Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think there were several key ideas that Marx deployed that were destined to have such an impact. And in some ways, they were actually kind of contradictory. On the one hand, Marx insisted that history has a purpose, that history is not just random events, but that rather it's history, we might say, with a capital H. History moving in a deliberate direction.
History having a goal, a direction that it was predestined to move in. At the same time, in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels also suggested that there was a role for special individuals who might, even if history was still moving in this predetermined direction, might... given an extra push, might play a heroic role in that process.
And I think that these two ideas added together, the notion that there is a science of revolution that suggests that you can move in a deliberate and meaningful, rational way towards the end of history and the resolution of all conflicts. a total liberation of the human person, and that moreover, that was inevitable, that that was pre-programmed and destined in the order of things.
When you add to that the notion that there's also room for heroism and the individual role, this ended up being tremendously powerful as a combination. Earlier thinkers who were socialists had already dreamt of or projected futures where all conflict would be resolved and human life would achieve some sort of perfection.
Marx added these other elements that made it far more powerful than the earlier versions that he decried as merely utopian socialism.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, one has to stress Marx would have gotten extremely upset at this point in the conversation because to call someone a utopian was precisely to argue that you're not scientific, you're not rational, you're not laying out the iron laws of history, you're merely hoping for the best. And that might be laudable, but it was fundamentally unrealistic.
That said, hidden among Marx's insistence that there are laws and structures as history moves through class conflict modes of production towards its ultimate goal of a comprehensive final revolution that will see all exploitation overthrown and people finally being freed from necessity in in. smuggled in among those things are most definitely utopian elements.
And they come especially at the end in which Marx sketches the notion of what things will look like after the revolution has resolved all problems. There, vagueness sets in. it's clear that it's a blessed state that's being talked about.
People no longer exploiting one another, people no longer subject to necessity or poverty, but instead enjoying all of the productivity of industrialization that hitherto had been put to private profit, now collectively owned and deployed. The notion that one will be able to work At one job in the morning and then engage in leisure activity or yet another fulfilling job in the afternoon.
All of this free of any contradictions, free of necessity, free of the sort of ordinary irritations that we experience in our ordinary lives. That's deeply utopian. The difference was that Marx charted a route towards that outcome that presented itself as cutting-edge science and, moreover, having the full credibility that science commanded so much, especially in the 19th and early 20th century.
to the extent that they were based on inequalities and on man's exploitation of man, the result was supposed to be a resolution of all of this. And inevitably, when you talk about the history of communism, you have to include the fact that this often tragic and dramatic history produced a lot of jokes, jokes that were in part reactions sometimes to the ideological claims made by people like Marx.
And one of the famous jokes was that What's the difference between capitalism and communism? And the joke's answer was capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and communism is the exact opposite.
Marx had been a student of Hegel. And Hegel, as a German idealist philosopher, had announced very definitively that history has a purpose. History is not a collection of random facts. And as an idealist, he proposed that
The true movement of history, the true meaning of history, what made history, history with a capital H, something that's transcendent and meaningful, was that it was the working out of an idea through different civilizations, different stages of historical development. And that idea was the idea of human freedom.
So it was not individuals or great thinkers alone making history and having an impact. It was the idea itself striving to come to fruition, striving to come to an ever more perfect realization.
In the case of Hegel, in this very Prussian and German context, he identified the realization of freedom also with the growth of the state, because he thought that governments are the ones that are going to be able to deliver on laws and on the ideal of a state of the rule of law, in German, the Rechtsstaat.
That was a noble dream at the same time as we recognize from our perspective, state power has been put to all sorts of purposes besides guaranteeing the rule of law in our own times. What Marx did was to take this characteristic insistence of Hegel that history is moving in a meaningful and discernible way towards the realization of an idea and flipped it on its head.
Marx insisted that Hegel had so much that was right in his thinking, but what he had neglected to keep in mind was that, in fact, history is based on matter. So hence dialectical materialism, dialectical referring to things proceeding by clashes or conflict towards an ever greater realization of some essential idea. And so Marx adapts a lot of ideas of Hegel.
You can recognize entire rhetorical maneuvers that are indebted to that earlier training, but now taken in a very different direction. What remained, though, was the confidence of being on the right side of history. And there are few things that are as intoxicating as being convinced that your actions not only are right in the abstract, but are also destined to be successful.
Absolutely. So Engels, when he gives the grade-side eulogy for his beloved friend Marx, he
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