Even if you lump Marx together with the engineers and scientists, like astronomers and architects, it would not affect my claim. Einstein himself, perhaps the greatest physicist ever, was a committed socialist; he wrote an entire article about it. Marx's influence was not just philosophical, but also political, economic, and scientific. There are very few thinkers in history whose contributions actually extended to so many different dimensions of human society.

But my particular claim was restricted to the stereotypical version of an intellectual, the kind of person who has grand ideas about the world without any prospects for immediate application (though they could certainly be applied later). In any case, it hardly matters what standard you adopt for intellectual influence. Marx was so influential that he meets, exceeds, and then obliterates every possible standard.

In addition to this, frank assumes that the problems of global capitalism are somehow all settled and that the "moderates...won in the end." One could see this as a modified version of Francis Fukuyama's thesis that the end of the Soviet Union and the imminent spread of liberal and democratic capitalism signified "the end of history." If these bedtime stories make you feel better, by all means go ahead and recite them.

The truth is that American society, and the capitalist system that underlies everything about it, is in severe crisis. Life expectancy has declined for two years in a row. Real wages for half of American workers have stayed largely flat in the past four decades. Average real GDP growth in the US has fallen from more than 4% in the 1950s and the 1960s to around 2% in the first 17 years of this century. The US represented almost half of all global GDP after World War II; it now has just about 15% in purchasing power terms. The richest 1% of the country owns a greater share of national wealth than at any point in the last 50 years. As our position in the global capitalist system deteriorates, our political system will necessarily feel the heat, and has already suffered from it considering the events of the last three years.

In this economic and political context, Marx feels as fresh and as useful as he ever was. In other words, the fall of the Soviet Union was at best an armistice of 20 or 30 years, much like the Treaty of Versailles. Now the global system is in upheaval again, and these are exactly when Marx is at his best (ie. when describing a system in crisis, which most conventional economic philosophies prefer to ignore).

Umm off the top of my head...

1) Marx was the major ideological figure of the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Civil War, and the Cuban Revolution, to name just a few seminal events of modern history.

2) Decolonization movements in many parts of the world were led by socialist and communist parties. Marx was a major inspiration for oppressed indigenous peoples to challenge and overthrow their colonial masters.

3) Much of our foundational political and economic assumptions are Marxist. You see this all the time when people speak about the 'working class' and the 'middle class' and the this or that class. The idea that the economic foundations of society determine its major political, social, and cultural properties is widely accepted (or functionally assumed, if not explicitly recognized). Most historians nowadays basically practice some version of historical materialism in their work.

4) Over 1.5 billion people today live under governments that claim to be Marxist.

Marx is alive and well. As long as there is some kind of social conflict in the world, he always will be.

The title of this thread is misleading. The municipal government of Trier, Marx's birth city, accepted the gift from China. The German federal government had nothing to do with it. Trier accepted the statue mostly because it wanted publicity and tourists.

Xi gave a speech last week in front of delegates at the Great Hall of the People honoring Marx's life and legacy. Marx still has propaganda and ideological value for the Communist Party, even though China's version of state capitalism is something Marx would have probably criticized.

Marx became one of the most influential thinkers in human history. He got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. His analysis of capitalism, despite its many flaws, remains the most insightful and comprehensive one ever attempted.

Full disclosure upfront: I am a proud vegan, so clearly I am biased to one side in this debate.

Second disclosure: this is the only post I will ever write on this thread, so feel free to dissect and criticize it as you wish. My intent is not to start a new argument, but to offer new ideas for consideration in these pre-existing arguments. Then you can reject or incorporate my ideas into your arguments as you see fit. I will also make some general comments about where I think this debate has landed after multiple rounds of arguments.

I have followed this thread quite closely and I've been impressed with some of the ideas presented, from both sides. I wanted to add my own thoughts on this debate, focusing on an angle that has not received much attention: the wider social, economic, and ecological relations that mediate and influence our food choices. I think it's important to consider this component of the debate because it can substantially alter the answer to the original question.

Is it wrong to eat animals? I would say it depends on a wide array of factors, and I don't think that this position commits me entirely to moral relativism. The reason why is because some of these factors are determined by biophysical and ecological realities, hence they do not depend on social preference. I am fully supportive of the San in the Kalahari hunting gazelles or the Inuit in Canada hunting seals. These are communities that live in very forbidding ecozones, making an exclusively plant-based diet quite difficult to achieve. The San still obtained most of their calories from fruits and vegetables gathered by women, but meat was clearly an indispensable part of their diet as well.

We obviously don't live in those worlds. We live in an integrated system of global capitalism, where goods and commodities are exchanged for financial profit and where a small minority of the human population controls the vast majority of surplus wealth. This is the fundamental economic system that lurks behind, in front, and everywhere around that original question. I will argue that eating animals, in the context of modern capitalism, is an objectively bad idea for a number of related reasons. Our moral considerations cannot be fully divorced from these biophysical and ecological factors, hence any moral judgment on whether we should eat animals needs to somehow account for them. The basis for this claim is that the quest for a moral life represents both a social and a philosophical enterprise. In other words, morality is inextricably bound to social relations, and those social relations are themselves coevolving with economic and ecological conditions. Hence we cannot fully analyze the moral dimension of whether to eat animals apart from these conditions.

For your consideration, I present the following three points:

1) Because farm animals are bred for capitalist profit, they are subject to the same dynamics of waste and overproduction that characterize other parts of the global supply chain. Global capitalism slaughters roughly 60 billion animals a year. One estimate says that 12 billion of those animals end up dying for nothing: their meat simply gets thrown away. Others are simply considered useless and slaughtered with no intent for consumption. Male chicks are usually tossed into the grinders on their very first day of life.

2) Eating meat from the capitalist food industry has a negative impact on health. Numerous studies point to vegans and vegetarians having longer life expectancy than meat-eaters (see this and this for some major ones that came out recently). Other studies show that a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, beans, and nuts will yield the best health outcomes over the long run. The World Health organization has classified red meat and processed meat as likely carcinogenic (see here). Being vegan is not just the default choice when you want to avoid eating meat while still surviving. It's a way to thrive and contribute positively to your health.

3) The global agricultural and land use industry is responsible for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN, a huge fraction of which come from raising livestock. These emissions include the biological products of farm animals as well as emissions from logistics, transportation, and other activities that require a large amount of mechanical work. Changing consumption patterns is an important component of making this industry less energy-intensive, though certainly not the only one. Concerted public pressure and state action would also help, but these will probably take a long time to materialize.

In conclusion, it's not simply eating animals that represents the biggest moral problem today. Rather it's an evil economic system that kills so many animals for pure profit, with no intent to actually feed the poor and the hungry around the world. Participating in this system willingly, when its damaging effects are so clear, is what constitutes an immoral offense. Being vegan can represent a small act of revolt against an otherwise corrupt system that seems to be indifferent to the concerns of living things, including human beings, outside of their relationship to the market and their level of wealth.

In following this thread, it has occurred to me that the arguments of the anti-vegan camp, especially from Michael and jastopher, are reducible to the following position:

I will hold any philosophical belief necessary to justify my current methods of energy consumption, or those methods of consumption widely prevalent in society.

For me, the most revealing comment of the entire debate was the following from jastopher, after considering several of the ethical responses available on this issue:

"I like utilitarianism since it permits me to continue to eat meat...."

And that's fundamentally what this entire debate has come down to. It's no longer an argument about who has the best reasons for the ideal moral stance. Instead it's become an exercise for finding any excuses necessary to justify existing lifestyles, lest we have too much pesky radicalism. Better to invent spurious reasons to justify the current state of the world than contemplate any meaningful change to improve our lives. Casual centrism reigns supreme. All the beautiful normative ideals have devolved into the brutal descriptive reality: humans have power over animals, so we can do with them as we please. Might makes right.

What a glorious philosophy!