Posted by
Tzimisce on Monday, September 15, 2008 2:01:33 PM
Karl Marx was a man born after his time. He looked back to the violence and chaos of the French Revolution as a Golden Age that should be duplicated. Every idea he has its roots in that bloody era – from a violent overthrow of everyone he disagreed with to the idea of government ownership of everything. Not even his terminology was his own: “Communes” and “bourgeoisie” those were the words of French revolutionaries. Marx proposed nothing new.
Perhaps his intellectual vacuum is the reason why he could never gather enough people to lead a revolution of his own. Unfortunately for him, he wouldn’t live long enough to see the day people’s IQs drop low enough to think anything he proposed was insightful or intelligent.
Case in point: the modern day. Out of the hundreds of self proclaimed Communists I’ve run into, only two could honestly say they hail from the poor, downtrodden working class. It leaves me wondering if they actually read Marx when he wrote about what he was going to do with the bourgeoisie and the wealthy. It’s even more perplexing when it comes from a college professor. Marx was concerned with the way blue collar factory workers, not white collar do nothings. Especially white collar do nothings with cushy jobs that allow them to live at the bourgeoisie level or better.
Artists are another odd case. I’ve met a lot of artists that identified themselves as Marxists. But I’ve never met an artist that I would call “poor”. In fact, most of the artists I’ve known are living rather good lives.
Take actor/artist Matt Damon for example. I guess he’s working on a movie called “The People’s History of the United States” written by Communist historian Howard Zinn. It’s bizarre to think that someone who’s raking in millions of dollars based on his name recognition is sympathic to a system that requires everyone to be poor and unknown. Moreover he’s got a star studded cast to participate in the movie with him. Do these people really think they’d be happy living in a Marxist society? Would any other artists? Since there hasn’t been any mass exodus of artists to China or Cuba, I’d have to think “no”.
That aside once again I’m left wondering what artists contribute to the factory system. It’s not like art work can be divided up amongst a large population. If you chopped the Mona Lisa up into a couple thousand pieces, it would lose all value. One of the first things the artists had to do after the Communists took over in Russia was go to the party leaders and explain how what they did was valuable to society.
But this brings up another hole in Communist theory: how can there be leaders in a classless society? Whereas the Communists I’ve run into have come from all class backgrounds, I have yet to meet a Communist that didn’t see themself as leading the revolution.
Even Marx himself admitted that there would have to be leadership for a certain amount of time. He just rationalized that eventually it would no longer be necessary and those in charge would disband themselves. I guess he forgot his own idea that those with privilege will do anything to keep it: even amongst the Communists. Human beings are human beings after all. This should indicate that Marx had no idea what he was talking about. But he was a lib and libs are never wrong. (Their system just hasn’t been given a fair chance.)
Of course, if Marx’s system was so brilliant you’d think it wouldn’t need mountains of time for its “fair chance”. It would just work.