On Monday, Kyung Hee University associate philosophy professor Jason Barker penned an op-ed for The New York Times celebrating Karl Marx’s birthday with this exciting headline: “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” If he was, the people north of the 38th parallel might have an interest in hearing about it, but Barker earned his space in the Times, which has spent the last two years reviving talk of communism’s glories in articles like “When Communism Inspired Americans,” “Socialism’s Future May Be Its Past,” and “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.”
So, how was Marx right — aside from the mountains of corpses created under the rubric of his ideology? According to Barker, Marx was filled with “boundless intellectual enthusiasm.” And Barker criticizes Marx’s reliance on Hegel: “If ever there were a convincing case to be made for the dangers of philosophy, then surely it’s Marx’s discover of Hegel.” But then Barker gets to his case:
Today the legacy would appear to be alive and well. Since the turn of the millennium countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age.
What, exactly, was Marx right about? According to Barker, he was right that “capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit.” But this is idiotic. Unless Marx could show involuntary removal of labor by the upper classes, there was no basis for the accusation of labor “appropriation”; that case still can’t be made in a free and open society. And as for Marx’s “prescient … conviction that capitalism has an inbuilt tendency to destroy itself,” that conviction isn’t prescient — it’s just true that Left-wing intellectuals have ginned up opposition to the free exchange of goods and services for political benefit. – READ MORE
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