Glosses on Marx

Marx’s perpetual ambivalence to modernity becomes clear as soon as the argument turns to the ancient world. Here, as we are already accustomed to the fury of Marx’s moralizing thunderbolts on the depravity around him, we expect to find him more calm and relaxed. But this is not the case—indeed it is precisely here that he expresses his greatest misgivings: “Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production.”⁴⁶¹ But it only “seems” more noble and lofty, since Marx has a clear intolerance to it; and certainly not for the same sentimental reasons (due, for example, to the old world being founded on slavery), but because that world lacks power and, above all, because it is not built in such a way that its operation necessarily and automatically exalts power regardless of the direction in which it is applied. “Wealth,” indeed, if observed in terms of its physiology, is far richer (and far more interesting!) than the service that man devotes to man in the ancient world, where “the question is always which mode of property creates the best citizens.”⁴⁶² The bourgeois world of wealth is certainly not much concerned about creating virtuous citizens. If anything, it extends the comédie humaine to every kind of monstrosity, but in return “when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away [and Marx here, in officer’s uniform, visits the cocotte in her room and finally glimpses, behind the flimsy screen, her ancient—and, more than ancient, her modern!⁴⁶³—sweetly veiled nudity], what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature?” Here, having banished all shyness, Marx at last declares his innermost feelings: antiquity, yes, fine statues, fine lines of verse, heroes, tombs and columns, etc.; but how poor and feeble if we think of the majesty of bourgeois wealth, of the irresistible abstractions from which it grows, of its vast warehouses, which are only seemingly filled with mere things: on closer inspection they contain the phantoms of ever-growing needs, pleasures, qualities, powers, gathered together in a pulsating and expanding nebula. Above all, we have to remember, Marx is greedy. He wants more of everything. He is suspicious of quality unless it is simply the mark of greater quantity: even if quality could exist alone, it would always be less admirable than a quantity in continual prospect of increase. Marx’s heart beats here: it is not like that of Schiller, who dreams of belonging to a worthy community, of overcoming divisiveness, of rediscovering blades of grass. No: here it is the pride of full “mastery,” mastery over “so-called nature,” and then the moment will also come for humanity to sort out its “own nature.” This is a promise of power, this is the intoxication of the Nothing that moves the machine, an inexhaustible fuel, the unleashing of forces! And even the idea of a process that is an end in itself, which Marx has branded with contempt over hundreds of pages of analysis as being a supreme corruption of the mercantile world—well, even this now seems much more exciting than the “childish,” limited, even if well-meaning, world of antiquity.