Gone the Prodigal Son: Marx, the Prodigal Son/the Bastard (5 of 5)
Posted on | December 10, 2009 | No Comments
Marx’s fuzziness allows him to stand directly on the line between ruthless and revolutionary, but he makes sure to leave enough open to interpretation that you can’t tell whether he would have been expressly against the Gulag or understood it as a necessary transient evil in the course of industrializing a nation that jumped the gun on the golden mean a bit too soon. Pontuso describes the Gulag:
The work norms were set so inhumanly high that the extra rations awarded if the goal was met did not compensate the worker for the energy expended: a method intended to drive the always-hungry prisoners to toil by dangling food in front of them. The goal was to extract the maximum amount of labor at the minimum cost (except in human lives, of course) (24).
In this light, it almost seems as though Marx intended, through his silence on easily prescient issues, to damn humanity to material equality. The problem is that he not only outcasts from his summit the previously wealthy, who would be at just as little fault by his calculations as those determined by their environment to be poor, but that he changes the dominant system of currency. What would cost other nations in dollars costs his in lives. And this is forgivable under the auspices of the collective good. His economist’s thinking turns men into statistics, and their deaths become a part of a sinister cost-benefit analysis that places Stalin’s five-year plans (Pontuso 47) and Lenin’s insistence that only by “‘shooting hostile classes wholesale’ could the proletarian victory be gained.” (Pontuso 60)
Ultimately, Marx alienates himself from the whole of philosophy when he relegates humanity to the position of breathing math. That he chooses to be so keen on the details of numbers but unclear on issues of common humanity makes his work monstrous. Marx has his own opinions of his family:
Marx denigrates previous philosophers for making a distinction between thought and action. He proposes that whatever differences exist between theory and practice must be settled in favor of practice—praxis. Indeed, he goes so far as to assert that for something to be true, it must occur in the physical world and not just in mind. (Pontuso 118)
I wonder what the philosophers he devalues would say in response to his ironic assertion that he should be judged by the work of Stalin and Lenin.
Plato would probably say he was ruled by the lowest of functions: “the appetites, which form the greater part of each man’s soul and are by nature insatiably covetous” (38).
St. Augustine would awe at his call for permanent revolution—after all, the saint assumes that “no man seeks war by making peace. For even they who intentionally interrupt the peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but only wish it changed into a peace that suits them better” (110). What of men such as Lenin and Stalin whose best-suited peace is war?
Rousseau would suggest Marx rescind his dedication to praxis, noting that “it cannot say: ‘What he wills to-morrow, I too shall will’ because it is absurd for the will to bind itself for the future” (231).
Personally, I’d just call him a bastard who conceived a gruesome philosophy. But perhaps it isn’t his philosophy’s fault, if I take into account his social determinism: for what else is to be expected when one is born to an environment of illegitimacy?
Works Cited
Augustine. “The City of God.” Excerpt from The City of God in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Trans. Marcus Dods. Vol. 2. Ed. Philip Schaff. Buffalo: The Christian Literature Company, 1887. Print. Rpt. in Introduction to Political Thinkers. Ed. William and Alan Ebenstein. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. 104-116. Print.
Ebenstein, William and Alan. Introduction to Political Thinkers. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. Print.
Marx, Karl. “The Communist Manifesto.” Excerpt from The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore. Ed. Friedrich Engels. 1888. Print. Rpt. in Introduction to Political Thinkers. Ed. William and Alan Ebenstein. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. 303-319. Print.
Plato. “The Republic.” Excerpt from The Republic of Plato. Trans. F. M. Cornford. London: Oxford University Press, 1945. Print. Rpt. in Introduction to Political Thinkers. Ed. William and Alan Ebenstein. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. 13-57. Print.
Pontuso, James. Solzhenitsyn’s Political Thought. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 1990. Print.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “The Social Contract.” Excerpt from The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G. D. H. Cole. London: Orion Publishing Group, 1947. Rpt. in Introduction to Political Thinkers. Ed. William and Alan Ebenstein. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. 225-245. Print.
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