Recent contributions and relevance of Marxist Thought Today
One line of development of Marxist thought naturally depended on the Russian revolution in 1917 and the transition from the civil war to a superpower. Lenin (1870-1924) was the main theorist in this period. This more dogmatic-deterministic interpretation of Marx found its culmination in Stalin’s (and in China in Mao Tse Tung’s) writings. Besides the condification of dogmatic Marxism , there were also relevant debates on how to organize the society and economy in a new socialist country, how should for example the financial, human and natural resources be invested and divided among consumption and investment, ect.
Another debate took place in the confines and strategies og European social democracy, In Germany, it was a long way from voluntaristic Marxism under prohibition to Kautsky’s and later Bernstein’s revisionism, to the Godesberger program in the 1950s and diverse third ways at present.
There was a strong influence of Marxism on the decolonization policies in the 1960s and 1970s in Asia, Africa, and Latin America where for example the peaceful socialist policy by Allende in Chile was suppressed by national and American military forces. The influence of Marxism on Christian thought was felt in for example South Africa and Roman Catholicism in South America (the theology of liberation by archbishop Camarra). Marxism influenced the student’s uprisings in 1968 and the feminist, antiracism, the peace and the environmental movements.
Out of these movements and the experience with the state communist countries (which amounted to at least one third of the world population in the 1970s and 1980s) developed what may be called intellectual Marxism which went beyond the classical critique of capitalism. It includes the reception of Freudian psychoanalysis, the changing role of the state in capitalism, the history of the worker’s movement, a critical analysis of law, the critique of the commodity aesthetics and ideology in capitalism, the reception of Marxism in critical American institutionalism in the tradition of Veblen and Commons,etc.
One major stand of critical Marxism is the negative dialectics of the Frankfurt critical school, originally developed by Horkheimer and Adorno, where all eschatological dreams have been abandoned. Their most relevant disciple today is Habermas who after the linguistic turn supplemented the Marxian concept of labor as an elementary category of human self-expression by the autonomous dimension of communicative interaction which should not be distorted.
It is not possible to review critical-intellectual Marxism in detail here. Instead, let us ask briefly if a reformulated Marxism should have a place in the universe of science and public discourse today. Paradoxically, with the demise of socialism and the rise of capitalism as the dominating universal and globalizing system, the Marx’ way of looking at economy and society from an economic interest and contradiction of interests and exploitation/alienation paradigm may play a role in emphasizing the global and never-ending character of capital accumulation and direct our attention to the price of its normless dynamism in the economic, political, social, cultural, ecological, and anthropological dimensions.
In the economic dimension, let us only briefly mention the constant reproduction of a rising international reserve army, the problem of increasing inequality between nations and in the confines of nations, the dysfunctional aspects of speculation over enterprise and the public policy in favour not of Main but of Wall Street, the feeling of many people to life in an unjust and irrational society where the increase of unemployment is greeted with an increase in stock prices. Further, an economic system in which the link between effort and reward became relatively loose (winner-takes-all problem). The increase of internationally operating few oligopolies in major branches of industry, the increasing practice of firms to lengthen the work-day without a monetary compensation due to the dangers to become unemployed in the age of downsizing, and the international discrepancy between supply and demand and the resulting overaccumulation of capital for example in the car industry, may be taken as negative examples of global capitalism today from a Marxian perspective.
In the political sphere, the more and more subordinate role of the state to short-run business interests and the state’s inability to confiscate sufficient taxes due to the mobility of capital deserves critical recognition. The subjugation of all life processes to the profit motive and commodification, the dissolution of social bonds, the downgrading or international McDonaldization of culture, the visible shrinking of high culture (literature, theatres, cultural foreign self-presentation like the Goethe-Institutes in Germany), and the commercialization and banalization of the mass media (especially TV), can be interpreted as the increase in the three dimension of alienation worked out by Marx. It is the final price of commercialized capitalism in which the logic of profit-maximization and commodification invades all spheres of society and transforms the individual character into what intellectual-critical Marxists in the Hegelian tradition called an unhappy consciousness.
All this is not to say that Marx’ predictions of the future of capitalism were correct. He often thought that socialism is a simple necessity in the not too distant future, and that the class struggle will lead to revolution and not to an integration of the working class into the capitalist system. He underrated the innovative dynamism of capitalist that the population in the capitalist centre would continue to increase. He did not see the population explosion in the so-called underdeveloped countries and he did (and maybe could) not foresee the dramatic global degradation of the environment.
The most radical consequence of the present situation is drawn in a Marxist perspective by Sarkar (1999) who argues that humanity’s basic choices are universal capitalism and ecological disaster or what he calls eco-socialism, characterized by the values of equality, co-operation and solidarity. For him, the former socialist countries (which primarily tried to catch up economically) and capitalism are variants of industrialism and “economism”, that is, continuous growth is considered possible and desirable and material affluence is held necessary for a good life. An opinion, we also found in Marx. For Sarkar, socialism today is more a question of human relations and moral growth and less of economic development. Sarkar argues that today the human specie has to take care of its survival facing the degradation of nature and the biosphere. Therefore, a sustainable socialism has to be combined with a limit to growth paradigm. Presently, the forces of production are not developed enough but due to ecological restraints they are too developed. An ecological policy in capitalism is doomed to fail because Marx was right that capitalism is essentially combined with the accumulation and extension of capital and the motivational forces of greed, status emulation and profit.
Eco-socialism means first contraction of the level of production and then a low-level steady state economy with a policy of simplified need, the ecological regulation by a world economic trade council, de-centralized production structures (also due to the increased prices for transportation), and labour-intensive technologies. A one-world perspective, the active creation of a new vision of global civilization which may include a non-theistic spirituality is warranted in Sarkar’s view in which socialism means first of all a change in values. Practically it means the planned and ordered retreat of the overdeveloped forces of production, ect. Per head in the development of the means of production at his time, this vision would entail the acceptance of a lower standard of living (but not necessarily of happiness) than today which can be better accepted if the sacrifices are borne proportionately, which means a policy of radical equality.
The eschatological component of Marx and his promise to ameliorate all dimensions of human life which disregards some societal trade-offs are less apparent in Sarkar’s reformulation. The problem we face today may be that if we are honest and accept what we all know about world-wide ecological degradation and the catastrializing counties like China with billions of ambitious consumers we understand the possible urgency of Sarkar’s position. On the other hand, we know today that the attempt to plan an economy on a large scale may lead to an ultra-authoritarian political system, in this case an eco-dictatorship.