Missing the Marx, More or Less: On Intellectual Failure and Environmental Catastrophe
Missing the Marx, More or Less
On Intellectual Failure and Environmental Catastrophe
By Paul Street
Getting radical anti-capitalist ideas wrong and ignoring those ideas completely are timeworn traditions for U.S. intellectuals. The habits go back a long way and have continued through the current millennium. The consequences can be deadly, as is seen with two short books printed by leading U.S. publishing firms a few years ago - liberal historian James Livingston’s Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (Basic Books, 2011) and environmental journalist David Owen’s The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse (Penguin, 2011).
GETTING MARX WRONG IN SUPPORT OF MORE
Marx’s “Protestant Work Ethic”
Here, from page one hundred and sixty-five the early Barack Obama enthusiast Livingston’s book is a graphic example of a U.S. intellectual getting a leading past anti-capitalist thinker (Karl Marx) badly wrong: “In fact, I would claim that we can’t live comfortably with the pleasures of consumer culture (not to mention the life of the mind) precisely because the Protestant work ethic still haunts us – because we believe along with Marx, who got the idea from Hegel, who got it from Luther, that human nature just is the metabolic exchange with nature that we call work.” By “work,” Livingston here means manual and physical labor, skilled and unskilled, engaged primarily in material production, extraction, transportation and the like.
It’s hard to imagine anyone missing the mark on Marx more completely. Marx spent the lion’s share of his most productive years engaged in intensely intellectual activity (“the life of the mind,” to say the least) in his study and at the British Museum library. He was grateful to escape the clutches of wage labor (production-oriented or otherwise) thanks in part to the support of his bourgeois comrade and fellow communist Frederick Engels. In his late twenties, Marx wrote of the glories of a “communist future” when all would be free to follow creative and intellectual pursuits beyond the requirements by class society’s division of labor:
“For, as soon as the division of labor comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” ....................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.zcommunications.org/missing-the-marx-more-or-less-by-paul-street.html
