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If This is Victory for Democracy…
I should hope to never taste defeat.
Poor old Karl Marx. His name got attached to so much nonsense. Yet, he is one of those rare thinkers who left his mark on so many disciplines that it’s hard to earn an advanced degree even now without encountering his work — though seldom in the original because his writing is a hard slog. Marx left tracks in political science, economics, sociology, philosophy, literature and many other arts.
He died a stateless person, having been expelled from most countries where he took up residence. I could make a “Marxist” argument for democracy and for autocracy. He purported to believe capitalism would collapse from the weight of its own internal “contradictions” but he was not above helping it along with a bit of violence.
He could speak of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” without accounting for persons who dictate — regardless of class origins — being no longer proles within any rational meaning of the word.
Aware of his growing influence within the intelligentsia of Russia, Marx briefly entertained whether it might be possible to proceed directly from feudalism to socialism by way of the mir, collectives of former serfs who governed themselves and owned the soil they worked.
