Karl Marx as Moralist-Prophet: Morning Coffee for Good Friday

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Good morning. I'm Brad DeLong, and this is my morning coffee.

Having video blogged about Karl Marx the economist on Wednesday, I decided to blog about Marx as political activist and moralist-prophet on Thursday, and only got through the political-activist part before I ran out of time. Which leaves Marx as moralist-prophet for today, Good Friday--which is either very fitting or very unfitting, depending...

As one of the graduate students put it in class on Wednesday, Marx's confidence that history has a direction and that it is a good direction--that it leads to a real utopia, a true New Jerusalem--is based on his belief that we are, as a species, smart enough to allow us to think our problems through and to evolve institutions that allow us to become who we fundamentally are. And who does Marx think that we fundamentally are? He thinks that we are generous, solidaristic, intelligent, and equal members of a free society of associated producers.

Now it is very possible that Marx is wrong about who we are. Perhaps we are jumped-up monkeys with big brains who have an instinct for reciprocity--for tit-for-tat--and for some degree of mutual solidarity and that we can then harness these instinctive drives in order to build a relatively good society based on market exchange if we are smart enough to build good institutions with our big brains. But if we are ultimately such monkeys building a free society of associated producers on the maxim "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is foredoomed to failure.

And perhaps we are jumped-up monkeys with big brains of whom at least half--the testosterone-poisoned half--are driven by fear that the male monkeys over the hill might kill us, take our stuff, take our breeding partners, and kill our offspring and that we need to strike first. In which case we had better hope that history does not have a direction, and that if it does have a direction that direction does not mean that we have to become who we are--because I at least would rather that we remain who we are not.

I'm Brad DeLong, this is my morning coffee, and what I see out the window is not the New Jerusalem but rather San Francisco Bay.

Comments

[John Howard Brown]

RE: Your last line

Isn't the San Francisco Bay area actually the Garden of Eden?
I once read a wonderful line in a science fiction story 30 odd years ago, "San Francisco is the only place on earth where people believe they can sin in a state of grace." Is that also a description of the Garden?

[RW]

E.O. Wilson, before all else (including that distraction otherwise known as sociobiology) a zoologist specializing in ants, phrased it most succinctly: "Why did Communism fail? Good ideology, wrong species."

[Barkley Rosser]

Rather than monkeys, the question may be whether we are more like regular chimpanzees or bonobo chimpanzees, our two closest relatives.

[Edward Downe]

Really good job of summarizing Marx the moralist in a couple of paragraphs.
Marx claimed to be strictly scientific, but he turns out to be quite religious.

[Randolph Fritz]

"And who does Marx think that we fundamentally are?"

Marx rejected the idea that humans fundamentally were anything, and this is an important point that is lost on both supporters and critics of St. Marx. Marx believed that history on the broad scale was a series of transformations through crisis, and that the crises could be studied and, once under way, their outcome the some extent predicted. There is in Marx, so far as I can tell, no requirement that a particular series of transformations occur, though some transformations are prerequisite to others: industrialism has to follow agriculturalism, not the other way around.

It is becoming clear that unless we are smart enough to think our problems through we have no future at all; if we let our instincts rule our intelligence, we will end up on an dying on an ecologically devastated planet. It seems to me that anything but belief in the possibility of thinking things through is simple despair and, in fact, you believe in the possibility of thinking things through, or why advocate for liberal policies. So what is your point?

[The Editors]

I don't know. Monkeys seem to do all right.

[roublen]

your morning coffee for Easter Sunday should have a bit more sugar in it.

[albrt]

Much better than yesterday.

Whatever happened to the "East African Plains Ape" meme?

[Harold]

Arguably: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" comes ultimately from another moralist:

And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. (Acts 2:44-45)
...
Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. (Acts 4:34-3.

I don't think there is anything in the gospels about a market based-utopia.

[Q the Enchanter]

"perhaps we are jumped-up monkeys...driven by fear that the male monkeys over the hill might kill us...and that we need to strike first."

What other ape ever had a policy of preemption?

[Maurice Lanselle]

Did you write this before or after rowing? It doesn't seem thunk though.

"He thinks that we are generous, solidaristic, intelligent, and equal members of a free society of associated producers." If he were that naive, would we still know his name? Pass the Alice B. Toklas devilled eggs, please.

[Edward Downe]

"Humans, I suspect, are simply great apes with a few unique --- and special --- genetic switches." (Jim Watson's version).