Marx Is Still Alive and Changing the World

By Manuel E. Yepe

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs3747.html
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

“Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s Great Leap Forward into Capitalism, the class conflict that Marx believed determined the course of history seemed to melt away in a prosperous era of free trade and free enterprise.”

This simple idea was the world scenario according to the assumptions and descriptions of U.S. corporate media, but the stubborn reality has forced other analyses like the one made by Michael Schuman, published in TIME magazine on March 27, which begins with the paragraph above. 

What the article calls China’s Great Leap Forward into Capitalism is in fact the economic miracle through which the Asian giant has achieved the highest record of poverty reduction in human history, based on a development strategy in its socialist project that makes use -with a wider scope and intensity than in the past- of the tools of the market, individual initiative and foreign investment, as well as the possibilities and long reach provided by globalization.

The article in TIME says that although Marx’s theory on the “dictatorship of the proletariat” didn’t quite work out as planned, one would have to accept that, in the light of today’s widening inequalities, what Marx had predicted is just, and class struggle is back all over the world.

TIME acknowledges that in the U.S. the rich are getting richer while the middle class and the poor are paying the price. It warns that with the global economy is in a protracted crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx’s biting critique of capitalism — that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed. The future points to a heightened conflict between the rich and the working classes, suggests the U.S. corporate magazine.

“Workers of the world are growing angrier and demanding their fair share of the global economy. From the floor of the U.S. Congress to the streets of Athens to the assembly lines of southern China, political and economic events are being shaped by escalating tensions between capital and labor to a degree unseen since the communist revolutions of the 20th century.”

“Tensions between economic classes in the U.S. are clearly on the rise. Society has been perceived as split between the “99%” (the regular folk, struggling to get by) and the “1%” (the connected and privileged superrich getting richer every day),” the U.S. publication states.

In a Pew Research Center poll released last year, two-thirds of the respondents believed the U.S. suffered from “strong” or “very strong” conflict between rich and poor, a significant 19-percentage-point increase from 2009, ranking it as the No. 1 division in society.

The article in TIME warns that the class conflict has dominated American politics and believes that “the partisan battle over how to fix the nation’s budget deficit has been, to a great degree, a class struggle. Whenever President Barack Obama talks of raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to close the budget gap, conservatives scream he is launching a “class war” against the affluent.” 

It also supports its statements with the fact that Obama based a big part of his re-election campaign on characterizing the Republicans as insensitive to the working classes.

There are signs that the world’s laborers are increasingly impatient with their feeble prospects. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets of cities such as Madrid and Athens, protesting stratospheric unemployment and the austerity measures that are making matters even worse.

The article in TIME reminds us that the U.S. and European political left was dragged rightward since the free-market onslought of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but points out that it is beginning to devise a credible alternative course.

The essay concludes by saying that Marx not only diagnosed capitalism’s flaws but also the consequences of those flaws. “If policymakers don’t discover new methods of ensuring fair economic opportunity, the workers of the world may just unite. Marx may yet have his revenge.”

April 2013.