of the poor and undemanding man who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even attained to it” (82–3; Marx’s emphasis). Marx is focusing on the human qualities of greed and crudity that makes some liberals despise and fear the Left. He would say it is stupid prejudice to think that all leftists are like that, but it is right to think that some leftists are like that though not him or anyone close to his heart. Here Marx is not only reaching out to the Tocqueville tradition but also trying to envelop it.
When Marx calls the bad communists “thoughtless,” he is suggesting not just that their ideas are stupid, but that they are unconscious of what their real motives are; they think they are performing noble actions, but they are really engaged in vindictive, neurotic acting out. Marx’s analysis here is stretching toward Nietzsche and Freud. But it also highlights his roots in the Enlightenment: The communism he wants must include self-awareness. This nightmare vision of “crude, thoughtless communism” is one of the strongest things in early Marx. Were there real-life models in the Paris of the 1840s? No biographer has come up with convincing candidates; maybe he simply imagined them himself, the way novelists create their characters. But once we have read Marx, it is hard to forget them, these vivid nightmares of all the ways the Left could go wrong.
There is another striking way in which young Marx worries about sex and conceives it as a symbol of something bigger. When workers are alienated from their own activity in their work, their sexual lives become an obsessive form of compensation. They then try to realize themselves through desperate “eating, drinking, procreating,” along with “dwelling and dressing up.” But desperation makes carnal pleasures less joyful than they could be, because it places more psychic weight on them than they can bear (74).
The essay “Private Property and Communism” takes a longer view and strikes a more upbeat note: “The forming of the five senses is a labor of the whole history of the world, down to the present” (89). Maybe the joy of a honeymoon enables Marx to imagine new people coming over the horizon, people less possessive and greedy, more in tune with their sensuality and vitality, inwardly better equipped to make love a vital part of human development.
Who are these “new people” who would have the power at once to represent and to liberate humanity? The answer that made Marx both famous and infamous is proclaimed to the world in the Manifesto: “the proletariat, the modern working class” (479). But this answer itself raises overwhelming questions. We can divide them roughly in two, the first line of questions about the membership of the working class, the second about its mission. Who are these guys, heirs and heiresses of all the ages? And, given the extent and depth of their suffering, which Marx describes so well, where are they going to get the positive energy they will need not merely to gain power, but to change the whole world? Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts don’t address the “membership” questions,4 but he has some fascinating things to say about the mission. He says that even as modern society brutalizes and maims the self, it also brings forth, dialectically, “the rich human being [der reiche Mensch] and rich human need” (89).
“The rich human being”: Where have we seen him before? Readers of Goethe and Schiller will recognize the imagery of classical German humanism here. But those humanists believed that only a very few men and women could be capable of the inner depth that they could imagine; the vast majority of people, as seen from Weimar and Jena, were consumed by trivialities and had no soul. Marx inherited Goethe’s and Schiller’s and Humboldt’s values, but he fused them with a radical and democratic social philosophy inspired by Rousseau. Rousseau’s 1755 Discourse on the Origins of Inequality laid out the paradox that even as modern civilization alienates people from themselves, it develops and deepens those alienated selves and gives them the capacity to form a social contract and create a radically new society.5 A century later, after one great wave of revolutions and just before another, Marx sees modern society in a similarly dialectical way. His idea is that even as bourgeois society enervates and impoverishes its workers, it spiritually enriches and inspires them. “The rich human being” is a man or woman for whom “self-realization [seine eigene Verwirklichung] exists as an inner necessity, a need”; he or she is “a human being in need of a totality of human activities” (91). Marx sees bourgeois society as a system that, in an infinite number of ways, stretches workers out on a rack. Here his dialectical imagination starts to work: The very social system that tortures them also teaches and transforms them, so that while they suffer, they also begin to overflow with energy and ideas. Bourgeois society treats its workers as objects, yet develops their subjectivity. Marx has a brief passage on French workers who are just (of course illegally) starting to organize: They come together instrumentally, as a means to economic and political ends; but “as a result of this association, they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what [begins] as a means becomes an end” (99). Workers may not set out to be “rich human beings,” and certainly no one else wants them to be, but their development is their fate, it turns their powers of desire into a world-historical force.
“Let me get this straight,” my mother said, as she took her book. “It’s Marx, but not communism, right? So what is it?” Marx in 1844 had imagined two very different communisms. One, which he wanted, was “a genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man” (84); the other, which he dreaded, “has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even attained to it” (83). Our twentieth century had produced a great surplus of the second model, but not much of the first. The problem, in short, has been that the second model, the one Marx dreaded, has had tanks, and the first, the one he dreamed of, has not. My mother and I had seen those tanks on TV; in Budapest, killing kids. We agreed, not Communism. But if not that, then what? I felt like a panelist on a TV quiz show, with time running out. I reached for a phrase I had seen in the New York Times, in a story about French existentialists—Sartre, de Beauvoir, Henri Lefebvre, André Gorz, and their friends—who were trying to merge their thought with Marxism and create a radical perspective that would transcend the dualisms of the Cold War. I said, “Call it Marxist humanism.” “Oh!” my mother said, “Marxist humanism, that sounds nice.” Zap! My adventure in Marxism had crystallized; in an instant I had focused my identity for the next forty years.
And what happened then? I lived another forty years. I went to Oxford, then Harvard. Then I got a steady job in the public sector, as a teacher of political theory and urbanism at the ever-assailed City University of New York. I’ve worked mostly in Harlem, but downtown as well. I’ve been lucky to grow old as a citizen of New York and to bring up my kids in the fervid freedom of the city. I was part of the New Left thirty years ago, and I’m part of the Used Left today. (My generation shouldn’t be embarrassed by the name. Anyone old enough to know the market’s ups and downs knows that used goods often beat new models.) I don’t think I’ve grown old yet, but I’ve been through plenty; and through it all I’ve worked to keep Marxist humanism alive.
As the twentieth century comes to an end, Marxist humanism is almost half a century old. It’s never swept the country, not in any country, but it has found a place. One way to place it might be to see it as a synthesis of the culture of the fifties with that of the sixties: a feeling for complexity; irony and paradox, combined with a desire for breakthrough and ecstasy; a fusion of “Seven Types of Ambiguity” with “We Want the World and We Want It Now.” It deserves a place of honor in more recent history, in 1989 and after, in the midst of the changes that their protagonists called the Velvet Revolution.
Mikhail Gorbachev hoped to give it a place in his part of the world. He imagined a communism that could enlarge personal freedom, not crush it. But he came too late. To people who had lived their lives within the Soviet horizon, the vision didn’t scan; they just couldn’t see it. The Soviet people had been burned so badly for so long, they didn’t know him; he called, and they didn’t return his calls. But we can see Gorbachev as a Willy Loman of politics—a failure as a salesman, but a tragic hero.
Some people think Marxist humanism got its whole meaning as an alternative to Stalinism and that it
