KARL MARX

POSTSCRIPT: MARX TODAY 4 2 3
nature of a future communist society are extremely sketchy. He had much
more to say about capitalism that he did about communism. It was Marx's
most celebrated disciple, Lenin, who was responsible for attempting to
construct a Marxist society after leading Marx's Russian followers to victory
in the Revolution of 1917. Lenin never knew Marx. He was only a
very young boy when Marx died and was brought up in a completely
different setting. Lenin reshaped the legacy of Marx, and became part of
an extended legacy. That 'extended legacy' is now usually called
Marxism-Leninism. The success of Lenin and his fellow-revolutionaries
put Marxism on the world map and meant that ever since for most people
Marxism has been closely associated with Soviet Russia - whose demise
would have caused Marx neither surprise nor dismay. But it is not only
in Marxist states that Marx's ideas have had influence. Throughout the
rest of the world, he has changed the way people think. Whether we
agree with him or not, Marx has shaped our ideas about society. He built
up a system which draws on philosophy, on history, on economics and
on politics. And although the professional philosophers, the economists
and the political scientists often do not accept his theories, they cannot
ignore them. They have become part of the mental scaffolding of the
century with the result that a lot of our thinking about history and society
is a dialogue with Marx's ghost.
To understand what Marx himself meant, a lot of history has to be
stripped away. For Marx's ideas have been overlaid by many different
interpretations and have been used to justify many different sorts of
politics. How are we to assess the importance of this ghost in the contemporary
world? What message, if any, do Marx's ideas have for us a century
and more after his death? Of course, the world has changed much since
Marx wrote. Marx's age was the age of steam power and the electric
telegraph. For him the great upheaval was caused when the traditional
craftsmen of the sort he actually knew in the old Communist League
were being replaced by unskilled or semi-skilled factory workers, the real
modern industrial proletariat. A century after Marx died that industrial
proletariat is being split up. In the West it is losing its identity. The
microchip gives the blue-collar workers white collars instead - and introduces
chronic structural unemployment. Thea microchip takes them away
from the factory, mill or mine. The means of production that Marx knew
about, that Lenin knew about, are changing fast. By the end of this
century the proportion of industrial workers will have declined considerably
and the numbers of technical and professional workers will have
increased. And this same technical progress has given the impersonal state
m industrial societies vast and frightening powers of intervention and
control.