Confronting the Constitution, Part 8: America’s Not Completely Forgotten Stalker: Karl Marx
People Really Believed This Stuff?
Marx believed that the U.S. — what he termed “the bourgeois republic” — was the final form of state, one to so eviscerate the human soul that its citizens would rebound off the bottom of existence like a collapsing supernova off its iron core. A luminous new beginning would commence with a revolution that would be the simultaneous birth of a utopian social life. In W. R. Newell’s spellbinding contribution to Confronting the Constitution we witness the broad scope of Marxist thought with its predictions of capitalism’s outcome and the state its married to. From the pen of Marx (1818–1883) we find him simultaneously dazzling, inane, alluring, and self-contradictory. His motive force was a passionate fear of the disenchantment of Man, from which, ironically, he created a social-political theory to ensure it.
“The core of Marxism’s appeal is the yearning for wholeness,” writes Newell, “for an existence that unites the personal and collective satisfaction. The breakdowns [of capitalism] are inevitable [to Marx] because capitalism must function by robbing man of a wholeness whose lack is, in the long run, unbearable to our species.” The New Deal, social welfare programs, and Keynesian economics are not patches to capitalism that would have swayed Marx, according to Newell. Such ameliorations would not conceal even bigger problems in America: “[It’s] not so much capitalism’s success as American’s apparent unawareness of this unbearable schism in their lives… They seem content with fragmentation, with parceling themselves out among their private, economic, and public pursuits… in family or love life, in religion, or even hobbies and leisure, [viewing] the political system as a means to these private satisfactions.” Born and raised in that system, this doesn’t sound so bad to me, but to Marx, we are reduced “to the service of biological existence alone.” And yet, I pursue the 3-Rs and painting between hikes with my dogs in the wilderness, free from the grind. Though it wasn’t always this way. I traded my youth for it. To Marx, this is tyranny on a small scale, where “America frustrates tyranny of the large-scale terrible kind by routinizing it into a universal, endless series of minor victories over others in commerce.” Precisely what America’s Framers considered a great achievement because it channels the most quarrelsome aspects of bipeds into relatively benign commercial interests.
In agreement with Rousseau, Marx found liberal individualism, for which capitalism is the servant, “to have truncated the human spirit,” with a “longing for a restored polis the Framers wished to dampen.” And that’s really the point. Marx, like Rousseau, had serious concerns about the evolution of individualism. In Germanic fashion, Marx wants the passion of the Volk, the clan, the tribe, on nation-state scales of mass populations that defy the very possibility of tribe, other than the disconnected, faceless, political tribes we have today. These are not the thick communities Marx ached for.
Of course, all of us under capitalism have been able to relate to Marx at one time or another. When each day’s commute to a place we don’t want to be, doing something we don’t want to do, with people we don’t want to be with feels like another lesson in submission. Nine years without a weekend off, and on rare occasions up to 98-hours per week could make me yearn for a little “wholeness.” But this was my own doing. As part of the so called “creative tech class,” my work provided high interest, often riveting. Marx didn’t see much of that in the 1800’s. What he saw is what I did before university, on road crews and in factories (when America had factories). Plenty still live that way — most of earth’s 8-billion humans — and from that perspective, Marx might look like he’s on to something.
But ideologies have an overriding tendency to see one side of an argument. This is borne out by Marx’s perspective on rights and power. “Whereas feudalism conflated personal wealth with political authority,” says Newell, for Marx “the modern state claims to represent impersonally a community of free and equal individuals. But the formal equality of rights guaranteed by the impersonality of the liberal state masks the lived reality of liberal society, a ‘war of all against all,’ [said Marx, quoting Hobbes] where the inequality of result expands without limit. The possession of rights — the occasion of so much reverence for the American Revolution — Marx believed to be nothing grandeur than the pursuit of wealth, in which the greediest and boldest triumph.” Marx makes a good point about feudalism’s conflation of property with power, and one that irritates any modern. He also sounds the alarm we’ve seen on this blog before from political philosopher Patrick J. Deneen on the impersonality of modern community, which isn’t community. To Marx, “Liberty as a right of man is not founded on the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man… The liberty of man is regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.” On that, we need only look around at disconnected America. According to the World Economic Forum, one of the loneliest places on earth. As Louis Dumont put it in his Essays on Individualism, things became more important than people. But Marx was wrong about the pretensions of the modern state (he meant the U.S.), it never sought equal individuals, but rather political equality for individuals. As Hamilton said, inequality will inevitably result from the very liberty that individuals have, free to pursue their talents, some better than others, not equalized by the state. Yes, material inequality can expand “without limit,” practically speaking, for corporations and scarce individuals like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett, but it’s the abuse of that wealth that matters. Abuse is why laws and regulations are in place as counterbalance, though not a threat to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation so long as it’s not exploited. And as the middle class demonstrated, at least until recently, so much for a war of all against all. As Montesquieu held, “If more people were devoting their energies to commerce, fewer people were absorbed in religious hatreds or the feudal pursuit of martial honor.” Marx’s absolutist assertion and his “nothing but” claims prefigure modern day talk radio, authoritarians, and fanatics on the Right and Left: good ratings, short on truth — which is not to say they can’t breed revolutions anyway.
But Marx wasn’t for killing off what capitalism built. “After the socialist revolution,” writes Newell, “the productive apparatus of the capitalist epoch would be retained to provide for everyone’s material needs. To dismantle this technological apparatus would only rekindle the centuries-long competition for economic survival and domination in the natural environment of scarcity that had culminated in the miseries of capitalism.” It’s after this stage in the march for socialism that Marx turns dogmatic. “Whereas that other great exploration of communism in the history of political philosophy, Plato’s Republic, concluded that self-interest and bodily desire made communism virtually impossible,” says Newell, “Marx believed that communism will be brought about precisely by the fullest development of self-interest and bodily desire. Socialism, the least competitive epoch, is brought about by capitalism, the most competitive.” The whole subject of “politics will disappear.” Yes, humans will suddenly transcend politics, greed, hormones, and live happy ever after under socialism. Trying to force mass overpopulations of individualist humans back into a grotesque approximation of our original mold is begging for slaughter, as seen with the Rousseau-inspired French Revolution, or Marx-inspired Stalin and Mao’s murder of millions. Either Marx was magnificently naïve, more likely he simply denied reality, or he ignored human nature to protect his ideology. As Newell points out, “naturally, one wonders why avarice, vanity, and competitiveness will not start all over again under socialism. For Marx… it is axiomatic that, once history has liberated people from the system that functions on alienation and exploitation, people will shed every motive for aggressive behavior.”
Pulease…
Karl.
Really?
Was Marxism not so historically consequential, it’d be laughable. Imagine, we socialists, filled to the brim with altruism, never again to harbor — by any member or by any generation to come — our habits of ravenousness, rapacious, voracity. “This shows the very limited sense in which Marx’s is an empirical theory,” writes Newell. Like Cultural Studies and its related social studies compatriots at university, there’s a long history of failing to check one’s social theory with the real world.
While Marx couldn’t know what we know about primate hierarchy, plenty of other philosophers, including America’s Founders weren’t so sanguine about human nature. Hence, their system — which Marx knew well — which was, in effect, to pit primate trait against primate trait, all to stymie our primate traits. The result would still be an oscillation because humans are inherently unstable, but dampened, less likely to swing wildly out of control.
It’s not that Marx was so wrong about the potential ills of individualism and its handmaiden, capitalism (with not a great deal to say about their positives), it’s that his cure was so lethal. Enlightenment and the Founder’s use of that philosophy were closer to right under our current circumstances of overpopulated, post-Ag-Revolution, nation states. In short, the latter group more closely approximated the human definition under its current circumstance. Marx was so far off target; his first great experiment lasted a pathetic seven decades as that tiny historical fart called the USSR. Capitalism, democracy, freedom, and equality are a mess because humans are a mess. Socialism, communism, and authoritarian tyrannies are a mess too, but in ways opposed to the messy nature of humans as we now exist.
How so many could champion a notion so contrary to human nature, from Lenin to postmodernist academics still pining for Marx after its predestined failure speaks volumes on the human capacity for analysis and honesty. Like the lunacy we saw last time with the libertarian oracle, Murry Rothbard, it’s a wonder people can manage an ice cream social, never mind a civilization. And what a surprise (not) that every one of them fails.
References:
Paragraph 2: “The core of Marxism’s appeal…” W.R. Newell, “Reflections on Marxism and America,” in Allan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990., pg. 335. “[It’s] not so much…”, Ibid. pg. 335. “to the service of biological…”, Ibid. pg. 337. “America frustrates tyranny…”, Ibid. pg. 346.
Paragraph 3: “to have truncated…”, Ibid. pg. 347.
Paragraph 5: “Whereas feudalism conflated…”, Ibid. pg. 341. “Liberty as a right…”, Ibid. pg. 341. “If more people were…”, Ibid. pg. 343.
Paragraph 6: “After the socialist…”, Ibid. pg. 337. “Whereas that other…”, Ibid. pg. 338–339. “politics will disappear,” Ibid. pg. 338. “naturally, one wonders…”, Ibid. pg. 339.
