Communism is dead, history over, the struggle forgotten. No better time, then, says James Buchan, to reread the finest thinker of modern times. Meet Mr Marx
What goes round, they say in New York, comes round. Fewer than 10 years after Marxism was pronounced dead beyond resurrection, buried for ever in the rubble of the tyrannies of Russia and eastern Europe, the New Yorker – of all publications – has pronounced the Next Big Thinker to be Karl Marx.
In a double issue published this week, and devoted to such Next Big Things as Elizabeth Dole for the United States Presidency and Alzheimer’s for everybody, writer John Cassidy disinters and dusts down the old boy as the prophet of our era. Marx, it seems, foresaw and explained our world: the remorseless agitation of existence; uncontrollable technical change;a pauperised and imbecile underclass; powerless governments;a witless world culture. Cassidy might have added the detonation of the family and a natural world reduced to a slum, but enough’s enough: it is not 50 years since to speak well of Marx in the US was to invite a subpoena from a certain congressional committee and a sudden loss of livelihood.
It is a characteristic of human beings to elevate their big books into scripture. That’s all very well with the Koran, which is clearly labelled as the word of God taken down by Mohammed – less good with the profane prophets of the modern West: Smith, Marx and Freud. Because their words are to their devotees both infallible and incomplete they cannot accommodate criticism; and when they cease to correspond to perceived reality, they disintegrate as if they had never been. That approximately is what has happened to Marx, is happening to Freud, and will happen to Adam Smith.
Yet it is precisely at that moment, when the statues in public squares come crashing down, and the believers reverse their uniforms and vanish into the crowd; it is at that moment these masterpieces become available to the ordinary Joe. The Marxist gives way to the Marxian, who is a person who likes reading Karl Marx, as a Proustian likes Proust, a Jamesian Henry James.
Marx is so embedded in our Western cast of thought that few people are even aware of their debt to him. Everybody I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation of their material circumstances and that changes in the ways things are produced profoundly affect the affairs of humanity even outside the workshop or factory.
It is largely through Marx, rather than political economy, that those notions have come down to us. Equally, everybody I know has a feeling that history is not just one damn thing after another; yet is not the unfurling of God’s grace over time, on account of God, unfortunately, having passed on; but is a sort of process in which something human – Liberty? Happiness? Human Potential? Something Nice, Anyway – becomes progressively actual. Marx didn’t originate the feeling, but he made it current.
I came to Marx through money. I was writing a book about money but quite early on fell into a severe embarrassment. I discovered that everything of interest and value on the subject of money had been thought and said by about 1719 AD.
At that crisis, Marx rescued me. I found a book called Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Those jottings I found to be as profound a meditation on the nature and effects of money as anything in Shakespeare or Cervantes.
The Marx I discovered in those writings was not the Marx either of the Soviets and Eastern Europe or of the depressed and peevish Marxists of the West. He was revealed as a true romantic. In those writings, money emerges as the master- villain of history which interposes itself in every relation between human beings and between human beings and the natural world, ruining everything that is sweet and precious, reducing the self to its mere possessions and so confounding the senses that people can no longer distinguish right from wrong or left from right. Money exchange, it seemed to me, rather than the relations of production of Marx’s later work, was the capital source of our delusions.
Marx made a fatal error that was to destroy him, his family and his doctrine. Communism, as the briefest reading of the Gospels shows, existed before the Manifesto of the Communist Party. What Marx did was to try and economise the thing. While he was writing the manuscripts he was reading the political economists. Though he recognised that political economy was not a science but an ideology, Marx yearned for its prestige. Marx bought the fiction that political economy was some kind of master social science, with all the regularity and precision of physics; as millions have done since.
Marx spent the rest of his life in a doomed quest for a stupendous Theory of Everything, using analytical tools that were designed for quite another purpose and were tainted beyond restitution. From that error flowed the hideous deformities of Real Existing Socialism.
Yet the primordial element in Marx, the humane, romantic, even reactionary, disgust at money and its disorders, survives him and appears to be gaining one or two adherents, even in New York. And not before time.
— James Buchan wrote Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money