200 năm Các xồm: Is Marx Still Relevant? May 1, 2018 Peter Singer.
http://nghiencuuquocte.org/2018/05/07/lieu-karl-marx-co-con-hop-thoi/#more-25640
On the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth on
May 5, 1818, it isn’t far-fetched to suggest that his predictions have
been falsified, his theories discredited, and his ideas rendered
obsolete. So why should we care about his legacy in the twenty-first
century?
MELBOURNE
– From 1949, when Mao Zedong’s communists triumphed in China’s civil
war, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall 40 years later, Karl Marx’s
historical significance was unsurpassed. Nearly four of every ten people
on earth lived under governments that claimed to be Marxist, and in
many other countries Marxism was the dominant ideology of the left,
while the policies of the right were often based on how to counter
Marxism.
Once communism
collapsed in the Soviet Union and its satellites, however, Marx’s
influence plummeted. On the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth on May 5,
1818, it isn’t far-fetched to suggest that his predictions have been
falsified, his theories discredited, and his ideas rendered obsolete. So
why should we care about his legacy in the twenty-first century?
Marx’s reputation was
severely damaged by the atrocities committed by regimes that called
themselves Marxist, although there is no evidence that Marx himself
would have supported such crimes. But communism collapsed largely
because, as practiced in the Soviet bloc and in China under Mao, it
failed to provide people with a standard of living that could compete
with that of most people in the capitalist economies.2
These failures do not
reflect flaws in Marx’s depiction of communism, because Marx never
depicted it: he showed not the slightest interest in the details of how a
communist society would function. Instead, the failures of communism
point to a deeper flaw: Marx’s false view of human nature.
There is, Marx thought, no such thing as an inherent or biological human nature. The human essence is, he wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, “the
ensemble of the social relations.” It follows then, that if you change
the social relations – for example, by changing the economic basis of
society and abolishing the relationship between capitalist and worker –
people in the new society will be very different from the way they were
under capitalism.
Marx did not arrive
at this conviction through detailed studies of human nature under
different economic systems. It was, rather, an application of Hegel’s
view of history. According to Hegel, the goal of history is the
liberation of the human spirit, which will occur when we all understand
that we are part of a universal human mind. Marx transformed this
“idealist” account into a “materialist” one, in which the driving force
of history is the satisfaction of our material needs, and liberation is
achieved by class struggle. The working class will be the means to
universal liberation because it is the negation of private property, and
hence will usher in collective ownership of the means of production.
Once
workers owned the means of production collectively, Marx thought, the
“springs of cooperative wealth” would flow more abundantly than those of
private wealth – so abundantly, in fact, that distribution would cease
to be a problem. That is why he saw no need to go into detail about how
income or goods would be distributed. In fact, when Marx read a proposed
platform for a merger of two German socialist parties, he described
phrases like “fair distribution” and “equal right” as “obsolete verbal
rubbish.” They belonged, he thought, to an era of scarcity that the
revolution would bring to an end.
The Soviet Union
proved that abolishing private ownership of the means of production does
not change human nature. Most humans, instead of devoting themselves to
the common good, continue to seek power, privilege, and luxury for
themselves and those close to them. Ironically, the clearest
demonstration that the springs of private wealth flow more abundantly
than those of collective wealth can be seen in the history of the one
major country that still proclaims its adherence to Marxism.
Under Mao, most
Chinese lived in poverty. China’s economy started to grow rapidly only
after 1978, when Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping (who had proclaimed
that, “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it
catches mice”) allowed private enterprises to be established. Deng’s
reforms eventually lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty, but
also created a society with greater income inequality than any European
country (and much greater than the United States). Although China still
proclaims that it is building “socialism with Chinese characteristics,”
it is not easy to see what is socialist, let alone Marxist, about its
economy.4
If China is no longer
significantly influenced by Marx’s thought, we can conclude that in
politics, as in economics, he is indeed irrelevant. Yet his intellectual
influence remains. His materialist theory of history has, in an
attenuated form, become part of our understanding of the forces that
determine the direction of human society. We do not have to believe
that, as Marx once incautiously put it, the hand-mill gives us a society
with feudal lords, and the steam-mill a society with industrial
capitalists. In other writings, Marx suggested a more complex view, in
which there is interaction among all aspects of society.
The most important
takeaway from Marx’s view of history is negative: the evolution of
ideas, religions, and political institutions is not independent of the
tools we use to satisfy our needs, nor of the economic structures we
organize around those tools, and the financial interests they create. If
this seems too obvious to need stating, it is because we have
internalized this view. In that sense, we are all Marxists now.
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University,
Laureate Professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
at the University of Melbourne, and founder of the non-profit
organization The Life You Can Save. His books include
Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason), Rethinking Life and Death, The Point of View of the Universe, co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, The Most Good You Can Do, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, One World Now, Ethics in the Real World, and Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction,
also with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. In 2013, he was named the world's
third "most influential contemporary thinker" by the Gottlieb Duttweiler
Institute.
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