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Marx's Prediction
By Msgr. George Higgins
May 1, 1998
Veso Press of London and New York just published a new edition of the Communist Manifesto to mark the 150th anniversary of what it calls "the most influential call-to-arms ever written."British historian Eric Hobsbawn has written a perceptive introduction to the new edition of the work by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He says that "whatever else it is, the Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force" and a compelling power as literature.
I am frank to say that it doesn't strike me as such, but relieved to note that even Hobsbawn says that the translations of the manifesto known to him do not have the literary force of the original German text.
Hobsbawn is less interested in the manifesto's literary merits than its historical impact and contemporary pertinence. Hobsbawn credits Marx with extraordinary foresight in predicting 150 years ago what global capitalism would look like today.
He says that what might have struck the reader in 1848 as revolutionary rhetoric can now be read "as a concise characterization of capitalism at the end of the 20th century." Other distinguished historians and political scientists have echoed Hobsbawn. This is not to say that they overlook or condone the crimes committed by Marxist regimes.
In condemning these crimes, however, it would be shortsighted to underestimate the extent and seriousness of the problems brought about by the triumphal ascendancy of the kind of global capitalism which Marx was the first -- or one of the first -- to predict.
Frank E. Manuel, in his recent biography of Marx, makes that point as follows: "A requiem for Marx cannot ignore the iniquities of his offspring.... But the banner that he unfurled need not be interred with his bones. Even a skeptical utopian like myself can still believe in the worth of the guiding principle: `From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs"' ("A Requiem for Karl Marx," Harvard University Press).
Even Pope John Paul II stated a few years ago in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa that while it was necessary to fight against the unjust totalitarian system that defines itself as socialist or communist, there is truth also in what Pope Leo XIII said, that there are "seeds of truth" even in the socialist program.
It is obvious, he said, that "these seeds should not be destroyed.... The proponents of capitalism in its extreme forms tend to overlook the good things achieved by communism: the efforts to overcome unemployment, the concern for the poor."
By "capitalism in its extreme forms" the pope was referring not only to the excesses of 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism but also to "distorted maisfestations of capitalism" at the root of many social and economic problems besetting the world today.
The pope earlier made substantially the same point in an address at the University of Latvia, once a Marxist academic community. Again, while condemning communism, he stressed that Catholic social teaching "is not a surrogate for capitalism." He repeated that there was "a kernel of truth" in Marxism and called for a balanced concept of the state that "assures the most vulnerable the support they need in order not to succumb to the arrogance and indifference of the powerful."
Veso's new edition of the manifesto is timely, then. As an avowedly anti-Communist and anti-socialist reviewer of Manuel's book put it: "Marx remains alive because the project which he initiated -- the understanding of the capitalist system as a system -- remains a necessity; and Milton Friedman (of the so-called Chicago school of economics) all by himself will not do the trick."