COMMENT
Karl Marx: Who keeps his myth alive?
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What would the founder of Communist thought do if he were to come to life today? A. DAMODARAN considers.
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IT was September 1991. The mighty Soviet Union had fallen to pieces. From the ruins, arose Boris Yelstin, Russia's first non-communist President with a determined agenda to put Russia onto the path of democracy and market economy. Around the same time, I happened to visit the Highgate Cemetery in London, the resting-place of Karl Marx. Marx's grave had a rare sense of grandeur. It had a bronze head of the philosopher surmounted on a huge granite plinth with the famous lines from his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it". In 1991, the solidity of Marx's tomb stood in ironic contrast to the collapsing Marxist empires of Eastern Europe. This was despite, visible signs of vandalism attempted on the granite by not-so-friendly visitors.
Twelve years later, in his country of birth, Germany, the Karl Marx myth gets an unusual revival. In a stiff, emotionally charged television contest, the erstwhile east Germany overwhelmingly votes for Karl Marx as the best German of all times. The prize ultimately goes to Konrad Adenauer thanks to the formidable vote banks of prosperous West Germany. Meanwhile, the trustees of the Karl Marx (birth) House in No. 10, Bruckenstrase in Trier solemnly commemorate Marx's 120th birth anniversary.
Karl Marx was bred in reasonable affluence. His father was a prosperous lawyer, Jewish by birth, who converted to Protestant Christian faith, a year before Marx's birth. Marx himself grew up drinking, duelling, romancing and writing poetry. He married a baroness and went on to write a doctoral dissertation on an unusual topic, "Epicureanism". As a young man he took well to the Epicurean view of freedom and independence of spirit, though this led him into the alley of atheism. Indeed, there was an anarchist streak in him in his youth, which was later to find reflection in his numerous contributions as a journalist. In his youth Marx was not an apostle of a strong proletarian State. Rather, in his critique of Hegel's philosophy of law (which he wrote in 1844), he talked about civil society being the primary requisite of democracy. In his economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, Marx saw communism in its humanist sense and saw future society as one, in which man's personality would flower in its spiritual essence. To quote Paul Johnson, Marx was more "a poet, a journalist and a moralist" at this stage.
It was not therefore surprising that Marx gave up an offer of a position in Prussian civil service and chose exile to France. Even when he was struggling to eke out an existence, he resisted the temptation of approaching his uncle Lion Philips (the creator of the Philips Electric Company Empire) for help. Interestingly, it is even speculated that Marx considered standing for elections as a parliamentary candidate from Trier in the 1840s!
It was from a state of idealism that Marx matured into hard-boiled votary of dictatorship of the proletariat, a line of thinking zealously followed by his disciples in Russia and China. Though scholars, often adduce his celebrated thesis of the "withering of the state", to indicate Marx's aversion for the authoritarian state, it was nevertheless a fact that in his later years Marx was more for the dictatorship of the proletariat. To some extent, this could have been on account of his own plight of being stateless in the latter part of his life. Faced with increasing pressures from the Prussian Government for extradition, Marx gave up his Prussian citizenship and died a civic orphan in 1883. Had the Paris Commune succeeded, the new Proletarian State would have crowned Karl Marx its first citizen!
In the 20th Century, Stalin and Mao led communist parties that were to rule the second world with ruthless power. Party elitism and ostentatious living by the communist czars of the Soviet Union made a mockery of Marx's own frugal lifestyle. Contrast this, with what the social democrats did for Karl Marx. In the 1940s the Social Democratic Party of Germany struggled hard to retrieve the Karl Marx House from its Nazi occupants. In 1968 the Friedrich Ebert Foundation developed the beautiful baroque residence of Karl Marx into a major museum and library. Despite the collapse of communism the social democratic party of Germany continues to have its enthusiasm for Marx and his teachings.
Today the forces of globalisation have combined with corporatist conservative welfare states to threaten welfare spending and livelihood subsidies for millions of farmers and workers. This trend seems to have gained currency through the WTO forum. The world does not have strong communist movements capable of countering these unwelcome changes. The task has devolved on the red-green political movements of the world, which draw sustenance from Marx's writings. Indeed there are many developing countries that analyse the global trade reality of today, through Marx. A few months before the Doha Summit in 2001, I recall a South East Asian trade diplomat (by no means a Marxist) telling me how much he profited from Marx's descriptions of the textiles industry in "Value, Price and Profit".
What would Marx see or do if he were to come to life today? He would note the unfriendly graffiti on his tomb. He would have seen his statues razed down in the former Marxist empires of East Europe. He would have seen his birth house and writings grandly maintained by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. He would have fondly noted the few enthusiastic supporters he still has in parts of the world. Finally, he would also have seen the marvel of international finance capital reaching out to the minutest speck of the globe, and mused on his mother's quip, "If only Karl had made capital instead of writing about it!"
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