Why karl marx is wrong

There are countless biographies of Marx — probably too many. But the latest one by Gareth Stedman Jones, a historian of ideas at the University of London, is a remarkable addition. I sat down recently with Jones to talk about the book. I think that we first have to separate Marx from Marxism.

I think Marxism is demonstrably wrong in various ways. Whatever we think of him, he gave an amazing picture of the developmental logic of capitalism itself — how it creates world markets, how it invents new needs, how it subverts inherited cultural practices and disregards hierarchies and so on.

What would you say he is most reacting against in his initial writings? Every great thinker is a product of his or her age, but this seems especially true of Marx. Marx is formed intellectually by the 19th-century critiques of religion and Christianity in particular. He really latches on to the idea that God doesn't create man but man creates God.

The subject and object, in other words, are inverted. Marx's innovation is to say that this could be applied not just to God but to other abstractions, like the state or the economy: Man creates these things in the course of history but they appear to him as having independent force, as though he is the creature of them and not the other way around.

Why was this idea that man creates God, not the other way around, such a politically destabilizing declaration? Marx changes the nature and implications of the critique of religion. Instead of challenging the claims of the Bible or Christianity, he says we have to understand religion, like everything else, in terms of the evolution and history of mankind; that these things we take to be divine or eternal are merely products of human beings, and that by ignoring that fact we allow ourselves to become objects rather than subjects.

So when he's critiquing religion it's not because it's untrue but because he thinks it strips people of their sense of agency. That's quite right. Whether it was true or not would have been something already sort of debated by David Strauss and Bruno Bauer and various others before them and indeed in the 18th century. So he extends his criticisms to the social and political realm. In other words, human activity led naturally to capitalism. But, over time, we became chained to its progress and thus forgot that we were the creators and that there is always the possibility of creating something new or better or more just.

I'm more interested in where Marx gets to by the s, which is to argue that revolution is not so much an event but a process, that it's cumulative. I think he invents a language of social democracy which really spreads in the following 40 or 50 years. His language and ideas spread, but they also get co-opted and transformed. In the s, Marx still thought that capitalism was an organism, so it would have a birth, a growing up, a maturity, and a death. But he gradually becomes aware that capitalism is more resilient than that, that it could adjust to overproduction and overpopulation and bad harvests and all the rest.

So he actually pivots and starts to believe that primitive communism can somehow survive and bypass capitalist development. Why is this evolution not reflected in doctrinaire Marxism at the turn of the century? This leads to a kind of religious fidelity to the idea that capitalism is in crisis and revolutions are necessary in order to hasten its collapse.

This sort of thinking is what produces the Bolsheviks in the 20th century. Marx was influenced by the German philosopher Hegel, who claimed that history was driven by ideas and the evolution of human consciousness. The economic theories of Karl Marx, born years ago, became unchallengeable doctrine in many countries for much of the 20th century. We take a look at which of his ideas were right — and which were wrong. When Karl Marx was working out his economic theories during his years in 19th-century Germany, France and Britain, Europe's leading nations were the center of global political and economic power.

Their far-flung empires dominated trade and industry; their militaries dominated subject peoples. Yet that didn't mean Europeans led easy lives. At home, life was very hard for most people, especially for workers in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution.

Technology was advancing rapidly, but government social protections were almost non-existent. Workers were often brutally exploited. Marx was born to an upper-middle-class German Jewish family on May 5, ; he died in London in March , a couple of months shy of his 65th birthday. When he was 30, in the fateful year of , a wave of democratic revolts broke out in much of Europe. Millions of Europeans were fed up with the continued rule of unelected kings and hereditary aristocrats.

They wanted democracy, and they had the examples of the American and French revolutions to inspire them. Those revolutions had succeeded, two generations earlier, in toppling monarchical rule.

But the revolution of failed. It was suppressed by armed force, and monarchical rule continued in Germany and elsewhere until , at the end of the First World War. Yet it was in that Marx, then a young revolutionary intellectual, co-published a pamphlet with his collaborator Friedrich Engels that was to become world-famous: the Communist Manifesto.

Marx spent the rest of his life working out the political-economic ideas he first gave clear expression to in His main body of work was published in three thick volumes, under the title "Das Kapital" Capital , written between and Violent social upheavals like the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Civil War have, more often than not, led both to ongoing social divisions and bitterness, and to the rise of opportunistic, megalomaniac leaders like Stalin and Mao.

Even the French Revolution, though it eventually led France to become a stable liberal democracy, only did do after almost a century of atrocities, short-lived dictatorships and civil strife. Meanwhile, the most successful examples of socialism — the mixed economies of the Scandinavian countries, France, Germany, and Canada — came not from the violent overthrow of the old order, but from gradual change within the democratic, partly capitalist system.

These countries have plenty of private businesses, but also fairly high taxes, universal health care, strong social safety nets and a variety of other government tools that keep capitalism from resulting in runaway inequality. Even in the supposedly capitalist bastion of the U. Meanwhile, almost all rich countries now have progressive income taxes, universal public education and laws against child labor — all things that Marx demanded in in the Communist Manifesto.

In other words, real socialist success has been of the gradual, incrementalist kind, more in line with the visions of thinkers like Eduard Bernstein than to the dramatic, violent prophecies of Marx. Through repeated experimentation, societies like those of Denmark, France and Canada have found ways to use government to make society more equal without killing the golden goose of private enterprise.

In fact, what defines the human condition is the ability to engage in both, deep thinking and intentional action, and indeed we should prefer action to be guided by thinking, just as thinking should be informed by the experience of prior action. The claim of infallibility, the will to political power, and the dismissal of ethical thought: such was the legacy that Karl Marx bequeathed to the Communist movement that once ruled half the world.

But Marx was hardly the only thinker to write about nineteenth century social conditions, and he was surely not the most interesting. A page of Dickens is worth a volume of Das Kapital. Wherever Marxism dominated working class movements—by suppressing competing reform movements or manipulating unions—blue collar workers fared worse. Had Marx not been appropriated as the ideological figurehead of the Bolshevik Revolution in in order to justify the dictatorship in Russia, he would be barely remembered today.

Instead, he has become the symbol of decades of terror. For those who want to talk about Marx, to erect statues in his memory or to defend him as a philosopher, it is high time to discover some intellectual integrity and face up to the crimes committed in his name. It is wrong to say, as one commonly hears in some circles, that his program of Communism was a good idea, but poorly implemented.

On the contrary, it was a bad idea from the start and the brutality that always accompanied it was a consequence of its core character. View the discussion thread.