I see a range of posters every day, slapped on bins, bus stops and lampposts, adorned with the face of Karl Marx. They usually promote something or other about a seminar on Marxism, or encourage you to vote for some minor communist party. I usually think to myself, “Wow, that’s another group of people going nowhere,” but it wasn’t until recently that I started to give serious thought as to why that is even the case. Even as someone sentimentally attached to left-wing politic – and recognises how different variants of Marxism has shaped left-wing thought – I cannot avoid the inevitable conclusion that Marxism’s time has simply passed it by.
Now, I’m not claiming that left-wing politics is dead or anything to that effect, because that would be objectively untrue. What I am suggesting is that a political ideology like Marxism cannot function in the modern day, and I would argue that Marx’s prediction of the future has been completely proven wrong by the course of recent history. It is an ideology stuck in the past and leftists just need to move on.
Despite my immense dissatisfaction with the Labour Party, I will confess that it – and most other social democratic parties – were correct in abandoning their Marxist principles throughout the 20th Century, as it has allowed them to at least remain relevant in the era of the atomised individual. What I have noticed, however, is that a large section of the left is refusing to do so, and if it keeps on this path, it will flounder in irrelevance forever.
The most pressing issue with Marxism in the present day is that in a majority of developed nations, the concept of an urban proletariat simply no longer exists. The deindustrialisation of most Western countries means that society is in a war of all against the one-percent, which is not a setting in which Marxist understandings of class struggle can succeed. We exist in an entirely new epoch of politics, and stubbornly refusing to acknowledge this fact has saddled the left with a seemingly dwindling base of support.
The fact that Marxist theory even exists is emblematic of this issue: it is so needlessly complicated. I cannot think of any period in history in which the average individual has had the free time to critically analyse works like ‘Das Kapital’, or even fully read the Communist Manifesto. The only significant group of people who are able, or even remotely willing, to study the works of Marx is the middle class. There is an everpresent gap between the champions of Marxism and the people whose interests it claims to represent. When the supposed ideology of the working class is, for the most part, only understood and promoted by the literal bourgeoisie, then it is an ideology that is completely and utterly inauthentic. The working class, both in the past and the present, has never had agency over what Marxism is or should be.
Further, the fractious nature of the ideology makes it hard to properly define, and its tendencies towards authoritarianism make it at best unappealing to consider. I recall being approached by two people selling a communist paper and being asked if I was a communist – to which I found myself wondering whether they were referring to Orthodox Marxism or Marxism-Leninism or Maoism or Trotskyism or Luxemburgism or one of the other dozen niche interpretations of the word. And these are just what I know to be “mainstream” interpretations of Marx. At present, the ideology is a joke and means too many things to too many different people. When I am told by someone that they are conservative or liberal or a Social Democrat, I can instinctively understand their position on most issues. One can never instinctively understand Marxism beyond its basic commitment to class struggle, a single principle that tells you almost nothing about their positions on countless other contemporary political issues.
What personally bugs me the most about Marxism is that it has demonstrated almost no empirical success. It has continually been bested by nationalism and fascism in capturing the hearts and minds of the public during times of economic pain. Marx did not anticipate the Russian Revolution or the rise of the CCP in China, nor did he foresee that his ideology would become the rallying point for post-colonial nationalism during the Cold War, or even that capitalism would reform so far towards socialisation. Consequently, contemporary Marxists waste their efforts agitating for a revolution that will never materialise, because its foundational assumptions are deeply flawed.
I don’t dislike Marx – I actually think that he was a pretty smart guy. All that matters to me is that he was wrong, and thus must be recognised as much. It is important to remember that Marxism at its core is but a humble theory, and that theory has been disproven time and time again. While it played a formative role in shaping the left into what it has become, its analytical limits are far more obvious today. The problems the left faces in the present day require a present way of thinking.
