20.07.2005

A vote for human freedom

Much to the dismay of establishment Britain, listeners to the BBC's In our time radio programme convincingly voted for Karl Marx as the greatest ever philosopher. The show, presented by Lord Melvin Bragg and currently the most popular Radio Four programme on the internet after The Archers, ran an online poll for five weeks, presenting the voters with a short list of 20 eminent thinkers. Impressively, and quite hearteningly in many ways, the In our time website attracted over a million hits during the conduct of this poll, thus proving that interest in this subject is considerable - and that, perhaps, Britain's political DNA is not as conservative as some like to make out, or imagine. When it came to the actual voting, Karl Marx gained 27.93% of the nearly 30,000 votes cast. Following quite some way behind in second place was David Hume, with 12.67%. After that we had Ludwig Wittgenstein (6.8%), Friedrich Nietzsche (6.49%), Plato (5.65%), Immanuel Kant (5.61%), Thomas Aquinas (4.83%), Socrates (4.82%), Aristotle (4.52%) and Karl Popper (4.2%). The remaining names on the list were Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, John Stuart Mill, René Descartes, Epicurus, Thomas Hobbes and Sà¸ren Kierke-gaard (unfortunately, BBC presenter John Humphrys' nomination, Eric Cantona, did not make it onto the short list, nor - quite unaccountably - did Gerry Healey). Philosophical battle lines were drawn everywhere. The Guardian came out in favour of Kant, The Economist for David Hume, and The Independent plumped for Wittgen-stein - then quickly changed its mind, claiming that such 'radical' uncertainty was fully in accordance with the latter's philosophical position(s). Amusingly, when Marx took an early and commanding lead in the race, Lord Bragg (a Kant man) could barely disguise his disappointment, and bafflement - exhorting Radio Four listeners to get their votes in and, by implication, keep the German-born revolutionary from coming top of the pops. If anything though, as we communists are glad to report, Bragg's subliminal 'vote Marx out' campaign only served to generate more votes for his intellectual bête noire. Lord Bragg's irritation was nothing, however, compared to the wrath and fury that some felt upon hearing the dreaded news that Karl Marx was the BBC-listening public's favourite thinker. Rightwing discussion forums and blogs lit up in outrage. Hence, for example, on the American-based Discuss Anything forum, 'Banana-King' posed the question, "So the BBC is full of commies or something?" - to which 'Snouter' succinctly replied: "Apparently the listeners of the BBC radio programme generally seem to be commie sympathisers. We can assume that the BBC therefore leans to the commie left since it attracts commies" (http://www.discussany thing.com/forums). Why Marx tops the polls opening session of Communist University 2005 August 13, Raymont Hall, 63 Wickham Road, New Cross, London SE4. Click here for more info Then for Tory-boy Times columnist Michael Gove, in an article entitled, 'I think therefore I am not voting Marx No1', the prospect of a Marx victory was almost too much to contemplate: "After all the horrors we have witnessed in the 20th century, success for Karl Marx in any poll would suggest we have learnt nothing" (June 22). Naturally, the Daily Mail (July 14) went into apoplexy. In a double-page spread, entitled 'Marx the monster', Simon Sebag Montefiore (author of the very readable and chilling study, Stalin: in the court of the red tsar) fulminated about how Marx's ideas have "justified the slaughter of more people than any other philosophy since time began". In fact, "under his name, oppression, torture, starvation and genocide became the routine practices of brutal governments all over the world". By Montefiore's calculations, "well over 150 million people were murdered in the 20th century directly on the orders of convinced Marxists in their hero's name" - and these "convinced Marxists" include, of course, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mariam Haile Mengistu, Colonel Gaddafi and Robert Mugabe. As if that was not bad enough, Montefiore urges us not to forget also that Blair's "centrist New Labour Party" cabinet is "full of ex-Marxists", nor close our eyes to the "desperately damaging effects of Marxist clap-trap on our own society such as the British educational systems - where competition is denigrated, ability is often punished and elite is a dirty word". Wearily shaking his head, Simon Montefiore concludes: "There is no doubt that Marx's influence has been as baleful as any person's in recent human history." So that immediately poses the question - why did thousands of presumably non-genocidally inclined Radio Four listeners give their endorsement to "slaughter", "oppression", "torture" and "starvation"? Well, for all of the head-scratching and Bragg-like agonising, the answer is relatively simple - more than any of the other thinkers on the BBC short list, Marx endlessly wrestles with the question of what it is to be human and, more crucially still, exactly how to be human in a class society characterised by - yes - slaughter, oppression, torture, starvation, etc. The other thinkers on the list, for the most part, and to some degree or another, all justified or sanctioned forms of unfreedom. Even in the case of Aristotle - perhaps the most outstanding thinker in the antiquity - who thought that slaves were barely more than animals: just things to be used by their masters as they saw fit. In his The politics he defined slaves as speaking tools. Marx's passionate, life-long fight for universal human freedom makes a stark and absolute contrast to the arid, gloomy and angst-ridden meanderings and intellectualist whims and fancies of a Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, or the bumptious and empty positivism of a Karl Popper, whose 'theories' amounted to not much more than a thinly disguised apologia for the existing order of things (which helps to explain his utterly absurd, and baseless, charge that Plato's Republic and Marxism have a lot in common, or even spring from the same totalitarian intellectual well). Contrary to the oft stated wisdom that the main attraction today of the Communist manifesto is its almost eerie prescience about the nature of globalisation under capitalism, what primarily appeals to - and fascinates - most (non-academic/professional) readers is its moral passion against exploitation, hypocrisy and oppression and a perspective of finding a practical means to overcome them and usher in a society that is really worthy of the name 'human'. Furthermore, for anyone whose perception or (mis)understanding of Marx has been largely or solely derived from rightwing newspapers and/or college textbooks, it undoubtedly comes as a bit of a shock, albeit a slightly delicious one, to encounter the real Marx - as opposed to Marx, the bogeyman. Misguidedly, many commentators, even sympathetic fellow travellers, overstate the case that the Communist manifesto is a sort of hymn-book of praise for the ruthless dynamism of capitalism - seizing on passages such as this: "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together ... what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?" (K Marx and F Engels The communist manifesto London 2002, pp224-225). Indeed, the bourgeoisie "has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals: it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades" (ibid p222). But, of course, for every section that supposedly lauds capitalism, there is another which mocks and castigates the bourgeoisie for its soulless commercialism and immoral hucksterism. Thus we read that the bourgeoisie "has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'"; that it has "drowned" the world in the "icy water of egotistical calculation" - which has "resolved personal worth into exchange value" and "set up that single, unconscionable freedom - free trade" (ibid p222). Flowing logically from its moral passion, the Communist manifesto revels in savage ironies (often misunderstood) that aim to expose the hypocritical nature of all the bourgeoisie's talk of 'freedom'. Marx and Engels point out that "in bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality", then go on to affirm: "And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeoisie abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying (ibid p237). As for the "bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child", that "becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour" (ibid p239). Now, you would not read anything like that in Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle, or even Lord Bragg's beloved Kant. Leaving the Communist manifesto aside, all of Marx's works - young and old, early and late - are absolutely saturated with terms and words that encapsulate, and are indicative of his unflagging drive to concretise and nail down the true nature and meaning of 'freedom', rather than the vacuous prattlings Marx was so used to - and which we are inundated with today, in an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to envelop the whole discourse with abstract and metaphysical philosophical musings which are either meaningless or impenetrable to all but professionally trained philosophers. So in Marx we constantly encounter terminology like Entfremdung (estrangement) and Entaüsserung (alienation), two largely interchangeable words that mean "dividing, separating" or "making strange or unfamiliar"; alienation literally means "making alien, making foreign". Estrangement of labour means "separating" labour from the labourer, separating the product of labour from the labourer, etc. As for alienation of labour, that can be understood in largely the same ways: "making labour something foreign to the labourer", "making the product of labour something alien to the labourer". In other words, what Marx unceasingly argued is that is that wage-labour becomes something that can be bought and sold just like any other object. The more important products become, the less important humans as labourers become. Then we have Ver-gegenständlichung (often translated as "reification", the "making into a thing") - that is, labour turned into an object. Under capitalism, labour becomes an object rather than a thing people do, and as a result, the labourer becomes an object rather than a human being. Just as important, we also have Verwirklichung, which literally means "the making real" - thus leading to the word "realisation", meaning "making real". On the other hand, we have Entwirklichung, "making unreal" - this, of course, is the opposite of Verwirklichung, "the making real". Here labour "made real" in its product "makes unreal" the labourer, who is no longer a person who is labouring: he or she becomes rather the products he or she produces. The products, maintains Marx, are more "valuable" than the people who produce them. Clearly, for anyone genuinely concerned with human suffering and human liberation, and the human condition as a whole, the author of the Communist manifesto and Capital is the natural first port of call - with maybe the occasional voyage, or excursion, to Sartre or Spinoza (and both trips are well worth making, unless you are a philistine dogmatist). The In our time poll confirms this contention, as well as amply demonstrating that there is a potentially huge audience out there for Marxist and communist ideas and values. Communists are also obliged to point out that Marx was not a philosopher or 'great thinker' in the ordinary, established sense of the term - as some professional, well-salaried, philosophers have rather grumpily pointed out, quite correctly. For Marx - who lived in a time, remember, when the word 'communist' denoted one as being on the most extreme or consistent wing of the democratic movement - was a revolutionary practitioner first and foremost and all his theoretical (or philosophical, if you really insist) investigations and writings were intended to be guides for action, most definitely not for scholastic hobbyists and solipsistic contemplation. Only by grasping this basic fact can you really understand his famous aphorisms, like the "educator must himself be educated ... [through] revolutionary practice" and, most legendary of all, maybe, that the "philosophers have only interpreted the world - the point, however, is to change it". The Marxist scholar (in the best sense of the term), August Nimtz, sums it up admirably when he observes: "Marx and Engels were revolutionary activists who profoundly understood that they had to actively put into practice what they wrote, as well as learn from practice what to write - tasks that are in general alien to the intellectual world, especially that of the Marxologists" (A Nimtz Marx and Engels: their contribution to the democratic breakthrough New York 2002, pix). So, if Messrs Montefiore, Gove et al were genuinely concerned about the plight of the individual, and the fight for human dignity for all, you would think that they would have at least a nodding acquaintance with Marx's writings. But, of course, their slanderous, and plain stupid, accounts of Marx's thinking are hypocritical and downright dishonest. Then again, they need their straw Marx to knock down - if not, their own thin and morally etiolated perspectives would be held up to the world and easily found to be wanting, to put it mildly. But in their own perverted, negative way, Montefiore and Gove have stumbled upon a truth which genuine communists are the first to acknowledge - even insist upon, in fact. That is, the malign and baleful legacy of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc continues to besmirch the honourable name of Marxism and communism in general. The horrors of 20th century 'actually existing socialism' need to be brought to accounts, and into the dock, in order to cleanse Marxism of all the Stalinite and 'official communist', and social democratic, muck and filth. Bluntly told, the ideas, theories and practice of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc were the living negation of Marxism and hence of communism. Concretely, for communists, wheeling out Pol Pot in defence of anti-communism is always the last refuge of the scoundrel - and of the desperate. Pot's Khmer nationalist vision of a 'purified' Cambodia, going back to the future in Year Zero, could not be more contrary to Marx's politics. For him, socialism grew out of the most advanced capitalism and the process of winning the battle for democracy so powerfully, conclusively, and extensively, that it bursts out of the capitalist shell. However, for Pol Pot, his grotesque parody of communism involved abolishing capitalism negatively and forcibly depopulating the cities - rather than the Marxist programme of gradually merging the town and countryside. Additionally, imperialism cannot be absolved of responsibility for the rise of Pol Potism - quite the opposite, in effect. To borrow a phrase from the recently deceased, and totally unlamented, general Westmoreland, Cambodia was "bombed into the stone age", thus providing very fertile soil for such fanatical, and irrational, ideas and movements to grow. Even more despicably, when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime was overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1979, imperialism - not to mention China - backed his forces to the hilt, providing arms and military training. It also came up with invaluable 'moral' support in the international arena - most notably reserving a seat for 'comrade' Pol Pot at the United Nations. Paradoxically, but quite logically, Khmer Rogue forces then became part of the 'front line against communism'. What was the Daily Mail saying then about its new ally against "genocidal" communism? In short, for communists, the counterrevolutionary 'communism' of a Pol Pot or JV Stalin is the very opposite of our internationalist, democratic, rational communism. Marxism, in essence, has one fundamental aim: to help bring about the self-emancipation of the working class and thereby the liberation of humanity as a whole from the alienation, oppression and all the other anti-human shit that is inseparable from the capitalist mode of production. Well worth voting for, don't you think? l Eddie Ford