Keys of This Blood (33 page)

By the time he graduated from Jena, in 1841, Marx had settled upon the social condition of mankind throughout history as his field of special interest. No philosopher himself, it was not surprising that he should have looked to the philosophy of another man to supply the superstructure of his own historical and social outlook. What was extraordinary was that Marx, dedicated heart and soul to atheism, should have derived that centerpiece of his thinking from Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had flourished and passed from the scene before Marx was fourteen. For Hegel had lived and died a believing Christian; and his theories about human history were steeped in his faith.

Hegel saw human history as a process through which all mankind has been advancing from the most primitive conditions of thought, culture and belief right up to the emergence of Christianity as the fullest expression of human ideals.

In essence, human progress was defined by Hegel as a process very much like a discussion between two men arguing about something in order to explain it. One man states his opinion or theory. His companion criticizes that theory, and proposes a different one. From their continuing discussion—presumably a friendly and constructive one—there emerges a third and new theory, which preserves what was true in the first two and which both men accept.

Hegel called the first theory a
thesis
. The second theory, he said, was an
antithesis
, because it opposed the first. The discussion itself he labeled a
dialectic
, from the Greek word for “conversation” or “arguing.” And the theory finally accepted out of this process he called a
synthesis
.

For Hegel, that dialectic exactly marked the manner of all human progress. There was one primitive stage of human history: a thesis. Another stage appeared in opposition: an antithesis. Out of the clash between the two—the dialectic—came a third and victorious stage: the synthesis.

All human progress, said Hegel, from the most primitive condition up to the most refined, proceeded along the lines of this triple-stage dialectic toward an ultimate goal. Moreover, God himself had fixed that goal ahead of time; and so, too, had God laid out the plan of triple-stage steps by which to arrive at the goal.

That ultimate goal was the transcendence by mankind of its own finite and created nature, and the attainment of absolute knowledge of the infinite: of God.

What Hegel had worked out, in other words, was a
dialectic of spiritual transcendence
—an attempt to codify the system provided by God from the beginning, by which man was to transcend the material limits of his
nature. The entire
dialectic process
was part and parcel of the destiny God had mandated for mankind to become greater than itself. Spirit inhabited matter, said Hegel, and drove mankind on through the successive triple-stage steps of history to that destiny.

By the time he appropriated Hegel's idea of the dialectic and applied it to his own thinking about the social condition of mankind throughout history, Marx was a thoroughly convinced atheist, fully persuaded there was no such thing as a soul and no such thing as spirit in man. Obviously, then, there would have to be a few adjustments here and there, if Hegel's theory was to be made suitable.

Yes, said Marx, there is a dialectic moving men through history. And, yes, that dialectic is a clash between thesis and antithesis. But while there is a series of steps leading to a goal, there is nothing transcendent about any of it.

In fact, for Marx there was nothing transcendent about mankind itself. There was no spirit and no soul. There was just this highly developed and totally material animal called man. And this animal was driven, as all matter was, not by transcendent spirit but by blind forces completely innate in matter. Powerful natural forces that mankind could not successfully resist. All was immanent to man. There was nothing in him that transcended his material condition.

In total contrast to Hegel's dialectic of spiritual forces, then, Marx constructed a dialectic of material forces. Thus was born the
dialectical materialism
of the Marxist lexicon.

As the chicken had been redefined, it was obvious that the egg would hatch a new and different beast, as well. The history of material mankind, said Marx, was a series of clashes, or dialectics, which all represented stages in what amounted to just one great clash—a kind of superdialectic of human history that came to be called by the most famous of Marxist terms, the “class struggle.” That clash was and always had been between the blind, material, irresistible forces inner to the proletariat, and the opposing forces of whatever privileged classes there might happen to be at any given historical period.

Human history itself, therefore, was written within the framework of dialectical materialism. It was the story of that clash of clashes. In Marx's reading of history, the proletarian mass of landless, moneyless, powerless workers—the thesis in Marx's redefined dialectic of material forces—constituted the structure of human society. In every set of historical arrangements that had ever existed, the proletariat was the manifestation of that same irresistible force, the dominant thesis of human history.

Throughout history, the privileged classes—the antithesis in Marxist
thinking—have always imposed a “superstructure” of oppression on the proletarian “structure.” Emperors had imposed their empires. Kings had imposed their kingdoms. Princes had imposed their aristocracies. Religious people and their churches had imposed their hierarchies. The bourgeoisie and the merchant class had imposed their systems of capital and land.

Marx was convinced by all he could see around him that the antithesis of his time was a spent force. The old regime of authoritarian kings was giving way to the rise of parliamentary democracy. But that circumstance itself, said Marx, was just one more passing step on the road to the true destiny of material mankind: the triumph of the proletariat as the final great human synthesis of history.

The first internationally resonant bellow of Marxism was heard in 1848, when, together with fellow socialist Friedrich Engels, Marx published
The Communist Manifesto
. It was too much for the resident “antithesis” powers of Europe, which were already badly shaken by what historians have dubbed the “year of revolutions.” For Marx was feeding the fires of social upheaval with his prediction of the imminent fulfillment of mankind's irresistible destiny: the proletarian revolution that would sweep away the oppressive superstructure finally and for all time.

“Society as a whole,” insisted Marx in his
Manifesto
, “is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat…. The workers have no country … and the supremacy of the Proletariat will cause the Bourgeoisie to vanish still faster.”

As bellicose as such material was, it was only a foretaste of what was to come. For when Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution two years later, in 1850, Marx regarded it as far more than theory. He seized upon it as his “scientific” proof that there was no kingdom of Heaven, only the kingdom of Matter. Darwin had vindicated Marx in his rejection of Hegel's belief in the soul, in the spirit and in God as the ultimate goal of human history.

So elated was Marx at the idea that man had actually evolved from stuff and matter that, had he been of a different mind, he might have hailed Darwin as a godsend. As it was, he wrote a self-congratulatory letter, in which he hailed Darwin as the one who had accomplished for anthropology what Marx himself was accomplishing for sociology.

It might have been foreseen that Marx would find no congenial home in the continental Europe of his day. In 1843, he had married Jenny von Westphalen, with whom he remained deeply in love all his life. Circumstances never allowed him to settle his family as he would surely have
liked, however. He shuttled back and forth between Germany, France and Belgium. Finally, in 1849, he migrated to London, where, as the supreme irony of his life, he eked out a sustenance for himself and his family in total dependence on the generosity of members of the capitalist class he hated so thoroughly. His own beloved Jenny was a member of that class. Horace Greeley, founder of the
New York Herald Tribune
, literally protected Marx and his family from starvation. And his friend Friedrich Engels helped out too, with his own capitalist earnings from the Manchester affiliate of his father's textile industry.

To add to Marx's trials, he lost several of his children to death, including his only son, Edgar. His greatest consolation was his love for Jenny. And his only triumph was that, by the time he joined his children in death, on March 14, 1883, Marx had established himself as the foundational theoretician of what we now call Communism.

Marx was primarily a student of social developments and a compiler of the views of others. He was saddled with the impossible desire, but not the necessary mental ability, to be a metaphysician. He was frustrated in his lifelong wish to hold a professorship at a prestigious university. In no way a doer of deeds, however, Marx kept to his books and his writing. He devoted his energies to outlining, if not exactly refining, his new process of social engineering.

Because of his virulent opposition to religion, and his quasi devotion to the scientific requirements of his day, Marx watered down his messianic persuasion that the proletariat would very soon be supremely dominant in human society. At least, he rationalized away the more mystical elements of that messianism, in order to produce a mentally satisfying synthesis of Hegelian dialectics, Darwinian evolutionary theory and the brutal facts of life in the world that lay outside the cocoon in which he came to live.

What he saw and tried to grapple with in that world were such burgeoning and hardheaded problems as the decline at one and the same time of both the ancien régime and the middle class, the start of galloping urbanization, labor relations, commodity pricing systems, the rise of colonialist empires and the inevitable politicization of the working classes by the heady leaven of nationalism.

Ignoring the fact that Darwin's theory of evolution was just that—a theory—and ignoring the fact that in any case what might be feasible anthropologically cannot be presumed to hold sociologically, Marx adapted Darwin's ideas to the social classes of his day. He asserted that a social class was definable solely in terms of its relation to the ownership, the production and the exploitation of all natural economic goods. By
such reasoning, the social class with the greatest control over those material processes and goods would be the dominant class at any given stage of history. Owners, workers, entrepreneurs, politicians, aristocrats—even artists, intellectuals and religionists—were all defined exclusively in those terms.

Darwin's theory of evolution being what it was, Marx reasoned that the social classes, like all matter, must always be in a struggle with each other for survival and dominance. A struggle, in other words, for those economic goods. That much had to be so. For mankind was and would always be exclusively material; and history was and would always be exclusively materialistic.

Marx observed further that shifts in the control of economic goods do not follow a straight-line pattern. One social class gets control for a while. Then another rises, clashes with the old, dispossesses it of its control, and takes over. In imitation of Hegel, Marx continued to call that movement of history—that seesaw pattern of shifting control—a dialectic.

Unlike Hegel, of course, Marx continued to insist that the motor of this struggle was not anything outside or above or transcending the social classes themselves. Within the vast proletariat of the world, there was only that inner power, that immanent force, blind and materialistic, driving the vast basic “structure” of society—the proletariat—to overthrow and cast off the oppressive superstructure of capitalism. It was that force, in fact, that created a solidarity between all the proletariats of the world. Through the unceasing dialectic of the class struggle, that blind and material force immanent to the masses was driving them inexorably forward to the
proletarian revolution
.

Never a consistent and logical thinker, Marx waffled about some of the basic properties of this dialectic. It was true, he said sometimes, that there could be no peaceful shift of control from one class to another, no movement through a process of democratic reform and renewal. The old class is destroyed through the sacrifice and suffering of the new class. Hence the sacrosanct position and exalted function in Marxism of violent revolution. Violent revolution is as natural to mankind's totally material condition as the pangs of childbirth to a mother.

On the other hand, Marx allowed for the possibility of democratic change. He did believe that matter was eternal, but he wasn't so sure about the struggle. He left open the point, in other words, of whether or not the struggle between the classes would be unending.

Whatever the reason might have been—perhaps because he was too much of a student to indulge in poetic fanaticism, perhaps because his ideas were adaptations of the ideas of others, perhaps because he was too
afflicted with painful and seemingly endless carbuncles and other physical ills to indulge in violent revolution, perhaps for all these reasons and others besides—the fact remains that Marx did not exclude peaceful change, or improvement through democratic means, as possible elements in his dialectic.

While such credulous errors and inconsistencies in abstract theorizing can be readily forgiven a pioneer such as Marx, his gross errors in analysis of the concrete data at his hand's reach are unforgivable by history. Even taking Marx on his own ground of atheism, virulent opposition to religion and deep hatred of capitalism, it is impossible to justify his unfounded assumption that between “structure” and “superstructure” everywhere, there was and can be no homogeneity—no commonality in matters cultural, religious and philosophical.