Apr 3, 2018 07:17 PM
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-am-not-a-marxist/
EXCERPT: Call me a killjoy but I am sick to death of hearing about Karl Marx. I am sick of his name, his -isms, his undoubted genius, and his “philosophy.” I am sick of him “having reason,” as the French say, or “being right.” But most of all I am sick of his “relevance.”
As someone whose parents were born and grew up in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and who missed the same fate by the skin of her teeth, I know perfectly well what Marx’s relevance amounts to. Marx gave it a name, even if for him it meant something else than it did for the people of Yugoslavia. I am talking about the oft-quoted and seldom understood “religion of everyday life.”
In post–World War II Yugoslavia, Marx’s “relevance” was to be a member of the ruling communist party. Outside of that supra-religious institution no substantial share in the social wealth was possible. “[T]he life-process of society,” as Marx observes in what turned out to be a weird prediction, “which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.”
The constitution that enshrined this religion in law and etched it in the consciousness of Yugoslavs did not survive the county’s horrific civil war, which lasted from 1991 to 2001, resulting in the deaths of 150,000 and the displacement of 4,000,000 people; in all, more than one sixth of its total population. And yet remarkably its “religion” survived, despite the fact that today it’s the “freely associated men” — or the freemasonic cabals that rule over the remnants of Yugoslavia like buzzards circling a herd of listless cattle — whose mystical veil is in urgent need of being torn to shreds.
[...] We are living in a culture that sees tragedy everywhere: that fetishizes it. It’s something of a neurotic obsession. In mid-19th-century England, around 60,000 people, including many children, would die each year of tuberculosis. [...] To be honest, one knows why Marx is so often portrayed as a tragic hero. It is to humanize him, thus attenuating any controversial aspect of his thought. By depicting Marx as a “19th-century life,” to borrow the title of Jonathan Sperber’s wholly unconvincing biography, one relativizes the man and his ideas. One quarantines it, much like the dangerous animals one locks inside cages at the zoo, so much the better to prod and gawp at the exotic creatures, in clear ignorance of the social context that facilitates such saccharine objectification.
Marx is not a tragic specimen, and I for one am not prepared to let him off the hook so easily. To say that his was a 19th-century life is to forget that his name and ideas only entered into common currency in the 20th. If the specter of communism makes any sense today then it’s because the thing itself was barely stirring when Marx and Engels prophesized it in 1848. It would be another hundred years before Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their supporting cast succeeded in turning one third of the global population red.
[...] But! his devoted fans insist, Marx cannot be blamed for the crimes carried out by the inheritors of his political legacy! Which is like saying that the makers of gunpowder cannot be blamed for its misuse. That is perfectly true — assuming we can agree on what might constitute “misuse.” Gunpowder isn’t intended for washing the dishes. It’s made for the express purpose of blowing things up.
Let us remind ourselves that Marx was the inventor of historical materialism. [...] Those fortunate enough to gain a foothold on the train of history must hang on as best they can. But ultimately the “natural laws of capitalist production” work with “iron necessity toward inevitable results,” meaning woe betide anyone stupid enough to get in the way, for they shall be steamrolled. Like the Slavs whom Marx describes as being “incapable of progress and civilization,” and Engels as “residual fragments of peoples” whose “whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.” Despite being “destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm” the Slavs might at least take heart from knowing that their brute existence served some purpose in the long march toward civilization. But then Marxists have been feeding the same message to the Slavs for the last century and a half.
[...] Imagine if Marx had been a theater producer. That was surely far more his style. He certainly knew how to flatter egos, as he did when Ferdinand Lassalle asked him to appraise the manuscript of his dud of a play *Franz von Sickingen*. [...] It might have been his true vocation, putting on dramas and musical comedies at London’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, the street where the German Workers Educational Society held its meetings, and where its members could partake of recreational activities, from poetry to fencing. I wonder if Marx ever lamented during those irreproachable sessions the fact that all the world’s a stage, and that he was overseeing the wrong one.
[...] Is it too outlandish to speculate that in Marx’s case the critique of political economy had been the stand-in for a juvenile passion? Poetry was Marx’s Thing [...] that a combination of his father’s bitter chastisement and his encounter with Hegel’s “craggy melody” managed to cure him of during his Berlin student days. The prospect of earning a living to provide for his future wife, the Baron von Westphalen’s daughter, no doubt helped to tear the veil of his metaphysical illusions. Like a restless artist, Marx’s lifelong fanaticism might thus be read as a nostalgic yearning for an irreplaceable fetish-object, “the sensibly super-sensible” (sinnlich übersinnlich) as he calls it in *Capital*. Nothing could ever compete with art, no amount of critical veil-tearing could ever substitute for Marx’s love of lyrical poetry. And so he took the only career path left open to him. He became a producer instead; an impresario in the art of critique...
MORE: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-am-not-a-marxist/
EXCERPT: Call me a killjoy but I am sick to death of hearing about Karl Marx. I am sick of his name, his -isms, his undoubted genius, and his “philosophy.” I am sick of him “having reason,” as the French say, or “being right.” But most of all I am sick of his “relevance.”
As someone whose parents were born and grew up in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and who missed the same fate by the skin of her teeth, I know perfectly well what Marx’s relevance amounts to. Marx gave it a name, even if for him it meant something else than it did for the people of Yugoslavia. I am talking about the oft-quoted and seldom understood “religion of everyday life.”
In post–World War II Yugoslavia, Marx’s “relevance” was to be a member of the ruling communist party. Outside of that supra-religious institution no substantial share in the social wealth was possible. “[T]he life-process of society,” as Marx observes in what turned out to be a weird prediction, “which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.”
The constitution that enshrined this religion in law and etched it in the consciousness of Yugoslavs did not survive the county’s horrific civil war, which lasted from 1991 to 2001, resulting in the deaths of 150,000 and the displacement of 4,000,000 people; in all, more than one sixth of its total population. And yet remarkably its “religion” survived, despite the fact that today it’s the “freely associated men” — or the freemasonic cabals that rule over the remnants of Yugoslavia like buzzards circling a herd of listless cattle — whose mystical veil is in urgent need of being torn to shreds.
[...] We are living in a culture that sees tragedy everywhere: that fetishizes it. It’s something of a neurotic obsession. In mid-19th-century England, around 60,000 people, including many children, would die each year of tuberculosis. [...] To be honest, one knows why Marx is so often portrayed as a tragic hero. It is to humanize him, thus attenuating any controversial aspect of his thought. By depicting Marx as a “19th-century life,” to borrow the title of Jonathan Sperber’s wholly unconvincing biography, one relativizes the man and his ideas. One quarantines it, much like the dangerous animals one locks inside cages at the zoo, so much the better to prod and gawp at the exotic creatures, in clear ignorance of the social context that facilitates such saccharine objectification.
Marx is not a tragic specimen, and I for one am not prepared to let him off the hook so easily. To say that his was a 19th-century life is to forget that his name and ideas only entered into common currency in the 20th. If the specter of communism makes any sense today then it’s because the thing itself was barely stirring when Marx and Engels prophesized it in 1848. It would be another hundred years before Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their supporting cast succeeded in turning one third of the global population red.
[...] But! his devoted fans insist, Marx cannot be blamed for the crimes carried out by the inheritors of his political legacy! Which is like saying that the makers of gunpowder cannot be blamed for its misuse. That is perfectly true — assuming we can agree on what might constitute “misuse.” Gunpowder isn’t intended for washing the dishes. It’s made for the express purpose of blowing things up.
Let us remind ourselves that Marx was the inventor of historical materialism. [...] Those fortunate enough to gain a foothold on the train of history must hang on as best they can. But ultimately the “natural laws of capitalist production” work with “iron necessity toward inevitable results,” meaning woe betide anyone stupid enough to get in the way, for they shall be steamrolled. Like the Slavs whom Marx describes as being “incapable of progress and civilization,” and Engels as “residual fragments of peoples” whose “whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.” Despite being “destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm” the Slavs might at least take heart from knowing that their brute existence served some purpose in the long march toward civilization. But then Marxists have been feeding the same message to the Slavs for the last century and a half.
[...] Imagine if Marx had been a theater producer. That was surely far more his style. He certainly knew how to flatter egos, as he did when Ferdinand Lassalle asked him to appraise the manuscript of his dud of a play *Franz von Sickingen*. [...] It might have been his true vocation, putting on dramas and musical comedies at London’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, the street where the German Workers Educational Society held its meetings, and where its members could partake of recreational activities, from poetry to fencing. I wonder if Marx ever lamented during those irreproachable sessions the fact that all the world’s a stage, and that he was overseeing the wrong one.
[...] Is it too outlandish to speculate that in Marx’s case the critique of political economy had been the stand-in for a juvenile passion? Poetry was Marx’s Thing [...] that a combination of his father’s bitter chastisement and his encounter with Hegel’s “craggy melody” managed to cure him of during his Berlin student days. The prospect of earning a living to provide for his future wife, the Baron von Westphalen’s daughter, no doubt helped to tear the veil of his metaphysical illusions. Like a restless artist, Marx’s lifelong fanaticism might thus be read as a nostalgic yearning for an irreplaceable fetish-object, “the sensibly super-sensible” (sinnlich übersinnlich) as he calls it in *Capital*. Nothing could ever compete with art, no amount of critical veil-tearing could ever substitute for Marx’s love of lyrical poetry. And so he took the only career path left open to him. He became a producer instead; an impresario in the art of critique...
MORE: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-am-not-a-marxist/