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馬克思和他的學說 -- 開欄文
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本欄及本文原名為：《紀念馬克思》。這一陣子為了將同主題/同性質的文章集中再一起，我開了一些專欄。馬克思主義在冷戰期間是「顯學」之一；我的政治思想和分析政治活動時也頗受他的啟發和影響；因此，將此欄改為現在名稱。
由於時間因素，今天只能略誌數語做個交代；以後我會找機會充實這篇《開欄文》。 -- 2026/07/15
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馬克思最具爭議的10個想法 -- Sarhaye Ca
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以下部份術語或概念的中譯跟隨通行版本；部份則基於我的了解。
對「社會主義」仍然深具信心的朋友，未必需要「博學」和「篤行」，但請務必實踐「審問」、「慎思」、「明辨」這三個動作。下文作者的詮釋和評論說得上平實；嚮往「社會主義」的朋友，可以試著反駁他的觀點做為「審問」、「慎思」、和「明辨」的起手式。
The 10 Most Controversial Ideas Karl Marx Ever Put on Paper
Sarhaye Ca, 07/22/26
Marx spent his most productive years in the reading room of the British Museum, poor enough that several of his children died of illnesses that money would have prevented, sponging off his friend Engels, who was, awkwardly, a factory owner living off the profits of the exact system Marx was trying to abolish.
When Marx died in 1883, eleven people came to the funeral. Engels stood over the grave and said that Marx’s name would endure through the ages.
That one held up. A third of humanity would eventually live under governments claiming his name, and people are still arguing, often furiously, about whether those governments understood a word he wrote. Here’s what the arguing is about.
1. History is a story about who owns what (「整部人類歷史講的不過是：誰能擁有什麼」；請比較我給「政治」下的定義：「政治是爭奪資源分配權的活動」。)
Marx called it the materialist conception of history (「唯物史觀」), and the short version is: forget kings, forget ideas, forget great men. What actually drives history is economics: who owns the means of production, and the fight between the people who own them and the people who don’t.
Feudalism gave way to capitalism not because someone had a better idea but because the economic ground shifted under everyone’s feet. Every era’s laws, religion, and morality, he argued, are basically a story the ruling class tells to make its ownership look natural.
It’s a genuinely powerful lens. It’s also the kind of claim that flattens everything into one variable, and critics have spent 150 years pointing out all the things (nationalism, religion, plain human stubbornness) that don’t reduce to who owns the factory.
2. Your boss is stealing from you (the labor theory of value；「價值(源自)勞力論」) (「你的老闆在偷你的東西」)
This is the engine of the whole system, and the part most economists now think is broken. Marx held that the value of anything comes from the human labor poured into it.
A worker produces, say, ten hours of value in a day but only gets paid for six. The other four, the “surplus value,” (「豐裕價值」) the capitalist pockets. That gap isn’t a fee for risk or management. It’s extraction (「剝削」), dressed up as a fair wage. Profit, on this view, is just theft with paperwork.
Mainstream economics abandoned the labor theory of value over a century ago in favor of marginal utility (things are worth what people will pay, not what it took to make them；「邊際效用」). But the moral intuition underneath, that the people doing the work aren’t getting their share, has never really gone away, and it comes roaring back every time wages stagnate while executive pay doesn’t.
3. Alienation (「疏離」)
Before Marx got into economics he was a philosopher, and this early idea is the one that keeps getting rediscovered. Under capitalism, he argued, work stops being an expression of who you are and becomes something you do only to survive.
You don’t own what you make, you don’t control how you make it, you’re a cog, and you feel like one. You’re alienated from your work, from the thing you produce, from other people, and finally from your own nature as a creative being.
You don’t need to be a communist to feel the pull of this one. Anyone who’s ever stared at a spreadsheet at 4 p.m. wondering what their one wild and precious life is being spent on has had a small, unwelcome visit from Karl Marx.
4. Religion is the opium of the people (「宗教是人們的鴉片」)
The most quoted line, and almost always quoted wrong. People use it as a sneer: religion is a drug for idiots. What Marx actually wrote is gentler and sadder. In a world of real suffering, religion is “the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.”
Opium, in his day, was medicine, the thing you took for genuine pain. He wasn’t calling believers fools. He was saying religion is a real comfort for real misery, which is exactly why it’s so hard to give up, and why he thought you had to fix the misery first.
Still an attack on religion, to be clear. Just a more human one than the meme version.
5. The revolution is coming whether you like it or not (「不論你喜不喜歡，革命終將到臨」)
Marx didn’t just hope capitalism would fall. He thought he’d proven it must. The system, he argued, generates its own gravediggers: it concentrates wealth at the top, immiserates the workers at the bottom, and keeps crashing into worse and worse crises until the vast exploited majority finally overthrows the tiny owning class.
This was presented as something close to science: historical inevitability. And it’s aged strangely. The revolutions that succeeded happened in poor agricultural countries like Russia and China, not the advanced industrial ones Marx predicted.
The rich capitalist societies he expected to explode mostly didn’t. Instead they raised wages, built welfare states, and bought their workers off. Which, depending on who you ask, either refutes Marx or proves he scared capitalism into behaving.
6. The dictatorship of the proletariat (「無產階級專政」)
Here’s where a lot of the bodies are buried, literally. Marx wrote that between capitalism and true communism there had to be a transitional period: the workers seizing state power and using it, by force, to crush the old ruling class. He called it the dictatorship of the proletariat.
He was vague about the details, which turned out to be a catastrophic thing to be vague about. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all pointed at this phrase to justify one-party states, secret police, and death tolls in the tens of millions.
Defenders insist Marx meant something like majority rule enforced against a defeated minority, not gulags. Maybe. But when your terminology includes the word “dictatorship” and history fills in the rest with mass graves, “you misread me” is a hard defense to run.
7. Abolish private property (「廢除私有財產」)
Not your toothbrush. Marx got tired of explaining this. He meant private ownership of the means of production (「生產工具」): factories, land, capital, the stuff you use to make money off other people’s work. Personal possessions were never the target.
The idea is that as long as a small class owns the machinery everyone else needs to live, that class will always hold everyone else hostage, no matter how nice the wallpaper of democracy looks. Abolish that, and you abolish the master-servant relationship at the root of everything.
Critics reply that private property isn’t just about exploitation: it’s tangled up with freedom, incentive, and the simple fact that people take better care of things they own. The twentieth century ran the experiment on collective ownership (「集體所有制」) at enormous scale, and the results were, to put it mildly, not an advertisement.
8. Class consciousness and false consciousness (「階級觀念」與「錯誤觀念」)
Marx noticed a problem: if workers are being exploited, why don’t they revolt? Part of his answer was false consciousness: the idea that the ruling class controls not just the factories but the newspapers, the schools, the churches, the whole machinery of ideas, so ordinary people absorb beliefs that work against their own interests without ever realizing it. The worker who idolizes the billionaire, who votes to cut his own protections, who thinks the system is basically fair: that’s false consciousness at work.
It’s a sharp and useful concept. It’s also intellectually dangerous, because it hands you a trump card: anyone who disagrees with you must simply be too brainwashed to see the truth. That move has justified a lot of arrogance and a fair amount of tyranny.
9. Workers of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but your chains (「全世界勞工聯合起來：你們將只會失去身上的枷鎖」)
The last line of The Communist Manifesto, and the most controversial thing about it isn’t the sentiment, it’s the word “world.” Marx insisted the working class had no country. A German worker had more in common with a French worker than with a German factory owner, so the revolution had to be international or it was nothing. Nationalism, in this framework, was a con, a way of tricking workers into dying in their masters’ wars.
Then 1914 arrived, and the workers of Europe cheerfully marched off to slaughter each other by nationality (指第一次世界大戰), and international socialism basically shattered on impact. Turns out people are attached to their flags in ways Marx’s theory had no room for. It remains one of the most consequential wrong predictions ever made.
10. Communism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs (「共產主義：各盡所能；各取所需」)
The promised land at the end of the road, and Marx spent shockingly little ink describing it. No blueprint, almost no detail, just a glimpse of a world where the state has “withered away,” nobody is chained to a single job, and you might “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticize after dinner.”
The famous formula (everyone contributes what they can, everyone receives what they need) is meant to describe a society so abundant that grabbing and hoarding no longer make sense.
Skeptics call it a fantasy that ignores human nature and the awkward question of who decides what your “needs” are. Believers call it the only moral goal worth having.
The tragedy is that every attempt to build it in the real world stopped at step six and never left, and the dictatorship of the proletariat turned out to be a place people checked into and couldn’t check out of.
Written by Sarhaye Ca
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介紹一本馬克思學說的入門書 - Laura Westford
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Where to Start with Karl Marx
The way of the master
Laura Westford, 06/29/26
Trying to understand where to begin in the vast pantheon of left-wing or especially Marxist literature is a daunting task for many of us. Not only are there a plethora of works from the likes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin to read, but there are likewise many biographies of and commentaries on the various works by these great thinkers.
It’s a well-known joke/meme online that different strands of leftists/Marxists all hate each other, and there is certainly a grain of truth to this. What this ends up meaning is that huge swaths of people inevitably end up having different perspectives on where to start when trying to get into these studies of politics.
Many will recommend something like Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels, or they might recommend State and Revolution by Lenin, and some will even recommend jumping straight into Marx’s Capital. Either way, there is a wide variety of perspectives on where to start in engaging with these ideas.
Someone who many on the left will no doubt be aware of is the great Marxist geographer and economist David Harvey. Harvey has been active in left-wing politics and Marxism for many decades at this point, and he has written many well-acclaimed books on Marxism, such as The Limits to Capital, 17 Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, The Conditions of Postmodernity, and Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason.
Harvey has also written a number of other books on politics such as A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which is very well-regarded as an analysis of the form of capitalism we live under to this very day.
Many people are aware of David Harvey because of the yearly courses he teaches on Marx’s Capital. This is where I first heard about him almost a decade ago, and I grew to have an interest in him. More recently, he has published a book, The Story of Capital, which gives us a great insight into Marx’s magnum opus, as well as showing how it can help us understand contemporary capitalism. I wanted to go over some of my thoughts on this book, having read it, and now come to the conclusion that it’s honestly one of the best books I’ve ever read.
The Story of Capital is, first and foremost, a book about Marx and his great book, Capital, which was an analysis of capitalist production and a critique of various analyses of political economy we saw during Marx’s day.
What Harvey does in The Story of Capital is give us an outline of some of the goals of Marx’s work, as well as presenting everything in the context of what Harvey calls his “Marx project,” which he has embarked on for several decades at this point.
One of the best and most valuable insights that Harvey presents is to point to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as a totality. The idea of the “totality” in Marxism is something some will be aware of, and Harvey presents it as a unique way of understanding capitalism.
Capitalism and capitalist society are not a mere collection of isolated individuals and actions, atomistic and unconnected from the wider social world. Instead, Harvey presents us with an analysis of capitalism in which everything is connected, the economy and broader social relations that underpin it.
A common criticism that is levied against liberal or bourgeois politicians and writers is to view capitalism in solely economic terms, thereby disconnected from social relations and historical processes leading to the social world we now live in.
The Marxist totality is about trying to understand all of these various systems and processes as being connected.
Harvey drew an analogy between this view of the totality and medicine/the understanding of the body. The human body is not a mere collection of random, unconnected parts. Instead, the body is made up of various systems, organs, parts, etc., which all work together as part of a wider process.
This analogy from Harvey was really interesting and something which is certainly useful in trying to understand capitalism and society.
It should be noted here that Harvey is not against trying to study specific aspects of capitalism, be it social relations, money, inflation, or whatever the case may be. He actually continues the analogy with medicine, and pointing out how sometimes you need people who specialise in specific fields of study in order to understand a certain thing.
This applies in trying to understand capitalism. However, Harvey does stress that ultimately, things need to be understood as a totality and connected to one another.
Some of my favourite parts of this book are when Harvey discusses primitive accumulation, the process in history where, during the early stages of capitalist development, people were separated from the land they previously owned/worked on, in order to make way for the development of capitalism and private ownership.
Land which was once owned in common by peasants was taken by force, with peasants being forced off their land and moved into developing cities, where they were forced to take up employment and sell their labour power to the emerging capitalist class.
This is a very basic overview of primitive accumulation and in the vast array of Marxist literature on this subject, you will see this analysis really fleshed out in great depth. In the case of Harvey and in the specific book The Story of Capital, we see some characteristically brilliant insight into this topic.
As you can no doubt imagine, this process of primitive accumulation and development of capitalism was a hugely violent process. Forcing people off land which had once been owned in common did not come easily and required a massive use of state power in order to achieve this.
As capitalism further developed, and when the introduction of machinery into the productive process became more common, you also had the rise of who correctly identified capitalists as replacing them with machines in order to avoid paying their workers for the same work.
Of course, Harvey presents this analysis as being interconnected and not at all as some isolated instance, but something deeply necessary for the development of capitalism. Capitalists are able to benefit from having the state on their side, exploiting their position as the ruling dominant class to further their interests via the state. The state in a capitalist society functions to legitimise class rule on behalf of the bourgeoisie.
Some of the most interesting parts of the book are when Harvey discusses matters of geography, most notably in the chapter “The Production of Space, Time and Place”. Being that Harvey is a geographer, this is really where he is in his element, and you can tell that he has great insight and experience in discussing these matters.
The kind of reactionary politics deciding who gets to be in our countries and which cultures we should allow is something we hear a great deal about, especially in the West, and it’s also highly related to capitalism.
Harvey’s insights into these topics from a Marxist analysis, making reference to the writing of Marx and others, are really powerful and make for some of the best reading in the whole book.
Overall, I have to say that The Story of Capital might genuinely be the best book I’ve read this year. There is a tendency when approaching certain Marxist books to be a bit worried, as things can often be very complex and hard to understand, but that isn’t the case with The Story of Capital whatsoever. Everything is presented very nicely, and it’s all easy to follow and understand, regardless of what understanding someone has of any of these topics.
I would actually recommend this book to people if they want to start getting into Marxism and Marx specifically. As I mentioned, the insights contained in regard to Marx are brilliant, but the way Harvey presents all of this and shows how we can use Marx’s insight to understand current politics and the state of capitalism is absolutely masterful, also.
Written by Laura Westford
Writer covering topics such as politics, culture, and philosophy
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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我這個年代的人，只要對政治有興趣，年輕時多少都受到馬克思的影響。讀過或讀懂《資本論》的大概不多，讀過《共產主義者宣言》的則大有人在。雖然當時在台灣，馬克思的著作是禁書，出國(留學)後或在島內地下讀書會中，大家總有機會讀馬克思的著作。
我是在出國後，才開始接觸馬克思的思想。當然，了解到的不過皮毛而已。 05/04是「五四」，我已沒有精神寫紀念文章。05/05是馬克思200周年誕辰。我在網上看到一篇(我認為)還算中肯的文章，刊登於另一欄，以感念馬克思對我的啟蒙。
本文原刊登於2018/05/06；是為了紀念馬克思200年誕辰。由於更改「本欄名稱」，原欄位改為《開欄文》，此文不得不重行刊登；造成不便，敬請見諒。 -- 2026/07/15
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我認為Bildt先生文章中最大的邏輯錯誤在於：
他沒搞清楚「思想」和「使用思想」的人的差別。簡單的說，許多拿「馬克思思想」來號召革命群眾的人，在列寧之外，真正懂「馬克思思想」的人大概屈指可數。這些人之中，讀過馬克思著作的人大概更少。
馬克思思想吸引和鼓舞人的地方，正在它指出：
這個世界是不公平的！
改變這個不公平的世界是每個人的責任！
所以：
每個人都應該投身於改變世界的工作！
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以上幾篇文章或多或少都跟馬克思有關。我同意P. Singer教授認為馬克思的經濟學和政治學理論已過時或不再適用的意見；但如S. C. Cleary、M. Pigliucci、和Y. Varoufakis三位教授的大作所討論，如果「人」和「人性」在今天的社會中還有一席之地，或比以往更需要「捍衛」；則如R. Cooper教授指出，我認為馬克思的社會學理論和(青年馬克思的)人本主義理論，在今天仍然有其相關性。
可惜時不我與，我只能點到為止。我希望一些馬克思的「死忠派」，或以「左派」自居的青年或中年朋友們，放棄馬克思的經濟理論，致力於從馬克思的社會學和人本主義理論來發揚他的思想。
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