From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Sat Oct 29 2005 - 13:21:18 EDT
Be careful what you write: it turns out he's on the Internet.
In solidarity, Jerry
Interview with Karl Marx Andreas Ramos
Oct 31, 2003 21:09 PST
Karl Marx takes stock
He erred in forecasting a socialist ascendancy but, as Karl
Marx tells historian Donald Sassoon in Britain's Prospect
magazine, his views are still the best means of understanding
contemporary capitalist society. Sassoon, author of a
magisterial study of Western socialism, wittily argues through
the medium of Marx's cranky ghost that his (often
unacknowledged) influence has in practice surpassed that of all
of the classical liberal theorists. It is now commonplace in
decision- and opinion-making circles to interpret events with
reference to economic interests and antagonistic power
relations between classes and groups, and to see the state as
the subordinate creature of the large corporations. Marx's
theoretical failure, which doesn't obscure the power of his
analysis of capitalist society, was to assume that the system
had already exhausted its potential by Victorian times. In
fact, it outlasted the mass socialist movement and, as Sassoon
suggests, it is one of the great ironies of history that the
Marxist-led revolutions of the 20th century appear in
retrospect mostly to have paved the way for the further
development of capitalism in Russia, China, and other parts of
the globe.
Karl Marx
By Donald Sassoon
Prospect
October 2003
Donald Sassoon: Well, Dr Marx, you are all washed up,
aren't you?
Fifteen years ago your theories ruled half the world. Now what's
left? Cuba? North Korea?
Karl Marx: My "theories"-as you put it-never "ruled." I had
followers I neither chose nor sought, and for whom I have no
more responsibility than Jesus had for Torquemada or Muhammad
for Osama bin Laden. Self-appointed followers are the price of
success. Most of my contemporaries would love to be as washed
up as you think I am. I wrote that the point was not to explain
the world, but to change it. And how many eminent Victorians
have done so?
DS How about John Stuart Mill?
KM He was a well-meaning plagiarist and somewhat touching in his
exertion to reconcile the irreconcilable, and he is still read
by second-rate minds at Oxford or Yale; but has anyone heard of
him in Peoria, Illinois, not to speak of Pyongyang? You recall
William Jevons, founder of the theory of marginal utility. He
was big in my day. But when did you last meet a Jevonsian? And
Comte, the father of sociology (a ridiculous discipline, if
ever there was one), is he in print? And, please, don't ask me
about Herbert Spencer, whose forlorn tomb lies in the shadow of
my monument at Highgate cemetery. No doubt this setting of Marx
opposite Spencer was a gravedigger's idea of a joke.
DS Are there no great bourgeois thinkers?
KM Of course there are. And I punctiliously paid my respects to
them. But today few of my enemies bother reading Adam Smith or
David Ricardo. And great scholars like Tschernyschewsky are now
forgotten.
DS What about Jeremy Bentham?
KM What a provocation! Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-
tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence. A purely
English phenomenon who could have been manufactured only in
England. Never has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted
about in so self-satisfied a way.
DS How about more recent thinkers?
KM The fashion-following apologists of the propertied classes,
now and again, try to find an adequate rival for me. They just
can't bear the thought of lacking a recognised genius. So they
resurrect Hayek one summer and, by the next spring, they are
all wearing Popper (now that's someone with only one idea in
his head and, boy, did he flog it to death and irrefutably
so!). The very lazy ones go for Isaiah Berlin-so easy to
comprehend, so stupendously unoriginal, so devastatingly
tautological. Of my contemporaries only Darwin made the big
time. And I understood it at once. Friedrich convinced me to
dedicate Das Kapital to him, but Darwin, coward to the last,
turned me down. On reflection, he was probably right. Had he
accepted, natural selection would have been regarded as yet
another Marxist conspiracy.
DS OK. No one underestimates your renown. But you must agree:
Marxism is not what it used to be...
KM In reality my work has never been as important as it is now.
Over the last 40 years or so it has conquered the academy in
the most advanced countries in the world. Historians,
economists, social scientists, and even, to my surprise, some
literary critics have all turned to the materialist conception.
The most exciting history currently produced in the US and
Europe is the most "Marxistic" ever. Just go to the annual
convention of the American Social Science History Association,
which I attend regularly as a ghost. There they earnestly
examine the interconnection between institutional and political
structures and the world of production. They all talk about
classes, structures, economic determination, power relations,
oppressed and oppressors. And they all pretend to have read
me-a sure sign of success. Even diplomatic historians-or at
least the best of them (a small bunch admittedly)-now look at
the economic basis of great powers. Of course much of this work
is crude economic determinism. But you can go a long way
with "vulgar" Marxism. Look at the success of simplistic
theories propounding the view that empires collapse because
they spend too much. Well, at least the economy is back in.
Social history, the history of ordinary men and women, has
supplanted the idiotic fixation with great men. Of course,
many things have moved on. Thank God for that. I was never one
for standing still. Das Kapital was unfinished, and
not just because I died too soon but because, in a very real
sense, it could not be finished. Capitalism moves on and the
analysis always trails behind.
DS So what have you achieved? What's left?
KM I devoted my life to the study of capitalism. I tried to lay
bare its laws of motion. I tried to get to the kernel of its
fundamental...
DS You were obsessed with the economy...
KM And how right I was. You are all obsessed with the economy
and, for the foreseeable future, you will remain so. I don't
need to explain this to readers of the Financial Times, the
Wall Street Journal and the Economist. Nor to politicians who
promise heaven on earth and then say "you can't buck the
markets," and that globalisation (the current polite name for
world capitalism) is unstoppable. Who is obsessed? Do you
remember that petty Arkansas politician who became US
president and played around with the intern? What's his name?
DS Clinton.
KM Yes. "It's the economy, stupid!" Well, my dear boy, I said
it first.
DS At some length...
KM True, Das Kapital is no soundbite. Yet when required I
produced my share of good quotes. "Workers of the world unite;
you have nothing to lose but your chains" is better than
anything the overpaid underbrained Downing Street spinners can
come up with.
DS But the idea that today's workers have nothing to lose is
absurd.
KM You are right. Your workers-the workers of Europe and North
America-now have plenty to lose. In my day, of course, they
were still treated abominably. Even 20 years after the
Manifesto, although England was richer than other
countries, matters had not improved all that much. The
search for profits made more and more
victims-and not just among the workers. In 1866 I noted the
sensational newspaper stories about railway crashes. In those
days, when Britain ruled the waves, the driver of a locomotive
engine would work for 30 hours on the trot with disastrous
consequences. Railway catastrophes were then called "acts of
God." I called them acts of capitalism. (Now, of course,
things are completely different, aren't they?) Or take the
report in the London papers of June 1863 under the
heading, "Death from simple overwork." It dealt with the
death of Mary Anne Walkley, a 20-year-old milliner, employed
in a respectable establishment. This girl worked, on average,
over 16 hours without a break. As it was the "season" it was
necessary to conjure up quickly the gorgeous dresses for the
noble ladies invited to a ball in honour of the
Princess of Wales. Walkley had worked without stop for over
26 hours, with 30 other girls in one small room. You'll find
all of this in Kapital. If you cared to read it, dear boy, you
will realise that it is not just a dry economic treatise. It
drips with outrage and indignation.
DS But such things were exceptions even then-which is why they
were reported. They no longer happen. Train drivers now have
nice homes, go on foreign holidays...
KM Yes, yes, and the main reason is that my side, my party, the
socialists, the trade unionists, the reformers whom I supported
and encouraged, set a limit to capitalist exploitation. Or, in
the awful jargon used by the complacent scribblers of the
bourgeois press, they erected labour market rigidities. But
elsewhere, in the former colonies, where there is no democracy,
no trade unions, no socialist parties, the degradation of those
who have nothing to sell but their labour power more than
matches the sweatshops of my days. And even in the west,
wherever the workers are not organised, things are just a
little better. Why
don't august organs such as Prospect lay bare the realities of
your world instead of gazing nervously at the navel of the
bourgeoisie and keeping its readership snug and sheltered?
Everything I denounced still goes on. In the capitalist
landmark itself, the US of A, deskilling and lower wages occur
across a broad spectrum of industries-from the most modern to
the most backward. New sweatshops and homework have broken the
backs of the trade unions in high technology areas such as
California. So when I hear sanctimonious claptrap about human
rights and freedom from the representatives of the bourgeois
order, the Bushes and Blairs and tutti quanti, I shake my
venerable head disconsolately. Do these people ever go to war
to impose limits to the exploitation of labour? Do they ever
fight for the freedom of workers to join unions? All they ever
do is replace "unfriendly" governments with "friendly" ones-
governments friendly to capital accumulation.
DS But in the west, workers used the freedoms you mention to
improve their lot under capitalist national states, not to
abolish them. Admit it: the working class has been a
disappointment to you.
KM It is true that the national state which had appeared as the
workers chief oppressor turned out, in the following 100 years,
to be their main source of loyalty. The middle class,
especially the intellectuals, proved to be far more
internationalist than the proletariat. We had a premonition
about this reformism. I recall the first elections held under
the 1867 Reform Act. Manchester (Manchester!) had returned
three Tories to two Liberals. Engels was upset. He wrote
that "the proletariat has discredited itself terribly."
DS How do you explain it?
KM The socialist struggle presents an unavoidable
contradiction. We need to fight for reforms but each gain saps
the revolutionary will of the workers. Strong workers extract
real improvements. Weak ones starve. You don't seriously think
that the bourgeoisie would have conceded the eight-hour day,
paid holidays, old age pensions, a free health service,
education for all, and national insurance in a paroxysm of
philanthropy? To get these things it was necessary to strike
not at the heart of the capitalists but at their profit. You
don't imagine that capital goes to Thailand, Taiwan,
Bangladesh or Brazil hoping to find well-organised workers,
conscious of their rights and able to secure high wages?
The conditions of life achieved by workers in the west cannot
be writ large over the entire planet. Capitalism can be
global-as I explained a long time ago when capital was but a
gleam in a vast
worldwide bog dominated by petty commodity production and
peasants. But can everything else go global? Swedish social
democracy? Or the lifestyle reached by many American workers?
Even the Catholics know that they can't all be popes. Will one
day the 1.3bn Chinese and the 1bn Indians go to work driving
their own cars powered by cheap petrol? And return home to air-
conditioned rooms? And in the morning spray their armpits (4.6bn
of them!) with deodorant without hearing the deafening sound of
the ozone layer cracking? Are there no limits to growth?
DS So now you too resort to Malthus and say that the future may
be catastrophic. May I remind you, Dr Marx, that you were a
Victorian optimist, a child of the Enlightenment. In the
Manifesto you...
KM The Manifesto, the Schmanifesto! Let me put it into
perspective. I wrote the damn thing in February 1848, when I
was under 30. Most of my scientific work was still to come. The
Manifesto, commissioned by an insignificant leftist group, was
written against a tight deadline. As it hit the bookshops (well,
that's a figure of speech, I don't think it sold more than
1,000 copies in 1848) Europe was swept by a wave of revolution:
France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Italy. Everywhere the masses
were clamouring for a constitution, for freedom, for democracy.
The Manifesto reflected the optimism of those heady days. We
thought that everything was possible. Imagination had seized
power.
DS And then?
KM Then the counter-revolution set in. Some gains were achieved
here and there, but on the whole, my side lost. In France, the
home of our most cherished hopes, a little upstart with a grand
name, Louis Napoleon, took over. He was the first elected
dictator in modern history. I wrote an instant book (I use your
terminology, just to show that my century had invented most of
what yours claims for itself). Contrary to all the neoliberal
philistines who think I'm an economic determinist-coming from
the dummkopfs who go round shouting that markets are the basis
of freedom, what chutzpah!-I explained that when the
bourgeoisie is
threatened, it will give up power to anyone it can pick up from
the gutter. Who cares about civil rights and elections and press
freedom when the rule of capital is in danger? The bourgeoisie,
realising that its political rule was incompatible with its own
survival, destroyed its own regime, vilified its own parliament
and invited Napoleon to rule. It abdicated its powers to the
scumbag leader of a party of decayed roués, swindlers,
mountebanks, gamblers, untenured academics, and beggars. With
these dregs the second empire was created out of a victory in a
popular referendum. All this I analysed. All this I
deconstructed (yes, I keep up with modern charlatans). The
result: the first
theory of fascism. So don't tell me I have ever been under any
illusion about the people. I know how to look at the harshest
reality with equanimity. I realised we had lost, as your
socialist friends have now. And I plucked up my courage and went
to work. I spent my days in the British Museum reading room,
solitary and proud, my soul devoured with rage, my arse festered
with carbuncles, but my mind doing its duty, the duty of
intellectuals: face reality.
DS No one doubts your integrity. It is your analysis which is
questionable. If democratic governments can be a threat to the
bourgeoisie, then it is surely wrong to say, as you wrote in the
Manifesto, that the "executive of the modern state is but a
committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie."
KM Well, was I that much off the mark? Is it not the case that
all governments are constrained by capitalism's own structures?
That, when all is said and done, they are forced to do all they
can to ensure its profitability, train its workforce, repair
its failures, and mop up the debris it excretes on the way? And
they all do it, all slaves to the imperatives of capitalism:
the left and the right and the middle and the socialists and
fascists and
liberals and greens. Once in power they must keep the show on
the road. If the show runs well, then they tax and spend and
redistribute this and that and help the poor and the sick just
as the Victorians did. When the profits roll in they bask in
morality and ethics. When profits decline and the economy
enters into one of the economic cycles I had predicted,
philanthropy is discarded like an ageing mistress. Then your
good bourgeois discovers that you cannot tax and spend, that
the unemployed are
scroungers, that public medicine costs too much, that single
mothers are feckless. The conscience of the bourgeoisie is
closely wired to the vicissitudes of the stock exchange.
DS And what about the intellectuals?
KM Second-rate theorists; in reality the paid lackeys of the
rich. The thing about bourgeois scribblers is that they always
theorise after the event. They pick up intellectual garbage,
polish it up, call it theory and serve it up as science.
Rebellion against capitalist modernity takes the form of
religious fanaticism and they call it "a clash of
civilisations."
Communism falls and the "end of history" is proclaimed-Oh poor
Hegel, what would he say? The first time a great thinker, the
second time a Fukuyama farce?
DS Calm down. Let's move on. I've got to ask you this: the
Soviet Union, the gulag, communist terror.
KM I thought you would. I must admit that I am as vain as the
next person and all this personality cult and Marx-worship did
get to me. It did tickle me to see my face on banknotes of the
old DDR and a Marxplatz in every Prussian city. Of course,
thanks to Engels's marketing skills and the efforts of
Bernstein and of
that tedious man, Kautsky, I became the grand guru of the
socialist movement soon after my demise. Consequently Russian
westernisers had to take me as seriously as electricity. So I
was not surprised when Lenin decided to turn me into the
Bible. Lenin
was a clever politician with good instincts. But he was also a
fundamentalist determined to find in my works the justification
for whatever it was he wanted to do. He made "Marxism" up as he
went along. This detestable habit, typical of religions since
time immemorial, spread everywhere. I began to have the feeling
that even my shopping lists were being drafted into the service
of this or that faction of the movement. Take the notion of the
"dictatorship of the proletariat." This was a formula I had
devised to suggest, following its ancient Roman usage, an
exceptional government in a time of crisis. I must have used
this expression no more than ten times in my life. I can't tell
you my surprise when this resurfaced as a central idea of
Marxism, used
to justify one-party rule. What can I say? And I was rather
surprised when the first so-called socialist revolution occurred
in such a deeply backward country run by Slavs-of all people.
What the Bolsheviks were doing was accomplishing the bourgeois
revolution that the Russian bourgeoisie was too small and stupid
to carry out. The communists used the state to create a modern
industrial system. If one must call this the "dictatorship of
the proletariat," well, so be it.
DS But the purges, the crimes, the blood....
KM I did say that capital is born dripping from head to foot,
from every pore, with blood and dirt.
DS I mean communism not capitalism.
KM The Russian revolution was not a socialist revolution waged
against a capitalist state. It was a revolution against a semi-
feudal autocracy. It was about the construction of modern
industry, modern society. Industrial revolutions always occur
at great cost whether led by communists or pukka bourgeois.
Your modern political accountants, as they scavenge through
history to make the case for the prosecution, have they totted
up the deaths caused by colonialism, and capitalism? Have they
added up all the
Africans who died in slavery on their way to America? All the
American Indians massacred? All the dead of capitalist civil
wars? All those killed by the diseases caused by modern
industry?
All the dead of the two world wars? Of course Stalin and co were
criminals. But do you think that Russia would have become a
modern industrial power by democratic, peaceful means? Which
road to industrialisation has been victimless, and undertaken
under a benign system of civil liberties and human rights?
Japan? Korea? Taiwan? Germany? Italy? France? Britain and its
empire? What were
the alternatives to Lenin and Stalin and the red terror? Little
Red Riding Hood? The alternative would have been some Cossack-
backed antisemitic dictator as cruel and paranoid as Stalin
(or Trotsky; frankly I have no preference), far more corrupt
and far less efficient.
DS So was it all inevitable?
KM That I don't know and neither do you. But don't you dare to
reproach me with one drop of blood or one writer in jail. May I
remind you that I was a political exile because I defended
freedom of speech, that I lived all my life in shabby conditions
and that I died in 1883 when Lenin was 13 and Stalin four. I
could have written a bestselling "Black Book of Capitalism" and
listed all the crimes committed in its name. But I did not. I
examined its misdeeds dispassionately, in a balanced way as I
would examine now those of communism. Much as I like polemic I
knew capitalism was better than anything that preceded it and
that it could lay the basis for the realm of true freedom,
freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from the state,
which is what communism is. Take the piece I wrote on the Indian
revolt of 1857 in the New York Daily Tribune. English soldiers
committed abominations: raping women, roasting whole villages.
Did I use this to score some petty points? I did not. Nor did I
wax sentimental over the destruction of idyllic native
communities. These I denounced as the solid foundations of
oriental despotism and tools of superstition. I explained that
British imperialism was bringing about a social revolution and
celebrated it, but I saw no reason not to lament the devastating
effects of English industry on India.
DS How about your early writings on alienation? The 1844
manuscripts were popular in the 1960s. People saw their
relevance to the modern world.
KM Nonsense. The reason I did not publish such stuff is that it
was inconsequential claptrap. It is typical that the disaffected
petty bourgeois intelligentsia would have lapped this up. I
have no time for them.
DS So you don't think your relation with Hegel...
KM Hegel Schmegel. I must tell you a secret: I never actually
read, except in the most cursory fashion, Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit or his S cience of Logic. Life's too short.
DS This will be a bit of a shock in some quarters.
KM People should read the great English economists, Adam Smith
and David Ricardo. Well, not really English: one's a Scot, the
other a Sephardic Jew-clever people of good stock, who know the
value of money. Germans like Hegel transform hats into ideas. I
prefer the Brits who transform ideas into hats.
DS What do you make of present-day socialism?
KM It has been moribund for a long time. It fulfilled its task:
civilising capitalism in its heartland. More could not be asked
of it. It is now going quietly. Communism too has collapsed, its
task fulfilled: the construction of capitalism. They understand
this well in China-where the next century will play itself out.
In Russia, where we are witnessing the transition from lumpen
communism to lumpen capitalism, it's a different matter. But how
can you build anything with the Russians? One should read their
novels, listen to their music, but as for a viable economy...
DS How about Blair, Schröder, the third way?
KM Do I have to have a view about these people? To say that
history will forget them is too grandiose. They won't even
register. And this shows how low your lot has sunk. In my days we
faced Bismarck, Lincoln, Gladstone and Disraeli... real enemies.
DS So that's it? The triumph of capitalism.
KM Quite, but let's be a bit dialectical. As this is not a
system where everyone can win, there will be resistance. For
now it's just puny sects playing at revolution. Or the "No
Global" bunch , the anti-globalisers...
DS What do you think of them?
KM A mishmash of inchoate fragments. But better than nothing.
At least they stand up to capital, but they won't change the
world, let alone explain it.
DS And feminism?
KM I did write that great social changes are impossible without
the feminine ferment. But there is far to go. The majority of
workers in the world are now women, but the vast majority of
feminists are not workers. What many western feminists want is
to share power with western man. And why not? Who would want
to be some schmuck's hausfrau? But this makes no difference to
the feminine army of labour.
DS What about America?
KM Always liked the Yankees: no feudalism, no hallowed
traditions. Of course, a lot of cant and religion. But somehow
they come out of every capitalist crisis stronger and stronger.
Wonderful system of government. Fake democracy, fake elections,
fake political system surrounded by humbug and greedy lawyers.
This allows business to get on with its tasks, buying
candidates, a bribe here, a bribe there. The people are not
taken in. Half of
them don't bother to vote. For the other half, politics is
harmless fun, like watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I
moved the headquarters of the first international of workers to
New York not just to control it better but also because America
was becoming the workers' country par excellence. It is really
the only working-class country in the world. Their games, their
culture, their manners, their food; everything about Americans
is working class. Of course, old Europe remains rather snobby
about them, a consolation prize for lost supremacy.
DS Finally, what about the war against terror?
KM Well, in the end everyone chooses his enemies. It is absurd
to
think that a capitalist world should not encounter some form of
resistance. The communists and socialists offered a rational,
modern, sensible opposition. They shared many of the values of
their liberal opponents: basic rights, the idea of popular
democracy, the emancipation of women, a distaste for organised
religion. But once the communists and the socialists were wiped
out what do you expect? The triumph of rational thought? Of
course not. The political vacuum was filled by fanatical
fundamentalists, religious bigots, crazed mullahs. You wipe out
the communists in Iran and the Ayatollah comes in. You do the
same in Iraq, you get Saddam Hussein. The USSR falls and Osama
bin Laden arises.
DS And you? How do you spend your time?
KM Oh! I have fun. Friedrich and I play on the internet. Did you
know that "Karl Marx" scores 367,000 Google hits? And I never
miss The Archers, that wonderful saga of the idiocy of rural
life. What a hoot!
© 2001 Topica Inc. TFMB
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Oct 30 2005 - 00:00:04 EDT