If you are looking at the American political scene from outside, you can’t escape the feeling that the United States is now deeply schizophrenic. It continuously alternates ever more conservative and ever more progressive candidates. Who can forget the juxtapositions of George Bush, Sr. to Bill Clinton to George Bush, Jr. to Barack Obama to Donald Trump?
Clearly, the U.S. is deeply divided, as indicated by Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote, only to lose the electoral vote, a throwback from the States Rights’ compromise that made possible the consensus behind the U.S. Constitution. Are we committed to tackling climate change? How many Administrations did it take to get us to the Paris Summit, only to have Donald Trump walk out?
What few people would suspect is that a debunked economist, really a social critic, foresaw it all, even though most of his predictions failed to materialize. Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto is the second most popular book ever to be written, next to the Bible, itself. What? How so?
Why a Resurgence of Interest in Karl Marx?
Capitalism as we know it today is not true capitalism, and socialism is no longer true socialism. We measure the difference primarily between free market and planned economies, and libertarian and totalitarian civil liberties. Americans who take a close look at how much better Sweden and France care for their citizens will be deeply distressed, as Bernie Sanders pointed out. However, youth in America, France and Sweden are equally disenchanted.
Globalization has spread the free market to almost every single country, with a boost for civil liberties to varying degrees. Along with it, the safety net has continuously eroded. Nothing can mitigate that less than 1% of the world’s population control the wealth of the bottom half. A Wall Street executive can earn 6,000 times the wages of his lowest employee.
The millennials have grown up a deeply compromised generation. They have to go back to living with mom and dad after finishing school until they can afford a house, or even an apartment that they can call their own. The workplace has moved from farm to factory to office. Now Starbuck’s provides office space for a new generation of contractors and would be entrepreneurs, using their laptops and tablets, with broadband courtesy of Google.
Why Karl Marx’s Dialectic Has Never Been More Relevant
Karl Marx brilliantly encapsulated the logic of our lives in his formula of Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis. We live in a world where every action produces an equal, but opposite reaction. We live in a world of polarity, of constant flow. There are no straight lines, only curves.
When you take a progressive view, you inspire others to take a conservative view. A conflict of some kind invariably ensues. Out of the contest of ideas and insights, a higher view emerges, containing parts of the previous positions, but with a unique twist. Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis.
Think of father and mother begetting a daughter, let’s say “Sandy,” who is like each of her parents, and yet somehow different. Sandy is her own person. She mates and produces a son. That son is like both her husband and herself, and yet somehow different. So with people. So with ideas. An evolutionary progression, a gradual enfoldment… forever.
We now find ourselves in an era of ever accelerating change, much as Ray Kurzweil observed with his vision of the Singularity. A generation of 20 years is now reduced to 18 months with high technology. Living in Silicon Valley for most of your life is for technology the equivalent of living for centuries in ordinary life. The only thing we can count on is change, itself. Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis.
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How Reductionism Ruined Marxism
Karl Marx grew up in an age where industrialization made a huge footprint on European and American society. The steam engine had been invented way back in 1790, but already in the early 1820’s, the world witnessed the first railroads and steamboats. By the time that Marx with Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto as a young man in 1848, the movement from farm to factory was irreversible. Child labor was the norm, as were 12-hour days, six days a week. Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol wasn’t that much of an exaggeration.
As a consequence, Marx developed a masculine perspective, without being a sexist. He was preoccupied with the nexus of politics, economics and society. Could it all be explained in terms of power? The golden thread in this was economics. He saw that the rich and the powerful were not about to give up their privilege; hence the need for revolution.
The real problem with Marx was that he got so enthralled with using the dialectic from an economic standpoint that he minimalized everything else. Religion was the opiate of the people. The things that make life truly worthwhile, the divine, the creative and the intellectual, were simply distractions from getting on with material progress. Ironically, Marx, himself, seemed conscientious as a person, a very good father and husband. Perhaps he saw a higher truth in his private life.
Don’t Thank Marx; Thank Socrates
Socrates, the father of philosophy, pioneered the dialectic for humanity, being influenced by Heraclites’s observation that you never step into the same river twice. Everything is in flux in the world of appearance. Socrates postulated that the truth could be found only in the world of pure forms or ideas. He focused on debunking his fellow Athenians of their conventional thinking. He ended up being accused of corrupting the youth and was given the choice of banishment or drinking hemlock. Socrates chose hemlock.
George Friedrich Hegel in the early 19th century picked up on Socrates concept of the dialectic, and developed it from a historical perspective. He saw civilization emerge from the creative tension of ideas that found their way into forms and everyday events. He looked at history from a multidimensional perspective. Living in the early romantic period, Hegel was not caught up in a realistic perspective of fighting exploitation in the big cities.
Karl Marx popularized the dialectic, but wedded it with his personal perspective, dialectic materialism. He rejoiced in standing Hegel on his head, moving from idealism to realism.
In principle, the only things that really counted for Marx was bread and butter. The worker must take off his or her chains and own the means of production. Strangely, with quantum physics, the solid “real world” has become increasingly abstract, more like ideas than things. Marx would have been shocked.
How the Dialectic Informs the Big Picture
When Adam and Eve plucked the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, it was sweet to the mouth and bitter to the stomach. They awoke from primal unity as food gatherers, to polarity, becoming hunters and ultimately famers. They realized that they would “certainly die” in the big world out there as they got increasingly caught up in the survival game.
As we look at social, economic and political development, we notice constant swings, as in conservative to liberal positions. In culture, we notice perpetual oscillations from classical to romantic and then back again. When we take a jet halfway across the world, we will likely to fly an arc over the poles, as that route is faster than a straight line on a 3D sphere, such as Planet Earth. Straight lines work on paper, not in nature. The only straight lines in geography are manmade. Follow any brook, stream or river and be convinced.
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We can never really take things at face value. Nothing is as it appears. We live out a story within a great dream where we are both the dreamer and the characters. In order to have a good story, you must have suspense, sudden turns, reversals, and above all, surprises. The last thing we suppose about life is that it could be God having fun, that the entire universe is one gigantic celebration of pure being. The Hindus have a Sanskrit word for it, Lila, or divine play.
How the Dialectic Plays Out in Our Private Lives
If you remember learning to walk, or ride the bike, you will notice that you move to one direction, and then to its opposite, and then back again. A jet plane and an oceanliner both are constantly adjusting their trajectories with gyroscopes to stay on course.
We go from infancy to elementary school to college to military service or career to mate to children to contribution and retirement. Each time we finish one phase, we have to start all over again, and learn it all on a higher level. If we are perceptive, we will notice a spiral, rather than a circle or a straight line.
We don’t go straightforward without obstacles, and we don’t perpetually go around in circles. We go through this spiral where the bottom of one cycle is higher than the top of a previous cycle.
We celebrate a great breakthrough, such as finding the perfect mate, only to lose our job, to finding a new career, to finding more fulfillment from starting a business, and so on. If we are smart, we begin to realize that there is always something to learn, that this is all really a form of play. True, consequences are built in, but what game is worth playing without a clearly defined sense of rules.
The journey is always the reward.
How the Dialectic Can Bring You Peace of Mind
On Karl Marx’s deathbed, he reminded his friends that he was NOT A MARXIST. Neither should we be. Yet we all owe him, his atheism not withstanding. Marx had the courage to challenge the established order and suggest there was another way. He gave us progressive taxation and the impetus for social progress around the world.
The dialectic is the game plan, but the story is up to you. You were put here as creator to create. You know this is ultimately a playground, and yet it is still precious to you. You realize that you are no longer “a spec of protoplasm on a dirt ball hurdling through space,” as Werner Erhard once put it. You are all of it. You can define your life as a progression of love and enlightenment, as opposed to an endless pursuit of more for the sake of more. You can then see how it is, indeed, more blessed to give than to receive.
May we together redefine our world, both in the private arena and in the public domain.
What Karl Marx Got Right appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.
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