[Reader-list] Fwd: *“Thanks for inviting me to speak at your Karl Marx Club. But I can’t. I’m not a Marxist.”*K Marx Quoted by Howard Zinn ,in Post by Sukla Sen elsewhere

[Venugopalan K M]

--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sukla Sen <sukla.sen at gmail.com>

Quote

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.

Marx had something important to say not only as a critic of capitalism, but
as a warning to revolutionaries, who, he wrote in The German Ideology, had
better revolutionise themselves if they intend to do that to society. He
offered an antidote to the dogmatists, the hard-liners, the Piepers, the
Stalins, the commissars, the “Marxists.” He said: *“Nothing human is alien
to me.”*

That seems a good beginning for changing the world.
Unquote

http://invereskstreet.blogspot.com/2006/09/howard-zinns-je-ne-suis-pas-marxiste.html

<
http://invereskstreet.blogspot.com/2006/09/howard-zinns-je-ne-suis-pas-marxiste.html
>

*The following is reprinted from The Zinn Reader (1997, Seven Stories Press,
pp 574-578) and with the permission of the author.*

*For a long time I thought that there were important and useful ideas in
Marxist philosophy and political economy that should be protected from the
self-righteous cries on the right that "Marxism is dead,” as well as from
the arrogant assumptions of the commissars of various dictatorships that
their monstrous regimes represented “Marxism.” This piece was written for Z
Magazine <http://zmagsite.zmag.org/curTOC.htm>, and reprinted in my
bookFailure
To Quit <http://www.word-power.co.uk/catalogue/0896086763>* (Common Courage
Press, 1993).

Not long ago, someone referred to me publicly as a *"Marxist professor.”* In
fact, two people did. One was a spokesman for “Accuracy in Academia,”
worried that there were *“five thousand Marxist faculty members”* in the
United States (which diminished my importance, but also my loneliness). The
other was a former student I encountered on a shuttle to New York, a fellow
traveller. I felt a bit honoured. A “Marxist” means a tough guy (making up
for the pillowy connotation of the “professor”), a person of formidable
politics, someone not to be trifled with, someone who knows the difference
between absolute and relative surplus value, and what is commodity
fetishism, and refuses to buy it.

I was also a bit taken aback (a position which yoga practitioners understand
well, and which is good for you about once a day). Did “Marxist” suggest
that I kept a tiny stature of Lenin in my drawer and rubbed his head to
discover what policy to follow to intensify the contradictions o the
imperialist camp, or what songs to sing if we were sent away to such a camp?

Also, I 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.”*

That was a high point in Marx’s life, and also a good starting point for
considering Marx’s ideas seriously without becoming a Pieper (or a Stalin,
or Kim Il Sung, or any born-again Marxist who argues that every word in
Volume One, Two and Three, and especially in the Grundrisse, is
unquestionably true). Because it seems to me (risking that this may lead to
my inclusion in the second edition of Norman Podhoretz’s Register of
Marxists, Living or Dead), Marx had some very useful thoughts.

For instance, we find in Marx’s short but powerful Theses on Feuerbach the
idea that philosophers, who always considered their job was to interpret the
world, should now set about changing it, in their writings, and in their
lives.

Marx set a good example himself. While history has treated him as a
secondary scholar, spending all his time in the library of the British
Museum, Marx was a tireless activist all his life. He was expelled from
Germany, from Belgium, from France, was arrested and put on trial in
Cologne.

Exiled to London, he kept his ties with revolutionary movements all over the
world. The poverty-ridden flats that he and Jenny Marx and their children
occupied became busy centres of political activity, gathering places for
political refugees from the continent.

True, many of his writings were impossibly abstract (especially those on
political economy; my poor head at the age of nineteen swam, or rather
drowned, with ground rent and differential rent, the falling rate of profit
and the organic composition of capital). But he departed from that
constantly to confront the events of 1848, the Paris Commune, rebellion in
India, the Civil War in the United States.

The manuscripts he wrote at the age of twenty-five while an exile in Paris
(where he hung out in cafes with Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin, Heine, Stirner),
often dismissed by hard-line fundamentalists as “immature”, contain some of
the most profound ideas. His critique of capitalism in those Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts did not need any mathematical proofs of “surplus
value.” It simply stated (but did not state it simply) that the capitalist
system violates whatever it means to be a human. The industrial system Marx
saw developing in Europe not only robbed them of the products of their work,
it estranged working people from their own creative responsibilities, from
one another as human beings, from the beauties of nature, from their own
true selves. They lived out their lives not according to their own inner
needs, but according to the necessities of survival.

This estrangement from self and others, this alienation from all that was
human, could not be overcome by an intellectual effort, by something in the
mind. What was needed was a fundamental, revolutionary change in society, to
create the conditions – a short workday, a rational use of the earth’s
natural wealth and people’s natural talents, a just distribution of the
fruits of human labour, a new social consciousness – for the flowering of
human potential, for a leap into freedom as it had never been experienced in
history.

Marx understood how difficult it was to achieve this, because, no matter how
“revolutionary” we are, the weight of tradition, habit, the accumulated
mis-education of generations, *“weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the
living.”*

Marx understood politics. He saw that behind political conflicts were
questions of class: who gets what. Behind benign bubbles of togetherness (*
We*** the people…*our* country…*national* security), the powerful and the
wealthy would legislate on their own behalf. He noted (in The Eighteenth
Brumaire<
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm>,
a biting, brilliant, analysis of the Napoleonic seizure of power after the
1848 Revolution in France) how a modern constitution could proclaim absolute
rights, which were then limited by marginal notes (he might have been
predicting the tortured constructions of the First Amendment in our own
Constitution), reflecting the reality of domination by one class over
another regardless of the written word.

He saw religion, not just negatively as *“the opium of the people,”* but
positively as the *“sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless
world, the soul of soulless conditions.”* This helps us understand the mass
appeal of the religious charlatans of the television screen, as well as the
work of Liberation Theology in joining the soulfulness of religion to the
energy of revolutionary movements in miserably poor countries.

Marx was often wrong, often dogmatic, often a “Marxist.” He was sometimes
too accepting of imperial domination as “progressive,” a way of bringing
capitalism faster to the third world, and therefore hastening, he thought,
the road to socialism. (But he staunchly supported the rebellions of the
Irish, the Poles, the Indians, the Chinese, against colonial control.)

He was too insistent that the industrial working class must be the agent of
revolution, and that this must happen first in the advanced capitalist
countries. He was unnecessarily dense in his economic analysis (too much
education in German universities, maybe) when his clear, simple insight into
exploitation was enough: that no matter how valuable were the things workers
produced, those who controlled the economy could pay them as little as they
liked, and enrich themselves with the difference.

Personally, Marx was sometimes charming, generous, self-sacrificing; at
other times arrogant, obnoxious, abusive. He loved his wife and children,
and they clearly adored him, but he also may have fathered the son of their
German housekeeper, Lenchen.

The anarchist, Bakunin, his rival in the International Workingmen’s
Association, said of Marx: *“I very much admired him for his knowledge and
for his passionate and earnest devotion to the cause of the proletariat.
But…our temperaments did not harmonize. He called me a sentimental idealist,
and he was right. I called him vain, treacherous, and morose, and I was
right.”* Marx’s daughter Eleanor, on the other hand, called her father
*“…the
cheeriest, gayest soul that ever breathed, a man brimming over with humour".
*

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.

Marx had something important to say not only as a critic of capitalism, but
as a warning to revolutionaries, who, he wrote in The German Ideology, had
better revolutionise themselves if they intend to do that to society. He
offered an antidote to the dogmatists, the hard-liners, the Piepers, the
Stalins, the commissars, the “Marxists.” He said: *“Nothing human is alien
to me.”*

That seems a good beginning for changing the world.

*Howard Zinn*

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You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a
nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the
foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.
-AMBEDKAR



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