Peter Singer on Marx

BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, Marriage & Children, Karl Marx and Rend Collective

‘So 200 years on since his birthday, can we say with with almost 100% certainty that his theories have been discredited?’

‘Well, I think what we can say is that the predictions that he made about how things would work out, have been shown to be false. He made a number of quite specific predictions. One was that capitalism would collapse because of its own internal contradictions. And he thought that would actually happen in the most advanced capitalist economies. Well, of course, that didn't happen. Most advanced capitalist economies remain capitalists to this day. And the revolutions that were anti capitalist happened where capitalism was either not fully developed as in Russia, or not really developed at all, as in China and Cuba. So yes, he got those things quite wrong.

Does that mean that his theory is completely falsified or refuted? Well, I mean, among his theories was one about the way in which ideas and politics and a lot of other things about our life are influenced and affected by the economic relations we're in. That is that, as he said, under  feudalism you get ideas of loyalty and obligation to your Lord or the Lord's obligation to the vassals. Under capitalism, you get much more of an idea of individual freedom, because it's important to the factory owners that workers are free to leave the land and to move to where the factories are. And so you get a different set of ideas based on that. And I think, you know, there's there's still a significant element of truth in that. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Marx got it completely right. But it's a useful framework for thinking about influences on our ideas’

‘Did communism collapse because it It didn't provide people with a standard of living that could compete with Capitalism?’

‘I think that that is true to a large extent, especially if we're talking about the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union. I think people there were able to see as communications improved, people were able to see that over in the West, people did have a materially better standard of life. East Germans, for example, could see that West Germans just lived much better than they did. They were able to buy things that ast Germans couldn't really dream of buying. And they took them for granted. So I think that was a major factor in collapse of communism, perhaps not the only one but an important one.’

‘And would you argue that that has more to do with human nature and that perhaps Marx had a false view of human nature and ultimately, that is why communism failed?’

‘I think that Marx certainly had a false view of human nature. Essentially, he denied that there is such a thing as human nature, certainly an innate human nature that we inherit, irrespective of the economic relations in which we're living. Marx thought that human nature is something that is always really determined by the economic structures so that essentially, he thought, yes, under capitalism, you have this nature in which people think of themselves, are basically selfish and want more consumer goods for themselves. Whereas he thought once you eliminate private property, and you hand over the factories to workers in the factory, the workers will work cooperatively together. And they will not be so egoistic as they are under capitalism.

What we saw in the Soviet Union was that, you know, maybe they they simply couldn't acquire the same sort of material goods, but they were still were egoistic, in the sense of trying to achieve power, and the drive in the Soviet Union for the party members to gain power over others was perhaps even more destructive than the desire under capitalism to acquire more wealth than others. So yes, in that sense, Max got human nature quite wrong. And that definitely meant that communism did not develop in anything like the way that he had anticipated that it would.’

‘And that aspect of human nature that it devotes themselves to themselves rather than to the common good, is that most clearly demonstrated in the China of today?’

‘Yes, I think you what you can say China demonstrates today is that after Deng Xiaoping brought in economic reforms, basically, in the late 70s, changed the nature of the economy to allow more private enterprise, China's living standard rose quite rapidly. And that this was really because people were more prepared to work when they had the incentive of enriching themselves than they were when they were simply working for a state owned enterprise. And I think that's, that is effective. That has made capitalism more productive than fully socialist or communist economies, state owned enterprises. And this is something that Marx had not reckoned with. He thought that the opposite would happen, that in fact, he thought communism would be more productive than capitalism, because it would be more cooperative’…

‘So 200 years on since his birth, his name is either a rallying cry, or it's an insult. He's a divisive figure. What is his legacy?’

‘I think his legacy is is to make us see the world as one which we don't fully control what is happening because the economic structure in which we're living, which none of us can individually determine, has an important effect on us. And in a sense, we're not working together, we're working in a structure that none of us individually set up. And that frames the way we interact with each other. That's something significant for us to think about in terms of, are we really, fully free? And what does freedom mean in a world in which we cannot control these structures that we or previous generations set up.

So I think he's still got some interesting ideas for us to ponder. But he's certainly not got any recipes for how we ought to reorganize the economy. And I certainly think we ought to reject the idea that he somehow was a scientist that discovered laws of nature or laws of development that predict how history is going to unfold. Because those are the things that he got most clearly mistaken about.’

‘What might he think of those today who want to overthrow the globalist capitalist order in his name?’

‘Well, I'm not sure because he could point out that the conditions are not those that he expected. He expected that under capitalism, the workers would remain close to the line the World Bank now calls the line of extreme poverty, that is the line at which they barely have enough to meet their basic needs for food and shelter and survival, because he thought that there would always be a kind of law and supply of supply and demand, that meant that workers would never in the long run anyway, maybe for short term times they would but in the long run, they would never rise above that level. And that was what would lead them to want to have a revolution against the small number of capitalists who hold power.

And we could point out to Marx that that hasn't happened, that in the most advanced capitalist countries, the standard of living has risen far above that. And in fact that workers as long as they are employed, of course, not everyone is employed, but those who are employed, can live at a much better level than people could, workers could in the 19th century. So I'm not sure that Marx would actually think that the conditions for revolution are here or even that they're on the horizon in the near future, and therefore, I'm not sure that he would still be the kind of revolutionary that he was in the 19th century.’


China must have developed more than the USSR because of the lack of US sanctions, not because of capitalism