Is Marks still important?

From 1949, when Mao Zedong's Communists triumphed in Chinese civil war until the fall of the Berlin Wall 40 years later, the significance of Carl Marx's story was insurmountable. Nearly four out of ten people on the planet lived under governments claiming to be Marxist, and in many other countries Marxism was the dominant ideology of the left, while right-wing policies were based on the way Marxism should be fought.

When Communism collapsed on the Soviet Union and its satellites, Marks ' influence fell. On the 200th anniversary of his birth on May 5th 1818, it is not wrong to say that his predictions were false, his theory was discredited, and his ideas didn't stand the time. Why, then, should we be concerned about his legacy in the 21st century?

Marx's reputation had been severely damaged by atrocities committed by regimes that called themselves Marxist, although there is no evidence that Marx himself would support those crimes. But Communism collapsed because, as practiced in the Soviet bloc and in Mao China, it failed to offer people a standard of living that would be compared to that of most people in capitalistic economies.

These failures do not reflect the faults of Marx's descriptions of communism, because Marx never did such descriptions: he had no least interest in the details of the functioning of a communist society. Instead, the failures of communism address a deeper flaw: Marx's mistaken view of human nature.

There is no such thing as internal or biological human nature, according to Marx. Human essence is, he wrote on Thees on Feuerbach-un, “So it turns out that if you change social relations, for example, by changing society's economic base and removing the relationship between capitalist and worker, in a new society would be radically different from the people of capitalism.

Marks failed to come to this belief through a detailed anthropological study of human nature under different economic systems. It was more, an application of Hegel's view of history. According to Hegel, the purpose of history was to free the human soul, which would occur when all of us realized that we are part of the universal human mind. Marks transformed that idea into a materialistic view, which said that the driving force of history is to satisfy our material needs, and liberation is achieved by warfare among classes. The working class will be the means for universal liberation because private property will be denied and therefore achieved in collective ownership of production tools.

When workers owned the production tools collectively, Marks thought, <x0-sources of co-operative property” would flow more abundantly than those of private wealth more abundant than the distribution of wealth would be no problem. That's why he didn't like to deepen in detail about how income or goods would be distributed. In fact, when Marks read a proposed platform for the unification of two German socialist parties, he described phrases such as “correct distribution” and “equal rights” as “plehra verbal).” They belong, he thought, at a time of inadequacy that the revolution would end.

The Soviet Union testified that removing private production resources does not change human nature. Most people, instead of devoting themselves to the common good, continue to seek power, privileges, and luxury for themselves and their relatives. Ironically, the clearer demonstration that the sources of private wealth flow more abundantly than those of collective wealth can be seen in the history of one of the major countries still promoting its Marxism.

Under Mao's regime, most Chinese people lived in poverty. China's economy began to rise sharply only after 1978, with Mao's successor, Deng Xipooning [saying, “does not matter whether it is the white or black cat, as long as it captures the mice” which allowed private entrepreneurs to settle. Deng's reforms saved 800 million people from extreme poverty, but they also created a society with greater inequality than any European country [and much larger than in the United States]. Although China still promotes that it's building “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is not easy to see what's socialist in its economy.

If China is no longer influenced by Marxism, we can conclude that in politics, as in the economy, Marx is really insignificant. Yet, his intellectual influence remains. His theory of historical materialism has become part in a smooth form of our understanding of forces that determine the course of human society. In various writings, Marx displayed a very complex view in which there is interaction among all aspects of society.

Marx's most important idea of history is negative: the evolution of ideas, religion and political institutions is not independent of the means we use to satisfy our needs, nor in the economic structure that we organize around these tools, and in the financial interest that we create. If this seems so obvious that it doesn't matter, it's because we've already interviewed it as an idea. In that sense, we're all Marxists now.

The author is professor of bioethics at the University of Princeton.