Abstract
Karl Marx’s writings have exerted a substantial influence on politics and on the way that philosophers have engaged in public matters since the nineteenth century. In this chapter, Wood makes a plea, on grounds of intellectual honesty and for the sake of the long-term interests of humanity, to read Marx’s writings for what they say, rather than interpreting them in the light of deeds done by others in their name over a generation after Marx’s death. Wood notes that Marx, in fact, wrote almost exclusively about capitalism, saying very little about the socialist or communist society he hoped would eventually replace it. In addition, capitalism is still with us, and Marx’s thoughts about it have more relevance to current social reality than we have any right to expect from writings that are 150 years old.
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We humans do a lot during our lives for which we should be held accountable. We should not also be held accountable for what others do in our name long after we are dead. To look in Marx for evidence that he would support totalitarianism is like looking in the Gospels for evidence that Jesus would have supported the Inquisition. I have sometimes heard it suggested that the polemical tone Marx took in many of his writings about other leftists is evidence that he would have supported the totalitarian repression and intellectual unfreedom that prevailed in the Soviet system. I regard such suggestions as ridiculous. Even if true, this would be only an ad hominem observation about Marx’s personality; it could not pertain to the content of his doctrines, or show that they advocate totalitarianism. Engels reports that Marx denied being a ‘Marxist’ (for example, CW, 46, p. 126; 49, p. 10). One of Marx’s most repeated claims is that the modern working class, in the course of its development, has made mistakes and will make more of them, from which it must learn (see CW, 11, pp. 106–7; 22, pp. 328–35). Rigid adherence to ‘Marxist’ dogmas could never be part of that learning process.
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This statement is a ‘Yogiism’: one of the many assertions so stupid they are brilliant, attributed to the Hall of Fame catcher, Yogi Berra. It has also been attributed to Niels Bohr. But Bohr never said: ‘It’s déjà vu all over again’. That is a Yogiism that could well be applied to twenty-first-century capitalism.
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Benjamin Franklin said that the only things inevitable are death and taxes. But US corporations, with the help of the Republican party, have definitely proven him wrong about taxes. See McIntyre et al. (2014).
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The notion that Marx’s claim that capital exploits labour depends on this theory of value seems to me clearly false, as I have argued in Chap. 16 of my book Karl Marx (2004).
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Blanc (2012 [1851], p. 108, cited in CW, 24, p. 87). When Marx quoted this slogan in Critique of the Gotha Program, his audience knew its source and would not have associated it with Marx himself.
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Wood, A.W. (2016). Karl Marx After a Century and a Half. In: Fives, A., Breen, K. (eds) Philosophy and Political Engagement. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44587-2_11
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