I’ll start this by screaming: I’M NOT A MARXIST. I’M NOT A COMMUNIST. Ok?
If you grew up in Venezuela and witnessed the complete and total destruction of your country at the hands of a populist dictatorship, you’re pretty much vaccinated against all things communist.
However, Hugo Chavez also had a huge impact on the country’s I.Q. Nowadays, you can barely mention the name “Karl Marx” without giving a Venezuelan a brain seizure. This is highly unfortunate: the impact Marx had on the history of ideas is impossible to ignore. So let’s talk about Karl Marx and his role in the history of philosophy.
Let me say this again: we’ll be talking about Marx’s philosophy, aka, Marxism. We’ll not be talking about Communism or Socialism, which are political and social theories in action. So arguing something like, “Marx was wrong, because the USSR fell in 1989” is ridiculous.
The 3 most important paradigmatic changes in history
When (if) you follow a liberal arts degree, you’ll hear the notion that 3 major thinkers loom large over everyone else: Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Their epistemological revolutions are tantamount to Galilleo upending the geocentric theory: they changed Man’s place in our conception of the universe, bringing us down to earth. No, the earth isn’t at the center of our galaxy, let alone universe; no, we’re not divine beings descended from angels, we’re sophisticated primates (some of us less so). Later, Freud threw a wrench into the idea that we were these rational, Cartesian beings, by describing the role of our unconscious and showing all the non-rational behaviors we have. Marx topped it off by emancipating Man from notions like destiny or fate, giving humans the ability to control their history. These thinkers had a huge impact on humankind, transcending geographical boundaries and language barriers to permeate the whole world.
What is history?
Marx’s contribution was pointing the analytical lens at history from a material perspective. Our species is unique in this sense: we’re the only animal capable of using storytelling techniques to create social cohesion. From tribal songs and Greek tragedies to history departments in college, we’re an imaginative species that needs these ideas to make sense of the world.
However, Marx was the first to propose we can manipulate history, making us the active actors of our stories. We didn’t have to suffer passively anymore: we could take the reins of history in our hands and change our conditions. That’s the brilliance of the Marxist approach: giving people the tools to incarnate their history, even though these tools are cruelly misguided and plainly wrong on many occasions. The point is: you can take control of your history and forge your destiny.
History is built on dialectic materialism
You’ve heard of dialectics, right? It’s what XVIII-century German philosopher Hegel proposed to bring philosophy out of dualistic structures. He thought two opposites in stark contradiction could be solved through a “synthesis” process: a solution containing both extremes as well as their solution. Think of it as black versus white being solved with gray, if gray is considered a sort of evolution from the color contradiction. That’s my layman-color example, I’d be crucified in academia for saying that. The classes I took on dialectics saw the professor rambling through Hegel’s example of Jesus Christ and tying himself into knots in the process. That one goes, God (thesis), Man (antithesis) = God-cum-man, aka Christ (synthesis). Let’s not bother with that for now.
Enter Marx: the idea that history itself is a dialectical process. History is also material, based on things and objects (not ideas). So you get to his core tenet: the History of mankind is the history of oppression of man by man. All periods are looked at from a power dynamic, the haves versus the have-nots, if you will.
Why is it dialectic? Because Marx doesn’t consider history as a succession of different oppressors, but as an evolution or change in this oppression.
Consider slavery: you have an obvious slave-master power dynamic going on. The “synthesis” appears when slaves are freed, and this gives way to a new historic dialectical period: feudalism. Now we have a material power dynamic based on renters versus land owners. This in turn evolves into industrial society, where the workers versus factory owner dynamic is supposed to also be material and dialectic... That’s the gist of it.
Why Marx Matters
I obviously have serious, serious critiques of this point of view. To name the most gaping one: we’re in a digital, globalized world, not the industrial hellscape that was eighteenth-century Britain. I work for a tech company; when Marx says we “workers” should “seize the means of production”, does he mean we should all keep our company’s computers? Who’s exploiting me exactly, when I publish a work article I freely came up with and wrote? Intellectual endeavors are very difficult to analyze with dialectic materialism, because the exploiter-exploited logic just doesn’t hold up. I work in a collaborative environment, where people tacitly agree to exchange information to get our projects done. Nobody “exploits” me: I could quit in a heartbeat and my life would be pretty much the same.
Notwithstanding, this doesn’t mean everybody has a swank tech job in the first world where they’re respected and recognized for their talents. So keeping a dialectic eye out for power dynamics is a good thing. The problem is when you treat it as a one-size-fits-all tool and you muck about trying to ascribe “exploiter” and “exploited” roles to everything. That’s pretty dumb.
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater: Karl Marx, for all his deficiencies and insufferable style (have you ever tried to read Das Kapital?) made us conscious that we could change our fate, even if some countries, like Venezuela, changed it for the worse.