What Would Karl Marx Think?

There is nothing left of the Left.

When I was 17 I read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie in English translation under the the title Capital: Critique of Political Economy. I was deeply impressed by how Marx had figured it all out—history, economy, morality—everything!

I gazed at photographs of the man with the big bushy beard who spent most of his days in the British Museum reading room—a perfect scholar. When I was 18, I made a special pilgrimage to his grave in Highgate Cemetery. Somewhere I have an ancient photo of myself—a goofy 18-year-old kid—standing in front of this colossal monument funded by a wealthy capitalist admirer.

Only later did it dawn on me that reality is a bit more complex than Marx’s neat conceptualization. With a bit of literary education, I realized the irony of the fact that Marx was a lifelong admirer of Goethe, who famously observed:

A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.

Marx’s saw in the owners of capital what he carried in his heart—namely, hatred. At about the time this dawned on me, I read a poem by Edgar Bauer, who’d known Marx when they were students at the University of Berlin.

A dark fellow from Trier, a vigorous monster,

With angry fist clenched, he rants ceaselessly,

As though ten thousand devils held him by the hair.

And yet, for all of his shortcomings, Marx did make a serious effort to assess the reality of the world. We can fault him for his adolescent egotism that hindered him from recognizing that the world is too complex to be reduced to his neat formulae. All the same, he undoubtedly believed in the value of scholarship and rational reflection.

I often contemplate what he would have thought about what is the left of the Left. What was, for the better part of 200 years, a doctrine of individual freedom, fairness, and equality before the law has become a chaotic maelstrom of childish tantrums, malevolence, resentment, brutality, and larceny.

Every now and then I stumble across an old Leftist who has retained the capacity for serious critical reflection—someone like the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis—but guys like him have become extreme and antiquated exceptions.

Today’s young leftists strike me as lunatics with no education, no ideas, and no self-control—people susceptible to every enthusiasm and slogan that is fed to them by their wealthy puppet masters.

I suspect that if Karl Marx were alive, he would share my perception.