Marx and Humanism

Abstract

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has aroused new interest in Karl Marx, as he declared the recurrence of economic crises to be an inevitable property of capitalism. In the following, I attempt to examine whether this interest is well- founded. My answer is: Marx can tell us something about how to interpret modern society, but little about the kind of society that we might change the present society into. This answer may seem incompatible with Marx’s famous remark that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”1 Doesn’t Marx reject interpretations in favor of practical change? But as Marx produced theory all his life, we cannot reasonably assume this.