Like many who’ve been poor at some point in their lives, Karl Marx spent a lot of time thinking about money. He didn’t just think about it of course; he philosophized. In much of his writing money took on almost mystical properties: It reduced the richness and complexity of human labor to an abstraction, helping to disguise the very nature of capitalist oppressions. It gave men powers they couldn’t have had without it, allowing stupid men to buy talent, ugly men to win the hearts (or at least the bodies) of beautiful women, cowards to buy bravery. In short, money turned “the world upside-down,” it was “the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities.”
I know how that works. I’ve done it myself. And I’m not proud of it. A few years ago–more recently than I care to admit–I was briefly a member of a socialist sect. To be specific, I was a dues-paying, paper-selling member of the tiny International Socialist Organization, a sect of the Trotskyist variety. I say “briefly” to lessen the embarrassment, but the fact is, “briefly” wasn’t a minute and a half. It was six months. As they would say on Oprah, Six Months of Secret Sectarian Shame.
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I don’t have an excuse for my lapse in judgment. My politics have always listed leftward, and I’ve thought of myself as some sort of socialist–enemy of capitalism, friend of the people, and all that–for more than a decade. But aside from the ISO experience I’ve kept myself relatively sane about it, alternating periods of intense and mildly idealistic political activism with periods when I recoil from politics in disgust. The ISO caught me at a time when I was heading back into politics and feeling rather guilty about having stayed on the sidelines for so long. Perhaps it’s too simple to say I became a sectarian out of guilt. As they might point out on Oprah, I also suffered from exceedingly poor self-esteem at the time, and dealing with Trotskyist dogma was easier than dealing with the world.
It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that my ex-friends’ faith in their brand of revolutionism had a religious cast–and that their faith served more of a psychological function than a political one. Like recent converts to an evangelical religion, they were simply baffled that anyone would think to question this or that tenet, and they tended to look on any ideological opposition as evidence of ignorance, laziness, or opportunism. Like born-again Christians witnessing on the street corner, they were unapologetic about their certainty. One of their pamphlets pitted “Marxist Views of Women’s Oppression” against what were described as “Wrong Views of Women’s Oppression.”
For Marx’s psyche was a volatile mixture of grandiose illusions, anger, and self-hatred. Born a Jew but baptized a Lutheran at age four, the atheistic Marx denied and rejected his Jewish heritage, filling his writings with vicious denunciations of Jews and “Jewishness” that would make any anti-Semite proud. A man without a religion–and later without a country–Marx looked for spiritual sustenance in his grand mythology of the proletarian revolution. “The festering wounds of Marx’s self-loathing might have destroyed him,” Manuel writes, “had he not found salvation in the fantasy of an arena of combat in which he could lead the forces of the proletariat to victory.” In other words, the proletarians would not only save the world–they would save Marx from himself.
An Ethiopian poem written in 1980 captures some of the flavor of this mystical Marxism:
Three in One And One in Three The Trinity in Unity For Many’s Liberty! Marx the Father Engels the Son And Lenin The Holy Ghost Made the new Man Free from slavery!
It would be convenient to dismiss these terrible consequences–as some have tried to do–as evidence only of a perversion of pure Marxism by demagogues and dictators. But there’s too much in this history that’s redolent of the Marxism of Marx himself: the boundless faith in revolutionary progress, the unspoken certainty of those who presume to know what’s best for the masses, the vindictive intolerance shown those who haven’t seen the light.
