What is the legacy of Karl Marx?
On the 200th birthday of Karl Marx a bronze statue was unveiled in his home town of Trier in south-west Germany - a controversial gift from China. At a ceremony marking the opening of several exhibitions, EU Commission President Juncker stressed that Marx must be understood in the context of his times. A look at Europe's press shows that this is no easy task.
Marx was not a Marxist
Jean-Claude Juncker warned in Trier against holding Karl Marx responsible for the crimes of communism. Blogger Pitsirikos agrees:
“It should be clear to everyone that Marx was not a Marxist. Marx was Marx. Just like Jesus Christ was not a Christian. Jesus was Jesus. Is he responsible for the cruelty and the crimes committed in his name over the centuries? Hundreds of millions of people have been killed in Christ's name. ... 170 years ago Marx wrote: 'Workers of the world, unite!' It's clear that the workers don't want to unite. In my view both Christ and Marx made one big mistake: they forgot that most people are scum. All theories stumble over that basic fact.”
He had too little faith in democracy
Marx's philosophy should be reappraised in the Internet era, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier writes in Der Tagesspiegel:
“This moment [of upheaval caused by digitisation] must not lead us into a new dependency, but open up paths to greater self-determination and less alienation, to more participation and less inequality. Whether that will succeed depends to a large extent on a factor that Marx always trusted too little: namely democracy and the self-confidence with which we, as democrats in a social market economy, have the courage to shape our future! Marx said: 'The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.' I believe that the age of robots and artificial intelligences is a good time to prove to Marx that the opposite can be the case.”
Capitalism not sufficiently questioned
Today's social order can still be called into question on the basis of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, posits Jutarnji list:
“Even today, 170 years after its publication, the Manifesto outlines alternatives to capitalist production and the capitalist social order. What the authors of the Manifesto didn't foresee was that in the worker, capital would find its most loyal consumer. The increase of individual consumption and the corresponding improvement in material living standards bought social peace. ... Discussions about alternative methods of production are being delayed. We know that capitalist production leads to cyclical crises, but these are a reflection of systematically repressed questions about the social order and potential alternatives.”
Nothing to celebrate
Before Juncker gave his speech in Trier journalist László Seres formulated his expectations in an open letter to the Commission president:
“I hope that Juncker will talk in Trier about Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, which carried out one of the largest-scale genocides in the world. ... Not to think of him and the victims of Marxism's Gulag would be truly hypocritical. By comparison we Eastern Europeans can count ourselves lucky that from the 1960s and 1970s we only had to deal with the authoritarianism, dumb conformism, sense of oppression and helplessness, dependence on the state and social envy bequeathed to us by Marx's descendants.”
As influential as a religious leader
For all the criticism of his work the philosopher's influence should not be underestimated, Den argues:
“Once can curse Marx as 'the harbinger of totalitarianism', declare him 'the prophet of the gulag', protest that not one of his predictions came true, fire 'rockets' at the entire left-wing movement as such. ... There are more than enough chances to evaluate Marx. But we shouldn't forget him. People talk of a figure whose influence on the history of mankind is entirely comparable with the influence of Europe and Asia's major religious teachers and palpably transcends that of other 'pure intellectuals'. ... This alone suggests that he deserves the benefit of the doubt.”
A violent ideology
The fascination with the supposedly so humane philosopher Karl Marx is incomprehensible, writes PestiSrácok:
“According to official left-liberal dogma Marx was a very righteous, clever, compassionate thinker who was distorted and misunderstood by his followers - with the concomitant unpleasant effects. ... This is correct to the extent that Marx really was cleverer than his insane, mass-murdering successors. He simply pointed out that for a proletarian victory, murders would also be necessary. 'There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,' he wrote in his critique of the Gotha Programme. Is this clause really more restrained than the bloodthirsty rhetoric and deeds of Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot?”