3 Marxian Oddities

I recently found a copy of Marx and Engel’s “Communist Manifesto”. It was at the recycling center, of course; so I literally took the text out of the dustbin of history. I read it because, truth to tell, I had never read it before. My Russian blog readers may now scoff at my Marx-virginity.

Reading it, I find it mostly stale; some obvious truths, some obvious falsehoods. But included also were oddities; head-scratchers perhaps explainable as relics of history.

One is “the community of women”, which Marx advocated, and said already exists amongst the bourgeoisie. By this I suppose he meant the collective ownership… of women? By the men, I suppose? But I think the women themselves might have a different idea; namely, that they own themselves. Marx did not foresee feminism.

He also called for “the gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country”. I see the point of this not at all. Pol Pot tried this, minus the gradual part; Mao Tse Tung tried the Great Leap Foreward; both disasters. You might say that Detroit, now reverting from city to ruins to farmland, in Marxian slow-motion, is embodying this program; for it is indeed happening due to the dialectic of capitalist creative destruction; Detroit now on the destruction end of it.

The strangest thing to me now, here in the 21^st century, is Marx’s 19^th century faith in inevitability as scientific. But 20^th century science revealed quantum uncertainty, deterministic chaos, and Goedelian undecideability; three mighty blows against inevitability of any sort. Quantum uncertainty ensures that every dynamic physical variable is known to only limited precision; deterministic chaos ensures that small causes have big effects in unpredictable ways; and Goedelian undecidability ensures that no system of thought can prove every truth, or even correctly determine its own consistency.

It seems to me that the first two abolish Laplace’s nightmare vision of a single intelligence holding the entire path of a deterministic universe in a single equation; and the third seems to me to be Goedel’s mathematical rebuke to the ideologies raging around him, including Marx’s.