamism of capitalism and its transformation of societies on a global scale. It at once highlights the vulnerabilities of capitalism, including its unsettling disruption of States and political systems. Simply put, Marx launched the discourse on how best to transform politics and social relations. Ironically, much of the discourse today is divorced from the ground reality that animates our economy and hence our polity and society. While Capital is not without its flaws in critiquing capitalism as the organising principle of social life, the inevitability of Marx arises from the need to trace the reality of precarious labour back to its classical roots in Marx’s general law of accumulation and his concept of the reserve army of labour.

Marx was a fighter, willing to sacrifice anything in the battle for his conception of a better society. The problems he diagnosed are still very much with us: the tendency to economic instability; and to the concentration of wealth and power. The end of Marx is not nigh; if anything, his exhortation for a just and equitable society haunts us with compelling urgency. Like Marx said, philosophers have only interpreted the world, the thing, however, is to change it. When we do, Karl Marx will have reached his end.