Psyche, Science, and Society

Howard Zinn: ‘Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste.’

April 20th, 2007

Inveresk Street Ingrate has reproduced an old article by Howard Zinn on what he found valuable in the life and work of Karl Marx, appropriately titled ‘Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste.’ Well worth reading.

Here’s the explanation of the title:

remembered that famous statement of Marx: “Je ne suis pas Marxiste.” I always wondered why Marx, an English-speaking German who had studied Greek for his doctoral dissertation, would make such an important statement in French. But I am confident that he did make it, and I think I know what brought it on. After Marx and his wife Jenny had moved to London, where they lost three of their six children to illness and lived in squalor for many years, they were often visited by a young German refugee named Pieper. This guy was a total “noodnik” (there are “noodniks” all along the political spectrum stationed ten feet apart, but there is a special Left Noodnik, hired by the police, to drive revolutionaries batty). Pieper (I swear, I did not make him up) hovered around Marx gasping with admiration, once offered to translate Das Kapital into English, which he could barely speak, and kept organising Karl Marx Clubs, exasperating Marx more and more by insisting that every word Marx uttered was holy. And one day Marx caused Pieper to have a severe abdominal cramp when he said to him: “Thanks for inviting me to speak at your Karl Marx Club. But I can’t. I’m not a Marxist.”

From his conclusion:

He epitomised his own warning, that people, however advanced in their thinking, were weighted down by the limitations of their time. Still, Marx gave us acute insights, inspiring visions. I can’t imagine Marx being pleased with the “socialism” of the Soviet Union. He would have been a dissident in Moscow, I like to think. His idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the Paris Commune of 1871, where endless arguments in the streets and halls of the city gave it the vitality of a grass roots democracy, where overbearing officials could be immediately booted out of office by popular vote, where the wages of government leaders could not exceed that of ordinary workers, where the guillotine was destroyed as a symbol of capital punishment. Marx once wrote in the New York Times that he did not see how capital punishment could be justified “in a society glorifying in its civilisation.”

Perhaps the most precious heritage of Marx’s thought is his internationalism, his hostility to the nation state, his insistence that ordinary people have no nation they must obey and give their lives for in war, that we are all linked to one another across the globe as human beings. This is not only a direct challenge to modern capitalist nationalism, with its ugly evocations of hatred for “the enemy” abroad, and its false creation of a common interest for all within certain artificial borders. It is also a rejection of the narrow nationalism of contemporary “Marxist” states, whether the Soviet Union, or China, or any of the others.

In addition to the important concepts of Marx mentioned by Zinn, I would add  that of commodity fetishism. The idea that human relationships get transformed into things that are given a price and bought and sold on the open market has greater resonance today, when thre is virtually nothing that isn’t for sale. Beauty? Buy it here! Love? This way?

And my own profession of psychotherapy has transformed intimacy into a commodity, available to those who can afford it. In typical capitalist fashion, now that therapeutic intimacy is a commodity, its providers are having their wages squeezed lower and lower. Marx, presciently predicted the proletarianization of all. In our time we are seeing this prediction being realized as “professionals,”  doctors, lawyers, therapists, etc., are increasing turned into employees, “wage slaves”, loosing control of their professional destinies and doing the bidding of others.

Entry Filed under: Democracy, Inequality, Politics, Radical Politics, Social Change, Social Issues, Workers