On the long list of victims of Marxism, companions on the left figured prominently. While we might associate Marx with politics, in fact he lacked any real appreciation for a political sphere in which one would interact productively with advocates of varying programs. While for others, politics represents a realm of compromise and negotiation, for Marx, it was really the pursuit of power and the obligation to command.
Moreover he promised to abolish the state, and therefore politics, once Communism would eliminate class difference—or so the story went, as the ultimate outcome of Communism would be a libertarian utopia of statelessness.
Nothing, however, would be further from the truth. In practice, what Communism provided for was the development of a nomenklatura , a new class elite which talked the egalitarian talk while claiming for itself the privilege of dictators.
The Communist cadre always knew better than the unenlightened populace, and therefore the cadre would claim the power to impose their views and programs on the rest of society. The real political legacy of Marxism was not the abolition of the state but, on the contrary, the expansion of the state over society, and the elevation of a Marxist elite over the populace.
Marxism was not about achieving an egalitarian society: it was the vehicle through which party activists and thugs could pursue their own will to power. The Marxist pursuit of power also meant denouncing all religion, which Marx described as an opiate, a drug intended to lull its consumers into passivity and false consciousness, so as to keep them from the truth his truth.
Because Marxism emphasized labor and the primacy of human experience, it could appeal to various twentieth-century philosophers, existentialists among others, who emphasized the problem of alienation. The result was a modernizing fantasy of thorough-going transformation with scant attention to the human costs. Ultimately, Marx had offered a false alternative: philosophical thinking or changing the world.
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. Subscribe Now. It appears that you have not yet updated your first and last name. If you would like to update your name, please do so here. Please note that we moderate comments to ensure the conversation remains topically relevant. We appreciate well-informed comments and welcome your criticism and insight.
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Please enter your email address and click on the reset-password button. 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 Marx was a brilliant — albeit flawed — economic thinker.
He was also a strong-willed, opinionated egoist who was always sure he was right. At leftist meetings, he had a tendency to bully and humiliate anyone who tried to disagree with his theses. His wealthy friend Engels was an effective promoter and organizer who believed in Marx and his ideas with messianic fervor, and supported him financially.
As fate would have it, this combination of brilliance, controversy and self-promotion meant that Marx's reputation rose far above that of rival leftist political economists. Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his ideas came to be accepted as unchallengeable dogmas on the revolutionary political left.
As a result, when the credibility of Europe's royal houses collapsed in the wake of the disastrous First World War that they had misled the Continent into, it was Marx's ideas and doctrines that leftist revolutionaries tried to implement.
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