Marx as Educator

I am not now nor have I ever been a Marxist, yet Karl Marx was one of my most important teachers.

Marx wondered, with good reason, who would educate the educator. But as an autodidact himself, he knew that education, like the Lord, works in mysterious ways. In the late 1960s, I was a graduate student at MIT who shared the virtues and vices of the zeitgeist: I supported greater rights for blacks and women, wished for an end to the Vietnam War, and naïvely assumed that since McCarthyism and Goldwaterism had been defeated, the millennium was just around the corner. Then, upon my return from a jaunt to Europe in the summer of 1968, between my first and second years of grad school, I learned that I had been drafted.

Though opposed to the war, I had been too deeply buried in mathematics to make time for radical politics and was too enamored of my scruples to fake my way out of the service. In short order, and because I spoke French — which the Army, in its wisdom, thought would make me a good candidate to learn Vietnamese — I found myself fighting the “land war in Asia” to which President Johnson had promised never to send American boys. My year “in country” ended with the award of a quite undeserved medal for “valiant service against communist aggression,” a rather breathtaking characterization of my mundane duties, which left me with many unanswered questions. How exactly had an unworldly mathematician from New Jersey landed in a godforsaken town in the Mekong Delta? What did my presence in Asia have to do with an ideology born in 19th-century Germany? What role had Das Kapital played in firing up the peasants of France’s former colony in Southeast Asia?

A s my late mentor Stanley Hoffmann used to say, “I didn’t choose to study history; history fell upon my head.” History having fallen upon me unbidden, I resolved to make sense of it. As luck would have it, an Army buddy who had studied French colonialism at the University of Wisconsin introduced me to a classmate of his, Harry Marks (nomen est omen!), an erudite eclectic who combined a conscientious objector’s experience with a vast knowledge not only of Marx’s work but also of the subsequent European historical and sociological literature.

Much of what I know about Marx today I owe to Harry. His instruction was by no means systematic. He was a voracious reader with whom it was impossible to have a conversation without becoming aware that there was always more to learn. “Have you read Lichtheim’s From Marx to Hegel?” he would innocently ask. “Horkheimer and Adorno? Perry Anderson? The latest issue of the Annales? Eduard Bernstein? Leszek Kolakowski? The Making of the English Working Class? But you must know Althusser.” One day he suggested we read Marx’s Grundrisse together. I still have my moldy reading notes together with marginalia from our subsequent conversations.

None of this was meant to impress or intimidate. It was just that Harry had a particularly lively appreciation of the breadth of commentary that Marx’s work had aroused. A college teacher of mine had said that “all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.” For Harry all history was a series of footnotes to Marx — footnotes that he devoted himself to exploring in all their convolutions and infinite regress. Even though he died several years ago, and far too young, I still catch myself from time to time making mental notes to ask him how he thinks Georg Lukács or Antonio Gramsci might have reacted to some text.

Absorbing all this literature was particularly useful for someone like me, raised on the hard sciences but compelled by life’s vagaries to delve into an intellectual universe in which contradiction was the motor of history rather than a name for logical impossibility. Marx’s writing provided an armature on which to hang the contradictions I had intuited from the war but was unable to articulate. That armature was especially useful to a student without much concrete knowledge of history: It could turn the chaotic march of events from “one damn thing after another” into the vindication of an ineluctable logic. It pushed disorderly facts into a legible order and supplied ready-made causal explanations, which I could then question as I read more widely.

The questions came quickly. After taking my Ph.D. in math and teaching for a few years, I became restless, moved to France, and started translating French history for a living. In France I met actual Marxists — people who read Kapital not as a symptomatic specimen of 19th-century radical thought but as holy writ. Or, rather, it would be more accurate to say that most of them hadn’t read Marx but had absorbed by osmosis from the fraught political atmosphere of the late Cold War bits and pieces of ideas they attributed to Marx.

Harry had also introduced me to the so-called Annales school of French historians. The very name of their flagship journal — Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations — struck me as an equivocal embellishment on the Marxist dichotomy of base and superstructure. I became the translator of several ex-Marxists among them and perforce cohabited with their convoluted relation to Marx, to the German idealist philosophy and British political economy out of which he came, and to the politics of France past and present. It was an education, or, rather, an extraordinary form of on-the-job training, the upshot of which was that Marx gradually receded in prominence from the role of Virgilian guide to that of terrible simplificateur.

I can’t say that any other path through this thicket would have been better or worse, because life is short, and I had time only for the one. Looking back, I see that I wasted a good deal of energy following false trails, but no doubt that is an inevitable part of learning.

In recent years, there has been something of a revival of Marx in academe and the little magazines. What worries me about this turn is not the effort wasted on Marx’s more useless ideas, such as the labor theory of value. It is rather how his “othering” of political opponents influences the political attitudes of his young followers, heightening their antagonism to liberalism. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte demonstrated his brilliant insight into the French society of his own time, but the stark clarity of his vision led him to transform the opposition of class interests into the clash of contending armies between which no dialogue, let alone compromise, is possible. Although he appreciated the role of the “decadent aristocracy” and “rising bourgeoisie” in sustaining the Enlightenment and the critical spirit he held dear, his implacable theory of history implied that their role had been transcended, and that only the one “universal class” (as Lukács characterized the proletariat) could carry on the struggle. Harmony would be achieved only when the class enemy was definitively crushed.

But harmony is a false utopia. Conflict is intrinsic to social being. Anyone who aspires to a more humane social existence, as Marx surely did, should therefore seek to tame rather than eliminate it. To learn that lesson, one must turn to teachers other than Marx.

Arthur Goldhammer is a writer, translator, and senior affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He is the translator, most recently, of Capital in the 21st Century (Harvard University Press, 2014) and The Economics of Inequality (Harvard, 2015), both by Thomas Piketty.