Intro/Manifesto
Weird, huh?
That here on this site, in the heart of the techie wet dream — self-help, self-worship, self-advancement, self-absorption, and a selfie stick in every messenger bag — you would find a blog about Marxism.
Right: that Marxism. The famous one. AKA: The Faith That Betrayed Millions. AKA: The Light That Failed. A dim-witted attempt to explain the past, and predict the future, that deservedly got thrown into the “dustbin of history”.
Except that Marxism isn’t a “faith” (although it’s been used in that way by some very cynical people). It isn’t a “light” in the sense of being a beacon. It’s much more a light in the sense of sunlight: allowing us to see the details of human behavior that would otherwise be covered over by darkness.
As far as its “failure” in popular history —as far as its accuracy — as far as its durability —the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. There could be some surprises later on.
It’s a practical matter to note that it’s difficult for a theory to “win”, or to “lose”. A theory can be irrelevant: explaining something that doesn’t need to be explained. Or it can be erroneous: being just plain wrong according to the most objective opinions. But even those who assure us that Marxism has “lost” would find it a challenge to confirm that Marx’s ideas about economic patterns, human behavior, and social interaction are irrelevant to the current moment.
The current moment: the final End Game of Global Capitalism. The scorched earth of a raped and then neglected planet whose habitable places are already beginning to shrink, and have nowhere to go but decline.
Global Capitalism — and its ill-favored daughter, Blind Consumerism. “Everybody wanna get rich…right away…right away…right away.” “Bigger! Faster! Cheaper! Bigger! Faster! Bigger!” “He who dies with the most toys wins.”
Twenty-one children dying from preventable causes each minute so kids with money to burn can Instagram their fun trips to Paris. The soulless Robber Barons at the top insist that one thing (children dying) has nothing to do with the other (children overconsuming). But common sense dismisses that criminal conclusion.
We are currently in an election season. The strangest of my lifetime. The argument that has surfaced this time around from Progressives — offered as though it’s some sort of startling insight — is that the economic game is “rigged” in favor of our Overlords, the modern Aristocracy of Money.
Well…duh. One of the most pungent descriptions of Aristocracy is to look around and see who’s above the law. “A nation of laws, not men….” America offers examples every day of how status buys immunity.
As it always has. Which is where Karl Marx, and Marxism, pretty much begins and end. That the game is not just rigged now. It has ALWAYS been rigged: beginning with the God Kings, whose pyramids not only symbolized the spreading rays of the sun — but also the shape of the society they ruthlessly enforced. Millions of nameless workers pressed down to the bottom — essentially slaves. So a tiny knot of aristocratic vermin could rest in complete leisure at the very top.
As he sat at his desk in the Reading Room of the British Museum, Karl Marx saw this pattern repeated as he examined history. The game not just rigged here, or there. Rigged everywhere, and always — until people gather and begin to agree on what all human beings Deserve.
We are all economic entities (another one of his ideas). We have to be. We all have expectations and desires. We all have to function as players in larger societies. But what do we Deserve?
What do we Deserve? Is there an objective answer: for a month of typing computer code? — for eight hours of stoop labor out in a field? — for a day spent watching over other womens’ babies? — for moving a set of numbers from one side of a screen to another? — for being born in a palace — for being born without a home?
A lot of Marxist reading is very dry, and the theories are guilty of attracting people who trend toward the pendantic — and the discussions sometimes feel as though the room has been caught up in how many Marxist angels can dance on the head of a pin. The theoretical chatter has its own perversions — and its own strange calculus: opaque to those who don’t know the secret handshake.
Happily: this blog is not for the purpose of poring over technical entrails. It will just be an attempt to offer some thoughts on how Marxism helps us to understand past, present, and future. And to reach into the cold mechanism of Economics to answer a warmer question. The question that I asked above.
What do people Deserve? What do people Deserve for what they do — where they are — and who they are. Understanding that “Life is not fair….” A phrase that sounds so smug because it’s so crudely obvious.
We can stipulate to it — especially those who’ve been around for a while. That’s right, there’s no fairness in the short term (we’re not alive long enough to know what happens in the long term). And we can also stipulate to another obvious observation: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch….’
Many consider that to be the terminal criticism of Marx: that he believed that there could be free lunches. We can stipulate to that criticism as well: that he was excessively optimistic. He didn’t agree with “pie in the sky”, but believed that there could be a better world — created soon, if not now — once Human Nature could be coaxed into changing.
He didn’t gauge the future clearly, and being a Marxist in modern times means living with that.
What he did see, what he did know about, the calculus he did get right (and what hurt him throughout his life), was the injustice of societies based on aristocracy and theft. The cruel decision — always based on some sort of religious faith (and we know that Marxism has sometimes played the role of a religion in this respect) — that there must be God Kings always at the top, and the rest of us must suffer with what little we get, because we are not them.
Marx was forced to wonder: if we attest that “life is not fair” , then can there be some sort of consensus that might lead us to a kind of society that can be made MORE fair? Even if we can’t get all the way, can we get part of the way?
The economic game has always been rigged: ever since the beginning. Virtually every page in every history confirms it. But does that mean that the game can never be unrigged in the future, if we reach enough understanding to know that’s what we want?
