Happy Birthday, Karl Marx

Saturday was Karl Marx’s 200^th birthday. It’s dangerous to even wish Mr. Marx a happy birthday, because his name has become so closely associated with dictatorship and mass murder in the 20^th century. But Marx killed nobody and never advocated killing anyone. He spent his life fighting against repressive monarchies in the 19^th century.

Marx criticized the governments and societies he experienced in Europe, because they limited the freedoms of the majority. Hereditary monarchy, surveillance of political meetings, censorship, and banning of labor unions were discriminatory against the working class.

Marx’s political program for workers was remarkably progressive in the middle of the 19^th century and includes ideas that should be familiar to Americans. The “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 included: the right to vote for everyone (probably he just meant men) over 21; a free justice system; “universal arming of the people”; universal free education; strongly progressive taxes; and separation of church and state.

Marx signed a letter by the International Working Men’s Association congratulating Abraham Lincoln on his 1864 reelection, which ended: “it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.” Marx died in 1883, long before anyone who called himself a “Marxist” entered the political arena.

Marx experienced capitalism in its rawest form. The painfully detailed descriptions of the lives of early English industrial workers by Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels led them both to see the social, economic and moral flaws in a system where some own property and others work for them for wages. In today’s economically wealthy Atlantic world, where their demands for political change have been met for a century or more, their criticism of economic inequality as the basis for political inequality is still valuable.

Besides critiquing the world’s economic system based on the system’s own statistics, and calling for its overthrow, Marx occasionally imagined what real personal freedom for everyone would be like, with no company and no government telling people what to do. In the “German Ideology” in 1845, he wrote: “each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” He argued that such many-sided activity was most likely to produce happy and fulfilled people, willing to cooperate with each other, rather than compete against everyone.

There are strong resemblances to the extreme libertarian wing of Republican politics in America, but they won’t admit it. Marx is an emphatic punching bag for the right, because his writings lay bare the poverty of their appeal to people without property.

Every idea has dangerous possible consequences. Medieval Popes and critics of the Papacy like Luther both thought the Bible admonished them to demean and even kill Jews. People who called themselves Marxists killed millions during the 20^th century.

Thoughtful, courageous, honest and ethical Marxists were inspired by the vision of a free society of free individuals to oppose Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and their versions of Marx’s ideas, often losing their lives in the process. Marxists, both intellectuals and workers, became leaders in the deadly struggle against fascism in Europe, along with certain religious Christians. Christians who risked their own lives to hide Jews from the Germans, and sometimes their own police, demonstrated the hopeful humanitarianism of the Christian message. Does it make sense to toss them in the same pot as Torquemada?

Blaming Marx for the history of the Soviet Union or Communist China is like blaming Jesus for the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition.

On Marx’s birthday, as I do most days, I spent a few hours in my office, dug in my garden, read, and amused myself sharing the NBA finals with my wife. The productive, creative and self-regulated life appeals to me. I don’t like being told what to do or need a boss to tell me to how be useful to society. I like collaborations among equals. I see honor in all types of honest labor and don’t think that the work of executives is worth more than 300 times the work of average employees. I believe that humans become stunted intellectually and morally by a lifetime of one-sided dependent labor. We flourish best when we are able to do many things, develop many talents, control our own destinies.

For those ideas and others for which there is no space here, I am grateful to Marx. I wish the ideologues who perverted his ideas in order to justify becoming political tyrants had paid closer attention to what he meant.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal_Courier, May 8, 2018