Context
On May 5, 1818, Karl Marx was born. This year in
2018, the world reaches and celebrates the bicentennial Marx’s Birth i.e. Karl
Marx turns 200. Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian,
political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Marx's
theories about society, economics and politics—collectively understood as
Marxism—hold that human societies develop through class struggle. In
capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes
(known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working
classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their
labour power in return for wages. Employing a critical approach known as
historical materialism, Marx predicted that, like previous socio-economic
systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its
self-destruction and replacement by a new system: Socialism.
When his first centenary was celebrated in 1918, the
international socialist movement he had fought so tirelessly to create had been
torn apart by World War I, with the revolutionary turmoil in Russia inducing
further convulsions.
Now, as the world celebrates his second centenary,
the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s adoption of a particularly brutal
and corrupt form of market economy have shredded whatever remained of Marx’s
vision.
It would, however, be a mistake to simply add Marx
to the list of great failures. Despite all the crimes perpetrated in his name,
there is little doubt that his work not only changed the world but altered the
way we understand i
Understanding Socialism
Socialism is an economic system where everyone in
the society equally owns the factors of production. The ownership is acquired
through a democratically elected government. It could also be a cooperative or
a public corporation where everyone owns shares. The four factors of production
are labor, entrepreneurship, capital goods, and natural resources.
Socialism's mantra is, "From each according to
his ability, to each according to his contribution." Everyone in society
receives a share of the production based on how much each has contributed.
Socialism assumes that the basic nature of people is
cooperative. That nature hasn't yet emerged in full because capitalism or
feudalism has forced people to be competitive. Therefore, a basic tenet of
socialism is that the economic system must support this basic human nature for
these qualities to emerge.
The biggest disadvantage of socialism is that it
relies on the cooperative nature of humans to work. It negates those within
society who are competitive, not cooperative. Competitive people tend to seek
ways to overthrow and disrupt society for their own gain. A second related
criticism is that it doesn't reward people for being entrepreneurial and
competitive. As such, it won't be as innovative as a capitalistic society. A
third possibility is that the government set up to represent the masses may
abuse its position and claim power for itself.
Marxist Influence
Marx's ideas have had a profound impact on world
politics and intellectual thought. In the political realm, these tendencies
include Leninism, Marxism–Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Luxemburgism and
libertarian Marxism. Politically, Marx's legacy is more complex. Throughout the
twentieth century, revolutions in dozens of countries labelled themselves
"Marxist"—most notably the Russian Revolution, which led to the
founding of the Soviet Union. Major world leaders including Vladimir Lenin, Mao
Zedong, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, Josip Broz Tito, Kwame Nkrumah,
Jawaharlal Nehru, Nelson Mandela, Xi Jinping, Jean-Claude Juncker and Thomas
Sankara all cited Marx as an influence and his ideas informed political parties
worldwide beyond those where Marxist revolutions took place. The countries
associated with some Marxist nations have led political opponents to blame Marx
for millions of deaths, but the fidelity of these varied revolutionaries,
leaders and parties to Marx's work is highly contested and rejected by many
Marxists.
Commodity Fetishism – Alienation - Capitalism
A central, and still very powerful, concept is that
of "commodity fetishism": the situation in which relations between
people become mediated by relations between things: commodities and money.
Commodities (goods and services produced for exchange) are not simply things or
objects, because they possess both use value (meeting human needs or wants) and
exchange value (as a thing that can be traded in return for something else).
But value then gets seen as intrinsic to commodities rather than being the
result of labour, and the exchange of commodities and market-based interaction
are seen as the "natural" way of dealing with all objects, rather
than as a historically specific set of social relations.
More broadly, commodity fetishism is the illusion
emerging from the centrality of private property in capitalism, which then
determines not only how people work and interact, but also how they perceive
reality and understand social change. The urge to acquisition, the obsession
with material gratification of wants and the ordering of human well-being in
terms of their ability to command different commodities, could all be described
as forms of commodity fetishism. The obsession with GDP growth per se among
policymakers and the general public is an extreme, but widespread, example of
commodity fetishism today.
Marx identified three "cardinal facts" of
capitalist production:
- Concentration of means of production in a few hands, whereby they cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production capacities;
- The organisation of labour into social labour: through cooperation, division of labour and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences;
- The creation of the world market.
The third feature is what we now call globalisation,
and it is the natural result of the tendency of the system to spread and
aggrandise itself - to destroy and incorporate earlier forms of production, and
to transfigure and transform technology and institutions constantly.
Capitalism is dynamic, constantly generating new
types of production organisation and economic institutions: not just the
factory system but more recent arrangements, financial institutions and
structures, legal systems. The accumulation of capital generates higher
productivity and transforms systems, but it is also associated with uneven
development. Marx saw capitalism as being in a situation of continuous
disequilibrium, because of this tendency of uneven development, which is not
confined to a single arena, but characterises all social and economic
relations.
The system generates many conflicts and
contradictions, only some of which culminate in periodic crises. Since the
basic dynamics of capital is simultaneously to aggrandise itself and impoverish
other classes such as workers and peasants, within and across nations, it
obviously generates class conflicts. But the system also generates intra-class
conflict, pitting individual capital against other capitals and the individual
worker against other workers. There is a Darwinian struggle for survival
constantly at work, so individualism, conflict and competition become the
driving forces of the system.
But these also create what Marx called the anarchy
of the market and the inevitable tendency towards crises. Overproduction in
terms of the market (even when human needs of all the people in the society
need not be satisfied) is a characteristic feature simply because of the way
individual capitals operate in the drive to generate more profit. As a result,
the process of accumulation is never smooth. Rather, it is uneven and
punctuated by crises. Partly, this is the result of the very success of
capitalism in delivering more economic growth and technological advance.
A fundamental feature of the capitalist system that
Marx described, and one that has complex social and philosophical
underpinnings, is alienation. This does not refer to an isolated experience of
an individual person's feeling of estrangement from society or community, but
to a generalised state of the broad mass of wage workers. Most simply put, it
can be expressed as the loss of control by workers over their own work. This
alienation of the workers means that they effectively cease to be autonomous
human beings, because they cannot control their workplace, the products they
produce, or even the way they relate to each other. Because this fundamentally
defines their conditions of existence, this means that workers can never become
autonomous and self-realised human and social beings under capitalism.
This alienation, combined with commodity fetishism,
creates a peculiar kind of unfreedom - which is often not even widely noticed,
because individual emancipation appears to result from "universal
saleability". So every living creature is effectively transformed into
property and all social relations become transactionary.
Shortcomings
To begin
with, although Marx’s vision promised an eventual disappearance of the state as
class antagonisms withered, it was thoroughly statist.
Who would own
the means of production? The State. Who would plan their use? The State. And
who would determine the distribution of the social product and so control the
fate of every man, woman and child? The State.
To make
matters worse, this all-powerful state was not one that admitted of pluralism.
Marx had emphasised that politics was simply the expression of class conflict.
As a result, once the abolition of private property had eliminated social
classes, there was no need for politics — and any political opposition could be
dismissed, and suppressed, as counter-revolutionary.
Marx’s predictions about the future of capitalism
were almost entirely wrong. In industrialised countries, workers’ real wages
have risen, and capitalism has not collapsed. But focusing on this alone
overlooks Marx’s contribution to analysing freedom in Western society. Freedom
was Marx’s central concern – paradoxical as this may seem when we look at the
regimes that have professed to follow his ideas. These regimes include China
which today proclaims to be Marxist despite becoming the world’s largest
trading nation, and crushing individual freedoms on a scale that would surely
have troubled Marx. Without irony, the Chinese president and communist party
leader Xi Jinping last year declared: “If we deviate from or abandon Marxism,
our party would lose its soul and direction.” If Marx has any claim to a place
alongside Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel as a major political philosopher,
it rests on his critique of the liberal conception of freedom.
Marx’s influence in still evident today among
left-wing campaigners who favour revolution over incremental change. But
everytime what they lack is any plan or a viable alternative.
Common ownership under socialism may take shape
through technocratic, oligarchic, totalitarian, democratic or even voluntary
rule. Prominent historical examples of socialist countries include the Soviet
Union and Nazi Germany. Contemporary examples include Cuba, Venezuela and
China.
Due to its practical challenges and poor track
record, socialism is sometimes referred to as a utopian or “post-scarcity”
system, although modern adherents believe it could work if only properly
implemented. They argue socialism creates equality and provides security – a
worker’s value comes from the amount of time he or she works, not in the va+lue
of what he or she produces – while capitalism exploits workers for the benefit
of the wealthy.
Conclusion
While socialism and capitalism seem
diametrically opposed, most capitalist economies today have some socialist
aspects. Elements of a market economy and a socialist economy can be combined
into a mixed economy. And in fact, most modern countries operate with a
mixed economic system; government and private individuals both influence
production and distribution.
Historically, mixed economies have
followed two types of trajectories. The first type assumes that private
individuals have the right to own property, produce and trade. State
intervention has developed gradually, usually in the name of protecting
consumers, supporting industries crucial to the public good (in fields like
energy or communications) providing welfare or other aspects of the social
safety net. Most western democracies, such as the India, follow this model.
The second trajectory involves
states that evolved from pure collectivist or totalitarian regimes.
Individuals' interests are considered a distant second to state interests, but
elements of capitalism are adopted to promote economic growth. China and Russia
are examples of the second model.
