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Title: The Practical Marx Author: John Zerzan Date: 1979 Language: en Topics: Marx, marxism, anarchist analysis, Fifth Estate Source: FIFTH ESTATE, October 22, 1979 (vol. 14, no. 4, #299), page 8 Notes: Scanned from original.
The following article, an attempt to come to grips with the implications
of Karl Marx’s everyday life by long-time FE contributor John Zerzan,
has stirred considerable controversy among those of us presently working
on the paper and necessitates, we feel, a few brief introductory
observations.
For some time, the issue of confluence (or lack of it) between the ideas
we espouse and the activities of our daily lives has occupied a position
of central importance with many of us. In addition to our desires to
live lives as coherent as possible with our principles, we have been
concerned with the obvious link between the ways in which we relate to
others and the world around us and the kind of vision of a liberated
existence which we embrace. Thus we seethe importance of John’s article
in the fact that it makes explicit the connection between the way in
which Marx lived, the theories that his life produced and the way in
which those theories have found application in the world. For those of
us who see a continuum from Marx to Lenin to Stalin, it cannot be
coincidental that a man who operated in so authoritarian and
manipulative a manner in his own political life should produce a body of
theory so rife with ideas of the domination of nature and the secondary
(or even dispensable) status of individuals in relation to the greater
“forces of history,” which places so much faith in the power of the
state and which has been successfully used to justify some of the
bloodiest totalitarian regimes the world has ever seen.
The limits of the appropriateness of such a methodology as John’s,
however, have hardly been the subject of unanimous agreement among those
of us who read the article for this issue.
One of us felt, for instance, that an at best sketchy analysis of Marx’s
child-rearing habits lent little to an understanding of his work and
could ultimately become no more than an excuse for throwing out his
ideas (as it has been for many years among right-wing critics of
Marxism). Moreover, though this is not a charge we would ever lay at
John’s feet, we’ve all had enough bad experiences with ultra-left
moralists writing “police reports” on our activities to be at the very
least skeptical of the greater implications of his methodology, since it
is not difficult to make a case for the present-day “peer-group tyranny”
of socialist societies like China’s as being the logical extreme of this
kind of scrutiny of personal lives (at what point does the insistence on
moral/ethical consistency become the demand for ideological
conformity?).
For most of us the issue is far from resolved and inclusion of the
article will probably raise more questions than it answers. In some
sense, Marx is almost the “ideal” subject for such an article, since his
extraordinary impact on the world has made him a “world-historical”
figure regardless of his intentions or ours, and as a result, all of the
information that Zerzan cites about his life is readily available to
anyone interested, having had wide currency in radical circles for many
years. But what if someone, having read the article, insists on having
the same kind of intimate knowledge of John Zerzan’s personal life on
which to base their judgment of his ideas? Or ours?
One further note: most of us felt that certain of John’s contentions
about Marx’s private life, in particular the impact of his activities on
the lives (and deaths) of his wife and children, required at least more
serious substantiation than appears in the present article; John was
more than willing to provide this and it was only a last-minute mix-up
from our end of the postal system that prevented this from happening.
Karl Marx is always approached as so many thoughts, so many words. What
connection is there between lived choices--one’s willful lifetime--and
the presentation of one’s ideas?
Marx in his dealings with family and associates, his immediate relations
to contemporary politics and to survival, the practical pattern and
decisions of a life: this is perhaps worth a look. Despite my rejection
of basic conceptions he formulated, I aim not at character assassination
in lieu of tackling those ideas, but as a reminder to myself and others
that our many compromises and accommodations with a grisly world are the
real field of our effort to break free, more so than stating our ideas.
It is in disregarding abstractions for a moment that we see our actual
equality, in the prosaic courses of our common nightmare. A brief sketch
of the “everyday” Marx, introducing the relationship between his private
and public lives as a point of entry may serve to underline this
By 1843 Marx had become a husband and father, roles predating that of
Great Thinker. In this capacity, he was to see three of his six children
die, essentially of privation. Guido in 1850, Francesca in 1852, and
Edgar in 1855 perished not because of poverty itself, so much as from
his desire to maintain bourgeois appearances. David McLellan’s Marx: His
Life and Thought, generally accepted as the definitive biography, makes
this point repeatedly.
Despite the fairly constant domestic deficiencies, Marx employed Helene
Demuth as maid from 1845 until his death in 1883, and a second servant
was added as of 1857. Beyond any question of credibility, it was Demuth
who bore Marx’s illegitimate son Frederick in 1851. To save Marx from
scandal, and “a difficult domestic conflict” according to Louis
Freyberger, Engels accepted paternity of the child.
From the end of the 1840’s onward, the Marx household lived in London
and endured a long cycle of hardship which quickly dissipated the
physical and emotional resources of Jenny Marx. The weight of the
conflicting pressures involved in being Mrs. Marx was a direct cause of
her steadily failing health, as were the deaths of the three children in
the ’50s. By July 1858 Marx was accurate in conceding to Engels that “My
wife’s nerves are quite ruined...”
In fact, her spirit had been destroyed by 1856 when she gave birth to a
stillborn infant, her seventh pregnancy. Toward the end of that year she
spoke of the “misery” of financial disasters, of having no money for
Christmas festivities, as she completed copying out work on Marx’s The
Critique of Political Economy.
Despite several inheritances, the begging letters to Engels remained
virtually non-stop; by 1860 at the latest, Jenny’s once very handsome
appearance had been turned to gray hair, bad teeth, and obesity. It was
in that year that small pox, contracted after transcribing the very
lengthy and trivial Herr Vogt diatribe, left her deaf and pockmarked.
As secretary to Marx and under the steady strain of creditors, caused
pre-eminently by the priority of maintaining appearances, Jenny’s life
was extremely difficult. Marx to Engels, 1862: “In order to preserve a
certain facade, my wife had to take to the pawnbroker’s everything that
was not actually nailed down.”
The mid-’60s saw money spent on private lessons for the eldest of the
three daughters and tuition at a “ladies seminary” or finishing school,
as Marx escaped the bill-collectors by spending his days at the British
Museum. He admitted in 1866, in a letter to his future son-in-law, Paul
Lafargue, that his wife’s “life had been wrecked.”
Dealing with nervous breakdowns and chronic chest ailments, Jenny was
harried by ever-present household debt. One partial solution was to
withhold a small part of her weekly allowance in order to deal with
their arrears, the extent of which she tended to hide from Marx. In July
1869 the Great Man exploded upon learning of this frugal effort; to
Engels he wrote, “When I asked why, she replied that she was frightened
to come out with the vast total (owed). Women plainly always need to be
controlled!”
Speaking of Engels, we may turn from Marx the “family man” to a fairly
chronological treatment of Marx in his immediate connections with
contemporary politics. It may be noted here that Engels, his closest
friend, was, from 1838 on, a representative of the firm of Engels and
Ermen; in fact, throughout the 1850s and ’60s he was a full-time
capitalist in Manchester. Thus his Condition of the Working Class in
England was the fruit of a practical businessman, a man of precisely
that class responsible for the terrible misery he so clearly chronicled.
By 1846 Marx and Engels had written The German Ideology, which made a
definitive break with the Young Hegelians and contains the full and
mature ideas of the materialist concept of the progress of history.
Along with this tome were the practical activities in politics, also by
now receiving their characteristic stamp. In terms of his Communist
Correspondence Committee and its propaganda work, Marx (also in 1846)
stated: “There can be no talk at present of achieving communism; the
bourgeoisie must first come to the helm.” In June of the same year he
sent instructions to supporters to act “jesuitically,” to not have “any
tiresome moral scruples” about acting for bourgeois hegemony.
The inexorable laws of capitalist development, necessarily involving the
sacrifice of generations of “insufficiently developed” proletarians,
would bring capital to its full plenitude--and the workers to the depths
of enslavement. Thus in 1847, following a congress of professional
economists in Brussels to which he was invited, Marx publicly noted the
disastrous effect of free trade upon the working class, and embraced
this development. In a subsequent newspaper article, he likewise found
colonialism, with its course of misery and death to be, on the whole, a
good thing: like the development of capitalism itself, inevitable and
progressive, working toward eventual revolution.
In 1847 the Communist League was formed in London, and at its second
Congress later in the year Marx and Engels were given the task of
drafting its manifesto. Despite a few ringing anti-capitalist phrases in
its general opening sections, the concrete demands by way of conclusions
are gradualist, collaborationist, and highly statist (e.g. for an
inheritance tax, graduated income tax, centralization of credit and
communications). Ignoring the incessant fight waged since the
mid-18^(th) century and culminating with the Luddites, and unprepared
for the revolutionary upheavals that were to shake Europe in less than a
year, the Communist Manifesto sees, again, only an “insufficiently
developed” proletariat.
From this policy document arises one of the essential tactical mysteries
of Marx, that of the concomitant rise of both capitalism and the
proletariat. The development of capital is clearly portrayed as the
accumulation of human misery, degradation and brutality, but along with
it grows, by this process itself, a working class steadily more
“centralized, united, disciplined, and organized.” How is it that from
the extreme depths of physical and cultural oppression issues anything
but a steadily more robotized, powerless, de-individualized proletariat?
In fact, the history of revolts and militance of the 19^(th) and 20^(th)
centuries shows that the majority do not come from those most herdlike
and deprived, but from those least disciplined and with something to
lose.
In April of 1848, Marx went to Germany with the Manifesto plus the
utterly reformist “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany.” The
“Demands,” also by Marx and Engels, were constituent of a bourgeois
revolution, not a socialist one, appealing to many of the elements that
directly fought the March outbreak of the revolution. Considering Marx’
position as vice-president of the non-radical Democratic Association in
Brussels during the previous year, and, naturally, his support of a
prerequisite bourgeois ascendancy, he quickly came into conflict with
the revolutionary events of 1848 and with much of the Communist League.
Marx helped found a Democratic Society in Cologne, which ran candidates
for the Frankfurt Parliament, and he vigorously opposed any League
support for armed intervention in support of the revolutionaries. Using
the opportunist rationale of not wanting to see the workers become
“isolated,” he went so far as to use his “discretionary powers,” as a
League official, to dissolve it in May as too radical, an embarrassment
to his support of bourgeois elements.
With the League out of the way, Marx concentrated his 1848 activities in
Germany on support for the Democratic Society and his dictatorial
editorship of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In both capacities he pursued
a “united front” policy, in which working people would be aligned with
all other “democratic forces” against the remnants of feudalism. Of
course, this arrangement would afford the workers no autonomy, no
freedom of movement; it chose to see no revolutionary possibilities
residing with them. As editor of the NRZ, Marx gave advice to
Camphausen, businessman head of the provisional government following the
defeat of the proletarian upsurge. And further, astounding as it sounds,
he supported the Democratic Society’s newspaper despite the fact that it
condemned the June 1848 insurrection of the Paris proletariat. As
politician and newspaper editor, Marx was increasingly criticized for
his consistent refusal to deal with the specific situation or interests
of the working class.
By the fall of 1848, the public activities of Marx began to take on a
somewhat more activist, pro-worker coloration, as the risings of the
workers resumed in Germany. By December, however, disturbances were on
the wane, and the volatile year in Germany appeared to be ending with no
decisive revolutionary consequences. Now it was, and only now, that Marx
in his paper declared that the working class would have to depend on
itself, and not upon the bourgeoisie for a revolution. But because it
was rather clearly too late for this, the source of revolution would
have to come, he divined, from a foreign external shock: namely, war
between France and England, preceded by a renewed French proletarian
uprising. Thus at the beginning of 1849, Marx saw in a Franco-British
war the social revolution, just as in early 1848 he had located it in
war between Prussia and Russia. This was not to be the last time, by the
way, that Marx saw in the slaughter of national wars the spark of
revolution; the worker-as-subject again fails to occur to Marx, that
they could act--and did act--on their own initiatives without first
having to be sacrificed, by the generation, as factory slaves or cannon
fodder.
There were radicals who had seen the openings to revolution in 1848, and
who were shocked by the deterministic conservatism of Marx. Louis
Gottschalk, for example, attacked him for positing the choice for the
working class as between bourgeois or feudal rule; “what of revolution?”
he demanded. And so although Marx supported bourgeois candidates in the
February (1849) elections, by April the Communist League (which he had
abolished) had been re-founded without him, effectively forcing him to
leave the moderate Democratic Association. By May, with its week of
street fighting in Dresden, revolts in the Ruhr, and extensive
insurgency in Baden, events--as well as the reactions of the German
radical community--continued to leave Marx far behind. Thus in that
month, he closed down the NRZ with a defiant--and manifestly
absurd--editorial claiming that the paper had been revolutionary and
openly so throughout 1848 and 1849.
By 1850 Marx had joined other German refugees in London, upon the close
of the insurrectionary upheavals on the continent of the previous two
years. Under pressure from the left, as noted above, he now came out in
favor of an independently organized German proletariat and a highly
centralized state for the (increasingly centralized) working class to
seize and make its own. Despite the ill-will caused by his
anything-but-radical activities in Germany, Marx was allowed to rejoin
the Communist League and eventually resumed his dominance therein. In
London, he found support among the Chartists and other elements devoted
to electoral reform and trade unionism, shunning the many radical German
refugees whom he often branded as “agitators” and “assassins.” This
behavior gained him the support of a majority of those present in London
and enabled him to triumph over those in the League who had called him a
“reactionary” for the minimalism of the Manifesto and for his disdain of
a revolutionary practice in Germany.
But from the early ’50s Marx had begun to spend most of his time in
studies at the British Museum, where he could ponder the course of world
revolution away from the noisome hubbub of his precarious household.
From this time, he quickly jettisoned the relative radicality of his
new-found militance and foresaw a general prosperity ahead, hence no
prospects for revolution. The coincidence of economic crisis with
proletarian revolt is, of course, mocked by the real history of our
world. From the Luddites to the Commune, France in 1968 to the multitude
of struggles opening on the last quarter of the 20^(th) century,
insurrection has been its own master; the great fluctuations of
unemployment or inflation have often served, on the contrary, to deflect
class struggles to the lower, survivalist plane rather than to fuel
social revolution. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought a
diminished vision, for example, perhaps characterized by German National
Socialism and its cousin, the American New Deal, nothing approaching the
destruction of capitalism. (The Spanish Revolution, bright light of the
’30s, had nothing to do with the Depression gripping the industrialized
nations.) Marx’s overriding concern with externalities--principally
economic crises, of course--was a trademark of his practical as well as
theoretical approach; it obviously reflects his slight regard for the
subjectivity of the majority of people for their potential autonomy,
imagination and power.
The distanciation from actual social struggles of his day is seemingly
closely linked with the correct bourgeois life he led. In terms of his
livelihood, one is surprised by the gap between his concrete activities
and his reputation as revolutionary theorist. From 1852 into the 1860s,
he was “one of the most highly valued” and “best paid” columnists of the
N.Y. Daily Tribune, according to its editor. In fact, one hundred and
sixty-five of his articles were used as editorials by this not
quite-revolutionary metropolitan daily, which could account for the fact
that Marx requested in 1855 that his subsequent pieces be printed
anonymously. But if he wanted not to appear as the voice of a huge
bourgeois paper, he wanted still more--as we have seen in his family
role--to appear a gentlemen. It was “to avoid a scandal” that he felt
compelled to pay the printer’s bill in 1859 for the reformist Das Volk
newspaper in London. In 1862 he told Engels of his wish to engage in
some kind of business: “Grey, dear friend, is all theory and only
business is green. Unfortunately, I have come too late to this insight.”
Though he declined the offers, Marx received, in 1865 and 1867, two
invitations which are noteworthy for the mere fact that they would have
been extended to him at all:
The first, via a messenger from Bismarck, to “put his great talents to
the service of the German people,” the second, to write financial
articles, from the Prussian Government’s official journal. In 1866 he
claimed to have made four hundred pounds by speculating in American
funds, and his good advice to Engels on how to play the Stock Market is
well authenticated.
1874 saw Marx and two partners wrangle in court over ownership of a
patent to a new engraving device, intending to exploit the rights and
reap large profits. To these striking suggestions of ruling-class
mentality must be added the behavior of Marx toward his children, the
three daughters who grew to maturity under his thoroughly Victorian
authority. In 1866 he insisted on economic guarantees for Paul
LaFarque’s future, criticizing his lack of “diligence,” and lecturing
him in the most prudish terms regarding his intentions toward Laura, who
was almost twenty-one. Reminding LaFarque that he and Laura were not yet
engaged, and if they were to become so, that it would constitute a
“long-term affair”, he went on to express very puritanical structures:
“To my mind, true love expresses itself in the lover’s restraint, modest
bearing, even diffidence toward the adored one, and certainly not in
unconstrained passion and manifestations of premature familiarity.”
In 1868 he opposed the taking of a job by Jenny, who was then
twenty-two; later he forbade Eleanor from seeing Lissagaray, a Communard
who happened to have defended single-handed the last barricade in Paris.
Turning back to politics, the economic crisis Marx avidly awaited in the
’50s had come and gone in 1857, awakening no revolutionary activity. But
by 1863 and the Polish insurrection of that year, unrest was in the
air-providing the background for the formation of the international
Workingman’s Association. Marx put aside his work on Capital and was
most active in the affairs of the International from its London
inception in September, 1864. Odger, President of the Council of all
London Trades Unions, and Cremer, Secretary of the Mason’s Union, called
the inaugural meeting, and Wheeler and Dell, two other British union
officials, formally proposed an international organization. Marx was
elected to the executive committee (soon to be called the General
Council), and at its first business meeting was instrumental_ in
establishing Odger and Cramer as President and Secretary of the
International. Thus from the start Marx’s allies were union bureaucrats,
and his policy approach was a completely reformist one with “plain
speaking” as to radical aims disallowed. One of the first acts of the
General Council was the sending of Marx’s spirited, fraternal greetings
to Abraham Lincoln, that “single-minded son of the working class.” Other
early activities by Marx included the formation, as part of the
International, of the Reform League dedicated to manhood suffrage. He
boasted to Engels that this achievement--is our doing,” and was equally
enthusiastic when the National Reform League, sole surviving Chartist
organization, applied for membership. This latter proved too much even
for the faithful Engels, who for some time after refused to even serve
as correspondent to the International for Manchester, where he was still
a full-time capitalist. During this practice of embracing every shade of
English gradualism, principally by promoting the membership of London
trade unions, he penned his famous “the proletariat is revolutionary or
it is nothing” line, in a letter to the German socialist Ferdinand
Lassalle.
Lasalle and his General Union of German Workers (ADAV) harbored
transparently serious illusions about the state; namely that Bismarck
was capable of genuinely socialist policies as Chancellor of Prussia.
Yet Marx in 1866 agreed to run for the presidency of the ADAV in the
hopes of incorporating it into the International. At the same time, he
wrote (to a cousin of Engels): “the adherence of the ADAV will only be
of use at the beginning, against our opponents here. Later the whole
institution of this Union, which rests on a false basis, must be
destroyed.”
Volumes could be written, and possibly have, on the manipulations of
Marx within the International, the maneuverings of places, dates, and
lengths of meetings, for example, in the service of securing and
centralizing his authority. To the case of the ADAV could be added,
among a multitude of others, his cultivation of the wealthy bourgeois
Lefort, so as to keep his wholly non-radical faction within the
organization. By 1867 his dedicated machinations were felt to have
reaped their reward; to Engels he wrote, “we (i.e. you and I) have this
powerful machine in our hands.” War Progressive and Inevitable
Also, in 1867 he availed himself publicly once more of one of his
favorite notions, that a war between Prussia and Russia would prove both
progressive and inevitable. Such a war would involve the German
proletariat versus despotic Eastern barbarism and would thus be salutary
for the prospects of European revolution. This perennial “war games”
type of mentality somehow manages to equate victims, set in motion
precisely as chattels of the state, with proletarian subjects acting for
themselves; it would seem to parallel the substitution of trade union
officials for workers, the hallmark of his preferred strategy as
bureaucrat of the International. Marx naturally ridiculed anyone--such
as his future son-in-law, LaFargue--for suggesting that the proper role
of revolutionaries did not lie in such a crass game of weighing
competing nationalisms. And in 1868 when the Belgian delegation to the
International’s Brussels Congress proposed the response of a general
strike to war, Marx dismissed the idea as a “stupidity,” owing to the
“underdeveloped” status of the working class.
The weaknesses and contradictions of the adherents of Proudhon and
Bakunin are irrelevant here, but we may observe 1869 as the high-water
mark of the influence of Marx, due to the approaching decline of the
Proudhonists and the infancy of Bakunin’s impact in that year. With
mid-1870 and the Napoleon III-engineered Franco-Prussian War, we see
once more the pre-occupation with “progressive” vs, “non-progressive”
military exploits of governments. Marx to Engels: “The French need a
drubbing. if the Prussians are victorious then the centralization of the
working class ... the superiority of the Germans over the French in the
world arena would mean at the same time the superiority of our theory
over Proudhon’s and so on.”
By July 1870, in an Address endorsed by the international’s General
Council, Marx added to this outlook a warning: “If the German working
class allow the present war to lose its strictly defensive character and
degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will
prove alike disastrous.” Thus the butchery of French workers is fine and
good--but only up to a point. This height of cynical calculation appears
almost too incredible--and after the Belgians and others were loudly
denounced for imagining that the proletariat could be a factor for
themselves, in any case. How now could the “German working class”
(Prussian army) decide how far to carry out the. orders of the Prussian
ruling class--and if they could, why not “instruct” them to simply
ignore any and all of these class orders?
This kind of public statement by Marx, so devoid of revolutionary
content, was naturally received with popularity by the bourgeois press.
In fact, none other than the patron saint of British private property,
John Stuart Mill, sent a message of congratulations to the International
for its wise and moderate Address.
When the war Napoleon III had begun turned out as a Prussian victory, by
the end of summer 1870, Marx protested, predictably, that Germany had
dropped its approved “defensive” posture and was now an aggressor
demanding annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine provinces. The defeat of
France brought the fall of Louis Napoleon and his Second Empire, and a
provisional Republican government was formed. Marx decided that the aims
of the International were now two-fold: to secure the recognition of the
new, Republican regime by England, and to prevent any revolutionary
outbreak by the French workers.
His policy advised that “any attempt to upset the new government in the
present crisis, when the (Prussian) army is almost knocking at the doors
of Paris, would be a desperate folly.” This shabby, anti-revolutionary
strategy was publicly promoted quite vigorously--until the Commune
itself made a most rude and “unscientific” mockery of it in short order.
Well-known, of course, is Marx’s negative reception to the rising of the
Parisians; it is over-generous to say that he was merely pessimistic
about the future of the Commune. Days after the successful insurrection
began he failed to applaud its audacity, and satisfied himself with
grumbling that “it had no chance for success.” Though he finally
recognized the fact of the Commune (and was thereby forced to revise his
reformist ideas regarding proletarian use of existing state machinery),
his lack of sympathy is amply reflected by the fact that throughout the
Commune’s two-month existence, the General Council of the International,
spoke not a single word about it.
It often escapes notice when an analysis or tribute is delivered well
after the living struggle is safely living no longer. The masterful
polemicizing about the triumphs of the Commune and Civil War in France
constitute an obituary, in just the same way that Class Struggles in
France did so at a similarly safe distance from the events he failed to
support at the time of revolutionary Paris, 1848.
After a very brief period--again like his public attitude just after the
1848 through 1849 outbreaks in Europe--of stated optimism as to
proletarian successes in general, Marx returned to his more usual
colors. He denied the support of the International to the scattered
summer 1871 uprisings in Italy, Russia, and Spain--countries mainly
susceptible to the doctrines of anarchy, by the way. September witnessed
the last meeting of the International before the Marx faction
effectively disbanded it, rather than accept its domination by more
radical elements such as the Bakuninists, in the following year. The
bourgeois gradualism of Marx was much in evidence at the fall 1871
London Conference, then, as exemplified by such remarks as: “To get
workers into parliament is equivalent to a victory over the governments,
but one must choose the right man.”
Between the demise of the International and his own death in 1883, Marx
lived in a style that varied little from that of previous decades.
Shunning the Communard refugees, by and large, as he had shunned the
radical Germans in the ’50’s after their exile following 1848 through
1849--Marx kept company with men like Maxim Kovalevsky, a non-socialist
Russian aristocrat, the well-to-do Dr. Kugelmann, the businessman Max
Oppenheim, H.M. Hyndman, a very wealthy social democrat, and, of course,
the now-retired capitalist, Engels.
With such a circle as his choice of friends, it is not surprising that
he continued to see little radical capacity in the workers, just as he
had always failed to see it. In 1874, he wrote, “The general situation
of Europe is such that it moves to a general European war. We must go
through this war before we can think of any decisive external
effectiveness of the European working class.” Looking, as ever, to
externalities--and of course to the “immutable laws of history”--he
contributes to the legacy of the millions of World War 1 dead,
sacrificed by the capitulation of the Marxist parties to the support of
war in 1914.
Refusing throughout his lifetime to see the possibilities of real class
struggle, to understand the reality of the living negation of
capitalism, Marx actively and concretely worked for the progress and
fullness of capitalist development, which prescribed that generations
would have to be sacrificed to it. I think that the above observations
of his real life are important and typical ones, and suggest a
consistency between that life and his body of ideas. The task of moving
the exploration along to encompass the “distinctly theoretical” part of
Marx, is expressly beyond the scope of this effort; possibly, however,
the preceding will throw at least indirect light on the more
“disembodied” Marx.
Picture caption: THE BLOC OF THE THREE CLASSES? No, just Fang Yi, a
Deputy Vice-Premier who accompanied Deng Xiaoping on their trip to the
U.S. earlier this year being hailed by two celebrities at Disneyland.
This gross obeisance to the worst of American culture should make the
China-toadies cringe, but instead it is printed with pride in New China
magazine. They also should have no problem then following the latest
twist in the party line which is rehabilitating Liu Shao Chi after years
of being reviled as the cause of all of China’s woes. Ah, the life of
the party faithful.