Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 02:41:27 +0700
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (donna jones)
Subject: marx: titan of the poor


I thought that I would reproduce part of this reflection of Marx by William
J Blake (whose 1939 textbook I have learned much, but not enough,
from).Entitled "Karl Marx: Titan of the Poor", it appeared in the New
Masses, 5/7/40, on the 122nd anniversary of Marx.  The original carried the
institutional baggage of the CP.  It does not seem to me that the one-line
defense of the Soviet Union and Stalin at the time of the war with fascism
has much to do with the content of the piece and especially its
contemporary relevance.
>
>"Not for nothing did marx make his his motto 'I am a human being, nothing
>human is alien to me." That excerpt fromthe old Roman comedy was dear to him.
>If he appeared cruel in his remarks on Schurz and Kugelmann, was not their
>career as he prophesied? He foresaw the public future of every revolutionist
>and he caviled at the conduct that foreshadowed it, not because he was
>informed by spleen, but because his eye carried a microscope slide of honesty
>and acute, detailed vision.
>"To those who wish to see the difference between marx and the economists, let
>them look at the permutations and combinations of surplus value, as given in
>his chapter on the total law of surplus value.  Suddenly he pitches out of the
>orbit of economic "theory" into the human needs of men,into their biological
>possibilities. No Ricardo, no boasted institutionalist, has ever so summed-up
>theory and the living needs of men. No other man has so situated theory in a
>historic, that is, a human setting. No other theoretician has made material
>law subject to the creative will of a rising class. He never studied "laws of
>political economy" as the rules of Medes and Persians. He annihilated the
>codes of science. He saw science as the plastic servant of man, whose
>consciousness of necessity was the springboad to freedom.
>"Marx's passion came from his deep belief that classless society, producing
>the true individual, would at last break down the barrier between man's soul
>and his surrounding institutions, that paradox of art since the liberating
>Renaissance. He carried the dream of Leonardo da Vinci to its scientific
>expression. That goal is human and inspiring. Marx restored the vision of
>paradise, not in the realms of the dead, but in the living labor of communal
>man....
>"When squealing ex-socialist revisionists, purer-than-pure revolutionists,
>etc. rush into print with one eye on the publication's check and the other on
>an alibi for future Gestapos, and simply strew the 'intellectual' journals
>with thrice-strain Marx, we must be near the great turning point at
>which...certain governments 'ruling by grace of God', will be missing."
>
>
d jones



     ------------------