Karl Marx: The greatest philosopher of all time

"PHILOSOPHERS HAVE interpreted the world the point is to change
it." This was the opening of Melvin Bragg’s Radio 4 programme In
Our time, broadcast on 14 July. This well-known quote from Karl Marx is
not the usual introduction to a programme introduced by Lord Melvin
Bragg, a close friend of Tony Blair!

Tony Saunois

The reason it was used by a bewildered Bragg, was that Radio 4
listeners had just voted Karl Marx the ‘greatest philosopher of all
time’.

The vote for Marx was overwhelming, winning 27.93% of the vote
compared to his nearest rival, the free trade supporter and contemporary
of Adam Smith, David Hume, who received only 12.67% of the vote. This
vote represents a blow to capitalist commentators. It illustrates
hostility towards modern capitalist society amongst even sections of the
middle class.

The result enraged the right-wing Tory press and media. The
right-wing Daily Mail denounced Radio 4 listeners for voting for the
"Monster Marx".

For weeks it had been reported that Marx was in the lead. Now,
dismayed capitalist commentators, following this victory by Marx, have
questioned the validity of the poll in which 30,000 people participated.

They have protested that socialists mobilised supporters to vote. Yet
all the main capitalist journals attempted to do the same. The Economist
supported either Adam Smith or John Locke. But as they admitted, these
pro-capitalist philosophers failed to make it onto the short list. So
they urged readers to vote for David Hume.

However, Radio 4 listeners rejected this advice and overwhelmingly
supported Marx. Capitalist commentators hoped that they had buried Marx
with the collapse of the former bureaucratic one-party regimes which
ruled in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

However, Marx’s analysis of capitalism and ideas are increasingly
seen to be relevant to understanding modern capitalist society. Even
some individuals from the ruling class have been compelled to recognise
the strength of Marx’s analysis.

In 1997 the business correspondent of the New Yorker, John Cassidy,
reported a conversation with an investment banker: "The longer I
spend on Wall Street, the more convinced that Marx’s approach is the
best way to look at capitalism."

Cassidy himself turned to read Marx for the first time. He found:
"Riveting passages about globalisation, inequality, political
corruption, monopolisation, technical progress, the decline of high
culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence…" All
issues at the centre of modern capitalism.

Yet Marx did not only analyse capitalism. He outlined the alternative
to it in the form of scientific socialism and the role of the working
class in building a new socialist society. He fought to build
international organisations of the working class and advance the
struggles of working people at great personal sacrifice.

He arrived in Britain as a penniless asylum seeker. It was not only
in the realm of ideas that Marx made this gigantic contribution. For him
his philosophy was a tool to understand the laws of capitalist society
but the essential task was to end it. ‘Philosophers have interpreted the
world the point is to change it’. He spent his life fighting to do just
that.

The vote by Radio 4 listeners recognises his historic contribution.
It is a rebuff to Bragg and other capitalist commentators who though
they had succeeded in burying Marx beneath the ruins of the Berlin Wall.
His ideas are destined to become the most influential of the 21st
century.