"It would be more accurate to say that Marx did not brook disagreement that he did not suffer fools. (Proudhon was no fool, nor was Mill.)
Politically he seems to have thought that ridicule, mockery, and abuse were effective weapons to dispose of opposition, maybe be was right.
And since he was a master of the German language (he's really very funny in a bitter sort of way) and the recipient of really first rate classical education (nothing like reading Martial, Tacitus, Juvenal, Apuleius, etc. if you want to learn the art of abuse), and had a bad temper, maybe those carbuncles, he was a formidable opponent."
Compare to Andie's calumny...
William J Blake "Karl Marx: Titan of the Poor", New Masses, 5/7/40, on the 122nd anniversary of Marx. >
Of course he was choleric and attacked like a wild boar. Of course when old friends left the cause, he assailed them. But if his silly critics will look at the then state of German and French polemics, in which he was educated, they will note that Marx is practically the most urbane and polished controversialist of that acrid period. And if in England debate was more pleasing, it was because nothing was argued. Marx wrote Lavrov to come to England where he would be safe. In Paris, he said the police arrested people for dangerous ideas. In London they police had no inkling that there could be any ideas, dangerous or otherwise... The artist intoxicated with Greek drama, the reciter of Richard III and Timon of Athens, the man who smashed lamp posts on Saturday night to scandalize bobbies, like college students, was no stuffed library pedant. When real genius came forward, as In Darwin's Origin of Species in that wondrous year 1859, Marx bowed before a conscientious mind. He knew the Malthusian assumptions but he rose above Darwin's sources to measure Darwin's achievement. When Balzac a royalist laid bare the nerves and tissues of the bourgeoisie, his devotee was Karl Marx. Socialists produced variant philosophies Marx thought unsound. But if he felt that the work was animated by a sincere love of the working class and was not noxious, he applauded. Witness his sympathy for that inspired Pfushcher Dietzgen.. Note his tribute for the followers of brave old Blanqui, heroes of the Commune. Mark his honest admiration for the Proudhonists in the Commune, whose principles he detested. For Marx there was no narrow dogmatism. A Man who in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, so admirably detected the spiritual nuances of every segment of the French nobility and bourgeoisie (as arising from their material foundations) is a miniature artist in delineating character to rival La Bruyere. To anyone who has checked the thousand references to numberous worthies in the three volumes of Capital, his skill at quick personal descriptions remains a marvel of literary triumph. Witness his thumbnail sketches of Americans in his letters on our Civil War...
"Not for nothing did Marx make his his motto 'I am a human being, nothing human is alien to me." That excerpt fromthe old Roman comedy was dear to him. If he appeared cruel in his remarks on Schurz and Kugelmann, was not their career as he prophesied? He foresaw the public future of every revolutionist and he caviled at the conduct that foreshadowed it, not because he was informed by spleen, but because his eye carried a microscope slide of honesty and acute, detailed vision. To those who wish to see the difference between marx and the economists, let them look at the permutations and combinations of surplus value, as given in his chapter on the total law of surplus value. Suddenly he pitches out of the orbit of economic "theory" into the human needs of men,into their biological possibilities. No Ricardo, no boasted institutionalist, has ever so summed-up theory and the living needs of men. No other man has so situated theory in a historic, that is, a human setting. No other theoretician has made material law subject to the creative will of a rising class. He never studied "laws of political economy" as the rules of Medes and Persians. He annihilated the codes of science. He saw science as the plastic servant of man, whose consciousness of necessity was the springboard to freedom. "Marx's passion came from his deep belief that classless society, producing the true individual, would at last break down the barrier between man's soul and his surrounding institutions, that paradox of art since the liberating Renaissance. He carried the dream of Leonardo da Vinci to its scientific expression. That goal is human and inspiring. Marx restored the vision of paradise, not in the realms of the dead, but in the living labor of communal man.... " -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20070403/3a6e3786/attachment.htm>