The New York Times published an op-ed Monday with the headline “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” The piece was festooned with a celebratory exclamation mark, as though the mere declaration needed that something extra, like a Broadway production (“Mama Mia!”) or television game show (“Jeopardy!”).
The piece was written by Jason Barker, who is an associate professor of philosophy (!) at Kyung Hee University in South Korea. He’s also the author of the novel “Marx Returns,” so he writes fan fiction as well. In his article, Barker triumphantly declares Marx’s legacy to be a success because “countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age.”
He then proceeds to describe the Marxist states which emerged primarily in the 20th century as “ironic,” based solely on the idea that Marx endorsed a concept in which there was no need for a state at all. How then does he explain the tenets of the “Communist Manifesto” in which industry, wealth, property, and even the lives of children should belong to the people as a whole? He doesn’t. This is philosophy where no explanation is needed. For someone who seems to be a fan of irony, he either overlooked or discarded the very definition of the term “state.”
But irony can be easy to miss. Indeed, as Barker’s article was being made ready for publication, a Marxist dictator was stepping across the 38th parallel into the very country where the professor teaches, in an historic event heralding yet another potential collapse of a communist regime.
As so many have done before him, Barker labors under the false assumption that communism has never truly been attempted in its purest form, and thus the term as well as the definition cannot be ascribed to failed states such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the German Democratic Republic, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
More irony: Marxist dictatorships labeled themselves “republics.”
