Happy 200th Birthday, Karl Marx!!!

With a book on Marx coming out soon, as well as on that other rebel who shares today as his birthday, Søren Kierkegaard, I thought I'd share some personal reflections on my own discovery of Marx. I never much liked him. Other philosophers I did, and often quite immediately. I loved Plato and Nietzsche from the very start, and I still do. I fell for Hobbes, and was thrilled by Rousseau. Freud, Arendt, Foucault, all struck a chord, not to mention my enduring love of Camus. And I could go on and on. Even Aristotle, who never much excited me, really got me going when I visited his logic a bit later in life. But Marx? Nothing. I didn't dislike him, and I even wanted to like him, as I generally want to like everyone I read. But he never got much of a response from me.

Even after travelling to NYC to study with someone who was renowned as a Marxist humanist didn't much change this. I wanted to study with Marshall Berman for his intellectual originality and creativity, his humanism, and for our shared interest in the tradition of Western thought, but it wasn't so much because of Marx. And this wasn't for a lack of personal reasons that should have drawn me to Marx. Visibly a minority, but one that generally gets treated as white, and also a man, it was always issues of class that I confronted. Luckily, the first few decades of this happened in Canada, were the doors of academia remain, for now, a little more open.

But it wasn't until I came across the work of Walter Benn Michaels, in my first year as a PhD student, that things really clicked for me. At first, it was The Trouble with Diversity, and then, the much better, The Shape of the Signifier. And what Michaels allowed me to see was, what I'd later call, the ontological difference between issues of class and those of identity, between issues of economics and those of politics, society, and culture.

More simply, I began to understand the way that social and political problems depend on ideas. When we notice an injustice in our society, we can often trace it to a belief with which we have a problem, such as the belief in the inferiority of a member of a gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, etc. And to eradicate this problem, we must eradicate the beliefs on which they’re based. (Systemic inequalities change this a little, drawing more on Marx's insights than is sometimes obvious, but for the sake of brevity, I'm going to try and limit this post.)

However, economic issues work differently. As Marx might say, we don't necessarily work because of any faith we place in the economy, we do not work because of a belief in capitalism (even if some do believe in it), we work because we must. And in a way, this is liberating, because we're free to have any thoughts at all, so long as we work. So, you can be a radical anti-capitalist in belief, reading Marx by the bedside every evening, so long as every morning you get up, shut up, and work.

But this also means that different tools are required for identifying economic injustices than social and political ones. At some level, identifying social and political injustices requires that we identify the beliefs by which they’re maintained. And intellectuals love doing this, because it often requires examining culture or reading very heady material, thinking critically about it, and then exposing the hidden biases. That is, doing this kind of work is doing the kind of work that intellectuals love doing: reading, thinking, and writing.

But exposing economic injustices is different. Rather than reading through complex and rich texts, even with an eye towards critique, these injustices require empirical work that many intellectuals don't like doing. It requires gathering data about national and global economies, and then engaging in the careful critical and empirical analysis that helps expose the nature of our capitalist economy. That is, it requires analysis that exposes the system in which our particular job occurs, and that provides our job it's context and structure. And I, like many of my friends in political theory and philosophy, didn't get into this game to do empirical work, but to read Plato.

And it took me years to realize this. To realize that the exact reason why Marx is so brilliant - his argument that the path to understanding injustice is through our material rather than our intellectual reality - is exactly why so few intellectuals appreciate him. He demonstrates the limits of philosophy, but to philosophers. Problem is, we like doing philosophy.

It's interesting, but this is one of the reasons I find the marriage of Marx and Kierkegaard so natural and fruitful. They both made that last claim, and they did so in tandem, but unbeknownst to one another. Kierkegaard did it for ethics and Marx for politics. But they were both anti-philosophical philosophers, demonstrating the limits of thought when it came to personal and political transformation. But it's not a lesson that philosophers want to hear.

It's not even a lesson that I want to hear, at least at times. I want to make the same argument, for sure, as doing that lets me make sophisticated theoretical arguments about the nature of material reality, ideas, their relationship, and so on. But it's not one that I'm always enthusiastic about following up on, because it probably means I should put down my Knut Hansun and J. L. Austin (the two books in my bag now), and spend a bit more time with political economy.

It's hard to recognize the brilliance of someone who pretty compellingly argues that what you're doing might not be as important as you think. Not that I was under any illusions about academic life, but still. Not to mention, it doesn't help when that person's writing style wavers between poetic but incendiary polemical attacks and the overly dense and sometimes impenetrable philosophical prose of German philosophy. It took me years to figure it out, and I got to study with the person who probably offered the most accessible and poetic account of Marx you could find. No wonder so many others don't.

And I guess to wrap these bicentennial birthday ramblings up, I have a couple of thoughts.

First, I hope none of this is taken to mean that I'm prioritizing class over other forms of injustice. I'm not, or at least I hope I'm not. That's an old and divisive argument, and not one I want to make. Racism and sexism can certainly be worse than class issues (even though I'd never try to rank them). I'm just trying to argue, however crudely (I'm typing on my phone on a plane - gotta kill time, and wanted to write on this birthday day), that these types of problems operate differently, just as they're often exposed and eradicated in different ways. That said, I think that issues of race and gender are increasingly looking like those of class, but I'll save that post for another day.

Second, maybe, as intellectuals, it's worth thinking about these problems more often, if even only for the role they play in our own little world of academia. While we're a far ways away from a gender and racially inclusive environment, we at least do think of these things - and try to act on them. For instance, many of us think these are problems, and we support actions to make our workplaces more inclusive. But I'm not sure I've ever heard of a desire, let alone a program, to make our workplaces more inclusive of class difference.

Granted, inclusion isn't really the right word to use for class, but I make this point only to indicate how absent this conversation is. We make a token nod in this direction when it comes to our students, praising the "upward mobility" of the public education system or the scholarships available in the private system, but I'm not sure I've ever heard any conversation remotely like this when it comes to our colleagues. I'm not even sure where the conversation would begin? And what does it say about us that we pride ourselves on our critical faculties but we spend no time analyzing (or even noticing) that the one group of people wholly absent from our ranks is anyone who doesn't come from a family within, let's estimate, the top 20% of income earners? Given the dramatic nature of American and global inequality, how is our work supposed to speak to people when so few of us are actually "of the people?"

Which is all to say, Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx!!! (And you too, Søren). Now back to the in-flight entertainment.