Karl Marx, or Mr. Presumes-a-lot

I will admit that I approached tonight’s reading of The Communist Manifesto with quite a bit of bias against it. I had experienced a brief infatuation with communism in the 9th grade – I believe it occurred not long after reading A People’s History of the United States – but I soon realized the contradictions and, dare I say, utter foolishness of this deterministic and paternalistic system of thought, and my opinions on the subject weren’t changed by this reading. This is not to say, however, that capitalism is absolved of any guilt. There are problems inherent in that system too – no one can deny the terrible conditions that so many working-class people in Europe suffered through – but it is Marx who I have my eye on for this post.

So back to those two qualities I have ascribed to Communism: deterministic and paternalistic. Now, having the benefit of knowing the past 160 years of history, I could write multiple pages on how history has proven Marx wrong (it would probably sound like this: Marx claims that “national differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing.” Really. World War One? World War One! WORLD WAR ONE!), so I will refrain from that tempting exercise in bombast. Still, his take on the future seems incredibly naïve if we take even the slightest glimpse at the past or at human nature. When the proletariat take over and reorganize the hell out of everything as they see fit - well, first off, who’s making all these changes? None of Marx’s “conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat” could be accomplished on a large scale without some central, organized authority. Marx assumes everything’s gonna be peachy-keen, that “the public power will lose its political character,” but, call me a pessimist, I don’t believe there is very large percentage of humankind who, upon reaching a position of power, is content to give up that power of their own accord. Was Marx not an educated man? (That is perhaps a bit mean-spirited; for the record, he was educated). But if he thought everything was going to work itself out, he had to have been kidding himself.

I don’t have much to say about the paternalism in this excerpt. Marx is basically claiming that Communists know what every working-class person wants. That doesn’t really contradict anything in Communist ideology, but Marx is once again presuming quite a lot, as it seems to be his wont to do.