Gone the Prodigal Son: Marx and Plato, the Father at Odds (2 of 5)
Posted on | December 10, 2009 | No Comments
Plato, the Father at Odds
Plato created the prototype for all political philosophy and suggested states with his Republic. For Marx to have even set out to write his considerations of political economy owed much to Plato’s groundbreaking, and that they both wrote works on ideal governments is at least one thing they share completely in kind. But these men would not sing over beers together. If Marx were the freed prisoner in Plato’s cave allegory, he’d escape only to see the halogen light of the corporate workplace—if Plato’s light revealed to him a case for absolute truth, Marx’s dim assessment shone but a dollar trail.
This is no doubt influenced by Marx’s own youth, during which he was witness to the material value of virtue: after a long-held rabbinical tradition in the men of his family, his father abandoned Judaism and converted to Christianity to enhance his job opportunities. This would play out in Marx’s own valuation of faith and perception of what is at the root of all things.
Whereas Plato’s obsession with truth and justice leads the Greek to center his Republic on the concept of rule by the wise—namely, the philosopher-king—Marx’s materialistic obsession forces society into an uncomfortable box and makes it stay there until it’s learned its lesson. Hypothetically responding to Plato’s case that the state is necessary because “no individual is self-sufficing; we all have many needs” (19), Marx argues that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (303). The former lauds the division of labor as something that makes each man best at any particular thing and the latter considers it a form of alienation.
It’s almost as though Marx sat down at his desk with only a paper and quill and copy of Plato’s dialogues, and then set out to explicitly create something that would surely piss the old man off royally. Plato embraces the class structure: he accepts a communitarian system within his guardian and auxiliary classes, ruled respectively by reason and spirit, but denies it for workers, whom he sees as too appetitive and beneath the honor required of such an environment (18). Marx puts this on its head, arguing that the workers are the only ones worth a damn and the bourgeois—Plato’s would-be guardians—writing in Capital, that their currency “lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”
Plato is an absolutist and tackles the issue not merely as one of building an ideal state but of building the ideal state. While he did not define matters of foreign policy in his Republic, it can be inferred that justice-spreading Plato would not coexist peacefully with the Procrustean brand of equality Marx propones to proliferate. Instead, he would agree with Solzhenitsyn in his critique of the West’s relaxing standards of truth:
A truly farsighted policy must recognize that freedom is indivisible. The world cannot exist half slave and half free. … [If the West] comes to doubt that value judgments of the kind that attribute superiority to one way of life as opposed to another, are impossible to make, then the West will not be able to defend its own highest principles. (Pontuso 184)
It is spiritedness, Solzhenitsyn asserts (and I think Plato would agree), that gives us the upper hand among the live-and-let-live relativists that, yes, “there are such things as morality and justice” (Pontuso 194). Plato’s lens of the tripartite soul would surely not allow rulers led by appetite and not temperance or spirit to sustain. If Lenin gave the Germans everything they needed to invade the Soviet Union, and worse, Stalin “could not conquer Finland and … panicked during the Nazi advance” (Pontuso 197), while using his position “to satisfy his desire for female companionship, good wine, and good food,” (Pontuso 41), then to Plato, both were unfit to lead. It was Plato who claimed, “a passion for honours or for money is rightly regarded as something to be ashamed of” (18). Having been taught by his mentor Socrates that “to know the good is to do the good,” he would have certainly taken notice and made advancements to free the Soviet Union from the grips of its shameless leaders.
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