I have read well beyond the first one-hundred pages of Gareth Stedman Jones KARL MARX: GREATNESS AND ILLUSION, Harvard, Cambridge, 2016. Author Jones reminds me of my maternal Grandma Knapp, when she hand-dug a water well at her West Michigan home about a century ago. Located in the rural community of Lacota, some six miles inland east of the Lake Michigan shoreline, and a short distance from the Riverview Indian encampment where her family homesteaded earlier, where my mother remembered Native Americans stealing loaves of baked bread from the window ledge where they cooled.
This sturdy pioneer later became my maternal, "Grandma Knapp" as I knew her. She died in the mid-fifties and I was too far away to attend her Memorial Service, but I grew up admiring her. I learned some valuable life lessons from her, Undaunted by lack of help, she provided her own water supply by hand-digging the twelve-foot deep well that supplied the needs for her humble abode six miles east of my birth place in South Haven, MI.
Grandma was a sturdy soul, divorced from Captain Knapp who commanded a Great Lakes shipping vessel, based in upper lower-Michigan. She never remarried; she just moved back south to be near the family that had launched her. Grandma's well penetrated the sandy loam of southwest Michigan, reaching a depth of twelve feet before reaching an abundance of satisfying water.
Reading Jones narrative of Marx, finds me digging through the sandy loam of philosophical truth and watching the sands of a-theistic theory slowly spill repeatedly into the bottomless hole before finding a satisfying supply of truth's water, to be assessed, reassessed, reconfigured and appropriately applied in a new context--finally finding the bottom of truth and a water supply adequate for the needs of her growing family.
Not finding satisfaction in my reading, and feeling a tragic sense of wasted life, I turned to the back of this six-hundred-page book looking for real direction. I scanned the closing chapters--"The Critique of Political Economy ,,, Capital, Social Democracy and the International ... (and) Back to the Future", and quickly scanning the brief epilogue detailing the sadness and tragedy of Marx's final few years. I found his final few years sadly tragic, somewhat uncomprehensable, and utterly nonreconcilable.
Author Jones concluded his weighty tome with a brief paragraph that I found pertinent and appropriate but tragic, and to this day, incomprehensible and irreconcilable. Marx seemingly lived a life wasted by framing it in an incomprehensible a-theism that resulted in philosophical theory and remained forever unreconcilable and without any reality of absolute truth. Jones concluded with what I call a confession,
"We cannot know why in 1923 the former leaders of the Group for the Emancipation of Labour forgot Karl's 1881 letter urging them to support the village community rather than follow the supposedly orthodox "Marxist" strategy of building an urban-based worker's social-democratic movement. But this only reinforces the point that Marx constructed in the twentieth century bore only an incidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth" (Italics mine).
Jones concludes with a scholarly admission informing us there is a vast world of difference in the philosophical theorizing of Karl Marx, that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov--better known by his alias Lenin--fiercely guarded as a Communist Manifesto of orthodoxy. We remember Lenin as a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist who served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. It was under his administration that Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Soviet Communist Party. A Marxist always, Lenin developed a variant of this communist ideology known as Leninism.
Jones' Epilogue describes the few final years of Karl Marx as a period filled with sickness, sadness, family tragedy, and continuing search for philosophical truth that he insisted on grounding in his a-theistic theorizing, yet he could never discover any solid foundation for truth in the absolute. Someone observed that Marx discovered Darwinian evolution and that he began where Darwin left off. Thus, Marx ended his life of wandering through a philosophical wilderness in his final days--philosophizing, theorizing, assessing and reassessing and assessing and reassessing, all the while reconfiguring and reconstructing new and different contexts for application.
He never arrived at any point that gave him comprehension and consistency with his belief system. Thus, he finished his life searching but never finding; he spent his life tragically wasted in an atheism that remained for him forever incomprehensible and unreconcilable.
Looking at Jones' thoughtfully selected book title, perhaps that is what he is telling us: Marx's greatness was Lenin's illusion and perhaps that is why the Communist hierarchy controls their doctrinal manifesto so guardedly--the illusion of atheistic communism.
So sad ...
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