Gone the Prodigal Son: Marx and Rousseau, the Better Brother (4 of 5)
Posted on | December 10, 2009 | No Comments
Rousseau, the Better Brother
If there is any (likeable) philosopher who might give Marx some love, it’s Rousseau. Where Rousseau believes we are determined by our culture, Marx says it is our class. The General Will, which Rousseau claims is for the “good of all”, may as well be for the good of the Party for its stipulation that “to be general, a will need not always be unanimous; but every vote must be counted: an exclusion is a breach of generality.” (231) So every vote must be counted, but not every vote has to count. (Rousseau may have as many gaps in his philosophy as Marx, but at least he acknowledges them with style.) This, in effect, is like a mother who feeds her children a dose of cod oil each morning for their future health. The children may object to the taste, but they at least acknowledge that it is for the best in the long run. Marx’s expectation that “for the success of the cause … the alteration of man on a mass scale is necessary” (qtd. in Pontuso 92) seems to follow along this line. However, Rousseau and Marx both ignore the possibility that the mother might one day begin substituting cod oil with a sledgehammer. What say the little ones then?
While Marx sees private property as a notion to overcome, Rousseau seems to think it just goes against man’s nature. Both Marx and Rousseau’s fundamental want for society is equality, but Rousseau makes it particularly clear that he is willing to sacrifice at least a kind of liberty in order to do that (a sincerity Marx doesn’t ever seem to share.) Rousseau is a pre-industrial precursor to Marx in that he still feels there is a turning point and humanity can undo all the alleged nonsense of culture and civilization. He asserts that this can be done by the whole of society, not through uprising but by cooperative resolve. In order to be a true sovereignty, he explains, it “neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs … The Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, is always what it should be.” By Marx’s epoch, it seems the philosophy becomes more akin to: if you can’t join them, beat them. In broad fashion, he predicts:
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians. (Marx 306)
Never mind that he leaves open to interpretation whether he expects you to use a gun or a coffeemaker on your oppressors, Marx cries out for equality while whispering to men how different they are from each other. Whereas there’s a confused sort of kindness in Rousseau’s noble savage, you can’t help but feel the sheer force of anger that comes through in Marx’s writing. That he claims to come from a place of love is disingenuous for anybody who’s read St. Augustine, to say the least. In each area wherein Rousseau wants to strip everybody of all differences, Marx wants to spread those differences around—because it’s more fun for a bitter soul to appropriate some of your property than to decide that nobody owns any property anymore, period.
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