Mark,
Is it not also true that Marx had a stroke in the early
1870s that slowed him down greatly after that (and also
did not exactly uplift his spirits)? I stand to be corrected
on this, if not correct, as on so many other matters.....
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Monday, May 22, 2000 3:07 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:19410] RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: Re:
Re:Re:Re:Re:MarxandMalleability (fwd)
>Rob Schaap wrote:
>>if memory serves, Marx held out hope for revolution by constitutional
>>means within monarchies during his 1873 speech
>
>Memory serves you poorly. By 1873 Marx had already given up any hope or
>expectation of proletarian revolution anywhere. He'd based his life on the
>great throw of a dice: staked it on the belief that a newly-emergent social
>class, the working-class, would become a class-for-itself, with its own
>political culture, leadership and trajectory to power - a naïve belief
based
>probably in an overestimation of Rousseau's conception of a civil society,
>in which 'classes' of people succeed one another in a kind of stately
>historical minuet; the fact that Marx's own conception of the w/c was
>protean, apocalyptic etc, that this was not a class so much as a furnace
>consuming history and reforging the world, was in contradiction with his
>optimistic Enlightenment core beliefs. When it became clear to him that
this
>proletariat did not exist, and the one which DID exist was and would ALWAYS
>be quite incapable of reshaping the world, he turned to ethnography and
>begun blindly clutching at anthropological straws, in other words he
>abandoned the western European political field aka actually-existing
>Capitalism in toto, along with all its classes, cultural impedimenta etc.
>Right at the end one of the straws he clutched had Russia written on it
and,
>poignantly, beside his death-bed was a large box stuffed with various
>pamphlets and writings about or from Russia. But this was just piling pain
>onto grief. It had all been the forlorn pursuit of will o'the wisps. Marx's
>political ideas were driven, as he was driven, by a burning desire, lust,
>for POWER (the next person on the scene to be similarly motivated was
Lenin;
>Engels, that genial old duffer, had no such yearnings and by the time his
>life-juices ran into the sands of the latter-day 2nd International, his
>personal accommodation to the world had also, tragically or bathetically,
>become his political accommodation to late-Victorian politics, an
>accommodation to which he, fondly but quite impermissibly, assimilated his
>old friend Karl, whose days of incandescent political passion he no doubt
>remembered sentimentally.
>
>The sheer extent of Marx's despair at the end, his absolute repudiation of
>events as they'd turned out, his remorseless cynicism about the everyday
>world of labour-bureaucracies, with their time-serving placemen and greasy
>little deals -- this is something we barely know and can hardly guess at,
>but in fact his latter writings, as do his latter SILENCES, his failure to
>complete any of Capital after vol I (pub 1867) speak eloquently enough,
once
>you understand what's going on. This was a man who had not expected to end
>his days in Bournemouth watching young governesses push prams and ply their
>trade; he'd expected volcanoes to erupt and to transfigure the geology of
>human civilisation, let alone its routine history. He'd expected to win
>power, to be a statesman for his elective class, and to begin epochal
>processes of change. It was not to be.
>
>He was a man who above all others had relentless and self-sacrificially
>sought after the truth, JUST BECAUSE he sought after power, and who had
>always striven to interrogate the world in the way which was MOST inimical
>to himself, in order not to hide from the truth, had therefore indulged
>himself as a thinker less than almost any scientist; one thinks of Plato,
>Newton (who also went mad, for the same kinds of reasons), Darwin, maybe
>Godel and a few mathematicians, but there are precious few others in the
>entire unfolding of western civilisation and none whose devotion to the
>unyielding perverse malice of facticity was more true, than Karl Marx's.
Yet
>at the end of his life he was obliged to face the unyielding facts of
>absolute failure, absolute seeming-miscomprehension of the world he'd
>striven so hard to deconstruct. It is hard to imagine a more profound
>personal tragedy, a sense of a life completely wasted, than this, than must
>have afflicted him.
>
>The man's life was a tragedy consumed by terrible poverty and personal
>disaster. What sustained him through all of that, and made him hope that
the
>bourgeoisie would rue his painful illnesses, was an incorrigible belief in
>the certain outcome of events, but it was not to be. He was not justified
by
>events, and died painfully, in despair, defeated and in obscurity.
>
>Mark Jones
>
>
>
>
>
