3 Marxian Oddities

 3 Marxian Oddities

 

Once I 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 Gödelian undecidability; 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 Gödelian undecidability ensures that no system of thought can prove every truth, or even correctly determine its own consistency.

The first two abolish Laplace’s nightmare vision of a single intelligence holding the entire path of a deterministic universe in a single equation. Gödelian undecidability rebuked the ideologies raging around him, including Marx’s.