He seems older to me.

Whatever else you want to say about Karl Marx (and there’s a lot to say, he doesn’t actually seem like someone I’d have wanted to be friends with), he had a profound, unprecedented critical sensitivity:

• • he possessed an empathy with the excluded periphery of the material and political world,
  • he was capable of finding the classist metaphysical assumptions, the cruel theology, in conventional assumptions about economics, and
  • he spotted, with precision, the ways in which symbolic, legalistic, institutional reforms failed to address the underlying problems they set out to reform.

Materiality always seems to have the last word, even though materialists have a mixed record on understanding oppression holistically. But you can’t get oppression without understanding how wealth, the generation of wealth, differences in wealth, control of systems of production large and small, contextualize it.

While I won’t defend those who insist that economics always comes first, it seems like the more pressing challenge always is convincing people it comes at all. There is a great material interest in obfuscating materiality.

Just search “Marx at 200” today and you’ll find many interesting reads, but a few that stand out are Andrew Hartman’s “Marx at 200: Just Getting Started” and Nigel Gibson on “why the workers’ way of knowing still matters.” Gibson writes:

In his last years, after the Paris Commune of 1871 when working people rose up against the capitalist state, he became interested in alternative paths to socialism. In his Ethnological Notebooks compiled in 1881, he critically read ethnographers, praising the freedom that the Native American Iroquois women had compared to women in “civilized” societies. It was live human beings and their reason that remained essential – not the mechanical materialism that Marxism is often reduced to. Marx was a revolutionary humanist, open to – and inspired by – the new passions and forces that spring up and open new avenues to a truly human society.

But he was also a materialist, and I think we have to be both and more.

matt