What I Learned from Marx

As I prepare to give a program next week on my travels in England, I think about Karl Marx.

Some people believe Marx was Russian. The Soviets claimed to be Communists based on the theories of Karl Marx. But Marx the man was German. Exiled from Germany, he did all his research in England. And that is where he died.

When I went to England the first time, I visited friends who lived in the Highgate neighborhood of London. I heard that Marx was buried in Highgate Cemetery. My friends took me to the cemetery on a Sunday afternoon. The big iron gates were locked. So I must base my belief that Marx is buried there on what I have read. I did not actually see his grave.

But I’ve seen his library card.

On another trip to England one summer afternoon I spent several hours pouring over Marx documents and memorabilia in a special exhibit in the British Library and Museum. Photos of his wife and daughters pictured typical middle-class Victorian ladies. I peeked in the doors of the reading room, where Marx did his research, but like the cemetery, the doors were locked except for authorized persons. That I was not.

I read “Das Kapital.”

What impressed me most about this big book was the amount of statistics on workers in Great Britain, the awful conditions in mines and factories, the brutal work of farm laborers, and the meager wages paid to the man, women, and little children forced to endless back-breaking tasks in order to eat.

Marx thought that surely the workers would revolt against these horrible conditions. He was wrong. Gradually, mostly through the organization of labor unions, pay and working conditions improved in England and other “developed” countries. In the U.S., where 19th Century working conditions were almost as bad as in England, by the end of the 20th Century the “average man” could not only provide his family with “a chicken in every pot,” but cooked the chicken in a pot in the kitchen of his own home.

Now what? At the beginning of the 21st Century women join men in households where two incomes are necessary. Workers lose jobs and depend on government for money to buy food. Homes are lost to foreclosure. “They should not have been given mortgages in the first place.” Really?

No one suggests a Marxist revolution.

But there are other lessons to be learned from “Das Kapital.” Marx wrote that there were only two kinds of capital. One was natural resources (in the earth (coal, oil, gold) and grown on the earth (lumber, cotton, wheat). The other type of capital was labor, which produced things out of the other kind of capital. In “advanced” societies people with specialized kinds of “labor,” such as making music or teaching school, exchange their labor for the hard goods produced by others, i.e. food. Money is used to facilitate these exchanges. You don’t teach the baker’s kids to read in exchange for a loaf of bread.

Today we hear a lot about capital markets, as if our economy was based on money. Our industries move overseas, and companies improve their “financial position” by firing workers. What are we producing? Wall Street is just a lot of paper shuffling. The brokers get richer and richer.

No, we don’t want an armed revolution. What are we to do?