September 28, 2006: Where it all Began

Enough of Generation M and the fictions we are making up to hide behind it! Let us try to remember, for better or worse, that there is a "world of work" out there. This makes it a good time to remember that the same essay that carries Marx' wonderful assessment of religion also signals his discovery of the proletariat. This forms the basis for today's commonplace book entry:

Where, then, the positive possibility of emancipation in Germany? Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong as such. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional title but only a human title, which is not partially opposed to the consequences but is totally opposed to the assumptions of the German political system; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, and thereby emancipating all of them; a sphere, in short, which is the total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat.

This seems to be where it all began, and one can only wonder if Marx could imagine where it would lead!

September 21, 2006: Marx on Religion

We all know that Marx invoked opium as a metaphor for religion, but how many readers know the context for this metaphor? I recently found it in a review ("critique") of Hegel's Philosophy of Right that Marx had written for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. Since I still find the Philosophy of Right to be Hegel at his most impenetrable (which is saying something, given all the other Hegel texts out there), I have to confess that I took a great deal of pleasure in observing Marx have a go at the text with one of his most flamboyant rants. I would not say that religion was one of the major topics in Hegel's text; and, to be fair to Hegel, Marx does not seem to lay out what it is that Hegel says about religion that he opposes. The bottom line is that, Hegel or no Hegel, Marx uses this review as an opportunity to launch a rhetorical salvo at the concept of religion that goes way beyond the metaphor we know so well. Here is the heart of it:

The basis of irreligious criticism is: man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion, indeed, is the self-consciousness and the self-esteem of the man who has not yet found himself or who has already lost himself. But man is not an abstract being crouching outside the world. Man is man’s world, the state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because state and society are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedia, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and the general ground for the consummation and justification of this world. It is the ghostly realization of the human essence, ghostly because the human essence possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The overcoming of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand that they should abandon illusions about their conditions is the demand to give up conditions that require illusions.

September 20, 2006 (1): Ignoring History

It is time to "read into the record" those sentences from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which always seem to be ignored in spite of their value:

Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Never mind that we have yet to track down the source of Hegel's observation. We can forgive Marx the rhetorical flourish in light of the subsequent insight!

I was reminded of this remark while reading Guenther Roth's (necessarily?) massive introduction to Economy and Society, the project to translate all of Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft into English. One particular sentence leapt out at me this morning:

Weber looked more closely at the consequences of the seizure of power than did Marx in spite of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"; he saw that revolutionary domination can survive only when an efficient administration suppresses the expropriated former holders of legitimate power.

Can we read this sentence without thinking about Iraq? Can we think about Iraq without thinking about Marx's two-fold analysis of history: the revolutionary overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy followed by the revolutionary overthrow of Ba'athist rule? There is no doubting the general consensus regarding the tragic nature of the first phase. We have only to read the news every day to complete Marx's couplet. I suppose there is little need to comment on how much thought was given to "efficient administration" before going in with the big guns!