By Michael Shook
Last month, we had a brief look at the history of human efforts to live communally, and how those did, or did not, work out. This month, we assess some of the life and work of the man perhaps most associated with modern Communism, Karl Marx.
Marx was a man of prodigious intellect, with a narcissistic ego to match. And, like others throughout history similarly endowed, he dismissed any and all criticism of his vision of the world, the people in it, and the way life “should” be. His life was defined by dramatic contrasts, and while he lived – in spite of his genius, his relentless commitment to the development of his ideas, and his valuable insights regarding economics, sociology, and philosophy – he never achieved the fame and status he felt he was due.
As a student in Berlin, Marx was deeply influenced by the work of Georg Hegel, earning his Doctor of Philosophy at age 23. He eventually dismissed Hegel’s work for its emphasis on abstract spiritual matters, but adopted and utilized a form of Hegel’s dialectic analysis. While the dialectic method was originally a conversational back and forth of questions and answers, whereby one arrives at a truth, Hegel used dialectic to demonstrate contradictions inherent in ideas. The contradictions would inevitably lead to a resolution of themselves, and a new idea, both negating and preserving the original idea.
Marx applied the dialectical method to material reality, the literal ways in which, for example, the bourgeois and proletariat contradict each other. This would lead to the negation of each, out of which would emerge a new way. Both men believed that this confrontation between forces would “… take the form of violent, cataclysmic leaps, destructive revolutions… which establish a new order upon the ruins of the old.”
Marx initially thought to seek a post teaching, but that door closed as his theories evolved and his activities became more politically provocative. He had joined a group of intellectuals who railed against the King, the bourgeoisie, and religion, and was forced to leave Prussia (Germany), emigrating to France. From there, again because of his radical politics, he decamped to Belgium, and then, finally, to London. There, he lived out all but the last few years of his life, supported as usual (and just barely) by his long-time friend, collaborator, and financial benefactor, Friedrich Engels.
Beginning in the early 1800s, workers across Europe, caught between job losses from mass industrialization, dislocation due to land enclosures, and enduring famine from failed crops, rose up and demanded change. The right to vote, the re-establishment of guilds, and access to land were among their demands. When the governments refused, riots, and eventually, armed attempts to gain power ensued. However, most of the uprisings were poorly organized, lacking coherent leadership, and were crushed.
For Marx, each failed uprising of workers, most notably those in Germany and France in 1848, only hardened his resolve. Early in his career, he had worked tirelessly to raise the consciousness of the proletariat through his writing, believing they would “see the light,” and advance their cause themselves. But in the aftermath of so many losses, he was convinced the only road to success was via an international organization, with himself at the head.
He was fiercely uncompromising in this, seeing the world in black and white – one was for him, or against him. To those who praised his work, or sought his advice in supplicating ways, Marx was genial, jocular, and indulgent. Those deemed unsympathetic to his vision of the Communist cause were bitterly attacked. Any who spoke of another path, or who complained about their physical struggles, or their emotional suffering, or who had concerns of spiritual morality, were viewed as indulging in bourgeois sentiment. In acid polemics, he poured his contempt on them.
Eventually, Marx decreed that the working class would have to be forced into acceptance of the principles of the Communist Manifesto, speaking of the workers as “asses,” “the rabble,” and “the mob.” Engels shared that view. In a letter to Marx in 1851, Engels agreed that, “… the people are of no importance whatsoever.”
Not surprisingly, Marx had few friends, and his family formed a bulwark against the world. His wife, Jenny, was devoted to him, and for his part, he leaned on her as his rock. He could be sincerely affectionate, showing great tenderness toward their three daughters, playfully calling them by nicknames: Qui-Qui, Quo-Quo, and Tussy (four other children died before age nine). Sundays were often spent in a park where Engels might join them, sharing in a picnic lunch, poetry readings, and games. Yet for all that, he willingly sacrificed his family’s health and well-being in the relentless pursuit of his goals, depending on others for income. Marx himself felt that the ongoing dire poverty his family endured caused the death of at least one of his three sons.
Sundays aside, Marx worked seven to nine hours a day, sometimes at home in his study, more often in the British Museum Reading Room, poring over history books and economics records. Marx came to believe the institutions of human society are solely the outgrowth of its economic activity and class relations, its material base.
This was the core of his (and Engels’) theory of historical materialism. Hence, the true driver of all human history was not ideas – spiritual, intellectual, or otherwise – but empirically demonstrable material things and conditions. He wrote, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (his italics).
This profoundly reductionistic approach to humanity permeates Marx’s work. The idea that one might be able to make choices for one’s life, independent of one’s social standing, or the work one performs, was for Marx an impossibility. Indeed, the notion of one person making any kind of significant impact upon the world was equally so, since he regarded the individual as a near non-entity, important only as a member of one class or another.
Philosophers fared no better. Marx wrote, in 1845, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world … the point is to change it.” His work is filled with such declarations, no small number showing insight and utility. Even one marginally acquainted with philosophy would agree that such work throughout millennia has radically changed and enlightened the world, and the way we think about our lives, our work, and indeed the cosmos. A philosopher himself, Marx was, ironically, blind and deaf to it all.
His philosophy of class relations was explicitly rooted in destruction. In “The Communist Manifesto,” he wrote, “The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” In 1849, as publisher of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” newspaper, he wrote, “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.” And in a statement praising the Paris Commune, issued after its demise, he wrote, “Should we not … reproach it for not having used it [terror] freely enough?”
Marx was a bundle of contradictions; a so-called champion of the worker, who derided the same, and who never worked a day in his life in any manual capacity; a man who loved his family honestly, who felt deeply the loss of four of his children, yet who thought nothing of exhorting society-wide violence and death for political ends. His world was one of interior abstractions, lived in the purity of thought alone, untethered from reality.
Next month, we’ll examine some of the fruit of humanity’s longing for the perfect society, and how that was manifested in Marxist-Communist ideologies and actions.
