Marx and America: Twin Heresies

 

There's an important distinction between natural suffering and suffering caused by human actions. Natural suffering is inevitable however careful we are. Diseases, accidents, and aging happen. I could blame God for not making a pain-free world, but I don't see what good that would do. With any luck, though, I can minimize the suffering my actions cause to others. It isn't easy. Like everyone else, I tend to understand the world as a movie in which I am the star--to see everything, including suffering, as less important as it recedes farther from me in time and space. It takes imagination and grace to escape this ego-centric illusion and to recognize the collective social assumptions (in Marxist terms, the ideologies) that pass for laws of nature and whitewash much of the suffering we humans cause.

Karl Marx is a curious case, a family man who lived in poverty and died in exile. Born to financial privilege, he renounced it out of a passion to better the lives of the poor. His analysis of economic and social forces was brilliant--in a purely intellectual sense, revolutionary--foundational to much of contemporary economics and sociology. Marx would deserve a bust beside Darwin, Freud, and Einstein if the social revolutions he called for had never been attempted.

But, of course, they were--if not in an overripe capitalist state like Germany as he expected--and the results were disastrous. Communist regimes have disintegrated (Russia), restored a market economy (China). or devolved into cult-of-personality dictatorships (North Korea). Along the way they have committed terrible violations of human rights and produced economies of scarcity, empty shelves and long lines at shops. 

Hardly anybody in America today advocates Communism, but there has been a tendency--most evident when Bernie Sanders was running for the Democratic nomination--to tar all manifestations of "socialism" with the Communistic brush. Never mind that the Marxist 1847 Principles of Communism already condemned democratic socialism as a distinct program. Democratic socialism shares with Marxism goals such as urban renewal, income tax, and public schools--but Marx repudiated it because it was not "part of the transition to communism," but merely bettered the lives of workers. 

            Most of the aims of democratic socialism are status quo in the United States, including public schools, public parks, public hospitals, income tax, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, and public sewer and water systems--which few conservatives wish to abolish. Sanders proposed tweaks to this status quo--expanding Medicare and extending tuition-free education from the twelfth to the fourteenth grade--not the kind of changes that, in the words of a Facebook friend, would make "everybody equally poor." The Soviet Union was "socialist," but a different kind of socialism, built on Marx's mistakes.

Marx's father was a landowner and lawyer who left him an inheritance worth about $100,000 even after he'd taken years of advances on it. It was enough to start a newspaper. Karl's mother was from a Dutch family that later founded Philips Electronics, and his sister married a wealthy industrialist. Marx himself earned a Ph.D., married a baroness, and could have prospered in the belly of the establishment if he hadn't chosen to share the privations of the working class by publishing radical articles that made him persona non grata in France, Belgium, and Germany. England tolerated Marx, but most of his life was hand-to-mouth, supported by free-lance journalism and handouts from patrons, poverty that may account for the early deaths of four of his children. But Marx continued to analyze the Industrial Revolution and to believe that somehow a materialist version the Hegelian history predicted an idyllic future. Marx's analysis of the past was coolly analytic, his predictions of the future wildly optimistic.

Although he was an atheist from early adulthood and maintained a pose of scientific objectivity, Marx's theories bristle with moral subtext. Capitalists "exploit" workers who are (in his analysis) the sole creators of value. Capitalists steal what rightfully belongs to the workers. Without overt preaching, Marx's terms of analysis project outrage at violations of the ethics of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets. The bourgeoisie don't do unto the proletariat as they would have the proletariat do unto them, and, when the proletariate returns the favor, it will serve them right, besides enabling a Messianic end of history. William Temple (1881-1944) described Communism as a Christian heresy, but it secularized Jewish morality as well. Both of Marx's grandfathers were rabbis, and he was baptized Lutheran after his parents converted to Christianity. Religion was in his blood, and classical liberalism primed him to see its failures and look for remedies.

Marx envisioned a world in which everybody would, like creative artists, happily contribute their talents to the general good within an economy that, because it fairly distributed surplus value, was productive enough to please everybody. Imagining  that the only reason people were selfish is that their needs weren't being met, he supposed that, once they understood the new system, everyone would gladly labor for the general good. Once this system (called communism) was realized, it would be so paradisal that nobody would dream of changing it. This beautiful Hegelian end of history would, with a little help from his violent friends, evolve naturally out of capitalism and last forever because it provided such obvious societal advantages.

Of course, the current owners of factories and railroads wouldn't voluntarily surrender them to workers, but they didn't need all that wealth to live on anyway and, in most cases, had already received value (created solely by labor in Marx's theory) in excess of the value of the their capital, so capital rightfully was the workers' property anyway. Workers' revolutions needed only to seize existing capital and park it under a government that would represent workers' interests and temporarily oversee the establishment of self-governing communes. After that, government would become unnecessary and "wither away." 

           This was such a beautiful vision that any necessary means were justified to jumpstart it. Counterrevolutionaries couldn't be allowed to spoil the future for everybody else. This led to the horrors of twentieth-century Communism, which devolved into totalitarian state capitalism. Government leaders formed a new class of plutocrats, using force more brutal than their capitalist predecessors to maintain power, as allegorized in George Orwell's Animal Farm, where the pigs morph into farmers. Marx was far too trusting of power. Nobody can be trusted without checks and balances.

But Marx was right in many ways, drawing attention to the problematic consequences of class inequality. The world would unquestionably be a better place if the rich heeded Jesus' injunction to give to the poor--if not all their possessions (Matthew 19:21), at least income they didn't need to live comfortably and save for retirement. Suppose they all did this--even allowing conservative preconditions such as expecting those able in body and mind to work--starting with the poorest and working up until everybody had a home, food, health care, and educational opportunity. With our average national income of about $75,000, the math works out. Suppose that their motive was internalized love of neighbor as ourselves. This would be simple Christianity and more, behavior encouraged by most religions. How about democratically established taxes that take nothing from the needy but increasing percentages from the more fortunate (call them "brackets"), taxes that leave everybody enough to live on without stunting the profit motive, taking only a fraction of any increase? How about democratic socialism?

In fact, compared to the early industrial revolution, America has moved dramatically toward this. Fewer of the unemployed are forced into begging and prostitution to survive, and clients at community meals I've helped with are generally well fed and clothed, but they are still shamed, shunned, and shut out of the American Dream. Mass incarceration, systemic racism, and neglect of the mentally ill maintain a large underclass in cities where the top one-percent sit like Tolkien's dragon on on third of national wealth. 

         The American heresy is to forget the Golden Rule and use the horrors of Marx's "any means necessary" to argue against communal human decency. In the preamble to the Constitution, government is "to promote the general welfare." Government achieves by coordinated public effort what can't be well achieved by isolated individuals. When citizens or their representatives vote to help their neighbors, this is not socialism in the Marxist sense. It doesn't participate in the evils of the Soviet Union, but is a function like national defense, road building, law enforcement, public hospitals, and public education.

The American heresy is to selfishly repudiate modest policies that express love of our neighbors as ourselves--Marx's goal as it overlaps with Christ's--on the pretext of Marx's mistakes, his excessive trust of in power and his naive belief in the end of history. He was wrong. History continues, and, meanwhile, our neglect of needy neighbors--the "widows and orphans" of our tribe--is a great and opposite wrong.