Painting The Town red

Get out the red flags and throw away all your stuff! Because it’s time to talk about Karl Marx, and communism.

He's got something you don't. A great big bushy beard!

Marx started his academic life brilliantly, initially studying law, he was held up as a model pupil. Until, to the shock of his tutors, he changed to philosophy. And from that, no doubt to the utter horror of his parents, he took up journalism. He’d have caused quite a stir in any press conference no doubt, what with the crazy-rabbi look going on. Indeed, his radical thinking got him kicked out of pretty much any country he tried to live in, until he came to London, the home of free thought.

Marx’s basic principle was that man was a productive animal. He is master of the world because of his use of tools (In a sense, you could say that man has out-evolved evolution).

Marx took a Darwin-like approach to his research, studying every aspect of society in order to try and understand it. He believed that other philosophers made no attempt at real change, they just spent their time sitting in darkened rooms, pontificating all the worthy questions of life.




Indeed his tombstone is inscribed with the words:

“Workers of the world unite”

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world - the point however is to change it.”

Very eloquently written, and ever the pragmatist.

Engles, an associate of Marx who also had a fantastic beard, and helped publish the Communist Manifesto. Said that Marx achieved in his philosophy, a fusion of Hegelian philosophy (dialectics), British empiricism (As of Adam Smith), and French revolutionary politics, especially the socialist side (remember from our romanticism discussion, “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”).

Though he was a self-proclaimed disciple of Hegel, he attacked the mysticism and idealism which clouded much of the man's work. He did not approve of wishy-washy ideas like the Geist, or the spirit of the world. But he did approve of the Dialectic, that opposing points of view could come together and form new (supposedly better) points of view. The dialectic that Marx favoured was based on materialism. No he didn’t spend his time angsting over the latest PlayStation console, or a particular polo shirt that is exactly the same as the one from Peacock’s only this one has a special label which makes it fly or something. No, his materialism was that which is based in the real world. Not the ethereal haze of other philosophers.

In this respect, the main focus of the dialectic was the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The proletariat are the plebeians, the workers, they were the people who had no means of production save for themselves. They are the lowest rung on the ladder, and as such, they have nothing to lose. As Marx said: “they have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

On the other side of the scale, the Bourgeoisie are the people who have property, whether they’re rich aristocrats, or the meanest landlord, they own some form of subsistence.  Marx predicted that at some point in the future. There would be a clash between the two parties, resulting in the victory of the proletariat, and the introduction of a socialist system in which production is used for the benefit of society as opposed to the benefit of the market (for an outline of the market system referred to, look at my earlier post on Adam Smith’s Opulence of Nations). This would show all the people that this is to the common good (hello hello, traces of Rousseau’s General Will idea) and the state would be able to disappear. Leaving a society not alienated by the division of labour (another Smith idea) as all activities are considered equal. The rocket scientist is not above the farmer, they are both as important as each other.

“From each according to their ability, to each according to his need”

Of course all of this is brilliant in theory, the USSR took up their own version of it, as did several other countries (everyone knows about the Berlin Wall for example, not to mention Cuba) though none of them got it quite right. It’s probably worth remembering that whilst Marx was dying, he said to his best pupil something along the lines of:

 “You were my best pupil, and not even you got what I’d meant.”

Damn Commies.

Rousseau, Romanticism, and the French Revolution.

Bright-eyed and bushy tailed, we emerge from our festering Christmas pits ready to glory in the renewed magnificence of HCJ. After a brief fistfight with a script writing lecturer, we put down our flag and were ready to get cracking. This year we kicked off with a sortie into the Romantic. And no, I'm not talking about Stephanie Meyer's sparkly, angsty, vampire novels (Team Edward FTW).

Perhaps a little background is needed.

We're in France, it is the end the 18th century, the Church's creative force has diminished, and a man named Jean Jacques Rousseau has taken a sabbatical to wander the mountains of Switzerland and the beaches of Vienna. Following an intense experience listening to the sounds of nature, and finding all his cares slipping away, he decides that the void of creative force left by the Church should be filled by the divinity of nature. He felt that all that had been written and proposed before were lies, that there was honesty in nature. That the empiricists were wrong, and it is feeling, not reason, that drives us. Reason did nought but stand in the way of innocence and beauty, and what it was to be truly human.

Rousseau calls to mind a state of nature, quite different to that of Hobbes, who would have us believe that before society was formed, we were all psychotic savages living in an anarchical world and that we cannot be trusted to live without a sword of Damocles threatening to drop at the slightest provocation. Rousseau claims that natural man was virtuous and was the perfect example of humanity. Indeed, he glorified what he called the 'Noble Savage' as being pure and beautiful.

While I'm sure he salivated over the idea of stripping down to a loincloth and running around the countryside, he was intelligent enough to realise that this would not be possible, what with all the trappings of society cemented about us. He claims that the origin of civil society and all of it's incumbent inequalities was found in property.

"The first man [he wrote] who, having enclosed a piece of land, bethought himself of saying "this is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of society." One wonders what he would have said to Locke on the subject if they had ever met, Locke being a great lover of property and basing near all his philosophy on the stuff. But I digress.

Rousseau's Romanticism was built upon the supremacy of emotions and was essentially a reaction to the enlightenment, which he perceived to be passionless. He despised the situation that man had gotten himself into, saying: "Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are." As far as his view is concerned, the world was is rotten, and civilisation corrupt. Man is engulfed in an endless competition of self esteem, which can never truly be conquered, 'am I doing as well as I could be?', 'why is my horse a poorer model than my neighbours?', 'why is the other man's joopleberry shrub always a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet?' etc.

Rousseau wished for a different type of social contract than had been proposed before. The problem was finding a government that would protect you, yet leave you free to do what you wished. And also create laws which everyone agrees with, allowing everyone to keep their freedom.

Now, Rousseau's idea of 'everyone' needs a little explanation. He came up with the concept of 'general will'  which decides the best way doing anything e.g. "we shall all eat Crunchy Nut for breakfast." Every citizen has a share in the general will, allowing everyone to be free, yet it is a conglomerate, and if an individual was to differ from the mass, then they would be "forced to be free." think of it as a tyrannical form of peer pressure, à la 1984.

This 'cult of sensibility', while initially, not particularly popular,was a political time bomb that would throw all of France into chaos. All it would take was a country that was completely out of pocket, and a king willing to let the paysans help sort it out. Quel surprise! Just such an event occurred. The commoners were brought in to discuss the country's financial problems and they decided this would be a perfect time to write their own constitution, which happened to be in the image of Mr Rousseau. Men being free and equal, and laws being an expression of "general will". This eventually led to the French Revolution.

As revolutions go, this one began somewhat, bureaucratically. Until the Bastille was stormed, a symbolic act that apparently irritated the six or seven prisoners residing there, as they had probably been having a kip. Whilst all this unruliness was going on in France, radicals in England, were becoming more and more intrigued. Indeed, many went over to France to see Rousseau's natural man becoming a reality for themselves. Wordsworth wrote that "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven."

But of course, this could not last. The power vacuum that resulted from the idea of general will, meant that no one had any idea who was supposed to be in charge, leaving everyone running around like the proverbial chicken. France's neighbouring countries, were not looking too happily at the chaos beginning to engulf France. The Prussians (being renowned for their sense of liberty and their happy-go-lucky attitude) were looking to invade France and banish this unseemly attitude once and for all. And the French, becoming more and more paranoid, began handing out weapons willy-nilly to allow the citizens to defend themselves and their country (the two being virtually synonymous). And this, coupled with their paranoia, made the French begin to massacre each other in search of counter revolutionaries. Tens of thousands died before it was brought to an end, along with much of the revolution, though it changed France forever. A legacy of the Romantics. Take that Robert Pattinson!

During the lecture, we also discussed Mary Wollstonecraft, and her writing, including her Vindications of the Rights of Women. But as she will be the subject of our seminar next week, I will discuss her in more detail then. Cheerio!