The ghost debate - Thoughts on the 200th birthday of Karl Marx

On 5 May, Karl Marx's birthday marks the 200th anniversary. In this context, he is misunderstood again and again - especially from the anti-Communist corner - as the founder of a very good idea of equality.

A clear example of the biased reception of the work of Karl Marx by the opinion makers in our society is a text of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, which states (1):

"For Marx and Engels, religion was the opium of the people. And yet they did not shy away from intoxicating their followers with great, sweet-sounding words. Also because they subliminally awarded man the rank of God. A God who is free to create a new world - a good, moral one. Marx and Engels were prophets. They promised salvation - in a new, better world with true people. "

The myth of capitalism as the social order that suits humans

Around the 5th of May one will probably hear more and more that Paradise ideas degenerate from any ideology to totalitarianism and violence, so the best idea is realpolitik without such visions.

Unfortunately, one often hears in this connection that Marx's ideas are good ideas in themselves; Man, however, is unsuitable for their implementation because he is an egoist, a wolf, whose own shirt is always closer than the charity. So capitalism is the social order most closely related to human nature.

The FAZ summarizes this frequently heard position, for example in the words (2):

"According to philosopher Hobbes, man is a wolf to man (...), excesses of the profit-seeking, as they are in the Siemens corruption affair just imply again, there will always be. They are the price of a free society that takes man as he is. "

The typical propaganda image of Marx and Engels, for which they are striving for a more just world man is not created, includes the thesis that the two were unrealistic dreamer, and the realization of their ethical-sounding vision is accordingly doomed to failure.

However, it is by no means the case that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels advocated communism for their own sake, because they regarded it as fairer and therefore more humane.

Marxist statements on the developmental logic of society

We were allowed to learn from Marx the basic law of history:

"In the social production of their lives, people enter into certain relationships (...) that are independent of their will, relations of production that correspond to a certain stage of development of their material production relations. The totality of these relations of production forms the economic structure of society, the real basis upon which a legal superstructure rises and which correspond to certain social forms of consciousness.
The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and spiritual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men, their being, but, conversely, their social being that determines their consciousness. At some stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or, what is only a legal expression, with the relations of ownership within which they had hitherto moved. (...) Then comes an epoch of social revolution. With the change in the economic basis, the whole monstrous superstructure rolls over more slowly or more quickly "(3).

"All previous society was, as we have seen, based on the opposition of oppressive and oppressed classes. But in order to be able to oppress a class, its conditions must be secured, within which it can at least maintain its servile existence. (...) The modern worker, on the other hand, instead of rising with the advancement of industry, is sinking ever lower (...). (...) It is obvious here that the bourgeoisie is incapable of remaining the ruling class of society any longer and of imposing the conditions of life of its class on society as a regulatory law. She is unable to rule because she is unable to secure her slave's existence even within his slavery, because she is forced to sink him to a position where she must feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under it, that is, its life is no longer compatible with society "(4).

The need to overcome capitalism

The two quoted Marx texts show a connection that already takes any validity from the anti-communist arrogance against Marxism. For here an overcoming of capitalism is not ideologically grounded in the attempt to fill a vision with life, but as a requirement of history on a certain level of the development of productive forces. Background is the story itself.

From the time of the hunter-gatherer to the era of digitization

The humans were the longest time - at least centuries - hunter-gatherers. At this stage, they had made various leaps in tool development, including initially purely verbal communication systems of language development, which was increasingly differentiated, this includes the control of the fire, bow and arrow, the hand ax, the lance ...

A qualitative leap was the plow: it brought about a multiplication of the productivity of the individual. He meant that the former collectors now had to remain as land-holding early farmers near the fields they had ordered by plow. The settlement came. With her came walls and enclosures, within which one could let the vanquished work for themselves. In turf wars defeated were no longer regarded as a danger and obstacle, they were allowed to live on, but just as slaves.

After the plow, the steam engine was the next comparable cut: If in the Middle Ages of the feudal nobility the agriculturally managed village was the heart and basis of society, then mass production in industry became possible because machines now systematically and worldwide took over the muscle power. The machine storm, for example during the Weber uprisings, responded as the oppressed classes saw their livelihoods melt away.

The end of serfdom, which two and a half centuries before demanded the revolutionary peasants in the peasant wars, now became a necessity. The French revolution in the union of the third estate with the emerging bourgeoisie had to prevail. Then came electrification, nuclear power, the globalized market, the industrialization of wars ... Today, with digitization, we have reached the place where mental abilities pass to machines. In addition Marx:

"In our day every thing seems to be pregnant with its opposite. We see that the machinery, endowed with the wonderful power to reduce human labor and make it more fertile, destroys and depletes it to exhaustion. The new sources of wealth are transformed by a strange spell of magic into sources of distress. The victories of science seem to come at the price of loss of character.

To the extent that mankind conquers nature, man seems to be subjugated by other people or by his own wickedness. (...) All of our invention and all our advancement seem to amount to endowing material forces with spiritual life and stultifying human life into a material force. This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand and modern misery and decay on the other, this antagonism between the productive forces and the social relations of our epoch is an indisputable fact. Some parties may complain about it. (...) Or they may imagine that such remarkable progress in industry needs an equally noteworthy retrogression in politics to complete it. We for our part do not misjudge the form of the malicious spirit that continually reveals itself in all these contradictions "(5).

Revolution as a way forward or as a disaster

Indeed, the many owners of the commodity labor, who seek to secure their existence as wage-dependent, in order to exist, see their livelihoods melting away. This is the hour of the fear-exploiters who, in the context of capitalism, are gaining inspiration with scapegoating theories and pushing the social climate to the right. They will prosper as long as humanity does not ask questions about the world's virulent causes for developments in the present epoch of history, but rather expire scapegoat theories.

Personalization distracts from the structures and contexts of the challenges that arise from the rise of man-poor and fully automated production. It challenges the relationship between wage labor and capital just as concretely as the steam engine once cut off the relationship between serfs and barons / bailiffs / princes / nobles.

"The use of robots and other technologies will make millions of workers redundant in the coming years. This is the result of a calculation of the economists of the bank ING-Diba. According to this, accelerating technologisation threatens more than half of all jobs in Germany in the medium and long term. Of the 30.9 million social security and marginally employed people included in the survey, 18 million would be replaced by machinery and software over the coming years and decades. "(6).

It is quite obvious that the incision depth of these processes in the everyday situation of the people, in the economy and in the human-human relations as a whole, as well as the pace of upheavals, the revolutions in the transition from the agrarian society of the medieval feudal nobility into the industrial society of the Puts capitalism in the shade. This development threatens to run as it Rosa Luxemburg dressed in these words, resorting to a warning from Karl Marx: "Socialism or barbarism."

This is precisely where humanity stands - shortly after imperialism made the Soviet Union disappear from the scene. Karl Marx's results help to keep his head clear.

sources:

(1) http://www.bpb.de/apuz/197977/zur-truegerischen-vision-menschlicher-vollkommenheit?p=all;
(2) „Warum ist Egoismus gut?“, FAZ, 30.12.2006
(3) Marx, Vorwort zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, MEW 13 S.7
(4) Marx/Engels, Manifest, Berlin/DDR 1969, S. 32
(5) Marx, People’s Paper, MEW 12, S.3f.)
(6) Die Welt, 02.05.2015