Marx’s Bastard Offspring

Karl Marx was born on May 5. 1818. Two hundred years ago. He is definitely an individual worth discussing. Probably, only a handful of other humans in human history had as big an effect on history as he did. Communism, Marx’s idea went from being a ridiculed thesis in a book by a man two generations dead to ruling more than half the world’s population in less than one human lifetime.

He is fascinating for me because he tried to create a science of human group behavior. He believed human history could be seen and understood under the microscope of Science, and that from the study of our history, we could figure out the rules that govern how we move and change as whole classes and nations. Once we had these rules clear, we could use that knowledge to guide our destiny and end the miseries we keep going through. Famine. Plague. Economic depressions. Revolution. War.

I like his intention. I agree with his concluding that the sufferings of humankind are over 90% avoidable, and since that is the case, we should be exerting ourselves to avoid them. To do otherwise is stupid. Irrational. Why would we want to suffer if we don’t have to?

But I don’t think he saw far enough, which is why his recommendations for how we should behave as nations didn’t work when they were tried in the real world. In short, the misery that his “communism” inflicted on people unlucky enough to come under its yoke is not due to the fact some of his disciples were immoral men. The problem lies in the vision itself; it’s a flawed vision.

Marx’s theory was that the set of facts we call “History” is a record of a struggle between two classes – workers and owners. In every era and nation, in every department of our lives - art, science, politics, work, health care – in every human activity – the rich are working to keep workers toiling, ignorant, beaten, starved, and scared. Churches, for example, are always being used by the rich to keep the poor ignorant, superstitious, and fearful.

The struggle has gone on for centuries because people who are clever at getting the big share of the value of the goods and services produced in a society then do not want to share that wealth with anyone else. The rich – whatever the country, whatever currency the people in that country use – hoard the wealth and use it to exploit the workers and keep them on the brink of bare subsistence. The rich then spend the remaining wealth, the surpluses of goods and services – which are made by the workers – on luxuries and pleasures. In the meantime, the workers and their children are skillfully steered by schools, churches, and propaganda, into starving, contracting preventable illnesses, fighting each other, and dying young.

Marx said that someday, as the workers grow in understanding, they are going to get fed up, get confidence in themselves, organize, and kick the rascals out. Kill them if need be. Then, the workers will take over, organize production of the things that they need to live comfortably, do moderate amounts of work, and fill their days with art and leisure activities. Enjoy life.

The responsibility of every decent person, regardless of his or her class, gender, race, etc. is to work in his or her best way to bring about that day. “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

                        

                                                          Stalin at 24 years old 

Communism’s big flaw is not apparent at first, but practical experience over the last hundred years has repeatedly shown us that flaw.

Communism is a fanatic belief system. It doesn’t make provision for any person to disagree with its worldview. It does not call for free speech and free elections inside a democratic state. Instead, Marx calls for violent overthrow of the existing order, annihilation of any who talk of gradual steps to social justice, and then the establishing of a "dictatorship of the proletariat".   

If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. If you aren't with us, you're against us. 

Consequently, in the real states set up by nations that try to bring communism in as their form of governance, it makes available early on the governmental machinery of total control. The world worker’s paradise, that is supposedly coming someday, instead becomes a vague justification for ending all dissent. The tiller of tyranny is there for an opportunistic person to seize and hold onto. But all nations contain opportunists. Someone always seizes that tiller.

                    

                    Thomas Jefferson (painting by Peale, via Wikimedia Commons) 

It’s worth noting that Marx’s vision is opposite to that of the founding fathers of the U.S.. Adams, Jefferson, and their colleagues aimed to write a constitution in which the first design principle would be to prevent any one individual, class, religious organization, or corporation from ever gaining total control of the state. 

They set out to make a country in which people must discuss, compromise, and reach consensus before they can organize and act. Before they can get anything on a community scale done, they must talk to each other. That was to be the only way, in Adams and Jefferson’s vision, for all levels of government to work. So they divided up the power – executive, legislative, judicial – in such a way that any two of the main organs of governance could always stop the third if it got out of hand, i.e. if it got mean and greedy.

Marx’s communist state is designed to be populated by optimistic cooperators. Jefferson’s republic is designed to be populated by cautious realists.

Communism failed because it does not make provision for the restless nature of humans themselves. In every community, nation, or tribe, there will always be some who are curious, creative, defiant, and restless. That restlessness, that need to keep pushing the envelope of life outward, in spite of the destruction it has sometimes caused via the tyrants of history, has nevertheless, at the same time, been the driver of all that is creative and noble in us. Human curiosity and the human need for constant testing of the limits of our lives will never be tamed; but it just might be managed, channeled, and invested if we consciously choose to start managing ourselves. Pluralistic democratic ideals, widely believed, could enable us to end the madness.

It is worth noting here too that in the real experience of the last hundred years, one of Marx’s most fundamental maxims has turned out not to be true. A mistake. A false portrayal of reality.

Marx said that the capitalists will always seek to get richer and richer and push the workers harder and harder. The rich do not share, and in this, they will never change. They hate the very idea of sharing, at least in Marx’s view.

But the wealthy of the U.S., for example, could see in the 1930’s that if they did not share at least some of what they had, they were going to lose it all. The Russian Revolution was still fresh in the minds of the people of the world. Its lesson? See what happens when the rich get too arrogant. They lose their heads. Literally. When the poor have nothing, they have nothing to lose. And there are many, many more poor than there are rich.

                               

                                            Franklin D. Roosevelt (Wikimedia Commons) 

So when Roosevelt told the rich of the U.S., many of whom were his personal friends, as he had been born among them, that they were going to have to invest in workers and their welfare, they listened to him. Partly because they did care about the suffering that was going on in all the U.S. states. (Kids were dying of malnutrition while food was being burned to keep the price up.) But also partly because those same rich did not want to end up like the Romanovs and their friends. Or the Bourbons of France a century or so earlier. The prospect of one’s own horrible death has a marvelous power to focus the mind.

In other words, while communism is extremely seductive in its idealized form, and extremely difficult to overthrow once its inevitable tyrants come in and secure their grip on the military and media, it eventually does crumble. The crumbling comes about partly because communism’s inherent flaws make the people who live under it gradually learn to hate it, and partly because its coming into real world existence forces its competitors on the world market of ideas – the free market, capitalist societies – to evolve. Opposing memes fight to survive. When the rich see they really could lose it all, including their own heads, they change their attitudes.  

The memes by which the societies of the human social world are built and run are like the genes of the living creatures of the natural world. They keep restlessly combining and re-combining, and combinations that don’t work in the current real circumstances of the world lead the individuals and species programmed with them into dead end paths. The species that are obsolete and the societies that are obsolete die out.

The problem for the cynics and pessimists of the world who say that this essay only proves life is inescapably miserable and doomed is that if we can grasp and discuss these ideas of how societies emerge and flourish and how they fall out of touch with their environments – if we can think with these ideas as you and I are right now – then we could learn to write and re-write our ways of life so that we don’t have to do the wars, revolutions, plagues, and famines anymore. We could learn to evolve peacefully.

“There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” (McLuhan)  

                                   

                         Marshall McLuhan (Josephine Smith, via Wikimedia Commons

During the Enlightenment, several of the finest thinkers of the West believed that reason could lead us into a Golden Age. We could fix the human condition. The more I understand of how fools and bullies come into power and go out of power, and how societies keep evolving, the more I think it still could be so.

Why not? “We have nothing to fear but fear itself?” (Roosevelt)

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have an intelligent and compassionate day. (Wendell)