SEOUL, South Korea — On May 5, 1818, in the southern German town of Trier, in the picturesque wine-growing region of the Moselle Valley, Karl Marx was born. At the time Trier was one-tenth the size it is today, with a population of around 12,000. According to one of Marx’s recent biographers, Jurgen Neffe, Trier is one of those towns where “although everyone doesn’t know everyone, many know a lot about many.”

韩国首尔——1818年5月5日，在德国南部小镇特里尔，风景如画的葡萄酒产区摩泽尔河谷，卡尔.马克思(Karl Marx)诞生了。当时的特里尔面积只有今天的十分之一大，人口约有1.2万。近期的一位马克思传记作家于尔根.内夫说，特里尔是那种“虽然不是每个人都彼此认识、但很多人彼此都非常熟悉”的小镇。

In 1837 Marx reneged on the legal career that his father, himself a lawyer, had mapped out for him and immersed himself instead in the speculative philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel at the University of Berlin. One might say that it was all downhill from there. The deeply conservative Prussian government didn’t take kindly to such revolutionary thinking (Hegel’s philosophy advocated a rational liberal state), and by the start of the next decade Marx’s chosen career path as a university professor had been blocked.

1837年，马克思违背了律师父亲给他规划的法律事业，在柏林大学(University of Berlin)沉浸在G.W.F.黑格尔(G.W.F. Hegel)的思辨哲学中。有人可能会说，从那时开始，一切都在走下坡路。极端保守的普鲁士政府对这样的革命思想并不友好（黑格尔哲学倡导理性的自由主义国家），在接下来的十年里，马克思选择的大学教授的事业道路被阻断了。

If ever there were a convincing case to be made for the dangers of philosophy, then surely it’s Marx’s discovery of Hegel, whose “grotesque craggy melody” repelled him at first but which soon had him dancing deliriously through the streets of Berlin. As Marx confessed to his father in an equally delirious letter in November 1837, “I wanted to embrace every person standing on the street-corner.”

如果有一个令人信服的例子能证明哲学的危险，那肯定是马克思对黑格尔的发现，黑格尔“怪诞刺耳的旋律”一开始令他反感，但很快就令他在柏林的街头兴奋地狂舞。正如马克思在1837年11月的一封信中向父亲极度兴奋地承认的那样：“想拥抱每一个遇见的人。”

As we reach the bicentennial of Marx’s birth, what lessons might we draw from his dangerous and delirious philosophical legacy? What precisely is Marx’s lasting contribution?

在马克思诞辰200周年之际，我们能从他危险、疯狂的哲学遗产中汲取什么教训呢？马克思永久的贡献到底是什么呢？

Today the legacy would appear to be alive and well. Since the turn of the millennium 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.

如今，他的遗产依然非常鲜活。自世纪之交以来，出现了无数关于马克思的书籍，包括学术著作和通俗传记，它们广泛赞同马克思对资本主义的解读，以及它同我们这个新自由主义时代的持久关联。

In the “Communist Manifesto,” Marx and Engels wrote: “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”

马克思和恩格斯在《共产党宣言》中写道：“资产阶级抹去了一切向来受人尊崇和令人敬畏的职业的神圣光环。它把医生、律师、教士、诗人和学者变成了它出钱招雇的雇佣劳动者。”

Marx was convinced that capitalism would soon make relics of them. The inroads that artificial intelligence is currently making into medical diagnosis and surgery, for instance, bears out the argument in the “Manifesto” that technology would greatly accelerate the “division of labor,” or the deskilling of such professions.

马克思确信，资本主义会很快将这些职业变成历史遗物。例如，人工智能目前正在进入医学诊断和外科手术领域，证实了《共产党宣言》中的一个论断，那就是，技术会大大加速“劳动分工”，也就是降低某些职业的技术要求。

To better understand how Marx achieved his lasting global impact — an impact arguably greater and wider than any other philosopher’s before or after him — we can begin with his relationship to Hegel. What was it about Hegel’s work that so captivated Marx? As he informed his father, early encounters with Hegel’s “system,” which builds itself upon layer after layer of negations and contradictions, hadn’t entirely won him over.

为了更好地理解马克思是如何获得持久全球影响力的——可以说，他的影响力比他之前或之后的其他任何哲学家都更大、更广泛——我们可以从他与黑格尔的关系说起。黑格尔著作中的什么东西深深吸引了马克思？正如他对父亲说的，他早期接触黑格尔的“体系”时，并没有被完全说服。那个体系是建立在一层又一层的矛盾对立之上的。

Marx found that the late-18th-century idealisms of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte that so dominated philosophical thinking in the early 19th century prioritized thinking itself — so much so that reality could be inferred through intellectual reasoning. But Marx refused to endorse their reality. In an ironic Hegelian twist, it was the complete opposite: It was the material world that determined all thinking. As Marx puts it in his letter, “If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its center.”

马克思发现，伊曼努尔.康德(Immanuel Kant)和约翰.戈特利布.费希特(Johann Gottlieb Fichte)的18世纪末唯心主义思想在19世纪初主导着哲学思维，以至于人们将思考本身放在优先位置上，甚至连现实都可以通过智力推理来推断。但马克思拒绝认可他们的现实。讽刺的是这是一种黑格尔式的转变，走向完全相反的方向：物质世界决定着所有的思考。正如马克思在他的信中所说的，“如果说神先前是超脱尘世的，那么现在它们已经成为尘世的中心。”

The idea of the classless and stateless society would come to define both Marx’s and Engels’s idea of communism, and of course the subsequent and troubled history of the Communist “states” (ironically enough!) that materialized during the 20th century. There is still a great deal to be learned from their disasters, but their philosophical relevance remains doubtful, to say the least.

没有阶级和国家的社会，是马克思和恩格斯共产主义思想的标志，当然，这也定义了此后在20世纪出现的共产主义“国家”（多么讽刺）的混乱历史。我们从这些国家的灾难中仍能学到很多东西，但至少在哲学层面，它们的经历有多少借鉴意义是存疑的。

The key factor in Marx’s intellectual legacy in our present-day society is not “philosophy” but “critique,” or what he described in 1843 as “the ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,” he wrote in 1845.

在我们当今的社会中，马克思的智识遗产中的关键因子不是“哲学”，而是“批判”，或者如他在1843年所描述的，“要对现存的一切进行无情的批判，所谓无情，就是说，这种批判既不怕自己所作的结论，也不怕同现有的各种势力发生冲突。”“哲学家们只是用不同的方式解释世界，问题在于改变世界，“他在1845年写道。

Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the “eternal truths” of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.

阶级剥削的运转中又加入了种族和性别压迫。像Black Lives Matter（“黑人的命也是命”）和#MeToo（#我也是）这样的社会正义运动毫不掩饰地把目标对准我们这个时代的“永恒真理”，因而默默地从马克思那里获得了教益。像马克思那样，这些运动认识到，所有社会的统治观念都是统治阶级的观念，推翻这些观念是真正革命进步的根本。

To cite Marx, “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”

引用马克思的话，“无论哪一个社会形态，在它所能容纳的全部生产力发挥出来以前，是决不会灭亡的；而新的更高的生产关系，在它的物质存在条件在旧社会的胎胞里成熟以前，是决不会出现的。”

The transition to a new society where relations among people, rather than capital relations, finally determine an individual’s worth is arguably proving to be quite a task. Marx, as I have said, does not offer a one-size-fits-all formula for enacting social change. But he does offer a powerful intellectual acid test for that change. On that basis, we are destined to keep citing him and testing his ideas until the kind of society that he struggled to bring about, and that increasing numbers of us now desire, is finally realized.

过渡到一个个人价值最终由人与人之间的关系所决定，而不是由资本关系所决定的新社会，被证明是一项相当艰巨的任务。正如我所说，马克思并没有给出一个实现社会变革的通用配方。但他确实为这种变革进行了一次有力的智识“酸性测试”。在这个基础上，我们注定要继续引用他的话，并且试验他的想法，直到他努力希望实现的那种社会，以及如今我们当中愈来愈多的人所渴望的那种社会终于得到实现。