Wednesday, March 31, 2004
First God now Marx and with any luck Chomsky
Many a right wing critic has claimed that what happened since 1917 has proved Marx wrong. Marxism was tired and it was a miserable failure. On the flip side of things, there are those who say Marxism has never truly been put into practice. Marxism as practiced is simply a perversion. Both are wrong for the same reason. Marx's vision for a communist utopia was never adopted, or perverted and there is a simple reason for this; he had no such vision. The young Marx did feel that Capitalism would come crashing down in 1848. In a letter to Marx, Engels even went so far as to, half jokingly, recommend a cousin as minister of Agriculture. To this end, the polemical Communist Manifesto contained 10 briefly spelled out “generally applicable” things that would help birth communism in the “most advanced countries”. However, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, the 30 year old Marx dedicated his life to detailing Capitalisms “inner contradictions”. He died doing so. He fished but one of proposed 6 Volumes of Capital. Volumes 2 and 3 were put together by Engels from what Marx left behind. He never got around to laying out a comprehensive plan for birthing Communism, nor did he feel the need to. By the end of his life, he was content that one way or another it would become a reality; his “Science” told him it was to be so. (Marx became ever more open to the possibility that Communism would come about through peaceful and democratic means. On a different front, in 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto Marx even granted the possibility that a country need not be thoroughly capitalist to transform itself into a communist state. The country he had in mind was Russia and this is the, much ignored, proviso he added. “Now, the question is this: can the Russian Obshchina, through greatly undermined, yet a form of the primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.”) As to what a communist society would be like, despite his musing as a 25 year old that under Communism one would be able fish in the morning and read Plato in the afternoon, the elder Marx steadfastly refused to foretell what “the cook shops of the future” looked like.
What truly bugs me about this fruitless debate is that while the two sides, neither of whom know anything about Marx, were arguing, Marx died. The New York’s Observer’s Ron Rosenbaum provides a perfect example about the comic nature of such a debate.
“Goodbye to all that. The phrase occurred to me when I heard the sad news that Christopher Hitchens was leaving The Nation. Sad more for The Nation, a magazine I’ve read on and off since high school, now deprived of an important dissenting voice amidst lockstep Left opinion. Mr. Hitchens was valuable to The Nation, to the Left as a whole, I argued back on Jan. 14 in these pages, because he challenged "the Left to recognize the terrorists not as somewhat misguided spokesmen for the wretched of the earth, but as ‘Islamo-fascists’—theocratic oppressors of the wretched of the earth." He was leaving in part, he said, because he’d grown tired of trying to make this case in a venue that had become what he called "an echo chamber of those who believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden."
The Nation still has assets of course: the incomparable polymath literary critic, John Leonard; the fierce polemical intelligence of Katha Pollit, which I admire however much I might disagree with her; some serious investigative reporters. And recently Jack Newfield, who long ago co-authored an important book on the populist tradition—still a faint hope for a non-Marxist Left in America.
But Mr. Hitchens’ loss is a loss not just for the magazine, but for the entire Left; it’s important that America have an intelligent opposition, with a critique not dependent on knee-jerk, neo-Marxist idiocy. And it’s important that potential constituents of that opposition, like Nation readers, be exposed to a brilliant dissenter like Christopher Hitchens.”
While, Rosenbaum is right about the Left’s myopic focus on the US and Israel (where was the New Left when Rwanda and the Congo needed them?), he has things between Hitchens and the rest of the Nation staff ass backwards. Indeed, although, Hitchens was once a Trotskyist, I am willing to bet a week’s wage that few of Naomi Klein and company have never heard of Feuerbach, skimmed through Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or waded through all three Volumes of Capital. Marx is simply not read let alone understood by the 30 something Left. Their champion is Chomsky.
Just as an aside, Chomsky is not only the most cited author alive, he is, according to the Chicago Tribune, one of the most cited intellectual luminaries of all eras. Chomsky placed eighth, just behind Plato and Sigmund Freud.
Now, it is hard for any serious thinker to take Chomsky seriously anymore. He is way past his expiry date. http://canadawide.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_canadawide_archive.html Scroll down to The Fruits of Chomsky’s Mind Need First to be Checked for Worms and then Washed. The problem is that Chomsky is very much the spokesperson of his intellectual generation and that the new generation of leftist intellectuals has swallowed the message of the baby boomers whole. Namely, their anarchistic lack of faith in the morality of the state or its actors is such that they feel that the ability of the state to wage war should be taken away. Any action, however, inadvertently, beneficial furthers an inherently undemocratic power structure. What buttresses this belief is the highly ethnocentric belief that what enemies America has and by extention the West has are, more or less, entirely of their own creation and that the key to not making any new ones is to so tie down the government it will not be able to act in politically realist manner.
Many a right wing critic has claimed that what happened since 1917 has proved Marx wrong. Marxism was tired and it was a miserable failure. On the flip side of things, there are those who say Marxism has never truly been put into practice. Marxism as practiced is simply a perversion. Both are wrong for the same reason. Marx's vision for a communist utopia was never adopted, or perverted and there is a simple reason for this; he had no such vision. The young Marx did feel that Capitalism would come crashing down in 1848. In a letter to Marx, Engels even went so far as to, half jokingly, recommend a cousin as minister of Agriculture. To this end, the polemical Communist Manifesto contained 10 briefly spelled out “generally applicable” things that would help birth communism in the “most advanced countries”. However, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, the 30 year old Marx dedicated his life to detailing Capitalisms “inner contradictions”. He died doing so. He fished but one of proposed 6 Volumes of Capital. Volumes 2 and 3 were put together by Engels from what Marx left behind. He never got around to laying out a comprehensive plan for birthing Communism, nor did he feel the need to. By the end of his life, he was content that one way or another it would become a reality; his “Science” told him it was to be so. (Marx became ever more open to the possibility that Communism would come about through peaceful and democratic means. On a different front, in 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto Marx even granted the possibility that a country need not be thoroughly capitalist to transform itself into a communist state. The country he had in mind was Russia and this is the, much ignored, proviso he added. “Now, the question is this: can the Russian Obshchina, through greatly undermined, yet a form of the primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.”) As to what a communist society would be like, despite his musing as a 25 year old that under Communism one would be able fish in the morning and read Plato in the afternoon, the elder Marx steadfastly refused to foretell what “the cook shops of the future” looked like.
What truly bugs me about this fruitless debate is that while the two sides, neither of whom know anything about Marx, were arguing, Marx died. The New York’s Observer’s Ron Rosenbaum provides a perfect example about the comic nature of such a debate.
“Goodbye to all that. The phrase occurred to me when I heard the sad news that Christopher Hitchens was leaving The Nation. Sad more for The Nation, a magazine I’ve read on and off since high school, now deprived of an important dissenting voice amidst lockstep Left opinion. Mr. Hitchens was valuable to The Nation, to the Left as a whole, I argued back on Jan. 14 in these pages, because he challenged "the Left to recognize the terrorists not as somewhat misguided spokesmen for the wretched of the earth, but as ‘Islamo-fascists’—theocratic oppressors of the wretched of the earth." He was leaving in part, he said, because he’d grown tired of trying to make this case in a venue that had become what he called "an echo chamber of those who believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden."
The Nation still has assets of course: the incomparable polymath literary critic, John Leonard; the fierce polemical intelligence of Katha Pollit, which I admire however much I might disagree with her; some serious investigative reporters. And recently Jack Newfield, who long ago co-authored an important book on the populist tradition—still a faint hope for a non-Marxist Left in America.
But Mr. Hitchens’ loss is a loss not just for the magazine, but for the entire Left; it’s important that America have an intelligent opposition, with a critique not dependent on knee-jerk, neo-Marxist idiocy. And it’s important that potential constituents of that opposition, like Nation readers, be exposed to a brilliant dissenter like Christopher Hitchens.”
While, Rosenbaum is right about the Left’s myopic focus on the US and Israel (where was the New Left when Rwanda and the Congo needed them?), he has things between Hitchens and the rest of the Nation staff ass backwards. Indeed, although, Hitchens was once a Trotskyist, I am willing to bet a week’s wage that few of Naomi Klein and company have never heard of Feuerbach, skimmed through Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or waded through all three Volumes of Capital. Marx is simply not read let alone understood by the 30 something Left. Their champion is Chomsky.
Just as an aside, Chomsky is not only the most cited author alive, he is, according to the Chicago Tribune, one of the most cited intellectual luminaries of all eras. Chomsky placed eighth, just behind Plato and Sigmund Freud.
Now, it is hard for any serious thinker to take Chomsky seriously anymore. He is way past his expiry date. http://canadawide.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_canadawide_archive.html Scroll down to The Fruits of Chomsky’s Mind Need First to be Checked for Worms and then Washed. The problem is that Chomsky is very much the spokesperson of his intellectual generation and that the new generation of leftist intellectuals has swallowed the message of the baby boomers whole. Namely, their anarchistic lack of faith in the morality of the state or its actors is such that they feel that the ability of the state to wage war should be taken away. Any action, however, inadvertently, beneficial furthers an inherently undemocratic power structure. What buttresses this belief is the highly ethnocentric belief that what enemies America has and by extention the West has are, more or less, entirely of their own creation and that the key to not making any new ones is to so tie down the government it will not be able to act in politically realist manner.
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