KARL MARX

Philosophy and Revolution

By Shlomo Avineri

As an influence on social change, the gospel according to Marx has few rivals. In his economic works, Marx predicted that capitalism would inevitably collapse; and in “The Communist Manifesto,” he exhorted the workers of the world to unite and seize political power, then forge a stateless, classless society of perfect harmony.



Neither has happened yet. But what has happened, as a result in part of Marx’s work, is impressive enough.



In the late 19th century, his teachings informed the rapid rise of what became, for a time, the largest mass political party in Europe, the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Eschewing the reformist policies of the Social Democrats, Russian Marxists, led by Lenin in 1917, and Chinese Marxists, led by Mao in 1949, treated Marx’s writings as the authoritative basis for designing despotic new forms of rule as a means for realizing Communism.



More recently still, millennial socialists in the United States, following in the footsteps of the New Left of the ′60s, have rejected both reformist political parties and totalitarian Communist regimes, in hopes of realizing a more fully democratic version of Marx’s original vision of social justice. As the headline of a 2017 New York Times Op-Ed piece by Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of the contemporary American Marxist journal Jacobin, put it, “Socialism’s Future May Be Its Past.”

