Philosophy

1) Karl Marx has won the BBC's Greatest Philosopher poll, with over twice the votes of the second placed David Hume (via DTPs for W).

2) Followers of Karl Marx have been responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people over the past century.

Discuss.

Comments

[Sluggo]

I'll be with you in a second. Got to get my Che t-shirts out of the drier.

[J.Cassian]

That's because Marx is more of a cult than a philosopher (and what a cult he was). I'd guess L. Ron Hubbard and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon would have done even better than Karl had they been allowed to enter (as would Kemal Ataturk- remember the Time Man of the Century Poll?- and, now you come to mention it, Snoopy). Just be thankful it's not the sixties and we haven't had lots of smug Western cretins voting for Mao Zedong as history's greatest thinker.

[Tim]

So, J. Cassian, you're saying the result was swayed by the vast membership of the Communist Party of Britain voting as a block?

[J.Cassian]

More like dogmatic academics, members of the student tosser community, assorted "anti-globo" soap-dodgers, sad teenagers who think the Manic Street Preachers write the greatest poetry since Arthur Rimbaud, Guardianistas who think deep down Karl was just a nice old liberal like them, anti-conformist conformists high on Theory and so on and so on. The usual suspects.

[siaw]

Norm Geras (for instance) is a follower of Karl Marx. Is he responsible for the death of anyone at all, let alone the deaths of more than 100 million people?
More to the point, since Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al. were (among other things) notorious liars, why do you take their word for it that they were followers of Marx at all, rather than murderous rulers of largely peasant societies that had very little in common with the advanced capitalist societies that Marx was concerned with?
It could also be relevant to ask how many people have been killed by followers of Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha ... but that would be as cheap a shot as the ones you've made in your post.

[Mick H]

SIAW
Cheap shot? Of course they were followers of Marx. It's not even arguable: they called themselves Marxists, had busts of the great Karl all over the place.... No doubt you'd argue they got him wrong, but it is something of a problem for Marxists that his legacy is so drenched in blood. Just rotten bad luck, I suppose, that every time a Marxist regime comes to power it happens to be led by a lying homicidal maniac.

[J.Cassian]

"Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al. were (among other things) notorious liars, why do you take their word for it that they were followers of Marx at all"

So we're reduced to putting a new spin on the "Cretan liar" to absolve Marx of any blame for his grubby spawn? I forgot, "historical materialism" means history doesn't matter. Actually, Marx himself wasn't above a bit of opportunistic lying ("dialectics"), so maybe he didn't believe his own theories. Western Marxists must be remarkably unobservant people, seeing how the majority of them have been hoodwinked by at least one of those genocidal "liars" over the years. It's sheer coincidence every time a professed Marxist gets their hands on power, it all ends in carnage.

"...rather than murderous rulers of largely peasant societies that had very little in common with the advanced capitalist societies that Marx was concerned with?"

That's right, the fact no Marxist state developed in the advanced capitalist world should be proof Marx's predictions were baloney. The working classes' lives improved, there was no immiseration and so no proletarian revolution. This was obvious even during Marx's lifetime, so Marx's theories should have been quietly retired to the limbo of sub-Hegelian drivel from which they emerged and no blood would have been spilt. But like an apocalyptic cult whose predictions of the end of the world sadly keep failing to materialise, Marxists (or "Marxists", as you'd have it) devised a series of increasingly inventive excuses as to why their guru's "scientific" prophecies had not come true. The first and most influential of these was "Marxist-Leninism", in which a self-styled intellectual elite inflicted its ideology on the largely peasant society of Russia. Who'd read Marx? The peasants or the Bolsheviks? Credit where credit's due.

"Norm Geras (for instance) is a follower of Karl Marx. Is he responsible for the death of anyone at all, let alone the deaths of more than 100 million people?"

Who's saying that? You don't have to be a member of the Cuban secret police to wear a Che T-shirt. But if you endorse any of the Marxist dictators (or their henchmen) from Lenin onwards, then you are unavoidably condoning mass murder and oppression in some form or other. Members of the French Communist Party in the late 1940s didn't actually do any "wet work" themselves, but they were responsible for the education of Pol Pot and other leaders of the Khmer Rouge.

"It could also be relevant to ask how many people have been killed by followers of Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha"

It could, but at least two of those figures specifically forebade violence. Marx called for the "violent overthrow of the existing order" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat"; Engels advocated the genocide of reactionary Slav nations. In any case, it's well known the trouble with religion is that its all-embracing worldview inevitably tends to attract a fair number of dogmatic zealots to the cause (which is why Marxism is like a cult). But Marx was a zealot himself. No one disembowelled a pregnant woman in the name of David Hume, because he offered doubt rather than dogma.

[Paul Davies]

"Actually, Marx himself wasn't above a bit of opportunistic lying ("dialectics"), so maybe he didn't believe his own theories."

You mightn't be as far off as you think. Apparently (it turned up in a chat I had with Gareth Steadman-Jones a year and a bit ago, so can't recall exactly) but before his death, Marx was working on some things that led him to think that actually he'd been a bit wrong earlier on. Engels, as Marx's executor, chose not to publicise these bits, for fairly obvious reasons.

[Tim]

"No one disembowelled a pregnant woman in the name of David Hume, because he offered doubt rather than dogma."

If you're going to blame the Russian Revolution on Marx, surely you can have the decency to blame the French Revolution on Hume.

[J.Cassian]

"If you're going to blame the Russian Revolution on Marx, surely you can have the decency to blame the French Revolution on Hume."

Hmm, why? That doesn't tally with anything I can remember about the Scottish Enlightenment. I always thought the French Revolution (in its Robespierrian phase) was more of Jean-Jacquerie. I don't remember the "colonne infernale" marching into the Vendée under banners bearing quotations from "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding".

[marc w.]

Johannes Cassianus/Dinah/cinderalla - it's good to see you're alive and well.

As much as I agree with your arguments, I think the real issue is how the popular impression of Marx has evolved. Marx won this poll due to the support of the Guardianista faction, I'd say, and for the exact reason you mention: they think he's a nice liberal like them; he's remembered first and foremost as a man who cared about the plight of the downtrodden. When no one else gave a toss about the masses of laborers in the industrial revolution (leave aside the veracity of that claim), here was a genial, deeply empathetic man who envisaged their salvation and reaffirmed their basic humanity. All of that is nice, but it strikes me as equivalent to saying that Robespierre was motivated by his passion for efficient government or that the emperor Commodus was a man who cared deeply about entertainment. That may be a cheap shot, but I think this hollowing out of Marx's work is the only thing that allowed him to win - as a 'scientist,' his predictive power is on a par with paul ehrlich, so that doesn't work. As a political philosopher, he's been an even bigger failure.
Does any of this absolve those who voted for him? I say it does - the voters need not pledge any allegiance to any of Marx's demented followers. People are quite capable of rejecting totalitarianism of any stripe and believing Marx was a good guy. I probably agree that there's a certain dissonance, an essential contradiction there - but it's true.
People take what they need from philosophy/philosophers and leave the rest. People can quote a few of Nietzche's aphorisms, but that doesn't mean they condone Nazi germany.

Now, of course, there are undoubtedly a few thousand people who voted for Marx who actually do/did support Marxist dictatorships and many who continue to do so. To them, you've been far too kind.

[J.Cassian]

Yeah, you're probably right, Marc. I doubt this was the most deeply informed vote ever held. Marx is the Greatest Thinker like Robbie Williams is the Greatest Artist of the Millennium. Remember the words of Bros' "When Will I be Famous?": "You've read Karl Marx and you've learnt how to dance". Greatest bit of rhyming ever.

[eric]

I say this as a fan of Karl Popper - who had his fair share of comments about Marx's views.

But, isn't this a bit like blaming Gregor Mendel for the 20th century's eugenics movement?

And didn't Marx once say "I am not a Marxist" or is that an old wives tale.

[Mick H]

Might as well drag this one out: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." I don't think Mendel said anything about how, now he'd discovered genetic inheritance, we should start using it to improve our genetic stock.

[marc w.]

J,
As I'm not British, I was spared the horrors of Bros. We also managed to completely avoid Take That, which also strikes Britons as some sort of physical impossibility.
E,
Agreed on all accounts - I'm a fan of Popper, but it's slightly unseemly to blame people who may only know of Marx as The Guy Who Gave a Damn and/or the guy who gets all the right peoples' knickers in a twist for the horrors of Pol Pot. I don't think that's what Mick was doing; I think he's just pointing out the... disconnect at work here.
M,
Mendel didn't, but I don't think Nietzche ever summed up his arguments about the order of society with something like, 'Of course, I'm just kinda brainstorming here - don't, you know, ACT on any of this'

[Mick H]

Breeders of the world, unite!

[Eric]

Hang on Mick, all politicians seek change. You seek change! Seeking change is not in itself a negative attribute.

Just because Marx wanted to seek change does not imply support for any of the atrocities committed under the banner of so-called Marxist regimes.

Mendel is arguably responsible for massive changes how we view and interact with the world. Again, like Marx, he had little control of that either.

[J.Cassian]

Yes, but Marx sought the "violent overthrow of the existing order" and preached "the dictatorship of the proletariat". In the context of the nineteenth century, "dictatorship" would inevitably lead readers to think of the Jacobin regime during the French Revolution. Or as one Hungarian communist interrogator put it to his victim: "You intellectuals are so naive. What do you think 'dictatorship' means? It means terror." There's a good reason for Marxism's appeal to butchers from Lenin to Mengistu.

Mendel made a genuine contribution to scientific knowledge, Marx's contributions are confined to the history of pseudo-science. The only question in 2005 is why he's still so "fetishised" (to use the academic jargon). After all, you don't see many Comteans around any more*.

(*And all this concentration on Marx is deeply unfair to Charles Fourier, correctly identified by Théophile Gautier as the only truly original mind in 19th century radical leftist thought: "a madman, a great genius, an imbecile, a divine poet vastly superior to Lamartine, Hugo and Byron." In Marx's future utopia, we'll be able to get a bit of fishing done in the afternoon; in Fourier's, the seas will turn to lemonade and we'll have 37 million Mozarts. Forget scientific socialism, bring on socialist surrealism!)

[marc w.]

You're right about that, J:
" An antibeaver will see to the fishing; an antiwhale will move sailing ships in a calm; an antihippopotamus will tow the river boats. Instead of the lion there will be an antilion, a steed of wonderful swiftness, upon whose back the rider will sit as comfortably as in a well-sprung carriage. It will be a pleasure to live in a world with such servants."
When cooperative living proceeds to a sufficiently harmonious state, new animals develop to do our work for us? How was this guy not shortlisted for the 'Greatest Philosopher' prize?

[J.Cassian]

Yeah, Gautier went on to say that Fourier had discovered "as many species of animal as Georges Cuvier, the great naturalist."

[Dave]

Marx did indeed say that that he was 'no Marxist'.

1. Marx fully deserves his position for having accurately anticipated globalisation and the effects of global capitalism more than a century before it came into being.

2. There has never been a genuinely Marxist state. Marx's predictions were predicated on such a state arising from an industrial economy not from peasant economies which have exclusively spawned 'communist revolutions'.

3. One cannot consider the USSR, China, etc to be Marxist states - nowhere does Marx suggest that the State should appropriate the position of the ruling elite and take over control of the means of production except as a temporary measure and precursor to the state 'withering away' - a genuinely Marxist state would be one based on political anarchy, in other words a direct rather than representative democracy.

Those responsible for 100 million deaths, as you put it, were not Marxist revolutionaries but counter-revolutionaries who, having swept away the old ruling elite then installed themselves in their place.

To call Marx's work 'pseudoscience' is utter nonsense. Marx was a philosopher not a scientist and cannot be judged in purely deterministic terms.

How about an alternate question - 99% of criticisms of Marx come from people who have either not read or not understood his work. Discuss.

[J.Cassian]

OK, I don't know why, but let's keep going.

1. Hmm, the only thing like that I seem to remember Marx claiming is that European imperialism would have to turn what we now call the the countries of the Third World into capitalist economies before Marxist revolution had any sort of chance. So, logically, true Marxists should be enthusiastic supporters of Western imperialism.

2. When is a state not Marxist? When it exists. "There has never been a genuinely Marxist state." True, and there never will be one. Marx's prediction of the forthcoming immiseration of the proletariat in advanced capitalist countries was utterly deluded. Without such immiseration, the Marxist utopia will never evolve (although there's a basic contradiction in Marx between his claims the proletarian revolution is inevitable and his calls for political violence.)

3. Dave, a quick read of your blog finds you describing South Africa attacking "Marxist Angola". Maybe it was a mirage. As for Marx not advocating a centralised state, ever read "The Communist Manifesto"? All the Communist states from the USSR to North Korea could claim that their dictatorship was merely a temporary measure in line with Marx's thought. When the time came they would relinquish power, which of course would not corrupt the leaders of those states in any way, since they were genuine idealists. As the joke had it: "What's the best road to socialism? The longest one."

"To call Marx's work 'pseudoscience' is utter nonsense"

Who described his work as "scientific" socialism then?

"Marx was a philosopher"

He certainly wasn't much of an economist...

"cannot be judged in purely deterministic terms."

Of course, the leading proponent of historical determinism cannot be judged in deterministic terms.

"How about an alternate question - 99% of criticisms of Marx come from people who have either not read or not understood his work. Discuss."

I always thought Marx stank. I'd never read any of his work. I read some. I still thought Marx stank. You might as well say: "99% of the criticisms of Ba'athism come from people who have never read or understood Michel Aflaq's work."

(By the way, you got one thing right: the Bolsheviks were certainly counter-revolutionaries.)

[Devil's Kitchen]

--"But, isn't this a bit like blaming Gregor Mendel for the 20th century's eugenics movement?"--

Eugenics was practised long before Mendel: it just wasn't called that.

Anyway, this little conceit, Karl Marx In Hell is very entertaining...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/wallace/wallace14.html

[Backword Dave]

Dave:
a) did Marx write about economics? Could Marx have been properly called an economist?
b) is economics a science?

Newton answered to the description "philosopher." So I agree with this "in a world where disciplinary boundaries were drawn more rationally, the runaway winner would have been Sir Isaac Newton."
http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_preposterousuniverse_archive.html#112146301398836210

2.There has never been a genuinely Marxist state. Marx's predictions were predicated on such a state arising from an industrial economy not from peasant economies which have exclusively spawned 'communist revolutions'.
So, shorter Dave -- Marx was talking bollocks?

[Sportin' Life]

a) did Marx write about economics? Could Marx have been properly called an economist?

Yes.

b) is economics a science?

No.

"There has never been a genuinely Marxist state. Marx's predictions were predicated on such a state arising from an industrial economy not from peasant economies which have exclusively spawned 'communist revolutions'.
So, shorter Dave -- Marx was talking bollocks?"

It's early days.