Marx My Words: Karl Was Wrong

It is amusing to read that sales for Marx's capital have sky-rocketed since the bank bailouts, as if he, whether cassock or cassandra, were the first person to notice that capitalism isn't, well... perfect. True, Marx did think that capitalism would destroy itself by periodic revolutions, as the relations and the forces of production, initially twain, came into conflict. But the detail of his argument is not borne out in the slightest by recent events.

Marx posited a dualism between ideas and (material) reality, with the determining factor lying with the latter. This is a point which Popper stressed. Our perception of the world is shaped or conditioned by the world we live in. This world is, in the final resort, economic. We are historically situated. Look at history, and what do you see? Class struggle. Whoever owns the means of production, that is, the physical, economic side of life, also controls the incipient intellectual culture. In modern society, economic relations take the bourgeois, or capitalistic, form. This means that history has resolved economic relations into two antagonistic classes, capitalist and labourer, with the latter exploiting the former. And yet - and this is the Hegelian side Marx's argument - the capitalist, who extracts the difference between the value of labour and the price at which the product has sold, and pockets it as profit - well, he is as much a slave as his inferiors. For he is a slave to the ideology of the age. To be free, one must be emancipated from the purely material, economic sphere: and this can only be done once the interpenetration of ideas and reality has been sundered. And this will happen once history - which has advanced from a manifold gradation of social rank - has reached it end point, when all the contraditions to which it has given rise will be resolved, and everything in the material world will be owned in common - the fruits of society, and of nature.

The thoughts of the system builders, where they are remembered at all, are remembered individually - a fate which has befallen Marx. His doctrine of dialectical materialism was the centrepiece of the grand, but not ineffacable, edifice with which we are here concerned. But it founders on two counts. First, there are clearly free-standing, transhistorical truths, and it is unclear what status they would have in Marx's theory. In other words, his system fails to circumscribe a domain of facts in such a way as to give it explanatory purchase. Secondly, his unfettered materialism is logically seperable from his theory of history as directional: and there is a residue of Hegel, uncogenial to his enterprise, which assumes that the world is analogous to the mind in the sense that it roots out contradictions and refines itself. This is the legacy of Enlightenment logocentrism.