Modern perceptions of Marx

Factual Questions
1

This question is really two separate questions, both related to how people view Marx today.

First of all, some time around 2004 (give or take a year or two), I recall reading a newspaper or magazine article about the results of a survey. Apparently a large sample of notable rich businesspeople (I think it may have been the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies) were asked to name their biggest influences. The results were then aggregated. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), Karl Marx was at or near the top of the list. However, for the life of me, I can’t remember the title or source of this article. Can anyone help me?

Second, a friend of mine recently told me about a survey where random Americans were shown the quote “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” and asked whether this was a quote from Marx or from the Constitution of the United States. Apparently most respondents thought it was from the Constitution. Is there any truth to this anecdote? If so, where and when were the results of this survey originally published?

2

What are you trying to show exactly? Do you really want cites to two obscure results or a discussion over whether modern people support what he said as a moto?

Marx was a fiction writer although unfortunately a persuasive and often cited one for a while. He indirectly caused the death of millions and the ruin of whole regions and those effects still linger. Hitlers Mein Kampf was also persuasive and selected quotes could also be pulled and widely supported in surveys.

Are you trying to show that selected groups are stupid like Jay Leno or that people really like the idea of communism?

3

Please let’s not use GQ for political posturing that wrenches history out of all understanding.

Marx took a specific problem, the rapid industrialization of Europe in general and Britain in particular, saw some real and overwhelming evils, and postulated a general solution.

With hindsight, we can see that the general solution would not have worked and that it was applied in times and places outside of the original. But the problem was very real. It was solved only through government action, which Marx believed was an impossibly - quite true in the monarchies of Europe of his time.

In the very long term, capitalism has created middle classes and this was the solution to the problem Marx was facing. He could not have foreseen this, because nobody foresaw this. And it wouldn’t have pleased him to learn that even in the best of all examples, the U.S., it would take a full century for the solution to come to pass.

It is a given that Marx’s writings have been abused, both by those who took action in his name, and by those who took actions against his name. But the problems he railed against were vital and deserving to be denounced in the strongest of terms, and serious people could seriously cite him as a possible solution until World War II, when the power of industrialization finally caught up with the problem of poverty.

You can’t invoke Marx’s name as a boogieman without making these distinctions. Well, you shouldn’t. People can and do all the time, but that is nothing more than heaping ignorance onto a pile of steaming lack of knowledge.

As for the OP, I believe both claims, though I can’t provide a citation. Without Marx’s critique of capitalism, you don’t have a full understanding of capitalism. He should be well and fully understood by any self-respecting CEO.

And "“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” is a phrase deliberately created to reflect Christian morality, and equally well reflects the Horatio Alger ideal of self-achievement in the U.S. With the general level of ignorance about Marx it’s not at all surprising that people don’t know the source or its context, but the sentiment is 100% American.

4

The survey was published in the Hearst Report in 1987.

"A recent nationwide survey found that many Americans appear to be deficient in both knowledge and appreciation of fundamental values, principles, and issues of their constitutional government (Hearst Report, 1987)… Nearly half revealed ignorance of both American government and the ideas of Karl Marx when they said that the following statement is part of the Constitution: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’

…Hearst Report. THE AMERICAN PUBLIC’S KNOWLEDGE OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION: A NATIONAL SURVEY OF PUBLIC AWARENESS AND PERSONAL OPINION. New York: The Hearst Corporation, 1987."

(found here.)

5

Marx wasn’t solely or exclusively an economic theorist – whose place in intellectual/social/political theory Exapno summarizes does with truly marvelous succinctness and precision. He is also central as a sociological theorist; he was one of the first to analyze the ways in which all the various elements (including, but not limited to, religion and politics) of a society can be seen as expressions/manifestations of the economic underpinnings of that society. It was a fundamentally new way of looking at the world, and one that has shaped huge chunks of social theory for the last century and a half.

6

Marx is important reading for anyone interested in sociology, political science, international relations, or economics–or anyone just interested in being a well rounded individual.

His writings on interactions between various social classes are pretty significant especially in the fields of international relations and political science.

Interestingly enough one of the more interesting results of Marx’s writings lead someone who was most decidedly not a Marxist, Otto von Bismarck, to introduce some of the most liberal social reform laws in European history.

Bismarck was no socialist, but he wanted to take preempt the Social Democrats and the more radical socialists/Marxists by carefully crafting social welfare reform that would implement what he felt was the minimum necessary amount of social welfare to placate the masses without adopting strongly socialist ideas. What this lead to was one of the first and most significant social welfare programs in European history, Bismarck’s Germany had an early version of our current Medicaid, Workman’s Comp, and SSA retirement programs in the 1880s.

Historians (and indeed the Kaiser) viewed Bismarck’s efforts as backfiring because they increased the legitimacy of the Social Democrats which eventually lead to the Kaiser forcing Bismarck out of government. I tend to take the view that Bismarck’s actions were instrumental in stopping widespread socialist revolution from getting out of hand in Europe. It’s not entirely unrealistic that Germany could have suffered a socialist revolution ala Russia at several points in its history in the 19th and early 20th century.

7

This is General Questions, not Great Debates. I want the two cites (thank you for one, pinkfreud), not a discussion about Marxian economics.

8

Cite? You might note that the country in which he was writing and did so much to prove him false was and is a monarchy. And was at the time (to a degree) a democracy, so the actions taken by parliament were the result of that democracy and therefore the result of the will of the people. You might also recal that two hundred years previously, the people, led by the middle classes, had asserted their supremacy over the monarchy.

Post-Marx? I cannot agree. The middle classes have existed since time immemorial. Merchants, bankers, architects, accountants, lawyers, teachers, landlords, etc, all are known before Marx.

Cite? Surely the American idea is ‘From each according to his ability; to each according to his ability’? The strophe being taxation and the antistrophe being success.

9

My old prof of politics, who is now rather illustrious, used to say ‘I am a Marxist, but believe that we are in the Capitalist phase’.

I’m firmly of the belief that a 500 page novel is a spun out short story. When I was at Uni an economics tutor showed us an early paper by Marx on the Capital/Labour ratio

  • now I doubt that Marx understood ‘capital’ as we do today, to him it meant machinery rather than hot currency.

It is pretty obvious that social behaviour changes in response to the amount of machinery (read robots) available.

I’m pretty sure that Marx would have been rather shocked by the Trotsky invention of ‘Permanent Revolution’ - and many other strange things purportedly in his name.

While I’ve never managed to wade through Das Kapital, and someone stole my copy, I would be unsurprized if most Fortune 500ers were not exposed to some potted explanations of what they guy was on about - a crafty consultant would come up with a few obvious concepts, wait till they were fully accepted and then show their origin.
Intellectual shock tactics work rather well.

@Martin Hyde Thank you, I have long been wondering why the Germans enacted social reforms about 30 years before the UK - it had never occurred to me that Bismarck had an idea of ‘social evolution’.

10

But you’re getting one anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

My take on Marx is that he introduced a pivitol idea- that societies adopt institutions based on economic necessity i.e. what works and what doesn’t. That he had a germ of a correct idea that was wildly overexpanded upon by others. Very similar in many ways to Freud. In fact you could make a direct analogy and say that Marx proposed that socieites effectively have a subconcious: a set of real reasons for why they believe and act as they do.

11

I’ve got to say that Marx and Engels were flat-out idiots, who lied all over the place. Don’t believe me? Go read Das Kapital and see the filthy lies they spewed about the evil Capitalists. It’d be entertaining if the real-world consequences weren’t so awful.

12

I view marx as an economic historian. His theory of history is interesting, but bear in mind, most of it was written ?130 years ago. His insights also failed to recognize the importance of markets-which makes most of his “value theory” of labor pretty nonsensical.
The question is: did marx and Engels ever anticipate the horror that communist regimes visited upon humanity? i can’t imagine that either one would have endorsed Stalinist Russia.

13

Could you please cite some actual lies?

14

Gummo was underrated at the time, we now know he was the true genius brother
Brian

15

‘Bout friggin’ time.

16

Have you actually read Marx? Since you’re threadshitting, it’s up to you to provide cites.

:carefully phrasing words:

I believe Marx is the most influential philosopher of the past 200 years. I can’t think of a single individual who has affected more lives - for good or bad. To be dismissive or flippant about his influence to make inflammatory anti-commie remarks is to negate that influence, the suffering it caused, the reforms it spawned.
I dare you to bring this to GD or the Pit. And if you do, I hope you actually have read Marx.

:/:

17

I read a book on Marx, once. He squealed the whole time asking me to please get off him.

18

An wise man once said, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

19

Hmmm. Are you sure you’re not thinking of the 2005 BBC poll on the greatest philosopher?

20

Yes, I’m sure I’m not thinking of that. This was at least a year or two earlier, and it wasn’t the general public who were polled, but rather rich or influential businesspeople.