A Human Marx

Introduction

Suppose first that 'Analytic ' succeeded, fully, indubitably, triumphantly, in its theoretical project at least. It re-organised Marx’s ideas into a set of formal propositions and arranged these into a model able to withstand the most rigorous demands of twentieth century analytic . Then consider everything lost or overlooked in the process of extracting a purely rational core from Marx's disparate texts: the left-overs, the obiter dicta, the rejectamenta. This excess includes many of his ambiguities, asides and contradictions, the repetitions and digressions, his passion and inconsistency and moments of suggestive disorder.

This paper is about the subjective dimensions overlooked when codifying Marx’s heterogeneous writing. It discusses the moral and emotional dimensions of his work; applies these to his concept of class; explores the imaginative elements of his project; and indicates some formative contradictions. It then sets out the ‘place’ of the subjective in his thought, showing how the more subjective dimensions fit with each other - and how they articulate with the more factual and theoretical aspects. The final section suggests some benefits of bringing a keener awareness of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity to Marx’s work.

The Moral Dimension

Morality is about the gap between what is and what should be - the gap in which Marx wrote. For his political objectives, his critique of political economy, indeed his whole work, derive from a set of judgements which are fundamentally (though problematically) moral in character. There is a clear moral purpose in his early writings about rights and liberty,1 alienation, acquisitiveness,2 commercialisation,3 and emancipation4; and a more implicit one in his subsequent project to analyse exploitation through political economy. A

1 e.g. , Collected Works of and Frederick Engels, Vol. 3, pp. 162-3. [hereinafter CW, 3, 162-3]. 2 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, [hereinafter EPM], CW, 3; 300, 306-7, 309. 3 Poverty of Philosophy, CW, 6, 113. 4 EPM, CW, 3, 296.

1 sense of vocation extends from his schoolboy aspiration to ‘work for mankind’,5 through to the close of his last major work, when he signs off with the words of the prophet Ezekiel: ‘I have spoken and saved my soul.’6

The intensity of Marx’s moral purpose is matched by an equally intense reluctance to admit to it.7 He sees moral preaching as misleading and out-dated, promoting false general interests and thus concealing crucial class differences. He wants to put the property question first:8 to highlight actual inequalities, not abstract wrongs. This is largely a question of tactics, fighting a battle on the basis of real facts, not general principles. But there is also a moral and paradoxical dimension: namely that, up to a point, Marx spurned the language of morality for the most moral of reasons: as dishonest. He attacked what is called ‘morality’ in the name of a deeper sense of morality.

Marx’s moral code is implicit, covert and often confused, but also passionate and, in its way, original. He tends to make moral points indirectly, implicitly, with more irony than clarity. His ethics come more often in denunciation than in prescription. They are also relational and collective rather than individualistic. We are free to become full human beings only through the quality of our relationships with others. ‘The essence of man is the ensemble of the social relations’.9 Marx recognises real asymmetries and avoids symmetrical judgements on what would conventionally be seen as similar acts. In contrast to the notion of ‘Recht’ which presupposes the formal equality of individuals (as do conventional morality and the Law), Marx sets out from actual inequalities, realities of power and subordination, and thus condemns ‘the hypocrisy of such a philosophy which treated all individuals without distinction’.10

In condemning a system, based, he believes, on irresponsibility and self-seeking, Marx is implicitly upholding an ethic of responsibility, compassion and concern.11 Although he condemns capitalists and their lackeys, sometimes in the most outspoken terms, there is none the less a largesse and forgiveness in his theory which blames society not the individual. Individuals are, by and large, innocent, since they are only ‘the bearers of particular class-relations and interests’.12

5 'Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession', CW, 1, 8. 6 Ezekiel 3: 19. Dixi et salvavi animam meam. At the end of Critique of the Gotha Programme, CW, 24, 99. 7 ‘The communists do not preach morality at all...’, , CW, 5, 247. 8 Manifesto of the Communist Party, CW, 6, 519. 9 ‘’, CW, 5, 4. c.f. , CW, 28, 195. 10The German Ideology, CW, 5, 418. 11 Capital, Vol. 1, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 380-1. 12, Ibid, Preface to the First Edition, (1867), p.92. And Ibid, 342, 381.

2

In many respects Marx’s values are quintessentially humanist. He opposes the prevailing Christianity on the grounds (inter alia) that ‘it regarded our flesh, our desires as something foreign to us’; and because ‘it does not go beyond mere moral injunctions, which remain ineffective in real life’. According to Marx, the ‘normal satisfaction’ of desire prevents it from becoming fixated. He anticipates a time when social conditions allow ‘the development of a totality of desires’ and ‘all- round activity and thereby the full development of all our potentialities’.13

Marx values ‘self-assertion’, standing up to others, more than ‘turning the other cheek’. The , he noted, ‘needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread’.14 These values are more in keeping with the Jewish scriptures or Old Testament than with the New. They continue the heroic, pagan lineage which values honour, pride, self-assertion and, by extension, ‘noble anger’, passion, honesty, audacity, expressiveness and contempt.15 Marx takes these virtues as natural and self- evident. They are not examined. But they, as much as any methodological approach, are what distinguishes him as a thinker.

The materialist conception of history is usually construed as a way of diminishing the rule of the moral. Morality, religion and metaphysics are lumbered with all the rest of ideology in the attic of the superstructure. The ethical realm is reduced, as precedence is given to the basic primacy of economy and society. But the theory, or metaphor, can be read quite differently. If morality and justice develop out of social conditions, then they can all improve together. This gives us an optimistic prognosis of humans growing in moral and spiritual capacities, along with the .

An ethical sense pervades Marx’s work, even as or even because he tries to suppress it. Others have been more scholarly, consistent, thorough and accurate in their predictions. Marx surpasses them in conviction, dedication, energy, force and gusto. His moral outrage is the well-spring of the emotions which suffuse his work.

Emotion

13 The German Ideology, CW, 5, 254-5. 14 ‘The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter.’ CW, 6, 231. 15 John Casey, Pagan Virtue: an Essay in Ethics, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

3 Marx usually presented his work as 'scientific', unclouded by emotion. But he studied subjects about which any normal human being would have strong feelings and the passionate force of his writing is often self-evident. His work was a response to suffering, perhaps the fullest and most thorough-going response of its time. His writing is a distinctive amalgam of compassion and aggression, love and hate, a combination of contradictory emotions. Contrasting his work with the writing of his wife reveals an emotional of a conventional kind. Karl is forceful, aggressive, assured: Jenny is caring, worrying, nurturing. After the massacre of the Communards, Jenny laments:16 Karl rallies the troops.17 His is a ‘man’s job’. He attacks ‘womanish resignation’18; and mocks others as ‘old women’.19 He writes as a man - a clever, forceful man - unaware of how this restricts his impact and his range. He shuns the softer emotions, such as hurt, for withering blasts of aggressive scorn, or stoic defiance.20 Jenny expresses fear and disappointment:

If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes to be completed, they would perhaps show a little more interest.21

Jenny is also more aware of the price of malice.

Only don't write with too much rancour and irritation. You know how much more effect your other articles have had. Write either in a matter-of-fact and subtle way or humorously and lightly.22

The advice went unheeded. Marx’s numerous polemics fuse analysis and abuse into a special genre of intellectual bullying. His numerous polemics - , The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, Herr Vogt, as well as attacks on rival approaches (‘utopian’ and ‘true’ socialism), theoretical opponents (Proudhon, ‘vulgar’ economists and ‘bourgeois’ economists) and political antagonists (Louis Napoleon and Thiers).etc. - all these exemplify his view that ruthlessness is ‘the prime requirement in all criticism’.23 Take, as an example, ‘The Great Men of the Exile’ (1852), a satirical exposé of fellow émigrés: one hundred poisonous pages of indignation and defamation,

16 Jenny Marx to Peter Imandt, June 1871, CW, 43, 561. c.f. Jenny Marx to Liebknecht, 26/5/72, CW, 44, 580. 17 ‘Civil War In France’, CW, 22, 311-55. 18 Marx and Engels, ‘Review of Daumer’, CW, 10, 244. 19 CW, 38; 119, 408. CW, 43, 113. 20 e.g. his last written words, a note to his doctor, two months before his death. ‘Indeed I find some relief in a grim headache. Physical pain is the only “stunner” of mental pain. Yours very truly, Karl Marx.’ CW, 46, 429. 21 Jenny Marx to Kugelmann, 24/12/67. CW, 42, 578. 22 Jenny Marx to Karl, c. 21 June 1844, CW, 3, 579. 23 Marx to Engels, 18/7/77, CW, 45, 242.

4 mirthless and mean-spirited irony, which, whether it is affected or authentic, says as much about the writer as his target. Marx forgets that brevity is the soul of wit; that satire is a swivel gun; and that the concentrated spite and waspish venom of the text, in its very length and intensity, inadvertently paints its author as unforgiving, unbalanced, even insane. In itself the polemic is futile, inept and actually counter-productive, first in that it keeps alive the names of the very men Marx detests, names which would otherwise be forgotten; and second because it was used by the Prussian police against his fellow exiles, former friends (e.g. Arnold Ruge) and potential allies.24

Confrontation, oppositionalism and intellectual aggression can become a habit or a manner, with disastrous results.

Whomever one seeks to persuade, one acknowledges as master of the situation.25

In the same way, one acknowledges something to whomever one seeks to destroy. One acknowledges them a significant power, or at least worthy of attention. We give power to what we blame. Marx realises on occasions that he is wasting himself on petty intrigues, ‘the war between mice and frogs’, but excuses himself on the grounds of compulsion: ‘I have to wade through all this ordure...26

The ordure is most visible, least contaminated by theory, in the nine volumes of collected correspondence. Marx passes contemptuous generalisations about entire classes, nations and religions. Recall his casual anti-Semitism: ‘the Jew Fould’, ‘the little Jew Bamberger’,27 ‘the grammatically illiterate Jew Reuter’;28 the ‘nastily Jewish physiognomy’ of someone at dinner.29 There is not the space here to discuss what is behind this contempt,30 but it is worth noting the sheer extent of it. There is scathing disdain for the works of others: ‘truly nauseous article’, ‘feeble platitudes’, ‘disgusting rag’, ‘charlatanism, poltroonery, bluster and ineffectuality’.31 There are denunciations of ‘idlers’, ‘boobies’ and ‘rascally curs’;32 of ‘incorrigible blockheads’, ‘crapauds’, ignorant

24 See Marx, ‘Hirsch’s Confession’, CW, 12, 40-3; ‘The “President of Mankind”’, CW, 20, 92-3. 25 ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, CW, 11, 158. 26 Marx to Engels, 19/11/59, CW, 40, 532. 27 CW, 39; 200, 273. 28 CW, 41, 121. 29 Marx to Antoinette Philips, CW, 41, 271. 30 Doubtless something to do with hurt, rejection, anger and fear. Marx observes that to some people ‘it is it is always a source of satisfaction to have somebody they think themselves entitled to despise’. Marx to Laura and Paul Lafargue, 5/3/70, CW, 43, 449. 31 CW, 38; 117, 293, 317, 491. 32 CW, 38; 354, 397, 375.

5 louts’;33 ‘semi-educated louts and semi-informed literati’.34. There is scorn for ‘asses’, ‘jackasses’ and, above all, ‘philistines’. These insults are frequent, casual and vehement. Occasionally the effect is humorous, as when Marx calls Karl Blind a ‘hydrocephalous crab-louse’, but for the most part and cumulatively, the abuse is pernicious. There is something hateful in the persistent name-calling: ‘the uneducated, four times cuckolded jackass’ (Willich); the ‘red fool’ (Herman Becker); ‘the fatuous Heinzen’, ‘the cuckold Brüningk’, ‘the blackguard Golonin’;35 ‘that pot-bellied philistine Freiligrath’, ‘that bastard Zimmerman’, ‘that swine Koller’;36 ‘that cur Ewerbeck’, ‘that old fool Lelewel’, ‘that swine Tucker’, ‘that jackass Weydemeyer’, ‘that rogue Trübner’.37

This is not just a biographical comment about some perceived shortcoming in Marx. Nor - though it could be satirised this way - is it to say that all should be sweetness and light. Rather it is an immediately practical observation about the human prerequisites for getting things done. Marx’s sustained satire and sarcasm, his resort to contempt and abuse, corrodes the trust on which long term co-operation depends. It replaces openness and good will with fear and bad feeling: a false start for socialism.

Class

The concept of class refers to real people and their place within the . It also takes in elements which are subjective, imaginative, or even mythic. There is nothing within Marx’s theory to explain his loyalty to the proletariat. To account for it, we have to go outside his work and posit a moral and emotional commitment, evident in his writing, but for the most part disregarded by his theory.

At one level, the most simple level, Marx sets in play a Manichean distinction between right and wrong, deserving and undeserving, exploited and exploiter. Proletariat good: bad. His grand narrative restores a sense of justice to a manifestly unjust age. It re-creates a moral universe. Good is on one side; Evil the other. It is not put that simply, but the reader is justified in taking it that simply, at least at one level.

33 CW, 39; 44, 51, 65. 34 Marx to Engels, 18/7/77, CW, 45, 242. 35 CW, 38; 284, 343. CW, 39; 62, 125, 361. 36 CW, 41; 35, 46, 347, 576. 37 CW, 39; 85, 172, 407, 409, 472.

6 At another level, Marx’s attitudes and allegiances are more complex. He admires the bourgeoisie for accomplishing ‘wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals’.38 His attitude to the proletariat is also more ambivalent than usually supposed. Sometimes the workers are nobles, or at least noble savages: 'the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies'.39 Marx bestows praise rather as if he were headmaster in ‘the stern but steeling school of labour’.40

You would have to attend one of the meetings of the French workers to appreciate the pure freshness, the nobility which bursts forth from these toil-worn men. The English proletarian is also advancing with giant strides but he lacks the cultural background of the French. But I must not forget to emphasise the theoretical merits of the German artisans in Switzerland, and Paris. The German artisan is still however too much of an artisan.41

The French workers come top of the class; the English proletarian is highly commended, but should brush up on culture; and the Germans are shaping up well. Overall the class is doing admirably.

Yet, on other occasions, there are opposing metaphors and attitudes. Marx uses Hobbes’ phrase puer robustus sed malitiosus (a sturdy but ill-natured boy) to describe ‘the real people, the proletarians, the small peasants and the plebs’.42. Marx describes actually existing workers as being marked by 'stupidity, cretinism' and like a 'neglected child'.43 They are ‘a crowd of scrofulous, over-worked and consumptive starvelings’;44 a picture of ‘broken health, tainted morals and mental ruin’;45 in ‘helpless dependence upon the factory as a whole, and therefore upon the capitalist’, sunk in ‘ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation’.46

The chasm between the actual working class and the ideal or potential one is bridged by new category: the "lumpen proletariat", which Marx castigated more absolutely than he ever did the bourgeoisie. The lumpen is ‘the "dangerous class", the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown

38 Manifesto of the Communist Party, CW, 6, 486-9. 39 EPM, CW, 3, 313. C.f. The Holy Family, CW, 4, 84. 40 The Holy Family, CW, 4, 37. 41 Marx to Feuerbach, 11/8/44. CW, 3, 355. 42 ‘The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter’, CW, 6, 233. Engels repeats the analogy in his introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1892, CW, 27, 300. 43 EPM, CW, 3; 273, 308. 44 German Ideology, CW, 5, 41. 45 ‘Inaugural Address to the First International’. CW, 20, 7. 46 Capital, I, 547 and 799.

7 off by the lowest layers of old society’. 47 In respect of proletariat and lumpen proletariat, Marx maintains a fixed dichotomy between Good and Bad. The lumpen is the scapegoat which bears all the proletariat's imperfections: passivity, fickleness, fecklessness etc. The proletariat is thereby purified, as it must be, if it is to be seen as the Just (the “chosen”, the “anointed”, the “innocent”, the “messenger”), whose sufferings will redeem the world’.48 In Marx’s script, it takes on the characteristics of Jung's child-god. It is innocent; it points to the future; it represents a unity; it is exposed to unusual tribulations; and it embodies a hope for renewal.49 It is first introduced as part of a myth of redemption, in portentous terms, philosophical, mystical and crypto-theological.50

In his political and polemical work, Marx maintains the distinction between proletariat (good) and (bad). In more analytic vein, however, he suggests something more subtle. Thus in Capital, he introduces a concept of ‘Relative Surplus Population’ (RSP), which makes the proletariat merge into the lumpenproletariat.51 He indicates that the active, industrial proletariat is only a fraction of the wider proletariat; and that, at any one time, much of the proletariat is surplus population, living off social wealth rather than producing it. This damages the economic (and moral) distinction between the proletariat (productive labourers, sole creators of wealth and ) and the rest of society (parasites). It also undoes the political (and moral) division between a proletariat (organised, disciplined, selfless, active, promising political material) and a lumpenproletariat (chaotic, selfish, passive, treacherous, politically hopeless).

Elsewhere Marx returns to more symbolic mode, where proletariat and lumpenproletariat re-emerge as standard bearers of political traits. The class categories have multiple referents. They are an arena in which different discourses intersect. The 'proletariat' refers to real people, the mass of people, caught in real poverty. It is a historical force, part of a moral narrative and a focus of loyalty and faith. It is a magic power, the hero of a magnificent revenge drama, as well as a philosophical and psycho-political category. These different meanings and contexts permeate each other. That is their power. Marx realises that classes have meanings, symbolic associations. He 'had the indisputable

47 Manifesto of the Communist Party, CW, 6, 494. C.f. ‘The Class Struggles in France’, CW, 10, 62. 48 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975) (1st pub. 1959), pp. 206-7. 49 Leonard P. Wessell Jr., Karl Marx, Romantic Irony and the Proletariat, Louisiana State University Press, 1979. p.200. 50 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (Recht): Introduction.' CW, 3, 186. 51 Capital, I, 794-8.

8 dramatic genius for casting the material forces of real man within a mythic script of human salvation'.52

As common sense would suggest, the imaginative and emotional aspects of Marx’s concept of class render it 'unscientific'. To the extent that Marxism identifies with the proletariat absolutely and mythologises its role, it is unwilling to reassess theory and prediction in the light of new evidence.

Dramatic Roles

The huge literature about Marx contains remarkably little on his imagination.53 Nor is there the space here for a full exploration of Marx’s imagination in terms of his favourite metaphors and analogies (e.g. Prometheus), or the parallels between Marxism as belief system and religion. But I do want to sketch some of the imaginative facets of his writing, in a novel yet far-reaching way, in terms of dramatic roles or ‘archetypes’.54 We will look at Marx the Warrior; the Destroyer; the Creator; the Ruler; the Magician; the Innocent; and the Lover. Each of these roles can be traced through individual passages and the project as a whole. Together, they open a highway into the imaginative world Marx occupied.

The Warrior

The Warrior is the Marx who joins battle with the Moloch of capitalism; Marx the politician, polemicist and chief Armourer to the proletariat. ‘His brain’, one admirer wrote, ‘was like a man-of-war in port under steam, ready to launch into any sphere of thought.’55 According to the Belgian police, he spent 5,000 gold francs, out of a legacy of 6,000 from his father's estate, on providing rifles for Belgian workers.56 After the

52 Wessell, op. cit., 201. 53 Honourable exceptions are Eliade and Wessell (see above). Also Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). (1st pub. 1961). Alan Cohen, The Decadence of the Shamans: or shamanism as a key to the secrets of communism (London, Unpopular Books, 1991). 54 Leave aside questions about Jung, or whether archetypes actually exist as part of a ‘collective unconscious’. For present purposes, the word is being used opportunistically, purely as a device to explore imaginative themes and motifs, implicit authorial positions and fictions. This is influenced by the work of Pearson, 1991. Her neo-Jungian, ‘non pathology- based’ typology is more helpful than applying the pseudo-scientific Freudian apparatus. 55 Lafargue, in Marx and Engels through the Eyes of their Contemporaries, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978) [hereinafter Eyes], p.37. 56 See the biography by Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1976) (1983 ed.). 1st English ed. 1936. p.151. Jenny Marx refers to the weapons, but gives no costs, in 'A Short Sketch of an Eventful Life', in Robert Payne, The Unknown Karl Marx, (London: University of London Press, 1972), p.121.

9 defeat of the 1848 revolutions, Marx called for the immediate ‘arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, muskets, cannon and ammunition’.57 And when the Narodniks assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Marx, in the mellowness of age, was full of praise for the ‘sterling chaps’.58 For himself though, he relied on argument rather than assassination, wielding ‘the weapon of criticism’59 and showing the proletariat ‘its spiritual weapons in philosophy’.60 As a philosopher he is engaged in ‘hand-to-hand combat, and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike him’.61 Marx strikes with words. Words like 'bourgeois',62 'philistine', ‘crude’, 'vulgar', ‘Utopian’ and 'chauvinist'. This vocabulary of abuse mixes analysis with emotion, to precipitate strong value judgements without resort to the conventions of morality.

The Warrior is also the permanent Rebel, who finds meaning and dignity (in an otherwise absurd, alienated world) through struggle, through a belief that it is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees, and a realisation that solidarity and sharing can transcend loneliness and solitude. This is the Left Bank juncture of Marxism and existentialism.

The Destroyer

Unleashed, the Warrior becomes the Destroyer: the Marx who wants to destroy the existing order, to smash capitalism, to abolish private property, country, nationality and family.63 The Destroyer's weapon is criticism. And this ‘is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy which it wants not to refute but to exterminate.’64

According to one of Marx's usages, Communism itself is the Destroyer, ‘the real movement which abolishes [aufhebt] the present state of things’.65 Chief agent of communism is the proletariat, whose ‘mission is to destroy all previous

57 ‘Address of the Central Authority to the Communist League’, 1850. CW, 10, 283. 58 Marx to his daughter, Jenny Longuet, 11 April 1881. CW, 46, 83. 59 ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (Recht). Introduction’, CW, 3, 182. 60 Ibid., 187. 61 Ibid., 178. 62 An American Senator noted ‘the cutting disdain’ with which Marx ‘pronounced the word bourgeois’. The Reminiscences of Karl Schurz, (London, 1909) quoted in David McLellan, Karl Marx: His lIfe and Thought, (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 453. 63 Manifesto of the Communist Party, CW, 6, 500-3. 'Theses on Feuerbach', # 4, CW, 5, 8. 64 'Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (Recht): Introduction'. CW, 3, 177. 65 'The German Ideology', CW, 5, 49.

10 securities for, and insurances of, individual property’.66 The proletarian is ‘the destructive side’.67

The Destroyer has an element of flamboyant self- destructiveness which finds explicit expression in Marx's revenge drama 'Oulanem'.

Ha! I must bind myself to a wheel of flame And dance with joy in the circle of eternity! If there is a Something which devours, I'll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins The world which bulks between me and the abyss I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses. I'll throw my arms around its harsh reality: Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away, And then sink down to utter nothingness, Perished, with no existence - that would be really living!68

Although the poetic persona should not be confused with the essence of Marx, the force of the soliloquy testifies to a good deal of identification with its sentiments. The sense of complulsiveness and being driven - the futility, rage, revenge, torment and defiance - suggest some of the passions firing Marx's mind.

The Creator

Images of destruction are also, of course, acts of creation. The twin of the Destroyer is the Creator, who would build from the rubble of capitalism a new proletarian order. (It is no accident that the hammer - creative and destructive - is symbol of so many revolutionary movements.) Destroyer and Creator combine in the vision towards which Marx's whole work intends: the death throes of capitalism which are the birth pangs of socialism.

Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolise all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the which has flourished alongside and under it. The

66 Manifesto of the Communist Party, CW, 6, 495. 67 The Holy Family, CW, 4, 36. 68 'Oulanem, a Tragedy', Act 1, scene iii). In Payne, op. cit. p. 82.

11 centralisation of the and the socialisation of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.69

The underlying theme involves death and birth, apocalypse, . It is written, like true myth, in an ever-lasting present. Marx makes the process sound inevitable through a number of apparent equations - increased degradation produces increased revolt, increased capitalism produces increased proletarian solidarity - and through a confident accumulation of verbal nouns, where action is turned into an abstract event, untroubled by questions of human agency or error, gathering into waves of rolling propositions, which are then reinforced by some choice, short, sharp sentences. The expropriators being expropriated has a moral and rhetorical logic and a delightful sense of poetic justice. Readers who have battled through eight hundred pages of may well surrender to this coup de grace with enthusiastic relief.

Ruler and Magician

The Ruler is the Marx who headed the First International, who claimed ‘the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’.70 He was the strategist, the general, hoping ‘to win a scientific victory for our party.’71

The Ruler is closely linked to the Magician: the Marx who would re-write past and future accordingly to his own (magic) formulae; who would pull out of the thin air of real life a solution to the riddle of history; and who, through the alchemy of Revolution, lets his followers feel that their actions - sitting in libraries, attending meetings, selling newspapers - glow with significance, directly linked to world history.

The Magician appears explicitly in Marx's tale, 'Hans Röckle', which, his daughter recalled, continued 'for months and months', telling about a magician who ‘could never meet his obligations either to the devil or the butcher’ and always had to sell his toys to the devil.72 Intellectually, the Magician is the virtuoso, the polymath and the intellectual shaman, who crosses between different theoretical worlds, who walks between Hegel and Ricardo; and Democritus and Darwin.

69 Capital, I, 929. 70 Manifesto of the Communist Party, CW, 6, 497. 71 Marx to Weydemeyer, 1/2/59. CW, 40, 377. 72 Eleanor Marx-Aveling. ‘Karl Marx: a few stray notes’, first pub. 1895. in Eyes, p. 197.

12

The Innocent

The Seeker and the Innocent co-exist in the kind of brilliantly simple questions Marx set out from. They are there at the heart of Marx's project: to change the world. Only the Innocent expects to do this. Others are content to scrape by, minding their own patch.

Marx's own Innocent can be seen in his daughter’s idealisation of him as a Christ-like figure with ‘good brown eyes’, forever surrounded by ‘a flock of children’;73 and in Liebknecht’s recollection of the Sunday picnics on Hampstead Heath74 and of Marx in society:

He never struck an attitude, he was always himself... His wife often called him “my big baby”, and nobody, not even Engels, knew him or understood him better than she did. Indeed, when he was in what is generally termed society, where everything is judged by appearances and one must do violence to one’s feelings, our “Moor” was like a big boy and he could be embarrassed and blush like a child.75

In Marx’s work, the Innocent manifests in the latent Rousseauism: the implicit belief that humans are naturally good, that all evil is caused by an oppressive society. It appears in his rosy view of both 'primitive' and 'advanced' communism; in his touching fidelity to Theory as the gateway to Truth; and in his fervour for Party, Proletariat and Revolution. The shadow side of the Innocent is deliberate evasion of reality, as in Marx’s disregard for the ulterior agendas which would inevitably latch on to the purity of his ideals, corrupting and co-opting them. This failure of imagination and analysis is the embattled, denying part of the Innocent, evident in Marx's rebuttal of Bakunin, who had foreseen that a "privileged minority" of "former workers" would come to represent themselves, not the real workers.76

The Lover

In purity of intention and compassion for those who suffer, the Innocent elides with the Lover. The compassion tends to be theoretical and implicit, usually compounded with raging invective and irony. Marx as Lover sounds far-fetched,

73 Ibid., 199. 74 Liebknecht, in Eyes, 93-7. 75 Ibid., pp. 78. 76 'Notes on Bakunin's Statehood and Anarchy', CW, 24, 520.

13 considering his mordant temperament.77 But Marx attributes his interest in political economy to his sympathies with the Moselle peasants and those who were being forbidden to gather timber from the words.78 His notion of the mass, the people, may be seen as a version of the religious ideal of love transcendent, love for (nearly) all. Although little compassion is expressed directly in his work, there would be little work but for the compassion. Consider a detail. In his description of the eviction of the Gaels by British soldiers, in the midst of the facts and figures, Marx includes one shorter, simpler sentence.

One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut she refused to leave.79

A single detail can do more than a ream of statistics. Compassion is implicit in it, as it is in the history as a whole. The empathy is central, but buried deep in a mass of outrage and irony.

Acts and Facts

The above gives only an indication of the imaginative dimension in Marx’s work - his mature work as well as his early writings. Each of the above examples could have been expanded and a fuller survey would also have looked at other ‘roles’ - Orphan, Outlaw, Prophet, Sage and Visionary. Marx occupies each of these positions, in individual passages or in the work as a whole, and each contributes to the imaginative allure of Marxism.

The double truth is that Marx had an extraordinary, vivid imagination and he habitually sought to suppress it, in order to ground socialism in serious theory. Notwithstanding his severe, anti-Utopian streak, his imagination was such that it continued to suffuse his work, in individual analogies and images and in the overall vision. He scripted roles and 'naturalised' them in and as theory, such that they can vanish below the threshold of thought, there to be acted out with maximum conviction and minimal self-consciousness. The plausibility of these positions and their capacity to inspire loyalty indicates that they match onto something real, that they both make sense of and glamorise actualities. To the extent that the twentieth century was defined by the rise and fall of communism, if that was the central theme around which the aspirations and anxieties of the age coalesced, then we can say that Marx scripted the myth which the twentieth century played out.

77 His father worried ‘Is your heart in accord with your head, your talents?’ Heinrich Marx, letter to his son Karl, 2 March 1837. CW, 1, 670. 78 Preface to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. CW, 29, 262. 79 Capital, I, 890-2.

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Formative Contradictions

The dramatic roles discussed above can be understood in terms of coincidenta oppositorum. Whenever one is identified, the converse too will obtain. The Innocent does not preclude the Cynic. Marx is Lover to the same degree as he is Hater; Destroyer to the same degree as he is Creator: and that degree is often extreme. Marx occupies and dramatises contradictory positions with the utmost conviction.

In logic contradictions cannot both be true; in the psyche, only contradictions are true. One of Marx’s approaches was to unravel the contradictions within a subject. By ‘contradiction’ he understood something quite broad: the tensions, antagonisms and opposing tendencies within a subject.80 I suggest something even looser and use the word ‘contradiction’ here to signify the tensions, knots, tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, inconsistencies, binds and whirligogs in the work.81 In this sense, one could examine the characteristic stresses at work in Marx, notably between:

 the visionary and the scientist  optimism and pessimism  common sense and high theory  the physical and the intellectual  the priest and the jester.

The last of these refers to a tension between what is doctrinal and tendentially systematic; and what is open-ended and transgressive.82 The priest is the Marx who is defending a position; the orthodox, academic Marx, who thinks in terms of problem, argument and solution; who is also Marx the Marxist- Leninist. The jester is the other Marx: everything surplus to Marx the priest; the Marx who insisted he was "not a Marxist";83 who thinks imaginatively more than logically; who "read Aeschylus every year in the Greek original", whose "respect for Shakespeare was boundless"84; who posed questions which he left unanswered; whose writing constantly points

80 The German words Marx uses are ‘Widerspruch’, ‘Gegensatz’, ‘Konflikt’. 81 R.D. Laing, Knots, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), foreword. 82 Leszek Kolakowski, Marxism and Beyond, (London: Pall Mall Press, 1968), p.53. 83 Engels to Bernstein, 2-3/11/82, CW, 46, 356. Also Engels to C. Schmidt, 5/8/90, In Marx and Engels Selected Works, in One Volume, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1968. p.689. 84 Paul Lafargue, 'Reminiscences of Marx', in Eyes, 31-2.

15 beyond itself; whose favourite mottoes were 'de omnibus dubitandum' and 'nihil humani a me alienum puto'.85

The Jester is the Marx who is thinking aloud, improvising or creating rather than presenting a finished case; who is half- aware of the aporia in his argument; and whose prose is more suggestive than purely logical. Consider the Grundrisse as a whole, or the ‘Economic Manuscript of 1861-3’. These are rough, unfinished drafts, pocked with incomplete, truncated sentences, marked by an elliptic style, erasures, revisions, insertions of cursory, fragmentary thoughts. The language is macaronic: a mix of German, French, English, Greek and Latin, switching in mid-sentence, using neologisms, words manufactured from elements of different languages, English or French words employed with German prefixes or endings. This lends a sense of urgent immediacy to Marx’s argument, as if he had seized words, from every corner and language and pressed them into service, invented terms where none existed; as if we are seeing his private thoughts, in the blast furnace of composition.

The point is to follow the unfolding of the contradiction between what is tendentially doctrinaire and what is open- ended. In the case of , the main danger lies in trying to codify Marx into a philosophical system or a priest.

Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.86

The ‘strait roads’ of Marxist theory are adequately mapped. But the map is not the territory. And it is the "crooked roads without Improvement", which lead through uncharted terrain to a Marx more various, elusive and contradictory than the one we know, a Marx whose genius and folly are equally evident, whose work fuses and suffuses the factual and the theoretical with the emotional, moral, imaginative and rhetorical.

The Place of the Subjective

The approach taken in this paper is justifiable without reference to Marx’s own pronouncements.87 In particular it is compatible with the following positions:

1.There exists a real world which includes real oppression, suffering and exploitation.

85 CW, 42, 568. 86 William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. 87 That said, at least two dozen passages in the Collected Works implicitly or explicitly justify studying the more subjective aspects of his work.

16 2.Marx's critique of that world and his aim of changing it remain, in some respects, unsurpassed.

3.Marx's work has validity and value quite independent from its imaginative dimension.

4.Nonetheless, the titanic scope of his intent, vision and achievement is such that it cannot help but seize the imagination and enter realms of subjectivity and heroic myth.

5.To deny or ignore the subjective side of Marx is fatefully to diminish self-reflection and self-understanding. Principled positions can become indulgent postures - self- righteous and self-defeating postures too. Pretensions flourish.

6.Following the political demise of Marxism, it is time to investigate subjective aspects of Marx, without fear or favour, going as far as possible both in terms of criticism and development.

It is probably easiest to think of the different dimensions as existing simultaneously and inter-dependently. They inhere in each other. The imaginative dimension in Marx is co-extensive with the theoretical domain which has pre-occupied academics. Although we can note where Marx is in especially ‘subjective’ vein, ultimately subjectivity pervades his whole project. Any separation is provisional. Subjectivity permeates theory as much as theory permeates subjectivity. If you ask which is the 'real' Marx, the two oscillate, like the two mutually exclusive ways of seeing a pattern in a two-coloured optical illusion.

The different positions Marx adopts can be categorised in many ways. Schumpeter divides him into Marx the Prophet; Marx the Sociologist; Marx the Economist; and Marx the Teacher.88 The complex mingling, confrontation or even synthesis of different philosophical and methodological discourses is combined with an equally complex overlapping of different chronological stages in the development of the thought. Even within a single text, the thought is multi-layered. Some ideas are residual; others emergent. The overlapping complicates attempts at neat codification and it disrupts the drive to arrive at a definitive reading of any one passage. There is no single, final Marx.

Marx’s writing is prolific, many-sided. Its beauty is the beauty of abundance, rather than order. Marx was always a poet, first and last, seeking to dramatise the potential human meaning of existence, to link his readers through action to

88 Joseph A. Schumpeter, ‘The Marxian Doctrine’ in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, (London, Unwin, 1987). [1st pub. in Britain, 1943.]

17 the grand unfolding of history, to realise their world- historical potential. To this end, he mythologises theory. This is, as it were, an Aufhebung of myth, which destroys its original form, but preserves it in theory - and theory, with its claims to analysis and objectivity, is the dominant language of the time. As Marx matures, the mythic is more perfectly incorporated, in ever more distilled and rarefied form, such that it need no longer be stated, because it is thoroughly embodied and enacted in the very form and structure of the system, rather than merely its surface content. The more implicit and invisible it becomes, the more powerful and momentous it is.

Marx synthesises dispassionate comment with impassioned condemnation. Aside from the incidental poeticisms, there is an element of poetry or myth intrinsic to Marx’s analytic categories, fundamentally bound up with the choice of subject, theme and approach, existing as an organising principle in entire works. Strong value judgements and analysis are fused into one. The moral, imaginative and emotional dimensions co- exist and interact with the analytic one. The challenge is to sustain simultaneous awareness of Marx as theorist, politician, researcher, poet, moralist, agitator; and to relate this to actual texts.

That which is rhetorical, emotional, moral, mythic, imaginative resists neat codification. Nor is the erratic inter-action of these spheres susceptible to systematisation. What 'Analytic Marxists' marginalise or ignore is as important as what they privilege. For these other dimensions - in themselves and in their interaction with the 'factual' and 'theoretical' - endow Marx's work with its peculiar character, power and life. Just as structuralism gave way to post- structuralism - to everything excessive, surplus and superfluous to structure, to the margins which return to haunt the centre - so Analytic Marxism could be supplemented and subverted by what it has excluded, by the omissions and absences which constitute its presence. And this, most importantly, should have practical benefits.

Continuities and Consequences

With respect to the ‘subjective’ dimensions outlined above, there are striking continuities between Marx and his followers. These are not merely interesting curios or incidental marginalia. They are fundamental to understanding both the attraction of Marxism and its failure. As such, they matter as much as purely theoretical continuities between Marx and his followers. This final section indicates ‘subjective’ continuities and practical and political consequences.

18 Moral Confusion

Marx’s reluctance to speak about values and core beliefs, his view of morality as bourgeois cant, and the ambivalent attitude to morality passed on through the Marxist tradition, has practical consequences. It discredits the language by which rights and wrongs are identified and elucidated. It removes ethical stopping points and practical safeguards, allowing enthusiasts to pack meetings, rig ballots, twist truths into half truths and fractions of truths, jail dissidents and liquidate opponents, all in the name, or the dream, of a greater Good. The short term gains of this are lost in the eventual rebound of ill-will and distrust.

Marx focuses on the final product, Revolution, displaced into the future. He forgets that the process of changing also matters and that the means used therein set up the new norms, expectations and standards: they become the product. In advocating a forthright and aggressive activism, Marx omits the necessary caveats and counter-balances. He seems unaware that violence has its own dynamics, that it escalates, spreads, skids out of control and turns back on its own perpetrators.

Emotional Culture

Marx once wrote about criticism:

Its essential sentiment is indignation, its essential activity is denunciation.89

The indignation and denunciation has been transmitted in a unbroken lineage of weeklies and leaflets ever since. The banner headlines of Marxist papers are variations on the same emotional themes of accusation and exhortation. The stories inside, whatever their ostensible factual content, have an emotional sameness and predictability, in terms of both motivation and effect. There is love and hate, compassion for the victims of oppression and fear of the oppressor, all contributing to a distinctive Marxist sub-culture, partly shaped around its founder’s peculiar mixture of love and anger: a calculated hard-headedness; a conscious and proud commitment to head before heart.

In terms of emotional economy, Marxism seems profoundly masculine in its

 emphasis on struggle  attempts to control others

89 ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (Recht). Introduction’, CW, 3, 177.

19  macho posturing  tendency to be aggressive and confrontational  obsessive intellectualism, the theoretical equivalent of train-spotting, on arcane topics, excluding others,  unwillingness to discuss emotions  contempt (or fear) of the softer emotions  neglect of nurturance, sharing and growth

All of these limitations are already there in Marx.

The Psychology of Solidarity

Referring to the men in the First International, Jenny wrote that her husband ‘inspired the trembling crew with fear and terror’.90 But in the long run, people are not inspired by ‘fear and terror’. They are intimidated and diminished.

Reading Marx, it is clear why his attempts to build solidarity would eventually collapse into bitter wrangling and sectarianism. His approach neglects the very things which potentially bond and unite people. He plays down a) collective values and long term intentions, and b) the sharing of experience and feeling. At the same time he emphasises theoretical and intellectual disagreements and demands an unrealistically high level of conformity on programmatic and political details, often minor ones. He fails to accommodate (let alone celebrate) difference.

Marx’s self-defeating relations with Lassalle set the tone. Similar patterns of behaviour - furious denunciations, efforts to annihilate others, in word or deed - are repeated in the many Marxist hate campaigns, enemy images, schisms and accusations of betrayal and treachery. Righteous anger can calcify into bitter hatred which eventually becomes in-turned and destructive, leading in the longer term to immobilisation and confusion. Anger is the alcohol of the activist.

Neglect of Desire

Marx notes in Capital that workers suffer ‘the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations’.91 In place of this develops a whole world of artificial wants: ‘inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites’.92 Put these two insights together and they suggest an awareness of the importance of desire and the ways in which it can be distorted and re-fashioned. Typically, Marx, with his hostility to ‘Utopianism’, did not pursue these glimmerings. He felt he had to eschew the world of hope, desire and

90 Jenny Marx to Liebknecht, 26/5/72, CW, 44, 580. 91 Capital, I, 481. 92 EPM, CW, 3, 306-7.

20 imagination, in order to be ‘scientific’. The ‘education of desire’ was neglected.

Despite or perhaps because of this, emotional and imaginative continuities (magnificent defiance and muted self-pity) form a bridge between Marx and his followers.

We have to break and fight, and go dry and hard in the process... And not just hardness: that can be learned. But being broken, yourself, while you try to change things. Not just broken in their terms, but finally in your own...93

Activists, especially veteran activists, need succour. But when deeply cherished self-images go unexamined, they foster a pretentiousness and indulgence which are ultimately self defeating. The activist can buy into a pain = reality racket, as if the suffering in life is more real than the rest and the deeper the agony, the more authentic the living.94 If wounds of political battle become badges of merit, testimony to some supposed political virtue, then all kinds of idiocy - impatience, intolerance, hard-heartedness, clumsiness, habitual cynicism - may then be paraded as political medals or divine stigmata.

In that it neglects the world of values, desires and emotions, Marxism is ill-prepared to comprehend or combat the spread of 1) mass movements (such as fascism) and 2) consumer culture, virtual reality and the commercialisation of fantasy. The appeal of these alternatives to Marxism lies in the inner world of desires and emotions, the very world which Marxism chose almost systematically to neglect.

An Untheorised Faith in Theory

Marx seldom reflected on the subjective elements of his own commitment and theory. (It was probably shunned as embarrassing, frivolous or 'petty bourgeois' terrain.) This evasion can border on a kind of emotional illiteracy which has disastrous consequences. For when Marxism presented itself as an all-explanatory philosophy, when Lenin, for example, claimed that it ‘is omnipotent because it is true’,95 then the neglect of psychology becomes a fateful deficiency. It renders Marxism especially prone to the personal, emotional and group

93 Raymond Williams, Second Generation, (London, Chatto and Windus, 1964), pp. 339-40. The passage refers to the Peace Movement, but it could apply equally to the New Left as a whole, or Marxist-influenced socialism in general. 94 See Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. (London: Joseph, 1961). 95 ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’, Lenin, Collected Works, (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1963), vol. 19, p. 23.

21 agendas which latch onto any great ideal, using and abusing it for careerism and self-advancement.

Despite his notion of ideology, Marx failed to see how his own ideas could be used to manipulate and camouflage. His followers overlooked the more subjective or personal aspects of theory; their own relationship to theory; and the expectations they placed on it. They ignored how theory is used and abused in practice; to bolster egos; to belittle others; to vent anger; to control and impress; to organise and manipulate; to disguise or obliterate an unwanted background; to meet the like-minded on known ground; to relate through concepts rather than the heart; to bed impressionable innocents (the ‘horizontal road to socialism’); to advance academic careers, etc. Too absolute a faith in theory alienates those who are unimpressed by grand systems and fear the intolerance of abstraction, sensing its danger rather than its excitement.

Taken together, the continuities discussed above suggest that causes of the political failure of Marxism are integrally present in Marx’s own work.

A notorious drunkard used to console himself with the thought that he was never drunk before midnight.96

Some Marxists are notorious for consoling themselves with a belief in the original purity of Marx’s approach. They try to slough off any deficiencies onto Engels or Plekhanov or whomever. The effort invested in protecting and preserving the founding father is a tribute to the power of his thought and the loyalty it could command. But in trying to keep the canon sacred and its creator immaculate, devotees diminish Marx. To interpret the world and change it means wising up to the human and subjective dimensions in Marx and in us all.

96 The Holy Family, CW, 4, 118.

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