Guest post: The ideas needed a little finessing
Originally a comment by Artymorty on The Three Anti-imperialists.
I’ve never understood people who worship Marx like a god and treat his writings like holy text. The philosophers and thinkers of the past had good ideas and bad ones. As I see it, the general rule is, the further back you go in time, the more surprising it is to find good ideas that hold up today — and the more credit is due to those who came up with them — and the more apt you are to find bad ones that didn’t hold up so well. Because that’s how knowledge is built: over time. So it seems weird to me that anyone would revere thinkers from centuries past beyond merely admiring them for what they did in the context of their time.
Like, say, Freud: amazing that he got people thinking about the human mind like that. Credit where it’s due in the context of his time and place. But the “Freudians” who take his nonsense literally today? Ridiculous!
Kant? Hume? Adam Smith? Great stuff! For their time. Even Darwin — even Einstein — they didn’t get everything right. Evolutionary biologists and quantum physicists get this. They take delight in showing where their fields have moved beyond their great founders’ texts. It’s a sign of how much those fields have grown.
Not so much with the Marxists, with their worldview seemingly set in amber. Is it just me who feels like they take his extremely out-of-date prescriptions for how the world should be organized far too literally? We tried applying a lot of Marx’s theories in the real world over the last one hundred years. Tens of millions of dead bodies later, it’s safe to say the ideas, radical as they were, and influential they have been, they needed a little finessing. They shouldn’t be taken at face value today.
It feels very religion-y, the Marx worship. The way even moderate Christians talk like the Bible is this great source of moral knowledge. In its day, two thousand years ago, the New Testament was radical, sure. Nowadays, we’ve built up a body of knowledge that cancels out a good three quarters or so of Jesus’s moral ideas.
I used to have lunch with a Muslim colleague every day, and one of the things that really surprised me was his inverse view of progress: that the world was perfect in Mohammed’s time, and the further we get from it as we move forward in time, the more corrupt the world becomes. His idea of progress was literally my idea of regress.
I sense the Marxists pine for a glorious past in the same vein.
Some years back, I read–yes, read–The Communist Manifesto. It’s an important document; I thought I should know something about it. A few things stood out to me.
Marx opens with a long harangue about “globalization”, and it could have come from any left-wing publication today. Same complaints; same old whiiiine in the same old bottle; absolutely nothing has changed in the last 170 years.
Second, I was struck by how parochial the whole thing was. Marx was torqued that the industrial revolution came to England before Germany, and he spends much of the manifesto trying to demonstrate that–as a matter of historical necessity, or historical imperative, or something–Germany was now (i.e. 1850) going to leap-frog England and get ahead of it on the ladder of industrial development.
Finally, by the end it seemed to me that Marx had done the Indian rope trick: he had climbed into a cloud and pulled the rope up after himself. He had created Communism as an hermetically sealed intellectual construct that could not be questioned, attacked, or falsified from the outside. There was a commentary attached to the copy that I had, and the commentator said pretty much the same thing.
The Communist Manifesto is tough going. The writing is dense–if not turgid–and by the end I was happy to be done with it.
Steven, in your last sentence you got it right, without realising you did.
The money is still, mostly, at the top. The hard work, and the least desirable jobs, are all still performed by those at the bottom. Workers are still exploited by capitalists who write the rules to ensure that exploitation continues, eg “tipped wages”, Union busting, “at will” employment, etc.
The main casus belli of the First World War was, in the main, because Germany determined to finally leapfrog Britain, not just in industrial output but also in colonies and access to raw materials and markets. It was a war fought by those who had nothing to protect the interests of those who had everything. As the IWW so eloquently put “A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end”.
Those who survived the trenches of Europe were then crushed by depression, and sent once again, to fight in a nasty war while the capitalists sat in their counting houses, counting out their money.
A brief, shining light, an almost Utopian existence for workers sputtered into life in the 1950s and the capitalists again called in their fire brigades (the legislators) to overturn all the hard-won gains and by 1990, workers saw rapidly declining living standards.
It was the destruction of people’s hopes and dreams in the 1920s on that was the direct cause of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco’s rise in Europe, and now, 100 years later, the rise of Trump, Erdogan, Mileii, et al.
So yes, you are right, very little has changed since Marx published “The Communist Manifesto”.
And Marx wrote far more than that little pamphlet. To read and absorb Marx and Engels can be an herculean task, but I do recommend this as a quick rebuttal of the lies told about Marxism and why some of Marx’s thinking is still relevant today. Eagleton’s writing is never turgid.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10185738-why-marx-was-right
I reread The Communist Manifesto just a few months ago while sitting in a deer blind (which apparently acted as deer repellent). My opinion is that it was just as irrational and full of logical errors, pompous pontification, and quasi-religious, gnostic claptrap masquerading as historical, economic analysis as I remembered from the last time I read it.
In the mid-1860s Marx reportedly said that one of his strongest beliefs came from the Roman playwright Terence: “Nothing human is alien to me.” It fitted well with his (somewhat distorted) understanding of Hegelian dialectics, with its interaction of ideas (thesis > antithesis >synthesis,) which he then cobbled onto his understanding of capitalist economics, with its perpetual market-place class struggle of workers seeking the highest possible wages, and capitalists seeking to pay the lowest. (Henry Ford later realised that it is in the interest of every capitalist, like himself, that every other capitalist pay his or her workers the highest possible wages; otherwise ‘how will people be able to buy my cars?”)
However, Terence was only half right. Some human ideas are totally obnoxious, like Adolf Hitler’s regarding the ‘herrenvolk,’ or ‘master-race,’ which led directly to the Second World War and its Holocaust.
Likewise, in Biblical fashion, Marxism begat (merely intolerant) Leninism, which in turn begat super-authoritarian Stalinism, and the regime which emerged from it. Of the latter, not a good word can be said.
What got left out of Marx’s schema was liberalism, particularly strong in Britain thanks to its at times turbulent history from the Magna Carta of 1215 onwards, and which had caused Marx to choose London, with the vast library of its British Museum, for his home and workplace.
So, for want of a nail, the horse-shoe was lost…