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Looking for top Marx
‘Capitalism without humanity, solidarity and justice has no morals and no future’ says Marx’s Das Kapital. Archbishop Reinhard Marx, that is, who has written a book with the same title as his ‘dear namesake’ (but no relation) Karl.
Almost a century and a half after the original was published, the Archbishop – who until last year was Bishop of Karl’s home town Trier – has written what he says is, to some extent, ‘an argument with Marxism.’ He is a strong proponent of Catholic social ethics, which he sees as being critical of both Communism and of a capitalism that is devoted overwhelmingly to profit margins.
This scepticism of the market predates the current banking crisis. ‘I already believed years ago that wild speculation is a sin,’ he says, and in 2006 he criticised the ‘audacious’ salary hikes of top managers. Unless capitalism reforms itself and takes a greater concern in social justice, he argues, the world might veer back to ‘dangerous ideologies’ such as Marxism. ‘The other Marx from Trier could still be proven right. And that I would find awful. We need a structured market economy, not a revolution.’
The 19th-century Marx offered ferocious rhetoric like ‘Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ The language of the contemporary Marx is somewhat more restrained – for his masses he has just ‘a plea’.
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