Back to Marx?
For Marx's 200th birthday, the big bourgeois press paid an unexpected tribute to the thinker from Trier. Time, Newsweek and even Der Spiegel have Marx on the cover. In a poll conducted by the BBC, Marx was ranked first among the greatest modern thinkers, surpassing even Albert Einstein, who placed second.
The New York Times wrote that Marx is the most influential thinker in history whose analyzes help us understand our world, as demonstrated by the recent ponderous work of Thomas Piketty, clearly in continuity with Marx. The Economist, less inclined to enthusiasm, instead wrote that, although a book on Marx should bear the subtitle "a study in failure", his legacy remains a monumental figure today more alive than ever. He then added, "The collapse of the petrified orthodoxy of Marxism has revealed that Marx is far more interesting than his interpreters have led us to believe." This invitation to return to Marx and his analysis of capital and political economy, going beyond the political use of his theories, would have gratified the hapless French philosopher Louis Althusser torn to pieces by the orthodox Marxists of his day.
The "Financial Times", in reviewing a very recent biography of Marx (A world to Win: The Life and Works of Carl Marx, by Sven-Eric Liedman), wrote that Marx is more relevant today than ever. Even the Germans, very lukewarm towards their bulky compatriot, accepted, not so much out of conviction as out of convenience, a monumental bronze statue of Marx donated by the People's Republic of China to the city of Trier, engaged in more commercial than cultural or ideological exchanges with the great so-called communist country.
Marx it is current?
Why all this drumbeat about Marx? Maybe because it's no longer scary? Or maybe because there really is something to learn from Marx's thought to interpret, if not to change, our world? After the interlude of the Welfare State, understood as a response to the worldwide spread of communism after World War II, capitalism is returning to its Victorian origins, those which were under the eyes of Marx and which he dissected with the analytical fury we know; a method that has inspired an intellectual tradition and given birth to a model that aims to engage thought in understanding reality as a whole. It is precisely the analysis of the intrinsic and spontaneous mechanisms of capitalism and its consequences on society that is the most topical aspect of Marx's thought.
We asked Giulio Sapelli, who wrote a book entitled The topicality of Marx, to explain to us what the modernity of Marx's legacy consists of. His contribution is below. Enjoy the reading!
Marxmore present than past
On May 12, 2018 elections were held in IRAQ and it did not attract the attention it deserved that the Communist Party of IRAQ forged an electoral alliance with Moktada al-Sadr, grand ayatollah of one of the most followed agnatic sects shia. The Communist Party of Iraq, founded in 1934, withstood the Bahathist and Saddam Hussein persecutions and the harsh repression following the North American invasion of Iraq in 2003, to then participate as a protagonist in Iraqi political life in the current period of reconstruction.
When they asked me to write an article to commemorate the two-centenary of the birth of Karl Marx, I could not help but look at the present rather than the past
Not only does Karl Marx continue to be studied in universities, but he also plays a significant role (and certainly greater than superficially believed and was able to believe until the current crisis of neo-liberal thought came to an end) in the world political struggle. Certainly: nothing similar to the cultural role that he had in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, when many of the political movements of the workers developed and some statehoods were created (the USSR, the most powerful of all until its collapse) by manipulating, political classes, his thought: in Russia and, after the Second World War, in China and the Indochinese peninsula, in some African states and on the island of Cuba.
Whatever judgment we can give on the theoretical legitimacy of the reference to Marx's thought by the ruling classes of the states that arose in the world after the Russian revolution of 1917 and that remade and remake themselves of his thought, one cannot fail to underline that even the manipulation of Karl Marx's thought is part of his fortune, just as "Machiavellism" is part of the fortune of Nicolò Machiavelli.
The approach of Marx
But there is a historical-concrete substance in the reverse of this fortune. Marx's thought remains, in fact, in the footsteps of David Ricardo, the only theoretical tool that one possesses to understand the unfolding of the development and crises of contemporary capitalism, beyond the academic disquisitions on the degree of truth of the nucleus of his thought, i.e. the labor theory of value, developed in the footsteps of Ricardo and remained unfinished, as it remained unfinished The capital, as the imperishable lesson of Piero Sraffa teaches us.
Marx draws the line between a theory of capitalist society in which production and work are defined as central in the creation of tangible and intangible assets and a theory based instead on the hypostatization of a rationalistic silhouette of the consumer. Marx's theory allows today, on the basis of the lesson of Rudol Hilferding and Augusto Graziani, to understand financial capitalism and its circuits for the valorisation of a commodity, money, which today banks create by themselves, overcoming the state monopoly of creation of money, through the internal production of the so-called "derivatives".
Financial centralization is intertwined with the enhancement and creation of a profit whose tendency to fall (predicted by Marx) is today there for all to see, creating that equally endogenous indebtedness of sovereign states and technocracies with the subtraction of sovereignty torn apart by the crisis such as the European Union
A booster of critical thinking
But Marx is an extraordinarily topical thinker because his thought cannot be subsumed in a totalitarian way under the steel cage of the Hegelian dialectic. Your thought on capitalism can be separated from historical materialism and still be very topical for understanding society and at the same time inspiring revolutionary struggles all over the world, also and above all in those increasingly important areas of capitalist development which have falsified the Weberian banality of development of "capital" possible only under the vaults of Protestant churches.
In the arena of social struggle, which continues to exist, Marxism continues to be a powerful factor in the development of critical thinking and resistance to the exploitation of man by man, both for those immersed in secularization and for those who instead they pursue the tradition of faiths.
The examples of Emmanuel Mounier and of a large part of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and Islamic theological and eschatological thought demonstrate this, as anyone knows who knows the art of anthropological comparison of those cultures that flow before our eyes and envelop us so pervasively that we often do not perceive its presence.
Like the thought of Karl Marx.
