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Socialist Simon used to be a Marxist. Then he got a life. Here, he picks through the detritus of his wasted youth to uncover the fleeting scraps of wisdom that Marx left him.

Campus Marxism is an odd beast. Anachronistic, repetitive, and often demonstrating a startling lack of basic logical concepts, its proponents can often be seen huddling in small, despondent, raggedly-bearded circles, plotting revolution and bemoaning the advent of online OUSA SGMs (so much harder to stack, damnit!).

Rarely does a card-carrying Marxist stand out as a person with whom one might conduct a reasoned, useful and intellectually honest conversation – not only about politics, but about anything. This is because, to most young Marxists, the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat for control of the means of production explains, well, pretty much every facet of society.

Why did the government lower taxes and cut public services? To benefit the bourgeoisie. Class struggle! Why did the government raise taxes and increase public services? To placate the proletariat and benefit the bourgeoisie. Class struggle! Why did they cancel Firefly? Because the market is directed by bourgeois tastes. Class struggle! Why are Pringles cans not wide enough? Because the bourgeoisie don’t do manual labour, and thusly have small hands. Class struggle! My foot hurts. Bourgeoisie! Class struggle!

I may just be projecting, but the realisation that there is more to the story usually occurs to the average Marxist around second year. This is the point at which they learn what the word “falsifiable” means, after which they get bored of the ISO and wander off. They used to have a theory that explained everything and delivered easy, chauvinistic judgements; now the world’s ambiguities come flooding in and it’s all a little bit overwhelming. (In the interests of balance, I should probably point out that your average right-wing libertarian will rarely, if ever, experience such a moment of self-awareness.)

In any case, the decline of Marxism as a theory that receives and (in its most common expressions) deserves attention is a loss. Marx himself was undeniably one of the most brilliant, perceptive thinkers of the last two centuries, so it’s a pity his reputation has been tarnished by a few campus shouty types and the odd genocide. As we emerge from the other end of the latest CRISIS OF CAPITALISM, it’s worth asking what, if anything, Marx can still tell us today.

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Karl Marx was born in Prussia (modern-day Germany) in 1818, the third of nine children. After avoiding military service at eighteen due to a “weak chest,” he became involved with the Young Hegelians, a group of radical thinkers, in the late 1830s. He moved to Paris in 1843, where he met long-time collaborator (and Robin to Marx’s Batman) Friedrich Engels. In 1845, however, his radical publications saw him expelled from France, and he moved to Brussels, and then England.

During this time Marx and Engels formed the Communist League and wrote the pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. After moving to London, Marx wrote his magnum opus, the three-volume Das Kapital (Capital), the last two volumes of which were published by Engels after Marx’s death in 1883. It was in Das Kapital that Marx identified what he saw as capitalism’s fundamental flaw, and the flaw that would inevitably lead to the theory’s downfall and the rise of communism – the problem of overproduction.

If you hire a worker to produce a good or service, which you then sell, you must sell this good or service for more than what you pay the worker. Your ability to make a profit depends on your ability to pocket the difference between the revenue you generate and the wages you pay. Writ large, this means that the total value of wages paid to workers must always fall short of the total value of all goods on the market.

There are three broad upshots to this state of affairs. First, demand has to continually expand in order to catch up with this overproduction. The most obvious way to do so is by increasing wages. These wage increases, however, take the form of a Ponzi scheme: to afford them, employers must increase their revenue by either expanding their operations or increasing productivity; both solutions, however, worsen the problem of overproduction, creating a vicious circle. If these continual wage increases cannot be sustained, overproduction will reach a tipping point and the system will head into recession: workers will go unpaid and goods and services unsold, on a mass scale.

Second, if wages cannot keep rising, demand can be artificially topped up by increasing debt. Allowing workers to borrow lots of money and repay it at some point in the future is, however, another Ponzi scheme that adds to and exacerbates the first. When demand collapses and a recession occurs, the presence of huge amounts of debt multiplies the severity of the recession – hence why the latest was one of the worst ever seen.

Finally, whenever demand cannot keep up, some members of the profit-making class (the bourgeoisie) will simply be unable to deal with the problem of overproduction, and will fail. In the long term, this means that the bourgeoisie will gradually shrink, with wealth concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

The picture that emerges is of a system with a pathological need for growth, periodic recessions, increasing debt, a gradual concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, and constant productivity gains squeezed out of the working class. In modern times, this is a pretty standard view of capitalism. Marx called it in the nineteenth century.

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But if Marx was so perceptive, why are we not all enjoying the wonders of centrally-planned socialist utopias? Why are we not smoking Victory Cigarettes and chanting “four legs good, two legs bad”? Where did it all go wrong?

The standard Marxist response is that we have exported the worst effects of capitalism offshore. Marx thought the proletariat would inevitably revolt due to their poor working conditions, and would set up a new, egalitarian system to replace capitalism. Rather than allow this to happen, though, the West has relied on sweatshop labour in the developing world, and has propped up governments that keep this underclass in line and out of the West’s sight. Meanwhile, Marx failed to anticipate the rise of the welfare state and the middle class it supported. This middle class, who would otherwise have joined the ranks of the proletariat, are given a comfortable living and so never develop a revolutionary mentality.

But does the middle class even need to exist? An article published last month in Strike! magazine, entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” has been doing the rounds on the Internet lately. The article, which was penned by David Graeber, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, contends that a large proportion of middle-class jobs have simply been “made up” to appease an otherwise non-working, restless portion of society. According to Graeber, these jobs – including but not limited to administrators, public relations researchers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, private equity CEOs, actuaries, and telemarketers – are all “bullshit.”

Graeber believes that while technology has made possible a 15-hour working week, we are working longer hours than ever because bullshit jobs have been invented to distract us. He points out that although the standard justification for this is an increase in consumerism, few bullshit jobs actually have anything to do with producing goods. In fact, people with bullshit jobs actively resent those with “real” jobs (i.e. jobs that involve the provision of a valuable good or service), because working at a job that doesn’t even need to exist is both unfulfilling and demeaning.

Graeber undoubtedly glosses over many of the nuances of capitalism and, like so many aloof Marxist intellectuals (not that he ever mentions Marx by name), he romanticises factory work to a bizarre extent, even placing it alongside nursing in the category of fulfilling jobs. The Economist also debunks many of his arguments (as it would), pointing out that a large amount of clerical work is important for the smooth functioning of highly complex, late-stage capitalist systems.

However, Graeber is right in that – at the very least – advertising, PR, and in-house lawyering are, from a social perspective, inherently useless jobs. They exist solely to provide a competitive edge to individual companies; but, in a classic Prisoners’ Dilemma, this advantage is nullified as soon as a competitor follows suit. What follows is an arms race in which bullshit jobs proliferate without any wider social or productive benefit.

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So, yeah! Revolution! Down with bullshit jobs! Emancipate the Thai proletariat!

Chances are you didn’t get particularly inspired by that last part. Thing is, the call for revolution doesn’t stir us much because we haven’t developed a class consciousness. This isn’t because capitalism has somehow divided the proletariat by giving a portion of them bullshit jobs (at least not entirely). It’s occurred because increasingly, class is not the only – or even the primary – way we think about ourselves, and it’s not our only clarion call to action.

As capitalism has advanced and markets become more prolific and varied, humanity has become more diverse. People’s politics are informed by much more than just class and material wellbeing; and differences, which used to exist on a group level, now exist between every individual human. This heterogeneity makes it more difficult to think about politics in terms of broad principles that treat everybody the same. Instead, the rise of identity politics requires a much more nuanced approach to questions of social justice.

In other words, I’m not going to fight alongside the proletariat if “proletarian” only describes a small part of my identity. I may be a proletarian, but I’m also much more than that, and there’s a growing sense, even among socialists, that capitalism might be important for fulfilling the other, non-proletarian parts of me. Perhaps capitalism is actually laying the foundations for more freedom and open-mindedness, and giving me the opportunity to explore facets of myself that the endless class rhetoric of Marxism tends to supress or deny.

Marxism is still useful because it allows us to look past the narrow focus on supply and demand to see the bigger picture. It opens our eyes to the limitations and flaws of capitalism, and suggests ways that we might humanise the economy. But it’s still only one perspective among many. It doesn’t provide a total explanation for the human condition, and thinking that it does is what makes Marxists so annoying.

The final tool in the Marxist shed is the hilarious concept of “false consciousness.” Many Marxists would dismiss everything I have just said, and claim that all the non-class-based parts of my identity are illusions brought on by capitalism. False consciousness is a great theory because it allows you to completely ignore what the other person is saying (“I actually love capitalism!” “No you don’t, that’s just the false consciousness talking”). Of course people get sucked in by consumerism – that’s a no-brainer. But I can think of a few people (myself included) who got sucked in by Marxism, and its lofty claim to have provided, after only my first year of university, the answers to all of society’s problems.

Breaking up with Marx was a slow and chastening experience. We’re still friends, but I’m wise to his ways now, and he’s not getting in my pants again any time soon.