“Setting off from idealism… I hit upon seeking the Idea in the real itself.”
–Karl Marx (1837)
Maybe Marxism hasn’t gone wrong. When asked why Christianity hasn’t ‘succeeded,’ Christians offer two responses: (1) It hasn’t really been tried, and (2) Just you wait, sinner. Marxists too have the right to hunker down and wait for the apocalypse.
Still, they have less right than Christians have. Christians, after all, await a divine intervention. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts; God’s time is not our time (or, more accurately, our time is God’s time, not ours). Marx’s proudest claim is: I give you the first scientific socialism, not a prophecy but a means of making rationally demonstrable predictions and, more, a means of making those predictions come true. Marx offers not only a social physics but a social engineering, a synthesis of theory and practice. Like any philosophic argument, Marx’s does not reject but invites rational inquiry and criticism. The ‘bourgeois’ regime of commercial republicanism has delivered on most of its promises; it does a fairly effective job of securing the unalienable rights it holds to be self-evidently true. The ‘proletarian’ regime of state socialism ruled by those who claim to be in the vanguard of history has failed to deliver on most of its promises, whenever and wherever it has been tried. Most conspicuously, it has failed to end class struggle.
Why is this so? Perhaps the criticism is merely premature. The worldwide advance of capitalism may not yet have gone far enough. Perhaps a world-state backed by international corporations is the necessary, but still uncompleted, first step toward a genuinely revolutionary circumstance, prefigured by the Great Depression of the 1930s. This possibility notwithstanding, it is surely fair to say that Marx (rather like the Apostles) expected the apocalypse to come much sooner than it has; in Marx’s case, it isn’t enough for the pious apologist to point to the mysterious ways of Providence. A critical reexamination of Marxism turns up problems. To say that they are fatal problems would be to substitute one prediction for another, a move I have learned not to make.
“The modern state is an accommodation between the political and the unpolitical state,” Marx writes. Machiavelli had said this, thinking of Christianity; Rousseau had said this, thinking of the bourgeoisie. Marx too claims that freedom, “the feeling of man’s dignity,” “with Christianity vanished into the blue of heaven,” leaving earthly life open to bourgeois egoism. Marx too wants to ‘de-feminize’ or re-thumotize the world: the Manifesto ends with a conspicuously ‘manly’ and spirited peroration. Unlike the Declaration of Independence’s manly and spirited peroration, the Manifesto predicts victory, relies on no Providence, refuses to moderate its spiritedness. Commercial republicanism doesn’t go far enough; it is a merely formal liberation, “the negation of alienation within alienation,” the final order of liberation within the prevailing order of things. In America, the State is free but men are not; the tyrannical relations of employer and employee remain. Modern natural right is egoistic/individualist, yielding a society based on the inhuman cash nexus. Money is the “alienated essence of man’s labor and life,” a social relation disguised as a thing, a ‘thingification’ of social relations, the externalizing of a social practice, labor, such that the labor looks at his own work as a thing to be sold, a mere means to get money, rather than an authentic life activity. We get money in order to buy ‘goods’ to consume and time in which to lay about: Human means aim at animalistic ends. Hobbes’s state of nature reappears within society itself, a war of all against all pitting men alienated from their own humanness and from their fellows. Godlike, the bourgeoisie has created a world after its own image, moving like a (decidedly unholy) world-spirit, ever-changing, destroying old life-ways in order to create anew. This is the penultimate, deformed but necessary, movement in human history which is the story of the self-creation of human being through labor, including the Machiavellian/Baconian conquest of external nature. Self-creation makes man the free/universal being, the only species that remakes/synthesizes all of nature, bending it to his (collective) will, humanizing it. Freedom is power, “the principle of politics is will.” With international capital comes an international proletariat as disenchanted and dis-enchanting as the bourgeoisie, but more numerous (90% of the population, according to Marx), more productive, and potentially far more powerful than the bourgeoisie. The international proletariat, once fully conscious of its own power of the ways of power, will expropriate the expropriators, establish its own brief dictatorship, abolish private property, and thereby abolish politics as we have known it—that is, politics as the instrument of class domination.
What is wrong with this impressive critique and prediction? Nietzsche predicts, famously, not class war but national war, not economics but politics, because the will to power will endure. Marx might accuse Nietzsche of ‘reification’: “Is Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented?” Marx fails to see that the real answer is ‘yes.’ The thumotic man remains alive in the modern world, not only as a physical warrior but as a mind-warrior. He is no longer named Achilles or Odysseus; he is named Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche, V. I. Lenin or Adolf Hitler. Marx, Hegel-as-materialist, is deficient precisely in self-knowledge.
The warrior-spirit, the man of dialectical polemic, remains a man-of-war. He will remain (as Nietzsche sees, and Marx does not) a man tending not to stop at freedom and dignity but to run to tyrannical rage, like Achilles dragging the corpse of Hector. To run to tyrannical rage is to ignore or despise the natural right (to say nothing of divine commandments) that sets limits to the exercise of human will or ambition. Marx makes two important criticisms of natural right and natural law: (1) Modern natural right puts the individual before society, but in fact ‘the individual’ develops after society does; (2) modern economists confuse particular social circumstances with ‘natural’ laws of production, smuggling natural law into conventional social relations. Marx sensibly concludes that one must always look at the particulars of social relations within any given society in order to understand and to improve it. Look (as Aristotle did) at who rules, and how they do it, to understand how a society works.
Unfortunately, the excessively spirited man is unlikely to be sufficiently ‘erotic’ or receptive to study concrete circumstances patiently, without giving way to moral indignation or bending what he knows to polemical purposes. In Marx, one sees the most remarkable conflict between eros and thumos, a conflict that, in his disciples, saw the unqualified victory of thumos, precisely because Marx eschews all natural right in his critiques of a particular kind of natural right and a particular misapplication of natural law. This lack of a moderating standard led to as series not of supermen but of super-Robespierres, who told the workers they had nothing to lose and a world to win. Instead of recognizing each social class as a potential faction, as the natural-right commercial republicans did, Marxists treated a particular class as religionists often think of themselves, as the God-bearing (or ‘History’-bearing) class. Whereas religionists teach the God-fearing nation that God’s law is a yoke, that God is the greatest imposer of responsibilities, the Marxists ‘realistically’ speak of power, of ‘laws’ inhering in social relations, of self-made and ’empowering’ laws, not laws untouched by what human beings think or do. So far, this has turned out to be unrealistic and destructive.
“All mythology subdues, controls and fashions the forces of nature in the imagination and through imagination; it disappears when real control is established.” To which Publius replies: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and tin the next place oblige it to control itself.” To oblige anyone to do anything, you need a standard beyond his own will and yours; you will also need institutions so arranged to check him from doing as he or you will if, in a state of libido dominandi or even honest moral indignation, one or both of you inclines to violate that standard. Marxism is deficient on both counts, in theory and practice. It is more thumotic, and less genuinely scientific, than it knows. Even if the Marxian analysis turned out to be right—the progressive, ‘dialectical’ enrichment of the haute bourgeoisie and the proletarianization of everyone else, with the ‘vanguard’ in the lead, poised to strike back—Marxism would remain an inadequate guide to government. Marxism claims that government exists only or mainly as an instrument of class domination, rather than as an instrument of class domination and a great many other things, which functions would not necessarily disappear if, per impossible, classes one day disappeared
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