bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to in reverent awe. It has transconverted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
Marx is not saying that in bourgeois society these activities lose their human meaning or value. If anything, they are more meaningful and valuable than ever before. But the only way people can get the freedom to make discoveries, or save lives, or poetically light up the world, is by working for capital—for drug companies, movie studios, boards of education, politicians, HMOs, etc., etc.—and using their creative skills to help capital accumulate more capital. This means that intellectuals are subject not only to the stresses that afflict all modern workers, but to a dread zone all their own. The more they care about their work and want it to mean something, the more they will find themselves in conflict with the keepers of the spreadsheets; the more they walk the line, the more they are likely to fall. This chronic pressure may give them a special insight into the need for workers to unite. But will united workers treat intellectual and artistic freedom with any more respect than capital treats it? It’s an open question; sometime in the twenty-first century, the workers will get power somewhere, and then we’ll start to see.
Marx sees the modern working class as an immense worldwide community waiting to happen. Such large possibilities give the story of organizing a permanent gravity and grandeur. The process of creating unions is not just an item in interest-group politics, but also a vital part of what Lessing called “the education of the human race.” And it is not just educational but existential: the process of people individually and collectively discovering who they are. As they learn who they are, they will come to see that they need one another in order to be themselves. They will see, because workers are smart: Bourgeois society has forced them to be, in order to survive its constant upheavals. Marx knows they will get it by and by. (Alongside his fury as an agitator, the Manifesto’s author also projects a brooding, reflective, long patience.) Solidarity is not sacrifice of yourself but the self’s fulfillment. Learning to give yourself to other workers, who may look and sound very different from you but are like you in depth, gives a man or woman a place in the world and delivers the self from dread.
This is a vital part of the moral vision that underlies the Manifesto. But there is another moral dimension, asserted in a different key but humanly just as urgent. At one of the book’s many climactic moments, Marx says that the Revolution will end classes and class struggles, and this will make it possible to enjoy “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Here Marx imagines communism as a way to make people happy. The first aspect of this happiness is “development”—that is, an experience that doesn’t simply repeat itself but that goes through some sort of change and growth. This model of happiness is modern and is informed by the incessantly developing bourgeois economy. But bourgeois society, although it enables people to develop, forces them to develop in accord with market demands: What can sell gets developed; what can’t sell gets repressed, or never comes to life at all. Against the market model of forced and twisted development, Marx fights for “free development,” development that the self can control.
In a time when crass cruelty calls itself liberalism (we’re kicking you and your kids off welfare for your own good), it is important to see how much ground Marx shares with the best liberal of all, his contemporary John Stuart Mill. Like Marx, Mill came to see the self’s “free development” as a fundamental human value; like Marx, he believed that modernization made it possible for everybody. But as he grew older, he became convinced that the capitalist form of modernization—featuring cut-throat competition, class domination, social conformity and cruelty—blocked its best potentialities. He proclaimed himself a socialist in his old age.
Ironically, the ground that socialism and liberalism share might be a big problem for both of them. What if Mr. Kurtz isn’t dead after all? In other words, what if authentically “free development” brings out horrific depths in human nature? Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud all forced us to face the horrors and warned us of their permanence. In response, both Marx and Mill might say that until we have overcome social domination and degradation, there is simply no way to tell whether the horrors are inherent in human nature or whether we could create benign conditions under which they would wither away. The process of getting to that point—a point where Raskolnikovs won’t rot on Avenue D and where Svidrigailovs won’t possess thousands of bodies and souls—should be enough to give us all steady work.
The nineties began with the mass destruction of Marx effigies. It was the “post modern” age: We weren’t supposed to need big ideas. As the nineties end, we find ourselves in a dynamic global society ever more unified by downsizing, de-skilling, and dread—just like the old man said. All of a sudden, the iconic looks more convincing than the ironic; that classic bearded presence, the atheist as biblical prophet, is back just in time for the millennium. At the dawn of the twentieth century, there were workers who were ready to die with the Communist Manifesto. At the dawn of the twenty-first, there may be even more who are ready to live with it.
This essay first appeared in the Nation, May 11, 1998.
Take It to the Streets: Conflict and Community in Public Space
THE DIALECTICS OF DOUBLE LIVES
Karl Marx, writing in the 1840s, developed a perspective that can help us see why modern men and women have a special need for public space, and also why the historical forces that create this need make it especially hard to fulfill. His 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question” tries to grasp the new liberal and democratic civilization that the French and American Revolutions have produced. In all states that have had successful bourgeois democratic revolutions, Marx argues, “man leads a double life.” The typical modern man or woman is “split into a public person and a private person,” or into an “egoistic individual” and a “communal being,” or—here Marx quotes the language of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen—“into a man and a citizen.” Marx characterizes this double life as a life of “political emancipation.”
It takes no special wisdom to see that this form of freedom has severe defects. Marx portrays it as only part of the way toward full “human emancipation.” Nevertheless, it is “a necessary part.” It is only by going through this historical split that we can integrate ourselves into fully developed “species beings.” Full human emancipation will happen “only when the individual man [Mensch—human being] has taken back into himself the abstract citizen and, in his everyday life and his relations with other people, has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers.”
It is this modern, split, fragmented individual, living a double life, that is Marx’s subject—these individual people who must do the work of putting their lives together, together with their fellows. Without the experience of radical separation, modern men and women will lack the space they need to grow into people capable of full integration. This is why Marx (as opposed to some other socialists, then and now) supports civil rights, both for Jews (as he argues in the “Jewish Question”) and for everybody else. It is true, civil rights for an individual or a group involve “the right of separation.” But it is only by going through the most intense separation and individuation that modern men and women can develop the resources to create new forms of solidarity and community.
The paradigms that Marx developed in the 1840s can still be fruitful for understanding life in the democracies of today. We still lead double lives, split into men or women and citizens, torn between private and public; we still dream of resolving our inner contradictions and living in a more integrated way. We know, as Marx did, that this can’t happen without a radical transformation of our economy, state, and society; we also
