Rethinking Marx

2013 is a year of anniversaries, so one for Karl Marx, who was born in Trier on May 5, 1818. To honor this 195th non-decanal birthday, German artist Ottmar Hörl placed 500 statues of the bearded thinker throughout his hometown of Trier. He said to Der Spiegel: I want to encourage passersby to rethink Marx, reminding us that although the German thinker is associated with labor, capital, and an impressive fortress of facial hair, his actual impact is arguably far more complex.

Ottmar Hörl and his Marx men (© Der Spiegel)

The miniature Marx men are all the same size and shape but cast in different shades of red. No one will deny Karl's historical importance, but were his ideas about class struggle not interred with the communist regimes in Eastern Europe? Not entirely; some governments around the globe still hold on to communism, where, in principle, all goods are equally shared between the people. In this sense, China is not a communist country. Any regime claiming to be a government of the people, by the people, for the people cannot overcome human nature, i.e., some people are better off than others. When these persons are party functionaries, as in the case of the Nazis or the GDR, the inequality is more than just annoying. The question is, are we in our democracies immune to inequalities recently caused by turbo-capitalism?

In a TIME article, Marx's Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World, I found Marx's statement: Accumulation of wealth on one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, the agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole. Without describing the article's content and considering that we are still far away from workers of the world uniting and even further away from a dictatorship of the proletariat, we still may ask how those who govern us can assure fairer economic opportunities. 

The gap between the rich and poor has been widening in recent years. In the 1970s, the wealthiest 10% of Americans earned 33% of the total income. By 2007, the percentage had increased to 49.7%, to nearly half. In Germany, where in the 1960s nobody imagined such a development, the situation seems worse. In 2004, the wealthiest 10% earned 49% of the total, a figure that increased to 53% in 2008.

On April 24, I published a blog about our revolutionary hike from Günterstal to Freiburg's town hall. I mentioned Freiburg's Social Democrat MP Gernot Erler, who, on that occasion, traced back the combination of the two words social and democracy to 1849. Ernst Elsenhans wrote them in the newspaper of Fort Rastatt Der Festungs-Bote. It was No 10, published near the end of the Baden Revolution on July 18, 1849, and was titled: Was ist und was will die soziale Demokratie? (What is social democracy, and what is its aim?). I read the article and was stunned by one paragraph:

Die Demokratie an sich wird uns weder Arbeit noch Brod geben, sie wird unsere fälligen Zinsen nicht zahlen, sie wird uns nicht von Sorgen und Leiden befreien, denn sie stößt bei Lösung ihrer Aufgabe, das Volk zur Herrschaft zu bringen, stets auf das Mißverhältnis des Eigenthums, des Besitzes. Diese Ungleichheit, dieses Mißverhältnis sucht nun der Sozialismus durch Herstellung der Gleichheit herzustellen ... Die Vertheilung der Güter soll nach dem Verlangen der Sozialisten von der Arbeit abhängig gemacht und dadurch die möglichste Gleichheit unter den Menschen erzielt, es soll jedem fleißigen, ordentlichen und geschickten Mann Gelegenheit verschafft werden, so viel Besitz zu erwerben, als zu einem vernünftigen Genuß des Lebens nötig ist ... (Democracy alone will give us neither jobs nor bread, it will not pay the interest on our debts, it will not liberate us from sorrows and sufferings for when trying to bring the people to power it always stumbles against the disproportion of property, of possession. Socialism tries to solve this disproportion by creating equality ... According to the socialists, the distribution of goods shall depend on work. Thereby the best possible equality among people shall be achieved. Each hardworking, decent, industrious man shall have the opportunity to acquire sufficient property to assure him a reasonable enjoyment of life...)

Der Festungs-Bote No 10 of July 18, 1849

For Ernst Elsenhans, socialism does not mean dispossession or leveling down but that every person should earn his living while working. In addition, remunerations shall be more than just sufficient to survive. The text is burning hot for my country where unemployment is low, but many a man or woman needs two jobs to earn his/her living or depend, while working, on additional government money supplements. The victims are young people, single parents and their children, and old people with insufficient old-age pensions. This is a social scandal in a country like Germany.

Like Ottmar Hörl, I want to encourage you to rethink Marx and would like to add: How deeply do you like the shade of red for your miniature Marx man?

Marx monument in Berlin (© Andreas Höfert†)

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