Cosmic Marx

Today is the one hundred and ninety fifth anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx and many ask how can the writings of a man born in 1818, almost 200 years ago, be relevant to the modern world. They also allege his ideas have led in practice to tyranny and dictatorships by advocating an authoritarian all-powerful state which stripped people of their freedom and individuality and ignored the human spirit, reducing everything to economics and out-moded notions of class. They regard him as a utopian whose predictions all failed to come about. They conclude that it is not the capitalist system which sacrifices the liberty of the many to the liberty of the privileged few but Marxism.


If only such criticisms of Karl Marx were accurate. Marx was no more responsible for the brutal oppression of Red China and the Soviet Union than Jesus was for the Crusades and the Inquisition. Nor was Marx some sort of utopian dreamer.

There is no greater misrepresentation of Marx than that which is to be found in the interpretation of Marx by the Bolsheviks, the social reformers, and the capitalist, all of whom assume that Marx wanted only the economic improvement of the working class. The truth is that for Marx the situation of a worker in a Russian state-owned factory, a British nationalised factory or an American “free-enterprise" factory, were all essentially the same.

For Marx the aim of socialism was the emancipation of man, and the emancipation of man was the same as a oneness with nature, a humanity which is at all times part of nature. Marx’s conception of socialism was founded on the possibility of a free individual in a free society where the well-being of each assured by the well-being of all. Marx's position was quite clearly on the side of the conquest of poverty, but equally against consumption as a supreme end.

The Socialist Party accept the ideas of Marx we consider important. We do not include those where he was proven wrong. We are not followers of Marx but adherents to a body of principles called Marxism. Marx had many personal foibles and failings. In his student youth he behaved like a drunken, dueling waster in imitation of his Junker friends. He lied to his relatives to get money. He squandered foolishly a good part of his inheritance. He was the father of an illegitimate child by his servant (or so it is claimed). He expressed himself in racist, anti-semitic slurs in private correspondence.

We say, despite all this, that Marx was the most profound economic, political and social thinker of his day, to whom we owe a debt. Marx furnished us with a guide to thinking in his historical materialism and laid bare the reality of the economic world for the proletariat.
Marx explained that the laws of the capitalist system are not products of nature such as the law of gravity but are the result of human activity. Commodities and their relations are created by human beings and human beings can abolish them. Yet, because we are ignorant of the laws of economics we think of commodities as natural, as things which , although created by us, assume an existence independent of us and go to a market whose laws we are subject to and must conform to. This is similar to the creation of religions or "primitive" belief systems where a person creates a fetish and then bows down to it and thinks it has power over him and he must subject himself to its demands and will. The capitalist market appears as the natural form of economic exchange and there is no alternative to it. It is not true that there is no alternative and humans can abolish capitalism and rid themselves of subjection to the laws of commodity production and create an economic world which serves human needs and one where human needs do not take second place to the need to exchange commodities at a profit.

These are enormous achievements. Marx as a scientific investigator and scholar, writer and author in the field of economic, political, and social research, stands preeminent. Marx was a fighter in the cause of the working class and its freedom. For Marx there is no socialism without democratic rule by the people. To this end Marx devoted the best years of his life.