The Next Phase of Development
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In my initiated efforts to promote the idea for Communism to advance to the next stage in its development, it has come apparent that while Marx, Engles and their followers present Communism as a final stage in the overall development of a Socio-political structure to be used by humanity, it too is but a stage in the development of human cognition. In other words, Communism nor any Socio-political doctrine can be viewed as a final goal to epitomize human thinking in regards to its social self-governance. They are all mere stepping stones, (stage coach, bus line, train station, airplane terminal) way stations and (biologically analogical) developmental stages.
Even though religions, businesses and nature-focused philosophies may readily express an acknowledgement that they are well aware that revisions in their views take place from time to time as conditions warrant, they do not necessarily view the overall belief— as an entity— that which deteriorates to the point of having reached a stage of obsolescence. Like Monarchies, Dictatorships, Religions and Philosophies of old that were developed as if they were to last forever but eventually came to die out; beliefs today are little different, no matter what efforts are made to prop up the sagging facial features; or what accommodations are made to lessen the obstructions for the usage of prosthetic devices; or what attitudinal preferences are adopted to reduce previous discriminations, prejudices and bias. All beliefs eventually come to die. As such, we can interpret them to have some semblance of an organic-based nature since they are originated from an organic creature, named humans, despite human egotisms claiming one another belief to be the Word of (a) God.
Perpetuation of a belief as an entity that is permitted to take upon the view of a being synonymous with a life form is like the old idea of transmuting a base metal into some more profitable substance (such as gold from lead) or engaging in a deliberate act of keeping a would-be dead animation alive in an artificial state (like a Frankenstein or Zombie); after it was artificially pronounced as being born and thus as a "living word" (or Word of [a] god) in the first place. In some way, this is an act of attempting to play the part of a god that could psychologically be interpreted as a projection of a person's underlying narcissism representing an attempt to compensate for thoughts of befuddled esteem wrought by feelings of lowered worth, inadequacy, or other embraced diminishment of character for which there is little basis to be found and should not exist, and exists only because the person has been subjected to circumstances which forced them to view themselves in such a disparaging way.
If one were to claim that Communism is an idea that arose from an influence of (a) God, do we then also claim it to be a religion or type of religious belief? Or does the concept of (a) god have noting to do with religion and religion merely wants to claim ownership of the idea, just as it does with trying to own what is meant by morality, similar to businesses and law or government which try to own the concept of ethics? If we simply want to avoid or evade the question of whether Communism is a religion or religious belief by defining it as a political view, the discussion can then revert back to the initial topic in which I am describing Communism as an organic-based belief in terms of its need to be viewed as a dynamic system involving change and not as a static "written in stone" archeological artefact to be set upon an alter within a temperature controlled glass case to try to keep it from weathering away in order to preserve it as it is, just as the U.S. Constitution is laughably subjected to such a pathetic exercise of human self-indulgence.
My beginning thrust into the foray of promoting a New Communism as the next stage in its development belies the fact that there have already been other stages and phases from different perspectives. Depending on the criteria to be used in defining a phase or stage, cataloguing all that have transpired might be difficult but not impossible. In any respect, let me state that I wanted to give some semblance of what influences Marx and Engels experienced during the era prior to, during and after the presentation of their Communist Manifesto. Cultural events included a "return to nature" philosophy labeled a "volkish" (folkish) attempt to recapture what was believed at the time to represent imagined old pagan or Teutonic beliefs that routinely became aligned with the ideas of the Aryan peoples. Let us look at this idea of "Aryanism" since it played a role in the period before, during and after the era of Marx and Engels:
(Aryan is a) former name given to a people who were said to speak an archaic Indo-European language and who were thought to have settled in prehistoric times in ancient Iran and the northern Indian subcontinent. The theory of an "Aryan race" appeared in the mid-19th century and remained prevalent until the mid-20th century. According to the hypothesis, these probably light-skinned Aryans were the group who invaded and conquered ancient India from the north and whose literature, religion, and modes of social organization subsequently shaped the course of Indian culture, particularly the Vedic religion that informed and was eventually superseded by Hinduism.
However, since the late 20th century, a growing number of scholars have rejected both the Aryan invasion hypothesis and the use of the term Aryan as a racial designation, suggesting that the Sanskrit term arya ("noble" or "distinguished"), the linguistic root of the word, was actually a social rather than an ethnic epithet. Rather, the term is used strictly in a linguistic sense, in recognition of the influence that the language of the ancient northern migrants had on the development of the Indo-European languages of South Asia. In the 19th century the term was used as a synonym for "Indo-European" and also, more restrictively, to refer to the Indo-Iranian languages. It is now used in linguistics only in the sense of the term Indo-Aryan languages, a branch of the larger Indo-European language family.
In Europe the notion of white racial superiority emerged in the 1850s, propagated most assiduously by the Comte de Gobineau and later by his disciple Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who first used the term "Aryan" for the white race. Members of this so-called race spoke Indo-European languages, were credited with all the progress that benefited humanity, and were purported to be superior to "Semites," "yellows," and "blacks." Believers in Aryanism came to regard the Nordic and Germanic peoples as the purest members of the "race." This notion, which had been repudiated by anthropologists by the second quarter of the 20th century, was seized upon by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and was made the basis of the German government policy of exterminating Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and other "non-Aryans."
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, many white supremacist groups adopted the name Aryan as a label for their ideology. Because of this usage and its association with Nazism, the term has acquired a pejorative meaning.
"Aryan." Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, 2013.
During the eras before, during and after the Marx and Engels time period (which includes the Enlightenment of the 17 and 18th Centuries), there was also a wellspring of alternative views centered around an attempt to gain greater insight into the presumed mysteries of ancient ideas such as described by an interest in the occult, usage of seances, spiritualist leaders and their super-natural guides or spirits, as well as an attempted comprehensive vehicle for understanding such assumed knowledge by way of a path called Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Esotericism, Occultism, Mysticism (Greek or otherwise), or religion/theology (such as divination, revelation), or science (such as researching the past or some unknown mystery), or alchemy, or mathematics (numbers), or art, or music (like music of the spheres), or poetry, or physics, or even "common sense", though when describing Psychology as an example one might turn to specifically denoting the development of Sigmund Freud's psycho-sexual ideas and Carl Jung's explorations into the vagaries of human consciousness as prevailing characterizations. Both Freud and Jung approached their respective interests on what can be viewed as excavations of the human mind with an intent to illustrate a developmental timeline, just as other excavations (called explorations, experimentation, analysis, etc.,) were taking place in other fields such as the embryology of Ernst Haeckel, the philosophy of G.W. Friedrich Hegel, and the mythology of Friedrich Max Müller (from which came Solar Mythology).
Let me also mention that in an effort to uncover supposed mysteries, that which obstructed the direct contact or inter-face was sometimes referred to as a cloud, shadow, veil, darkness, etc., and frequently described in terms of some convolution such as being a riddle, conundrum, maze, labyrinth, complexity, intricacy, series of passages, doorways, tasks to be performed, questions to be answered, riddles to be solved, tests to be taken (like academic tasks to show one has reached a "higher level" of understanding and comprehension), knowledge to be remembered in a given sequence, etc... Indeed, in the corporate world we often hear of someone having to "do their time" or having "paid their dues" before a given position or reward (such as a wage or salary or parking space, etc...) is to be awarded.
It should also be mentioned that both Freud and Jung occupied positions as the head of their own cult-like following, like many musicians, scientists, sports figures and other entertainers do today. Many of the historically important people during Marx's lifetime participated with experimentations in occult ideas, in an effort, during their time period, to explore considerations for discovering ideas which transcended contemporary views. If such views could not be found in religion then philosophy, the occult, mythology, anthropology, music, science, and politics was sought out as a means by which to unravel and further explore terrain that was though not yet to have been discovered. Many during that time, just as do many today, seek to find some virgin path that they can rush back to their contemporaries about the discovery of and being acknowledged for their part in helping humanity take a progressive step forward, though as is so often the case, the new territory is quickly overrun by scavengers and those who wish to exploit or stake a claim in order to advance some precedent that they should be provided with some provision, called a tax, a tithing or price tag. They take what can be described as a "here and now" (Machiavellian) approach to circumstances. Their personal profit is their only goal. There is none other. They do not see anything other than that which they can physically hold on to. They have no vision even when it is explained to them that what they presently hold is due to someone else's vision that could not be readily grasped by any physical means of apprehension. While a few do come to appreciate this, like the ancient King and Queen of Spain who funded Christopher Columbus' voyages, many so-called practitioners of practicality have no such ability nor interest in indulging in such speculations.
Marx and Engels, to their credit, were those who knew not only to attempt to thing in practical terms, but to speculated about the past and future. Unfortunately, the information during their time was appreciably limited in comparison to today. And even if we had a time machine that could venture into the past with today's information to give to them, it is not certain what use they would or could make of it. You, as a messenger, might very well be viewed as a liar, a fabricator, a hoaxer or even worse, and subjected to some legal retribution or illegal retaliation. A trip further back in time might have gotten you burnt at the stake, that is if anyone could come to understand your language and didn't think you were very weird for the modern clothes you were wearing. But changing them to the time-period dress code would not alter the fact that you would act strangely, given you were quite possibly not subjected to a history of intermittent malnutrition, infection, social and religious oppression, as well as contemporary fears and superstitions as well as illiteracy. Be this as it may, the point is that Marx and Engels were products of their era and so was the Communist Manifesto. It was influenced by Marx having a family history in which there were theologians, and his impoverishment, having to depend multiple times by the subsistence given him by Engels who came from a Bourgeoisie; a situation which may have created a lingering antagonism for Marx's feelings against such a social class.
Engels grew up in the environment of a family marked by moderately liberal political views, a steadfast loyalty to Prussia, and a pronounced Protestant faith. His father was the owner of a textile factory in Barmen and also a partner in the Ermen & Engels cotton plant in Manchester, England. Even after Engels openly pursued the revolutionary goals that threatened the traditional values of the family, he usually could count on financial aid from home. The influence of his mother, to whom he was devoted, may have been a factor in preserving the tie between father and son.
"Engels, Friedrich." Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, 2013.
- Oscar J. Hammen- Emeritus Professor of History, University of Montana, Missoula. Author of The Red '48ers: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Let's take an abbreviated but lengthier digression into the life of Marx. And yes, I am taking bits and pieces out of the much larger article:
Karl Heinrich Marx was the oldest surviving boy of nine children. His father, Heinrich, a successful lawyer, was a man of the Enlightenment, devoted to Kant and Voltaire, who took part in agitations for a constitution in Prussia. His mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, was from Holland. Both parents were Jewish and were descended from a long line of rabbis, but, a year or so before Karl was born, his father—probably because his professional career required it—was baptized in the Evangelical Established Church. Karl was baptized when he was six years old. Although as a youth Karl was influenced less by religion than by the critical, sometimes radical social policies of the Enlightenment, his Jewish background exposed him to prejudice and discrimination that may have led him to question the role of religion in society and contributed to his desire for social change.
In 1841 Marx, together with other Young Hegelians, was much influenced by the publication of Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig Feuerbach. Its author, to Marx's mind, successfully criticized Hegel, an idealist who believed that matter or existence was inferior to and dependent upon mind or spirit, from the opposite, or materialist, standpoint, showing how the "Absolute Spirit" was a projection of "the real man standing on the foundation of nature." Henceforth Marx's philosophical efforts were toward a combination of Hegel's dialectic—the idea that all things are in a continual process of change resulting from the conflicts between their contradictory aspects—with Feuerbach's materialism, which placed material conditions above ideas.
he next two years in Brussels saw the deepening of Marx's collaboration with Engels. Engels had seen at firsthand in Manchester, England, where a branch factory of his father's textile firm was located, all the depressing aspects of the Industrial Revolution. He had also been a Young Hegelian and had been converted to communism by Moses Hess, who was called the "communist rabbi." In England he associated with the followers of Robert Owen. Now he and Marx, finding that they shared the same views, combined their intellectual resources and published Die heilige Familie (1845; The Holy Family), a prolix criticism of the Hegelian idealism of the theologian Bruno Bauer. Their next work, Die deutsche Ideologie (written 1845–46, published 1932; The German Ideology), contained the fullest exposition of their important materialistic conception of history, which set out to show how, historically, societies had been structured to promote the interests of the economically dominant class. But it found no publisher and remained unknown during its authors' lifetimes.
During his Brussels years, Marx developed his views and, through confrontations with the chief leaders of the working-class movement, established his intellectual standing. In 1846 he publicly excoriated the German leader Wilhelm Weitling for his moralistic appeals. Marx insisted that the stage of bourgeois society could not be skipped over; the proletariat could not just leap into communism; the workers' movement required a scientific basis, not moralistic phrases. He also polemicized against the French socialist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in Misère de la philosophie (1847; The Poverty of Philosophy), a mordant attack on Proudhon's book subtitled Philosophie de la misère (1846; The Philosophy of Poverty). Proudhon wanted to unite the best features of such contraries as competition and monopoly; he hoped to save the good features in economic institutions while eliminating the bad. Marx, however, declared that no equilibrium was possible between the antagonisms in any given economic system. Social structures were transient historic forms determined by the productive forces: "The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steammill, society with the industrial capitalist." Proudhon's mode of reasoning, Marx wrote, was typical of the petty bourgeois, who failed to see the underlying laws of history.
An unusual sequence of events led Marx and Engels to write their pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. In June 1847 a secret society, the League of the Just, composed mainly of emigrant German handicraftsmen, met in London and decided to formulate a political program. They sent a representative to Marx to ask him to join the league; Marx overcame his doubts and, with Engels, joined the organization, which thereupon changed its name to the Communist League and enacted a democratic constitution. Entrusted with the task of composing their program, Marx and Engels worked from the middle of December 1847 to the end of January 1848. The London Communists were already impatiently threatening Marx with disciplinary action when he sent them the manuscript; they promptly adopted it as their manifesto. It enunciated the proposition that all history had hitherto been a history of class struggles, summarized in pithy form the materialist conception of history worked out in The German Ideology, and asserted that the forthcoming victory of the proletariat would put an end to class society forever. It mercilessly criticized all forms of socialism founded on philosophical "cobwebs" such as "alienation." It rejected the avenue of "social Utopias," small experiments in community, as deadening the class struggle and therefore as being "reactionary sects." It set forth 10 immediate measures as first steps toward communism, ranging from a progressive income tax and the abolition of inheritances to free education for all children. It closed with the words, "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!"
Revolution suddenly erupted in Europe in the first months of 1848, in France, Italy, and Austria...
Expelled once more from Paris, Marx went to London in August 1849. It was to be his home for the rest of his life. Chagrined by the failure of his own tactics of collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie, he rejoined the Communist League in London and for about a year advocated a bolder revolutionary policy. An "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League," written with Engels in March 1850, urged that in future revolutionary situations they struggle to make the revolution "permanent" by avoiding subservience to the bourgeois party and by setting up "their own revolutionary workers' governments" alongside any new bourgeois one. Marx hoped that the economic crisis would shortly lead to a revival of the revolutionary movement; when this hope faded, he came into conflict once more with those whom he called "the alchemists of the revolution," such as August von Willich, a communist who proposed to hasten the advent of revolution by undertaking direct revolutionary ventures. Marx wrote in September 1850:
Such persons substitute "idealism for materialism" and regard "pure will as the motive power of revolution instead of actual conditions. While we say to the workers: "You have got to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and national wars not merely in order to change your conditions but in order to change yourselves and become qualified for political power," you on the contrary tell them, "We must achieve power immediately."
The militant faction in turn ridiculed Marx for being a revolutionary who limited his activity to lectures on political economy to the Communist Workers' Educational Union. The upshot was that Marx gradually stopped attending meetings of the London Communists. In 1852 he devoted himself intensely to working for the defense of 11 communists arrested and tried in Cologne on charges of revolutionary conspiracy and wrote a pamphlet on their behalf. The same year he also published, in a German-American periodical, his essay "Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Napoleon" (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), with its acute analysis of the formation of a bureaucratic absolutist state with the support of the peasant class. In other respects the next 12 years were, in Marx's words, years of "isolation" both for him and for Engels in his Manchester factory.
From 1850 to 1864 Marx lived in material misery and spiritual pain. His funds were gone, and except on one occasion he could not bring himself to seek paid employment. In March 1850 he and his wife and four small children were evicted and their belongings seized. Several of his children died—including a son Guido, "a sacrifice to bourgeois misery," and a daughter Franziska, for whom his wife rushed about frantically trying to borrow money for a coffin. For six years the family lived in two small rooms in Soho, often subsisting on bread and potatoes. The children learned to lie to the creditors: "Mr. Marx ain't upstairs." Once he had to escape them by fleeing to Manchester. His wife suffered breakdowns.
During all these years Engels loyally contributed to Marx's financial support. The sums were not large at first, for Engels was only a clerk in the firm of Ermen and Engels at Manchester. Later, however, in 1864, when he became a partner, his subventions were generous. Marx was proud of Engels's friendship and would tolerate no criticism of him. Bequests from the relatives of Marx's wife and from Marx's friend Wilhelm Wolff also helped to alleviate their economic distress.
Marx had one relatively steady source of earned income in the United States. On the invitation of Charles A. Dana, managing editor of The New York Tribune, he became in 1851 its European correspondent. The newspaper, edited by Horace Greeley, had sympathies for Fourierism, a Utopian socialist system developed by the French theorist Charles Fourier. From 1851 to 1862 Marx contributed close to 500 articles and editorials (Engels providing about a fourth of them). He ranged over the whole political universe, analyzing social movements and agitations from India and China to Britain and Spain.
In 1859 Marx published his first book on economic theory, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). In its preface he again summarized his materialistic conception of history, his theory that the course of history is dependent on economic developments. At this time, however, Marx regarded his studies in economic and social history at the British Museum as his main task. He was busy producing the drafts of his magnum opus, which was to be published later as Das Kapital. Some of these drafts, including the Outlines and the Theories of Surplus Value, are important in their own right and were published after Marx's death.
- Lewis S. Feuer: University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Government, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Author of Marx and the Intellectuals and others.
- David T. McLellan: Professor of Political Theory, University of Kent at Canterbury, England. Author of Marxism after Marx and others.
"Marx, Karl." Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, 2013.
As true to form in many societies, particularly during Marx's time period, when the question of sanity comes up as a topic to provide an answer or reason to some behavior that is not understood, it was the woman or woman's family that was looked at as the repository of some mental illness history, though in fact the "mental illness" was a description more often than not to be attributed to the irrationality of male thought processes. I mention this because several people in the life of Marx died by what is described as a "mental breakdown". In other words, Marx's behavior may well have been brought about by an undiagnosed psychiatric issue which underlay his behavior leading to conflicts which caused him to be ostracized or feel the need to retreat from the company of others and establish his own conclave of broodiness which contributed to his impoverishment. Writing for a publication quite distant from home was part of the means by which he could maintain a distancing effect from socialization, not to mention being able to retreat to the quiet of studying alone in the British museum.
Date of Origination: Sunday, January 26th, 2020... 4:16 PM
Initial Posting: Saturday, February 1st, 2020... 12:34 PM
Herb O. Buckland
herbobuckland@hotmail.com