How to Use Karl Marx as a Conversational Exit Strategy
Thanksgiving may never be the same.
In Boston, I had a neighbor with whom I did not get along. He taught ethics at one of the universities. He didn’t wear a mask during a global pandemic, so I somehow also suspect he wasn’t particularly good at ethics. He certainly wasn’t good at taking out his trash bin, but I’ll say no more.
One day, he and I attempted a polite conversation. I mentioned, because he was ostensibly an academic, that I was listening to a lecture series on Karl Marx which had been recommended to me by a friend.
I should also mention I’d only read a few chapters of Das Kapital in university, but a good friend of mine had taken up reading Marx. We’d gone down to Starbucks near MIT, and he’d told me all about it. I love listening to smart people talk about the things that interest them.
He’s not a communist. I shouldn’t have to mention that, but you know Americans can get a bit panicky on this topic. Also, in recent years, that same friend has been studying the Talmud; he’s not even Jewish. He enjoys reading the Bible and I absolutely know he’s not a Christian because he refuses to celebrate Christmas on principle. But I do celebrate Christmas — or Yule, if you like — and there hasn’t been a Christian in my bloodline since the 1920s, so I don’t know what he’s doing with that one. Everyone should be able to celebrate Christmas. It’s wonderful and festive, and I’ll fight anybody who says otherwise.
Mind you, I doubt Karl Marx celebrated Christmas. I’ll go ahead and admit I’m not really a Marxist, and that I cannot possibly be a Marxist, for no other reason than I cannot seem to finish reading Das Kapital. That said, I’ve read enough to have learned Marx is not quite the evil wizard that cable news channels owned by billionaires desperately need you to believe.
Marx was required reading at university, just as it should be. Also, through pure luck, I found myself with a university mentor who was (in his words) rather good at what he does. He’s a historian of German history and, with the patience of a saint, he somehow furnished me with some decent methodologies. I can, for example, talk about Nietzsche for like three hours if you like. I mean, I don’t, but I can. Furthermore, I can do so in a manner that would not irritate a German-speaking scholar in the field.
Among other things, he specifically insisted I read some Marx because, of course, you can’t really understand what happened in the 20th Century if you haven’t read Marx.
Similar story with Freud. We don’t take his work as gospel, but we can acknowledge he had interesting thoughts which shaped many generations of thinkers. His influence on our world today is still difficult to fully recognize.
So there I was. A hapless working class kid from Queensland with a decent university education. What was I going to do? Write novels? HAHA, I do not come from money. My father wanted me to become a police officer. I went overseas and found work in IT, instead.
It was interesting. I worked among people who didn’t quite realize the scope or peculiar nature of my education. They saw me as some hoodie-wearing IT guy, or something. My neighbor, the hapless and ill-educated ethics professor, also could not have seen me coming. He hated talking to me, because evidently I was better read than he was, and this annoyed him. I don’t know why it annoyed him. I love being around people who are better-educated than me. My wife is, for one. So is that maniac I mentioned who, these days, is reading the Talmud. (His likeness appears in the Harvard Skull Fiasco as that meddlesome bureaucrat!)
Oh, the other thing? Because we’d talked about Marx that one time, he later sent me this limited-edition commemorative 0 euro note.
Where was I, again? That’s right — I was telling you about that nitwit I’d just bumped into. My neighbor. We were outside my house and he was asking me what I was listening to, and I told him it was some lecture about Karl Marx and that it was all very interesting.
And he said: “Oh, I would never read Marx. It sounds too violent!”
Now, that’s precisely the sort of joke that a smart person would make because, you know, Marx is an economist. In the simplest terms, he somewhat felt that working people in the 19th Century were treated poorly by wealthy factory owners. There’s more to it, but that’s most of it. The poor, in his view, were little more than slaves. After analyzing it, and producing a dense economic treatise, he encouraged the poor to stage a revolution and perhaps seize back their rights.
One might ask oneself, was he inspired by the American Revolution? Did Americans inspire Karl Marx? The answer is, of course Yes. Yes, he did, and I will never not think that funny.
But to be clear, when Marx wrote of revolution, it was not the 20th Century. It was before totalitarians like Mao and Stalin took the label of communists for themselves, and started crushing the, uh, working class beneath fists of iron.
The Cultural Revolution in China (1967) gave the word a different meaning again. And then, decades later, the word revolution came to signify a new iPhone being released by a major corporation. So you can see, understanding Marx, in today’s world, takes a bit of earnest scholarship.
But Americans aren’t really supposed to think about any of this. Wealthy individuals — you know, the sort of people who make sizable endowments to colleges and universities — do not need the next generation of underpaid employees thinking of themselves as members of an exploited underclass.
Of course, if you think that sounds implausible, or too conspiratorial, here’s an article in the Harvard Crimson which I very much suggest you read. My favorite quote:
“[Billionaire Ken Griffin] added that Harvard students were ‘whiny snowflakes’ caught in a misguided ideology of oppressor and oppressed during his remarks.”
Well, I don’t know about you, but I find his words terribly reassuring. So let’s return to my neighbor, who, as I mentioned, won’t open a book by a German author because he’s heard, somewhere, in his academic setting, that it’s violent. (And possibly caught in a misguided ideology of oppressor and oppressed). Unfortunately, I had allowed myself to forget that my neighbor was born tragically without a soul or a sense of humor, and so assumed he was making some sort of high-brow joke about people not understanding Karl Marx.
So I said, “I know what you mean. I refuse to read the Bible, in case it makes me interested in taking up carpentry.”
He ... uh … he rolled his eyes, then, and explained that the Bible had nothing to do with carpentry. I didn’t know what to say, so I elected to do the silliest thing possible, as usual, and continue with the joke.
“Well, I mean, you say that, but how did Jesus die, eh? You live by the carpentry, you die by the carpentry. That’s the message I’m taking away from your book. Also, it all sounds too violent?”
Why do I remember this conversation so vividly? Because it was the last time that man ever spoke to me. He departed, thinking I was some sort of communist. And this, I’ll admit, has interested me ever since.
First, I’d spent years in America without quite knowing how to politely persuade a person not to talk to me. I never thought to mention Karl Marx. I felt like a damned fool, in retrospect. I’d had twenty excruciating conversations with that neighbor. In retrospect, I might possibly have reduced that number to three.
On the other hand, and perplexingly, I also knew my fearful-of-Marx neighbor also considered himself an … actual leftist.
How? How does that even work?
So, let’s review. In the broadest possible strokes, if one had to summarize the basic gist of Karl Marx’s thoughts, it would probably boil down to this one sentence.
“Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of the life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.”
In other words, your garden-variety billionaire, or your average media corporation, does not care whether employees live or die. They will absolutely act like psychopaths; they will pump toxic waste into waterways, and poison the Earth. They will do this reliably, unless compelled by the people (democratically-elected governments) to behave themselves.
That’s the basic diagnosis. His suggested remedy, back then, was a sort of workers’ revolution. And to be fair, if you lived in his generation, and looked back at the American Revolution, you would most likely agree.
They had children working in factories, people. Karl Marx was saying, ‘hey maybe this isn’t cool’ and everyone was like, damn, he makes a good point. And the robber barons were all like, ‘this all sounds like a misguided ideology of oppressor and oppressed..’
But today, many of us wouldn’t opt for a revolution. A revolution would bring about the deaths of millions of people. Nobody with a brain wants this. Most of us just want a fairer, more equitable system. We all want free healthcare, and we think billionaires should not control government, and that sort of thing.
So, here’s a question to entertain. What is the opposite of capitalism? If your answer is communism, then you’re not just wrong, you’ve fallen victim to a certain form of propaganda. Because the opposite of capitalism is simply democracy. Capitalism advocates for a society that is run, and owned, exclusively by people with capital; that is, billionaires like Ken Griffin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, etc.
On the opposite end of that is a democracy in which the poorest citizen has equal political power to its wealthiest citizen. This is broad strokes, of course, but do remember that I absolutely refuse to pivot into becoming a political economist. And besides, no matter what the Minions of Rupert Murdoch tell you, there’s nothing really contentious here.
One thing billionaires do to attack democracy is to reframe any sort of effective governance as communism. Or, they conflate socialism with communism and totalitarianism. They do this in bad faith, and it’s a dangerous thing to do. Not for us, in particular, but for the billionaires. Let me show you why.
The majority of Americans do want free healthcare. They want and expect affordable housing, as well as higher wages and, of course, a better quality of life. In Europe, such causes fall under the general description of ‘social democracy’, but the term seems to be a little unfamiliar, still, within the United States. But I would argue that most ordinary Americans — so called liberals and conservatives — agree with each other about many, many things. Scratch the surface and you’ll find most Americans are moderate social democrats. This is why cable news channels like everybody arguing about immigrants, instead.
Meanwhile, and only two weeks ago, a social democrat became mayor of New York. That was really interesting. Again, social democrats don’t mind corporations existing; they just want them to operate within the bounds of the laws and regulations, and not (for instance) pollute drinking water. They want billionaires to pay much, much higher taxes. They want the existing system preserved, and they also seek to reduce the levels of exploitation that has brought forth all this very overt poverty.
Social democrats find this stuff pretty reasonable. And yet, this is how a billionaire would respond.
“All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody who is going to destroy our country,” he told reporters at his New Jersey golf club in August.” Donald Trump
There’s really only one reply I can make to this, and I can’t help repeating myself: Social democrats do not want to tear down the pillars of society; they want it better regulated. They want protections for workers, universal healthcare, and affordable houses. And yet, this is frequently framed as radical and unreasonable, and that is ultimately going to be bad for the billionaires.
My opinion? The billionaires should make a deal with the social democrats, who will at least protect the existing system. Because if they don’t? If they don’t help the middle class? If they just keep attacking them, and calling anyone seeking to preserve democracy a ‘radical communist’? What do I think will happen, then?
Well, do you remember when that healthcare CEO was gunned down in the street? The public reaction to that event was shockingly unsympathetic. Personally, I don’t think anybody wants to live in a world in which acts like that one become an every day occurrence. That would be bad world for everybody.
Warren Buffet once said in an interview, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” I think it’s self-evident from history that the rich cannot win a class war forever. Eventually, there arrives a period of intense upheaval and ugliness. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution — these were not good periods to be alive for anybody.
Personally, I don’t worry too much, and I’m generally hopeful for the future. The billionaires will have to make a deal with reformers — social democrats — or, they’ll create a society of desperate people who want to burn the system to the ground. It’s just more rational to preserve the system and bolster the middle-class, otherwise — and I often think about this — who’s going to shop at Amazon when nobody can afford to shop at Amazon? What happens to your quarterly reports then?
But my main point, obviously, is … well, do you remember my awful neighbor, who took to avoiding me after I mentioned Karl Marx? Well, all I’m offering, here, is an example for you. It’s Thanksgiving, and you might be sitting there, listening to some hapless fool talking about immigrants eating the cats and dogs. And if this is the case, I would urge you to remember the Parable of the Annoying Neighbor. Because you don’t need to deal with that. Sometimes, you can just ... talk about Karl Marx. You could read a certain person’s Substack aloud.
Worst case scenario? You stay home next year, you order pizza, and you play video games. Either way, we end up winning, right?
Yours in solidarity, comrade!
Kris St.Gabriel
Thank you, as always, for a witty, astute, and hilarious post. I love the story of your idiotic "intellectual" neighbor and how you dealt with him.
Thanks, this made me laugh out loud