in certain 1950s furniture stores and romantic comedies. It was the light scheme in the bachelor flat where the hero brought home Doris Day.) The staff knew just what book I wanted: Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan, and published in 1956 by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow. It was a collection of three youthful notebooks, divided into short essays. The titles didn’t seem to emanate from Marx himself; they appeared to be provided by twentieth-century editors in Moscow or Berlin. It was midnight blue, nice and compact, a perfect fit for a side pocket in a 1950s sports jacket. I opened it at random, here, there, somewhere else—and suddenly I was in a sweat, melting, shedding clothes and tears, flashing hot and cold. I rushed to the front: “I’ve got to have this book!” The white-haired clerk was calm. “Fifty cents, please.” When I expressed amazement, he said, “We”—I guess he meant the USSR—“don’t publish books for profit.” He said the Manuscripts had become one of their bestsellers, though he himself couldn’t see why, since Lenin was so much clearer.
Right there my adventure began. I realized I was carrying more than thirty dollars, mostly wages from the college library; it was probably as much as I’d ever carried in my life. I felt another flash. “Fifty cents? So for ten bucks I can get twenty?” The clerk said that, after sales taxes, twenty copies would cost about $11. I ran back to the rear, grabbed the books, and said, “You’ve just solved my Hanukkah problem.” As I schlepped the books on the subway up to the Bronx (Four Continents tied them up in a nice parcel), I felt I was walking on air. For the next several days I walked around with a stack of books, thrilled to be giving them away to all the people in my life: my mother and sister, my girlfriend, her parents, several old and new friends, a couple of my teachers, the man from the stationery store, a union leader (the past summer, I’d worked for District 65), a doctor, a rabbi. I’d never given so many gifts before (and never did again). Nobody refused the book, but I got some weird looks from people when I breathlessly delivered my spiel. “Take this!” I said, shoving the book in their faces. “It’ll knock you out. It’s by Karl Marx, but before he became Karl Marx. It’ll show you how our whole life’s wrong, but it’ll make you happy, too. If you don’t get it, just call me anytime, and I’ll explain it all. Soon everybody will be talking about it, and you’ll be the first to know.” And I was out the door, to face more puzzled people. I stopped at Jacob’s office with my stack of books, told him the story; went through the spiel. We beamed at each other. “See, now,” he said, “isn’t this better than revenge?” I improvised a comeback: “No, it’s the best revenge.”
I try to imagine myself at that magic moment: Too much, man! Was I for real? (Those are things we used to say to each other in 1959.) How did I get to be so sure of myself? (Never again!) My intellectual impulse-buying; my neo-potlatch great giveaway of a book I hadn’t even properly read; the exuberance with which I pressed myself on all those people; my certainty that I had something special, something that would both rip up their lives and make them happy; my promises of lifetime personal service; above all, my love for my great new product that would change the world: Willy Loman, meet Karl Marx. We entered the sixties together.
What was it in Marx, all those years ago, that shot me up like a rocket? Not long ago, I went through that old midnight blue Four Continents book. It was a haunting experience, with the Soviet Union dead; but Marx himself moved and lived. The book was hard to read because I’d underlined, circled, and asterisked virtually everything. But I know the ideas that caught me forty years ago are still part of me today, and it will help this book hold together if I can block out at least some of those ideas in a way that is brief but clear.3
The thing I found so striking in Marx’s 1844 essays, and which I did not expect to find at all, was his feeling for the individual. Those early essays articulate the conflict between Bildung and alienated labor. Bildung is the core human value in liberal romanticism. It is a hard word to put in English, but it embraces a family of ideas like “subjectivity,” “finding yourself,” “growing up,” “identity,” “self-development,” and “becoming who you are.” Marx situates this ideal in modern history and gives it a social theory. He identifies with the Enlightenment and with the great revolutions that formed its climax when he asserts the universal right of man to be “freely active,” to “affirm himself,” to enjoy “spontaneous activity,” to pursue “the free development of his physical and mental energy” (74–5). But he also denounces the market society nourished by those revolutions, because “Money is the overturning of all individualities” (105) and because “You must make all that is yours For Sale” (96; Marx’s emphasis). He shows how modern capitalism arranges work in such a way that the worker is “alienated from his own activity” as well as from other workers and from nature. The worker “mortifies his body and ruins his mind”; he “feels himself only outside his work, and in his work … feels outside himself”; he “is at home only when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labor therefore is not free, but coerced; it is forced labor” (74). Marx salutes the labor unions that, in the 1840s, are just beginning to emerge. But even if the unions achieve their immediate aims—even if workers get widespread union recognition and raise wages by force of class struggle—it will still be “nothing but salary for a slave” unless modern society comes to recognize “the meaning and dignity of work and of the worker” (80). Capitalism is terrible because it promotes human energy, spontaneous feeling, human development, only to crush them, except in the few winners at the very top. From the very start of his career as an intellectual, Marx is a fighter for democracy. But he sees that democracy in itself won’t cure the structural misery he sees. So long as work is organized in hierarchies and mechanical routines and oriented to the demands of the world market, most people, even in the freest societies, will still be enslaved—will still be, like my father, on the rack. Marx is part of a great cultural tradition, a comrade of modern masters like Keats, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence (readers are free to fill in their personal favorites) in his feeling for the suffering modern man on the rack. But Marx is unique in his grasp of what that rack is made of. It’s there in all his work. But in the Communist Manifesto and Capital, you have to look for it. In the 1844 Manuscripts, it’s in your face.
Marx wrote most of these essays in the midst of one of his great adventures, his honeymoon in Paris with Jenny von Westphalen. The year I had my Marxian adventure, I had just fallen in love, first love, and this made me very curious whether he would have anything to say about love and sex. The Marxists I had met through the years seemed to have a collective attitude that didn’t exactly hate sex and love, but regarded them with impatience, as if these feelings were to be tolerated as necessary evils, but not one iota of extra time or energy should be wasted on them, and nothing could be more foolish than to think they had human meaning or value in themselves. After I had heard that for years, to hear young Marx in his own voice was a breath of fresh air. “From this relationship, one can judge man’s whole level of development” (82). He was saying just what I felt: that sexual love was the most important thing there was.
Hanging around the Left Bank in Paris, Marx seems to have met radicals who promoted sexual promiscuity as an act of liberation from bourgeois constraints. Marx agreed with them that modern love could become a problem if it drove lovers to possess their loved ones as “exclusive private property” (82). And indeed, “Private property has made us so stupid that an object is only ours when we have it” (91; Marx’s emphasis). But their only alternative to marriage seems to have been an arrangement that made everybody the sexual property of everybody else, and Marx disparaged this as nothing but “universal prostitution.”
We don’t know who these “crude, mindless communists” were, but Marx’s critique of them is fascinating. He uses their sexual grossness as a symbol of everything that he thinks is wrong with the Left. Their view of the world “negates the personality of man in every sphere.” It entails “the abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilization”; their idea of happiness is “leveling down proceeding from a preconceived minimum.” Moreover, they embody “general envy constituting itself as a power”
