For the blasphemous folks amongst us – and they are many – Karl Marx comes second in influence after Jesus Christ of Nazareth. It could be an exaggeration, but what is not blown out of proportion is the truth that the legacy of Marx’s philosophy which has been termed Marxism has refused to die.
An exaggerated death
When the United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed and it seemed like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s would forever replace the red hammer and sickle flag in Moscow, there was joy in the West. The “Evil Empire” was gone. We were given myriad reasons for reversing Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. You cannot suppress individual endeavour and the individual instinct to create wealth, we were told.
To this day across Africa and the globe, a mention of Marxism or Socialism is met with the example of the USSR. I do not wish to defend the Soviet Union. I wish, though, to express my admiration for the person and ideas of Karl Marx and his buddy and collaborator, Friedrich Engels.
Stuart Hall’s centenary memorial lecture
In 1983, the late great British sociologist Stuart Hall gave a series of lectures in England and Australia commemorating the centenary anniversary of the death of Karl Marx. These lectures are readily available on the internet and YouTube. What Hall manages to accomplish is two things: to show Marx as a man of his time and not a prophet but at the same time a critical and open thinker who critiqued capitalism in a systematic and trenchant manner. Marx, Hall argues, has bequeathed us some very useful tools to analyse our societies in terms of our social relations, ideas, beliefs and attitudes.
But first some biographical detail.
A radical journalist
Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia (German Confederation). Marx studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin and received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1841. Frustrated by a right-wing regime from pursuing an academic career, Marx became a journalist for a radical newspaper called Rhineland News. But the Vene of that time did not like liberal ideas – they feared anything that threatened monarchs and aristocrats. The newspaper was banned. It was to be a pattern for the newspapers Marx worked at in Cologne and Paris.
Alongside his journalism, Marx was committed to the establishment of a socialist movement. But Marx was also keen to study feudal society and the behaviour of the bourgeoisie so in him there was a unique unity of theory and practice – activism and intellectual labour. Marx ended up in England where he would lead a precarious life for four decades until he died in 1883. It is where he meets and befriends Friedrich Engels who becomes a great collaborator as well a financial supporter.
Key tenets of Marxism
Studying deeply English factory capitalism, Marx began to observe how labour was organised to produce what was taken by those who own capital and the means of production. The workers sold their labour, got a pittance in return and the owner of the factory or means of production made a profit. Marx’s key insight was to show us that history has to be taught in terms of how people organise themselves socially. He argued that societies had developed from primitive communism to slave society, then to feudalism and then to capitalism. The driver of the changes was class conflict rooted in the exploitation of one class by another which resulted in a new mode of production. Remember the Industrial Revolution had started in 1760 and Karl Marx was observing the dramatic changes in rural-urban migration, the new factories driven by new technology (textile weaving machines, steam engine). Marx noted how the function of capitalism is profit and capital accumulation.
No dignity in poverty
The clarion call of the Communist Manifesto was clear in 1848 and remains clear in 2025: Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
142 years after Marx’s death, the bastions of capitalism actively work to ensure workers do not unionise. Unions represent workers and put forward demands for decent wages, safe working conditions and a standard number of working hours per week. You would think these are reasonable requests, but the logic of capital insists on paying as low wages as possible and providing the barest of working conditions, to maximise profit. Capitalists, like foxes, cannot be trusted to take care of the chickens. This is why the state and government must play a key and progressive role.
The role of the state
Once upon a time the Man from Zvimba posed as a Marxist. He caused fear and consternation amongst the Rhodesians. It would take only five years into Independence for the Man from Zvimba to reveal himself and for the Rhodies to feel they had nothing to fear. By the 1990s we were drinking something called ESAP (economic structural adjustment programme) – a bitter concoction but the ZANU comrades urged us to “tighten belts”. We looked at their double-chins and sagging tummies that nearly touched the ground and listened to the now less convincing slogans: “Pamberi negutsa ruzhinji!”
A progressive state would not have created leeches that cannot create wealth other than from robbing the fiscus. Parasites par excellence that cannot put in any decent shift but rather obtain rigged tenders, get paid millions of dollars without delivering any service. Our railway system – the lifeblood of any economy – has been brutally dismantled. The roads are a deathtrap. The national health system is comatose.
From Marxists like Frantz Fanon we learnt of a class called the comprador bourgeoisie – the Chivayo and Sakupwanya characters – middlemen who do not create anything but via their proximity with the state become consummate rent seekers.
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Empathy – the key value of the revolutionary
Whatever may have been Marx’s shortcomings, he cannot be accused of being indifferent to the plight of the downtrodden. He saw firsthand the exploitation of factory workers and their dire living conditions. You only need to read Charles Dickens’ Hard Times or Oliver Twist to see the lives of the wretched of the earth in Victorian England. This is what outraged Marx.
Daily on social media, we have pseudo-businessmen that chide our people for not having wealth. They point to the SUVs rolling up at some school rugby tournament and taunt the pauperised as not working hard enough to generate similar riches. A dog-eat-dog society that gives other people opportunity based on their access to power and influence, is not a just and equitable system. Marxism calls for a different world. A world where workers are compensated fairly for the sale of their labour.
That can’t be too much to ask.
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