The Practical Marx
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1979

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Author : John Zerzan

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Fifth Estate Introduction



The following article, an attempt to come to grips with the implications of
Karl Marx’s everyday life by long-time FE contributor John Zerzan, has
stirred considerable controversy among those of us presently working on the
paper and necessitates, we feel, a few brief introductory observations.



For some time, the issue of confluence (or lack of it) between the ideas we
espouse and the activities of our daily lives has occupied a position of
central importance with many of us. In addition to our desires to live
lives as coherent as possible with our principles, we have been concerned
with the obvious link between the ways in which we relate to others and the
world around us and the kind of vision of a liberated existence which we
embrace. Thus we seethe importance of John’s article in the fact that it
makes explicit the connection between the way in which Marx lived, the
theories that his life produced and the way in which those theories have
found application in the world. For those of us who see a continuum from
Marx to Lenin to Stalin, it cannot be coincidental that a man who operated
in so authoritarian and manipulative a manner in his own political life
should produce a body of theory so rife with ideas of the domination of
nature and the secondary (or even dispensable) status of individuals in
relation to the greater “forces of history,” which places so much faith
in the power of the state and which has been successfully used to justify
some of the bloodiest totalitarian regimes the world has ever seen.



The limits of the appropriateness of such a methodology as John’s,
however, have hardly been the subject of unanimous agreement among those of
us who read the article for this issue.



One of us felt, for instance, that an at best sketchy analysis of Marx’s
child-rearing habits lent little to an understanding of his work and could
ultimately become no more than an excuse for throwing out his ideas (as it
has been for many years among right-wing critics of Marxism). Moreover,
though this is not a charge we would ever lay at John’s feet, we’ve all
had enough bad experiences with ultra-left moralists writing “police
reports” on our activities to be at the very least skeptical of the
greater implications of his methodology, since it is not difficult to make
a case for the present-day “peer-group tyranny” of socialist societies
like China’s as being the logical extreme of this kind of scrutiny of
personal lives (at what point does the insistence on moral/ethical
consistency become the demand for ideological conformity?).



For most of us the issue is far from resolved and inclusion of the article
will probably raise more questions than it answers. In some sense, Marx is
almost the “ideal” subject for such an article, since his extraordinary
impact on the world has made him a “world-historical” figure regardless
of his intentions or ours, and as a result, all of the information that
Zerzan cites about his life is readily available to anyone interested,
having had wide currency in radical circles for many years. But what if
someone, having read the article, insists on having the same kind of
intimate knowledge of John Zerzan’s personal life on which to base their
judgment of his ideas? Or ours?



One further note: most of us felt that certain of John’s contentions
about Marx’s private life, in particular the impact of his activities on
the lives (and deaths) of his wife and children, required at least more
serious substantiation than appears in the present article; John was more
than willing to provide this and it was only a last-minute mix-up from our
end of the postal system that prevented this from happening.

The practical Marx by John Zerzan



Karl Marx is always approached as so many thoughts, so many words. What
connection is there between lived choices--one’s willful lifetime--and
the presentation of one’s ideas?



Marx in his dealings with family and associates, his immediate relations to
contemporary politics and to survival, the practical pattern and decisions
of a life: this is perhaps worth a look. Despite my rejection of basic
conceptions he formulated, I aim not at character assassination in lieu of
tackling those ideas, but as a reminder to myself and others that our many
compromises and accommodations with a grisly world are the real field of
our effort to break free, more so than stating our ideas.



It is in disregarding abstractions for a moment that we see our actual
equality, in the prosaic courses of our common nightmare. A brief sketch of
the “everyday” Marx, introducing the relationship between his private
and public lives as a point of entry may serve to underline this



By 1843 Marx had become a husband and father, roles predating that of Great
Thinker. In this capacity, he was to see three of his six children die,
essentially of privation. Guido in 1850, Francesca in 1852, and Edgar in
1855 perished not because of poverty itself, so much as from his desire to
maintain bourgeois appearances. David McLellan’s Marx: His Life and
Thought, generally accepted as the definitive biography, makes this point
repeatedly.



Despite the fairly constant domestic deficiencies, Marx employed Helene
Demuth as maid from 1845 until his death in 1883, and a second servant was
added as of 1857. Beyond any question of credibility, it was Demuth who
bore Marx’s illegitimate son Frederick in 1851. To save Marx from
scandal, and “a difficult domestic conflict” according to Louis
Freyberger, Engels accepted paternity of the child.



From the end of the 1840’s onward, the Marx household lived in London and
endured a long cycle of hardship which quickly dissipated the physical and
emotional resources of Jenny Marx. The weight of the conflicting pressures
involved in being Mrs. Marx was a direct cause of her steadily failing
health, as were the deaths of the three children in the ’50s. By July
1858 Marx was accurate in conceding to Engels that “My wife’s nerves
are quite ruined...”



In fact, her spirit had been destroyed by 1856 when she gave birth to a
stillborn infant, her seventh pregnancy. Toward the end of that year she
spoke of the “misery” of financial disasters, of having no money for
Christmas festivities, as she completed copying out work on Marx’s The
Critique of Political Economy.



Despite several inheritances, the begging letters to Engels remained
virtually nonstop; by 1860 at the latest, Jenny’s once very handsome
appearance had been turned to gray hair, bad teeth, and obesity. It was in
that year that small pox, contracted after transcribing the very lengthy
and trivial Herr Vogt diatribe, left her deaf and pockmarked.



As secretary to Marx and under the steady strain of creditors, caused
preeminently by the priority of maintaining appearances, Jenny’s life was
extremely difficult. Marx to Engels, 1862: “In order to preserve a
certain facade, my wife had to take to the pawnbroker’s everything that
was not actually nailed down.”



The mid-’60s saw money spent on private lessons for the eldest of the
three daughters and tuition at a “ladies seminary” or finishing school,
as Marx escaped the bill-collectors by spending his days at the British
Museum. He admitted in 1866, in a letter to his future son-in-law, Paul
Lafargue, that his wife’s “life had been wrecked.”

“Women Need To Be Controlled”



Dealing with nervous breakdowns and chronic chest ailments, Jenny was
harried by ever-present household debt. One partial solution was to
withhold a small part of her weekly allowance in order to deal with their
arrears, the extent of which she tended to hide from Marx. In July 1869 the
Great Man exploded upon learning of this frugal effort; to Engels he wrote,
“When I asked why, she replied that she was frightened to come out with
the vast total (owed). Women plainly always need to be controlled!”



Speaking of Engels, we may turn from Marx the “family man” to a fairly
chronological treatment of Marx in his immediate connections with
contemporary politics. It may be noted here that Engels, his closest
friend, was, from 1838 on, a representative of the firm of Engels and
Ermen; in fact, throughout the 1850s and ’60s he was a full-time
capitalist in Manchester. Thus his Condition of the Working Class in
England was the fruit of a practical businessman, a man of precisely that
class responsible for the terrible misery he so clearly chronicled.



By 1846 Marx and Engels had written The German Ideology, which made a
definitive break with the Young Hegelians and contains the full and mature
ideas of the materialist concept of the progress of history. Along with
this tome were the practical activities in politics, also by now receiving
their characteristic stamp. In terms of his Communist Correspondence
Committee and its propaganda work, Marx (also in 1846) stated: “There can
be no talk at present of achieving communism; the bourgeoisie must first
come to the helm.” In June of the same year he sent instructions to
supporters to act “jesuitically,” to not have “any tiresome moral
scruples” about acting for bourgeois hegemony.



The inexorable laws of capitalist development, necessarily involving the
sacrifice of generations of “insufficiently developed” proletarians,
would bring capital to its full plenitude--and the workers to the depths of
enslavement. Thus in 1847, following a congress of professional economists
in Brussels to which he was invited, Marx publicly noted the disastrous
effect of free trade upon the working class, and embraced this development.
In a subsequent newspaper article, he likewise found colonialism, with its
course of misery and death to be, on the whole, a good thing: like the
development of capitalism itself, inevitable and progressive, working
toward eventual revolution.

Unprepared for Revolutionary Upheavals



In 1847 the Communist League was formed in London, and at its second
Congress later in the year Marx and Engels were given the task of drafting
its manifesto. Despite a few ringing anti-capitalist phrases in its general
opening sections, the concrete demands by way of conclusions are
gradualist, collaborationist, and highly statist (e.g. for an inheritance
tax, graduated income tax, centralization of credit and communications).
Ignoring the incessant fight waged since the mid-18th century and
culminating with the Luddites, and unprepared for the revolutionary
upheavals that were to shake Europe in less than a year, the Communist
Manifesto sees, again, only an “insufficiently developed” proletariat.



From this policy document arises one of the essential tactical mysteries of
Marx, that of the concomitant rise of both capitalism and the proletariat.
The development of capital is clearly portrayed as the accumulation of
human misery, degradation and brutality, but along with it grows, by this
process itself, a working class steadily more “centralized, united,
disciplined, and organized.” How is it that from the extreme depths of
physical and cultural oppression issues anything but a steadily more
robotized, powerless, de-individualized proletariat? In fact, the history
of revolts and militance of the 19th and 20th centuries shows that the
majority do not come from those most herdlike and deprived, but from those
least disciplined and with something to lose.



In April of 1848, Marx went to Germany with the Manifesto plus the utterly
reformist “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany.” The
“Demands,” also by Marx and Engels, were constituent of a bourgeois
revolution, not a socialist one, appealing to many of the elements that
directly fought the March outbreak of the revolution. Considering Marx’
position as vise-president of the non-radical Democratic Association in
Brussels during the previous year, and, naturally, his support of a
prerequisite bourgeois ascendancy, he quickly came into conflict with the
revolutionary events of 1848 and with much of the Communist League.



Marx helped found a Democratic Society in Cologne, which ran candidates for
the Frankfurt Parliament, and he vigorously opposed any League support for
armed intervention in support of the revolutionaries. Using the opportunist
rationale of not wanting to see the workers become “isolated,” he went
so far as to use his “discretionary powers,” as a League official, to
dissolve it in May as too radical, an embarrassment to his support of
bourgeois elements.



With the League out of the way, Marx concentrated his 1848 activities in
Germany on support for the Democratic Society and his dictatorial
editorship of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In both capacities he pursued a
“united front” policy, in which working people would be aligned with
all other “democratic forces” against the remnants of feudalism. Of
course, this arrangement would afford the workers no autonomy, no freedom
of movement; it chose to see no revolutionary possibilities residing with
them. As editor of the NRZ, Marx gave advice to Camphausen, businessman
head of the provisional government following the defeat of the proletarian
upsurge. And further, astounding as it sounds, he supported the Democratic
Society’s newspaper despite the fact that it condemned the June 1848
insurrection of the Paris proletariat. As politician and newspaper editor,
Marx was increasingly criticized for his consistent refusal to deal with
the specific situation or interests of the working class.

Wars As The Spark Of Revolution



By the fall of 1848, the public activities of Marx began to take on a
somewhat more activist, pro-worker coloration, as the risings of the
workers resumed in Germany. By December, however, disturbances were on the
wane, and the volatile year in Germany appeared to be ending with no
decisive revolutionary consequences. Now it was, and only now, that Marx in
his paper declared that the working class would have to depend on itself,
and not upon the bourgeoisie for a revolution. But because it was rather
clearly too late for this, the source of revolution would have to come, he
divined, from a foreign external shock: namely, war between France and
England, preceded by a renewed French proletarian uprising. Thus at the
beginning of 1849, Marx saw in a Franco-British war the social revolution,
just as in early 1848 he had located it in war between Prussia and Russia.
This was not to be the last time, by the way, that Marx saw in the
slaughter of national wars the spark of revolution; the worker-as-subject
again fails to occur to Marx, that they could act--and did act--on their
own initiatives without first having to be sacrificed, by the generation,
as factory slaves or cannon fodder.



There were radicals who had seen the openings to revolution in 1848, and
who were shocked by the deterministic conservatism of Marx. Louis
Gottschalk, for example, attacked him for positing the choice for the
working class as between bourgeois or feudal rule; “what of
revolution?” he demanded. And so although Marx supported bourgeois
candidates in the February (1849) elections, by April the Communist League
(which he had abolished) had been re-founded without him, effectively
forcing him to leave the moderate Democratic Association.      By May, with
its week of street fighting in Dresden, revolts in the Ruhr, and extensive
insurgency in Baden, events--as well as the reactions of the German radical
community--continued to leave Marx far behind. Thus in that month, he
closed down the NRZ with a defiant--and manifestly absurd--editorial
claiming that the paper had been revolutionary and openly so throughout
1848 and 1849.

Marx in London



By 1850 Marx had joined other German refugees in London, upon the close of
the insurrectionary upheavals on the continent of the previous two years.
Under pressure from the left, as noted above, he now came out in favor of
an independently organized German proletariat and a highly centralized
state for the (increasingly centralized) working class to seize and make
its own. Despite the     ill-will caused by his anything-but-radical
activities in Germany, Marx was allowed to rejoin the Communist League and
eventually resumed his dominance therein. In London, he found support among
the Chartists and other elements devoted to electoral reform and trade
unionism, shunning the many radical German refugees whom he often branded
as “agitators” and “assassins.” This behavior gained him the
support of a majority of those present in London and enabled him to triumph
over those in the League who had called him a “reactionary” for the
minimalism of the Manifesto and for his disdain of a revolutionary practice
in Germany.



But from the early ’50s Marx had begun to spend most of his time in
studies at the British Museum, where he could ponder the course of world
revolution away from the noisome hubbub of his precarious household. From
this time, he quickly jettisoned the relative radicality of his new-found
militance and foresaw a general prosperity ahead, hence no prospects for
revolution. The coincidence of economic crisis with proletarian revolt is,
of course, mocked by the real history of our world. From the Luddites to
the Commune, France in 1968 to the multitude of struggles opening on the
last quarter of the 20th century, insurrection has been its own master; the
great fluctuations of unemployment or inflation have often served, on the
contrary, to deflect class struggles to the lower, survivalist plane rather
than to fuel social revolution. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought a
diminished vision, for example, perhaps characterized by German National
Socialism and its cousin, the American New Deal, nothing approaching the
destruction of capitalism. (The Spanish Revolution, bright light of the
’30s, had nothing to do with the Depression gripping the industrialized
nations.) Marx’s overriding concern with externalities--principally
economic crises, of course--was a trademark of his practical as well as
theoretical approach; it obviously reflects his slight regard for the
subjectivity of the majority of people for their potential autonomy,
imagination and power.

Correct Bourgeois Lifestyle



The distanciation from actual social struggles of his day is seemingly
closely linked with the correct bourgeois life he led. In terms of his
livelihood, one is surprised by the gap between his concrete activities and
his reputation as revolutionary theorist. From 1852 into the 1860s, he was
“one of the most highly valued” and “best paid” columnists of the
N.Y. Daily Tribune, according to its editor. In fact, one hundred and
sixty-five of his articles were used as editorials by this not
quite-revolutionary metropolitan daily, which could account for the fact
that Marx requested in 1855 that his subsequent pieces be printed
anonymously. But if he wanted not to appear as the voice of a huge
bourgeois paper, he wanted still more--as we have seen in his family
role--to appear a gentlemen. It was “to avoid a scandal” that he felt
compelled to pay the printer’s bill in 1859 for the reformist Das Volk
newspaper in London. In 1862 he told Engels of his wish to engage in some
kind of business: “Gray, dear friend, is all theory and only business is
green. Unfortunately, I have come too late to this insight.” Though he
declined the offers, Marx received, in 1865 and 1867, two invitations which
are noteworthy for the mere fact that they would have been extended to him
at all:



The first, via a messenger from Bismarck, to “put his great talents to
the service of the German people,” the second, to write financial
articles, from the Prussian Government’s official journal. In 1866 he
claimed to have made four hundred pounds by speculating in American funds,
and his good advice to Engels on how to play the Stock Market is well
authenticated.



1874 saw Marx and two partners wrangle in court over ownership of a patent
to a new engraving device, intending to exploit the rights and reap large
profits. To these striking suggestions of ruling-class mentality must be
added the behavior of Marx toward his children, the three daughters who
grew to maturity under his thoroughly Victorian authority. In 1866 he
insisted on economic guarantees for Paul LaFarque’s future, criticizing
his lack of “diligence,” and lecturing him in the most prudish terms
regarding his intentions toward Laura, who was almost twenty-one. Reminding
LaFarque that he and Laura were not yet engaged, and if they were to become
so, that it would constitute a     “long-term affair”, he went on to
express very puritanical structures: “To my mind, true love expresses
itself in the lover’s restraint, modest bearing, even diffidence toward
the adored one, and certainly not in unconstrained passion and
manifestations of premature familiarity.”



In 1868 he opposed the taking of a job by Jenny, who was then twenty-two;
later he forbade Eleanor from seeing Lissagaray, a Communard who happened
to have defended single-handed the last barricade in Paris.

International Workingman’s Association



Turning back to politics, the economic crisis Marx avidly awaited in the
’50s had come and gone in 1857, awakening no revolutionary activity. But
by 1863 and the Polish insurrection of that year, unrest was in the
air-providing the background for the formation of the international
Workingman’s Association. Marx put aside his work on Capital and was most
active in the affairs of the International from its London inception in
September, 1864. Odger, President of the Council of all London Trades
Unions, and Cremer, Secretary of the Mason’s Union, called the inaugural
meeting, and Wheeler and Dell, two other British union officials, formally
proposed an international organization. Marx was elected to the executive
committee (soon to be called the General Council), and at its first
business meeting was instrumental_ in establishing Odger and Cramer as
President and Secretary of the International. Thus from the start Marx’s
allies were union bureaucrats, and his policy approach was a completely
reformist one with “plain speaking” as to radical aims disallowed. One
of the first acts of the General Council was the sending of Marx’s
spirited, fraternal greetings to Abraham Lincoln, that “single-minded son
of the working class.” Other early activities by Marx included the
formation, as part of the International, of the Reform League dedicated to
manhood suffrage. He boasted to Engels that this achievement--is our
doing,” and was equally enthusiastic when the National Reform League,
sole surviving Chartist organization, applied for membership. This latter
proved too much even for the faithful Engels, who for some time after
refused to even serve as correspondent to the International for Manchester,
where he was still a full-time capitalist. During this practice of
embracing every shade of English gradualism, principally by promoting the
membership of London trade unions, he penned his famous “the proletariat
is revolutionary or it is nothing” line, in a letter to the German
socialist Ferdinand Lassalle.



Lasalle and his General Union of German Workers (ADAV) harbored
transparently serious illusions about the state; namely that Bismarck was
capable of genuinely socialist policies as Chancellor of Prussia. Yet Marx
in 1866 agreed to run for the presidency of the ADAV in the hopes of
incorporating it into the International. At the same time, he wrote (to a
cousin of Engels): “the adherence of the ADAV will only be of use at the
beginning, against our opponents here. Later the whole institution of this
Union, which rests on a false basis, must be destroyed.”



Volumes could be written, and possibly have, on the manipulations of Marx
within the International, the maneuverings of places, dates, and lengths of
meetings, for example, in the service of securing and centralizing his
authority. To the case of the ADAV could be added, among a multitude of
others, his cultivation of the wealthy bourgeois Lefort, so as to keep his
wholly non-radical faction within the organization. By 1867 his dedicated
machinations were felt to have reaped their reward; to Engels he wrote,
“we (i.e. you and I) have this powerful machine in our hands.” War
Progressive and Inevitable



Also, in 1867 he availed himself publicly once more of one of his favorite
notions, that a war between Prussia and Russia would prove both progressive
and inevitable. Such a war would involve the German proletariat versus
despotic Eastern barbarism and would thus be salutary for the prospects of
European revolution. This perennial “war games” type of mentality
somehow manages to equate victims, set in motion precisely as chattels of
the state, with proletarian subjects acting for themselves; it would seem
to parallel the substitution of trade union officials for workers, the
hallmark of his preferred strategy as bureaucrat of the International. Marx
naturally ridiculed anyone--such as his future son-in-law, LaFargue--for
suggesting that the proper role of revolutionaries did not lie in such a
crass game of weighing competing nationalisms. And in 1868 when the Belgian
delegation to the International’s Brussels Congress proposed the response
of a general strike to war, Marx dismissed the idea as a “stupidity,”
owing to the “underdeveloped” status of the working class.



The weaknesses and contradictions of the adherents of Proudhon and Bakunin
are irrelevant here, but we may observe 1869 as the high-water mark of the
influence of Marx, due to the approaching decline of the Proudhonists and
the infancy of Bakunin’s impact in that year. With mid-1870 and the
Napoleon III-engineered Franco-Prussian War, we see once more the
pre-occupation with “progressive” vs, “non-progressive” military
exploits of governments. Marx to Engels: “The French need a drubbing. if
the Prussians are victorious then the centralization of the working class
... the superiority of the Germans over the French in the world arena would
mean at the same time the superiority of our theory over Proudhon’s and
so on.”



By July 1870, in an Address endorsed by the international’s General
Council, Marx added to this outlook a warning: “If the German working
class allow the present war to lose its strictly defensive character and
degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will
prove alike disastrous.” Thus the butchery of French workers is fine and
good--but only up to a point. This height of cynical calculation appears
almost too incredible--and after the Belgians and others were loudly
denounced for imagining that the proletariat could be a factor for
themselves, in any case. How now could the “German working class”
(Prussian army) decide how far to carry out the. orders of the Prussian
ruling class--and if they could, why not “instruct” them to simply
ignore any and all of these class orders?



This kind of public statement by Marx, so devoid of revolutionary content,
was naturally received with popularity by the bourgeois press. In fact,
none other than the patron saint of British private property, John Stuart
Mill, sent a message of congratulations to the International for its wise
and moderate Address.



When the war Napoleon III had begun turned out as a Prussian victory, by
the end of summer 1870, Marx protested, predictably, that Germany had
dropped its approved “defensive” posture and was now an aggressor
demanding annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine provinces. The defeat of France
brought the fall of Louis Napoleon and his Second Empire, and a provisional
Republican government was formed. Marx decided that the aims of the
International were now two-fold: to secure the recognition of the new,
Republican regime by England, and to prevent any revolutionary outbreak by
the French workers.



His policy advised that “any attempt to upset the new government in the
present crisis, when the (Prussian) army is almost knocking at the doors of
Paris, would be a desperate folly.” This shabby, anti-revolutionary
strategy was publicly promoted quite vigorously--until the Commune itself
made a most rude and “unscientific” mockery of it in short order.

Paris Commune



Well-known, of course, is Marx’s negative reception to the rising of the
Parisians; it is over-generous to say that he was merely pessimistic about
the future of the Commune. Days after the successful insurrection began he
failed to applaud its audacity, and satisfied himself with grumbling that
“it had no chance for success.” Though he finally recognized the fact
of the Commune (and was thereby forced to revise his reformist ideas
regarding proletarian use of existing state machinery), his lack of
sympathy is amply reflected by the fact that throughout the Commune’s
two-month existence, the General Council of the International, spoke not a
single word about it.



It often escapes notice when an analysis or tribute is delivered well after
the living struggle is safely living no longer. The masterful polemicizing
about the triumphs of the Commune and Civil War in France constitute an
obituary, in just the same way that Class Struggles in France did so at a
similarly safe distance from the events he failed to support at the time of
revolutionary Paris, 1848.



After a very brief period--again like his public attitude just after the
1848 through 1849 outbreaks in Europe--of stated optimism as to proletarian
successes in general, Marx returned to his more usual colors. He denied the
support of the International to the scattered summer 1871 uprisings in
Italy, Russia, and Spain--countries mainly susceptible to the doctrines of
anarchy, by the way. September witnessed the last meeting of the
International before the Marx faction effectively disbanded it, rather than
accept its domination by more radical elements such as the Bakuninists, in
the following year. The bourgeois gradualism of Marx was much in evidence
at the fall 1871 London Conference, then, as exemplified by such remarks
as: “To get workers into parliament is equivalent to a victory over the
governments, but one must choose the right man.”



Between the demise of the International and his own death in 1883, Marx
lived in a style that varied little from that of previous decades. Shunning
the Communard refugees, by and large, as he had shunned the radical Germans
in the ’50’s after their exile following 1848 through 1849--Marx kept
company with men like Maxim Kovalevsky, a non-socialist Russian aristocrat,
the well-to-do Dr. Kugelmann, the businessman Max Oppenheim, H.M. Hyndman,
a very wealthy social democrat, and, of course, the now-retired capitalist,
Engels.



With such a circle as his choice of friends, it is not surprising that he
continued to see little radical capacity in the workers, just as he had
always failed to see it. In 1874, he wrote, “The general situation of
Europe is such that it moves to a general European war. We must go through
this war before we can think of any decisive external effectiveness of the
European working class.” Looking, as ever, to externalities--and of
course to the “immutable laws of history”--he contributes to the legacy
of the millions of World War 1 dead, sacrificed by the capitulation of the
Marxist parties to the support of war in 1914.



Refusing throughout his lifetime to see the possibilities of real class
struggle, to understand the reality of the living negation of capitalism,
Marx actively and concretely worked for the progress and fullness of
capitalist development, which prescribed that generations would have to be
sacrificed to it. I think that the above observations of his real life are
important and typical ones, and suggest a consistency between that life and
his body of ideas. The task of moving the exploration along to encompass
the “distinctly theoretical” part of Marx, is expressly beyond the
scope of this effort; possibly, however, the preceding will throw at least
indirect light on the more “disembodied” Marx.



Picture caption: THE BLOC OF THE THREE CLASSES? No, just Fang Yi, a Deputy
Vise-Premier who accompanied Deng Xiaoping on their trip to the U.S.
earlier this year being hailed by two celebrities at Disneyland. This gross
obeisance to the worst of American culture should make the China-toadies
cringe, but instead it is printed with pride in New China magazine. They
also should have no problem then following the latest twist in the party
line which is rehabilitating Liu Shao Chi after years of being reviled as
the cause of all of China’s woes. Ah, the life of the party faithful.



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