At a time of great upheaval the feel good rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto, its call to arms and claims of power for the oppressed, fell on many receptive ears. The testament to the power of its inspiring nature is that today, even after the fall of communism’s once mighty empire, people can still become enchanted by the message. For those who read the words of Marx the question of where or not they become new members of the faith rests solely on how strongly they are swayed by the rhetoric of his writing.
It should be abundantly clear to someone from today that, “neither capitalism nor the working class has developed as Marx anticipated” and this alone should give one pause before jumping in too deeply (Aronson 59). When someone creates a plan for a new society and then becomes so demonstrably wrong in how that society will come into existence we need to take a critical look at the plan itself, no matter how good it makes us feel. That critical eye should then be focused on the lynch pin of Marx’s plan, human nature.
Putting aside the “spin” the entirety of the communist system, as envisioned by Marx, can be boiled down to ten separate points. But these points are not merely my interpretation of the system. Marx himself, at the end of the second part of the Manifesto states, “Nevertheless, in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.”(Marx 75). At which point he then highlights the list of ten core things that must take place for the communist system to work. With a look at only a few of the core points we can begin to see that Marx’s stance on human nature leads to an absurd utopian vision without the need to troll the rest of the screed for fodder such as his call for the, “abolition of the family”(Marx 71).
In the first of his ten points Marx calls for the, “Abolition of property in land and the application of all rents of land to public purposes”(Marx 75), which in short means the state owns everything but you still have to pay rent. For Marx the inability to own land is a good thing. He thinks that without the influence of the bourgeois in society that people would naturally prefer to pay rent for housing that they can never ever have any hope of owning.
The second point calls for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” (Marx 75) which on the surface seems benign, after all we have a graduated income tax here in the US today. However in detail, what he is calling for is a very low salary cap. The tax rates would be setup so that no matter your income everyone gets the same amount. Sound fair? Let’s compare the ER surgeon with the stoner pizza delivery guy. The stoner, who may or may not have finished high school, works a few nights a week spending most of his massive free time playing Play Station and getting “baked”. The surgeon spent decades in a serious and demanding education system so that he can work 60+ hour weeks in a highly stressful environment. While it is true that here in our market economy the surgeon gets handsome recompense we still have a shortage of doctors. If we have a shortage now, how can you hope to get anyone to become a doctor if the most they can hope for is the exact same rewards as the pizza guy? Simple, the state monitors young students and one day informs then that they are going to medical school. Again for Marx in the new society free of the oppression of class structure people would rather have the state tell them what to do.
In the sixth point Marx states that the communist system will need, “centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state”(Marx 75). For Marx freedom of movement and communication are nothing more than bourgeois tricks. In the new order people will be quiet happy allow the state to control whom they talk with and where they can go. In that lies true freedom.
One of the more insidious of his proposals is the call for the, “equal obligation of all to work”(Marx 75) in the eighth point. Which, like many of his proposals sound reasonable on the surface, would have, had it been in practice in the US in the 1840’s, put Henry David Thoreau into prison for life. It’s one thing to say that everyone should do an honest day’s work and something altogether different to compel, by force, everyone to work. Do we want to replace the words on the statue of Liberty reading, “Give me your tired…” with, “Arbeit Macht Frei”?
Simply put, for Marx, human nature is nothing more than a mirage. It’s just our current world view and can be easily altered. In Marx’s plan the destruction of the ruling, “bourgeois” class leads irrevocably to the creation of a communist system. This is possible because in the plan there is no basic human nature. Our actions, thoughts and desires are what the ruling class wants us to think. It’s this view of human nature that is the foundation upon which the entire plan of communism rests, and that without collapses. Even the most hardened Marxist will agree that if Marx was wrong on human nature then the plan gets chucked in the bin which is why today, 157 years after the Manifesto was published, modern Marxists make such a point of defending the Marx’s denial of human nature. The Marxists group Youth For International Socialism (YFIS) makes great pains to prove that “so-called human nature” is nothing more than a facet of a peoples “world view”.
In order to illustrate their point the YFIS go to the world of art and shows us how art has changed through the ages and is different from culture to culture. In that it has changed and does vary they are correct. However they then make the leap of logic that since humans do produce many different works of art ergo, there is no underlying human nature. They, and Marx, make a seductive argument that humanity can be easily altered by trying to merge human nature and world view into one malleable outlook. But lacking the genius and power of Marx’s pen they have gone to the world of art to prove themselves and in doing so they have, to be blunt, chosen poorly.
There is nothing in existence that more fully shows the truth of human nature than the art that we produce. For starters if the YFIS is correct then what are the statistical odds that all cultures in all different places and times would produce works of art? If so, how can a Westerner be moved by African tribal art? If so, why did 20th century Japanese film master Akira Kurosawa translate 16th century Shakespearean plays into Japanese settings? If so, then why do we still listen to the stories told by an ancient blind Greek? Surely we don’t share the same “world view” as the prehistoric Greeks and Trojans yet we can identify with the greed of Agamemnon, the anger of Menelaus, the pride of Achilles, the love of Hector and the sorrow of Priam. That we can so easily relate to the story of a people so far removed from us today should be self evidence of the existence of an underlying human nature but do not expect those like the YFIS to concede this. They will not, can not, concede any ground on the subject of human nature for to do so is to bring to an end their belief in Marx’s grand plan.
In a way, even with his controversial views and the failure of the governments that tried to create his system, it is utterly impossible to prove Marx was wrong. Any modern day Marxists will quickly counter with claims like, Marxism has yet to be “properly” implemented, capitalism “will” collapse or to point out that you have been so thoroughly fooled that you really believe in “human nature”. The hindsight history offers us rather than cause the modern Marxist to reevaluate the plan instead drives them further in their “messianic eschatology”(Munck 6).
It is Marx’s view on human nature that leaves his entire plan untenable. It led to his mistaken belief in the imminent collapse of capitalism. It led to his erroneous prediction that industrialization would led to a stratification of society into two vastly separated classes. His denial of human nature allowed him to develop a utopian plan that the likes of Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot would be able to use as justification for the extermination of millions. Should their sins be laid at his feet? Not entirely. Marx wasn’t a monster. He really did have the best intentions and truly wanted to make the world a better place. Unfortunately, good intentions aren’t enough. In the end Marx’s great error was that by discounting human nature as nothing more than a variable equation he removed humanity itself from his vision.
Works Cited
Aronson, Ronald Farewell to Marxism. New York: The Gilford Press, 1995.
Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.
Munck, Ronaldo. Marx @ 2000. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Youth For International Socialism. What About “Human Nature”?. FAQ on
Defending Marx.
