Cha-Ching (Part II)

Marx is not a popular figure in the modern capitalist West. In my opinion, some of the prejudice is unwarranted, and in general, most people inimately associate him with Soviet and Chinese communism, brutal regimes based in central economies and dictatorial oppression.

Thing is, Marx was dead long before the Russian Revolution in 1917, the tenure of Mao Tse Dung, or the Cold War. He was born in the early 1800s and an indigenous product of the times, the 19th century, which among other things witnessed the ascendancy of Queen Victoria and a rise of Victorianism in England (the country in which Marx inevitably settled), and more pivotally, social revolutions in Germany and France. Socialism, the vision of Marx and Frederick Engles, could be interpreted as a reaction to brutal inequity of life for the underclasses under an adolescent capitalist system that facilitated the shift from cottage industry to industrialization. Truly, Marx could only so much as consider conditions in which he lived through, and could not have anticipated factors that would lead Russians and other peoples into embracing a socialist model based in Marx's ideas.

Debates centered in the meaning of Marxism, and the pursuit of Marxist study, thrived among intellectuals throughout the 20th century. During the 1920s and 30s, devotees of Marx's ideas and the socialist tenant formed vital organizations promoting the communist model. After World War II, and during the first years of the Cold War that gestated with conflicts in Eastern Europe and Korea, Americans that favored communist ideas were shunned and sometimes persecuted. Senate judicial committees of the McCarthy Era prompted the collapse of the careers of dozens of actors, writers, and artists. However, formidable accord was given intellectual freedom by the 1970s, perhaps as one but many outcomes of the progressive 1960s. The few years before the fall of communism in Europe and Russia ushered in a period of vigorous academic interest in Marx and in applying Marxist interpretation to a variety of studies.

So, what happened after the demise of the Soviet Union? Not surprisingly, interest in Marx and in socialism waned if not practically disappeared. What was the point of discussing Marx in light of the triumph of capitalism? Academics and journalists at least transferred their focus to other events and phenomena like the war in the Balkans, the formation of the EU and middle-eastern politics. Marxism, or rather communism, was an anachronism. Well, maybe not for Fidel Castro.

Based on the failed application of socialism onto the economic and political landscape of Cold War communist states, it is probably safe to say that no one's going to bet on that horse anytime soon. European countries like Germany, Spain, Norway, etc... seem to do pretty well with the light version, the socialist democracy, that sustains itself on a mix of capitalism and social welfare.
It would seem that because socialism or communism is no longer relevant, neither is Marx or anything else he wrote.

But in terms of economic study, a dissemination of capitalism, a blueprint of the system, he should not be so quickly forgotten. Marx wrote the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867, but was never able to fully complete subsequent volumes. Because of the work's breadth, I couldn't possibly summarize it here. Suffice to say, certain concepts he puts forth, like that of "labor theory of value," or the way that time and labor correlates to money, sort of. What one thing I remember from the few chapters of Das Kapital that I have read, is that human labor, in its basic form, is priceless and that a subtle, tragic aberration of humanity is inherent in the act of one individual with power, the capitalist, extracting profit from a persons labor by charging more for the produced goods than the total of wages and overhead.

Anyway, maybe I've wet your whistle. Das Kapital is worth a look, and if that's too intimidating, you can try abbreviated or summarized versions like Sparknotes or the like.