Lefebvre on irony

[James Farmelant]

Concerning Marxists and irony, what about the Great Ironist
himself, Karl Marx? His writings from the earliest like
the 1844 Manuscripts to his polemics against fellow
Yong Hegelians sucn as The Holy Family, to the Communist
Manifest all the way to Capital are all dripping with irony.
Was it is his intention that Marxism be the property of a
small ironically-aware elite or did he have perhaps a different
approach to the uses of irony than did say Plato or Swift?
You also seem to imply that ordinary workers cannot understand
or appreciate irony.  Is that really the case or is it perhaps
the case that certain forms of irony may well not be to their
taste but other forms may be.  If that is the case
then how does Marx's brand of irony fit in?

Jim Farmelant

On Wed, 17 Nov 1999 14:05:09 -0600 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>Doug, what I read in the whole of Lefebvre's piece is an extended
>chanting of "Thank god that I Lefebvre am not as other men." In
>other words, I see not self-consciousness or "irony" in his sense
>but sort of a dour puritanism.
>
>I still say that irony is a weapon to use against others, to 
>consolidate
>
>a rather smug "we" against "them." While I don't doubt, actually, the
>goodness of Swift's intention, the *effect* from its day of 
>publication
>of "A Modest Proposal" has been not to aid Irish peasants but to
>create a fraternity/sorority of "those who know" (those who "get
>it" in such smug superiority to the great unwashed. And Swift was
>perhaps the only satirist (at least according to some of his critics)
>who aimed at his blows striking the reader. All other ironic
>satirists as well as unsatiric ironists that I know of aim at the
>creation of this smug society of the intellectual elite. That was
>certainly the effect aimed at by Plato in the creation of that
>master ironist, Socrates.
>
>It is also important to recognize that over time just a small 
>proportion
>
>of marxists are intellectuals, or even very skilled readers. The
>insistence
>that marxists be ironists is an insistence that marxism should remain
>the private property of a small intellectual elite.
>
>Carrol
>
>

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