Many Happy Returns

It was May Day again, the equivalent in the Communist world of Christmas and Easter combined. As usual, the Kremlin's rulers watched a convoy of rockets and tanks roll through Moscow's Red Square in the annual parade. In Peking, Mao Tse-tung strode briefly onto a balcony before half a million Chinese assembled for fireworks and singing. In Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh also showed up at the festivities, accepting a bouquet of flowers from a small girl. Everywhere, also as usual, Communists displayed portraits of and ritually quoted the man who started it all, Karl Marx. This week is the 150th anniversary of Marx's birth, and it is just as well that he is not around to see what has happened to his ideas in the lands that pay them lip service.

Tiny Elite. Marx felt that the proletariat could win victory only through unity, yet world Communism today is more fragmented than ever before in its history. His disciples are so antagonistic, so split over questions of ideology, that 30 Communist parties have refused to attend a worldwide convention in Moscow later this year. In Eastern Europe, such Communist nations as Czechoslovakia and Rumania are exhibiting an independence that almost amounts to a secession from the Communist fold. China and Russia vilify each other in terms as harsh as either uses against the capitalist world.

Marx foresaw a classless society under Communism and predicted that the state would wither away; but Communism seems to have produced just the opposite. Russia, China and most of the other Communist nations are run by a tiny elite that hold stronger sway over workers than Marx's capitalist villains ever did. Far from disassembling government, the revolution's rulers, whom Marx called a temporary "dictatorship of the Proletariat," have strengthened it into an instrument that, were Marx living under it, would subject his own writing to censorship.

After Communism's failure to reconstruct the social order, perhaps the most grievous failure of Marx's teachings has been in economics, upon which Marxism as an operating system must succeed or fail. The 100 years since Das Kapital appeared, says Polish Marxist

Philosopher Josef Zawadzki, putting it mildly, "have not left all the theses developed in that book incontestable." In Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia, Marxism has been abandoned for economic reforms that borrow their mam tenets from capitalism. The revisions, grouped together in Russia under the term Libermanism, permit everything from market pricing of some consumer goods to incentive bonuses in factory piecework and decentralized planning--all untouchable in Marxist dogma. One result is a resurgence under Communism of Marx's despised petty bourgeoisie.

Inexhaustible Terms. Can the Communist system still be called Marxist? That term, answers Raymond Aron, political commentator of France's Le Figaro and a student of Marxism, "is equivocal and inexhaustible. Almost anyone can claim to be a follower of Marx." And practically every Commu nist still does, whether he is a Yugoslav explaining why his economy was liberalized or an Albanian explaining why his was not, a Russian defending coexistence or a Chinese condemning it. Practically everyone can find something in Marx to support his own view; in fact, the clearer Marx seemed on a point, the more vigorously will two Communists debate it.

Marx dismissed religion as the "opiate of the people," for example. Yet the Czechoslovaks are restoring religion to the country's life after 20 years of repression, the Italian Communists are currying favor with the Roman Catholic Church and Marxist and Christian philosophers are busily involved in a dialogue aimed at understanding each other. All of this goes on, of course, while the Albanians are wrecking churches and abolishing religion.

Still, the 2,000 pages of Das Kapital add up to much more than a list of unfulfilled prophecies. From Marx's apocalyptic vision came a new order that, however unfaithful to his thought, rules 13 nations in his name. Partly as a result of the same vision, capitalism took on a viability and a humanized posture far more rapidly than it might have. Moreover, for scholars and more than one modern theologian Marx's most enduring legacy is his social thought: his impassioned tracts on behalf of the victims of 19th century laissez-faire competition, his egalitarian belief in a system "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all," and his insistence on finding history's hidden economic motives. It is an ironic tribute to Marx that, on his sesquicentennial, serious study of his ideas is more common among Western than Communist intellectuals.

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