Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

— Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Matthew 25:34-40 (NIV)

The burden of consummating God’s success rests squarely on the shoulders of humanity.

If we are God’s creation, then we are also Their experiment. As such, it is only through our achievements and deficiencies here on earth that Their success or failure can be determined. Our God’s right to divine claim exists in direct proportion to our austerity in this fleshy life. In this way, tribute to the Creator cannot be paid only through quiet reflection, but must be waged actively and with zealous devotion to the progress of humanity. In order to love God, we must first love man; for we are Their creation, and what fool is fascinated by the cobbler while traversing indignantly on blackened soles?

We determine the substance of our God by the quality of our actions. If those actions are insubstantial in our complacency and apathy for the sacral privilege of having existed and even lived, then much as though we make ourselves inconsequential, we also snub God out of any meaningful quality of existence. We cannot undo God, be assured and I am not claiming that our incompetence renders us atheists; though if humanity is worship and living its church, then it does make us a lazy congregation, and all the apolitical laity are sleeping in the sweeping pews of civilization. The Creator of an irrelevant thing renders Themselves illogical. The God that speaks to a sleeping congregation serves no purpose but to provide a consistent droning sound by which their unproductive slumber is made all the more gentle in its insolence as they and They slip deeper into unconsciousness. We being the physically expressed qualities of a metaphysical Divine, give it its physical substance, and if we lack momentum, then we relegate God from a position of sentience to that of a stone. And a stone becomes no more useful when spelled with a capital S.

This is our interesting dilemma: to act upon each other in kindness and charity reflects these qualities on God, which in turn shifts God’s motive factor for our creation and continuity as having been from those same qualities. This then increases the value of our worship, because it increases the value of God. The propensity of our meaningful worship through action in life makes life itself both a gift and a responsibility to God to maintain Their image for posterity. The coffers of our divine reason for being are only as great as the contributions we are willing to make. The question now is, are we willing to tithe for humanity or will we continue to greedily hoard the contents of our lives to ourselves?

“What has been so apparent in the modern history of the family will be no less apparent in the future histories of profession, university, labor union, and all other forms of association in our culture. Deprive these entities of the authorities over their members through increasing centralization of political power in society, and these associations, like the extended family, the church, and the local community, must shrink immeasurably in their potential contributions to culture.”

— Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community

One’s outlook on the political movement of humanity is primarily founded on their linguistic perspective—how they interpret words such as nationalism, liberalism, freedom, individualism, etc. For in each of these, where some see potential for dark devices, others see devices for hope. Where some discover disorder, others find the necessary checks on centralized authority. It is the question of the function of state in relation to society.

Whereas the state serves at the function of individuals, society serves at the function of individual associations. This is a great distinction, for the culture of man is dictated not by internal machinations and the structure of the individual, but by the quality of space between men, determined by their common ties. If the state is personal and comprised of individuals, then a society is interpersonal and comprised of communities.

The popular understanding of the world today is founded on the peculiar concept of political culture, that which fuses a state’s historical traditions to its cultural institutions and values. In reality, however, there is no state culture because culture is a tool of society, created through man’s voluntary association to man. When the state absorbs what once contained culture, it can only become contract. This is because a state is incapable of creating a singular unity, but through the dissolution of warmer unities instilled by entities outside of its control.

It has been suggested that nationalism has the potential for both unification and fragmentation, of which liberals of course prefer unity, meaning one world-nation. This ideological interpretation of the word nation debases classical definition. Proponents of singular nationalism see fragmentation as threatening because it serves to break up countries and governing body. Liberals therefor would define any political setting in which liberal academics might find a multitude of conflicting authorities as a state in disorder. But this conception of fragmentation is really just pluralism. It is absurd to assume that normative ethics cannot exist in society without state interference. A legitimate society exhibits redundancy in its authorities through the associative ties in which one man can have many masters—be they in the form of state, church, guild, family, or others. This is the purest form of separation of powers; for the separation of powers existing solely within a state entity is in fact the same centralized power given several names under the same authority so as to give off the illusory comfort of a false separation.

Globalization is commonly described as a process by which increasing interdependence and communication between states and varying parts of the world lead to shared experiences and common identification of global issues. Suggesting that globalization is a facet of democratization, many follow Steven Spiegel’s reasoning that it “brings human rights, and, ultimately, global peace, because democracies are not generally at war with each other,” in keeping with the esoteric philosophy of Progress as emphasized in Frank Fukuyama’s End of History. In it, Fukuyama posits that “the apex of human political and social development is reached by successfully democratizing,” leading the world into  a population of “peaceful, democratic, economically interdependent states.”

These self-described progressive ideologues may admit that the defense of national and cultural identities in fact create conflict, thereby contradicting ideas of easy momentum toward globalization, but they are generally quick to add that cultural defense plays a minor role, often suggesting that the conflict is actually rooted in the aftermath of colonialism or the social and political experiments following World War II. In this way, they define fragmentation as a sort of stunted political growth or regression into past eras, discarding cultural defense as a merely anomaly in the course of any consideration of regress stemming from Newtonian predictions of politics in straight lines. It is delusive because, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, “to explain all evil as simply a reversion to the past is like describing individual insanity as simple a reversion to childhood.”

Similar is the always disregarded concept of society in economic discussion. Economic society is that in which the cultural symbols of freedom are ever suffering under the political invasions of freedom. Economics are presently discussed with heavy emphasis on a perverted definition of individualism, which less considers the individual than the individual in their relation to the state, requiring a dissolution of all associative institutions that are not under the direct authority of the state. The presumption is that the wants and desires of the state and the individual are one and therefore anything that benefits the state must innately benefit the individual. But the resistance to so-called free trade does not find its source in imagined fearful states. One need not look further than the North American Free Trade Agreement to see that states have shown that they are generally uninterested in fighting the absolution of their laborers into huddled, international workforces. Indeed, states are often the progenitors of such movements. Instead, the resistance exists in the domestic labor unions, where community is found in the association of the culture of labor. Indeed, it is labor unions who typically serve as the most vehement opposition to free trade policies. The state itself has never been opposed to entangling alliances in its entire history.

The state has the power to consume associations, but is incapable of creating them. The lone individual, as well, is incapable of creating associations because the very nature of association requires not only the associate but also that to which he is associated. To be sure, it is through the associations of groups of men that the state even comes into existence. It is wholly unreasonable to think then, after the dust has settled in an absolutely globalized society, that the state will ever place new symbols and associations where it has dissolved those of the old world. But once society is entirely a composition of the sprawling state and its  servile masses, each individually connected to it but not each other, who, then, will be capable of creating culture? Or will culture and society simply cease to exist in the face of the new totalitarianism we once affectionately described as liberalism?

The state cannot create power, it can only take it from the institutions to which men have volunteered their allegiances. It does this by first eliminating the associations between the individual and those middling authorities to which they submit themselves (because of their belief in their share of the culture of those authorities.) Finally, it places itself in a position through the absorption of previously designated institutional responsibilities, in order to become the new associated object of individuals’ desires. As it amasses the natural divisions of power, it in turn multiplies its own. And with every new authority it consumes, not only does it become the greater object of the individuals’ respective directions, but they also become the lesser subject to its own. All the while, the state convinces these subjects that they are not losing anything, but that through it they are gaining the power formerly held by their associative communities. This flawed logic is construed from a confusion of power and freedom. Of course, if the state is that which is the source of individual power, then, as Thomas Jefferson once said, “the State with the power to do things for people has the power to do things to them.”

In this way that the idea of an immanent, natural Progress unfolds completely not to the exception of totalitarian hiccups, but instead to the rule of their perpetual roar. If state Progress is a timeline and history is its momentum, we have no manner of determining if the state we end up with will be the result of upward or downward momentum. Perhaps, then, the hiccups were democracy?

While new conservatives such as Nisbet suggest that this confused brand of individualism is the true source of globalization, thus culminating in the destruction of community, it is the destruction of self which inevitably proceeds from the loss of community that is of greatest importance.

We are social creatures. We find meaning in our associations because they serve as reflections on our own nature. Man apart from society, which I believe is really just the democratic state of community, is lonely. And apart from our associations with others, we have no reason to improve. For what use is language without someone with whom one can communicate? What use are the labels and words which define property without a boundary separating what is yours from what is theirs—when there is no them? And without ownership, what is the purpose of labor—what can we hope to attain and what can we hope to keep when we have not the language to call things ours nor the comprehension to understand the importance of such language?

A man adapted to a world without society is a man alone in the world. Without the ability to empathize with others by association, he loses his ability to empathize with himself: for what is empathy, but the recognition of certain aspects of oneself in others? And if others do not exist in the form of associations, how can one recognize those aspects of common humanity in themselves? The fabric of humanity is therefore inevitably found in its associations.

If man tears away at the very fabric of his self, that which makes him human, in order to prop up and aggrandize the state, because he believes the state when it tells him that its power is his freedom, does there not come a point when there is no fabric of self left, all of it having been sewn into the state? The future of humanity posited by those who believe progress is the gradual tearing away of boundaries may end up surprised when they find that those boundaries do not stop with the lines of a political map, but continue deeper until they’ve ground away the flesh and bone which constitute the very individuals they originally sought to protect.

When the state stops functioning at the service of man and the plurality of men, and instead they must submit themselves to the function of it, they lose themselves in it to the point of their own negation. And once men cannot be told apart within the vast, collective machine of state, absorbing all old ties into its faceless masses, the only purpose left for the machine will be to run itself.

Those not involved in such contracts are, by definition, not citizens, and are neither obliged to treat others with the empathy of petition (to follow the laws of that institution) nor can they be guarded by such from harm, because they have chosen by exclusion to live in an anarchic state apart from social man. These men will not last long, either in death or resignation to the system at large, for a man not interested in his own social cultivation is in fact, by the very nature of things, no man at all.

Man has found it exceedingly difficult to live permanently in anarchy, for in his natural state he has an innate desire to design social contracts with others to ensure his and their livelihood. The closer one is to his brethren, the more he feels a natural bond to them, and the more a state of anarchy feels contrived and alien to him. At present, the only perpetual anarchy men have been able to achieve is that of the world stage, where each government represents a systemic Leviathan-man composed of all men in his boundaries, and for whom diplomacy and war are both bred from the very human hopes and fears that play out on the individual level as conversation and barbarity (but where one man only has a club to defend his fears against others, the Leviathan has a multitude of clubs, all beating in synchronicity to the drumbeat of collective war.)

In any other sense, fighting at the anarchic, systemic level is no different from fighting in those anarchies we see on the individual level during transitions between governments. This occurs in that murky fog of revolution that leads to riot and tumult when the sense pervades, during a changeover wherein the national flag is not completely in the hands of one leader or the other, that the flag is owned by nothing and therefore ceases for a moment to represent anyone.

This need for contract denotes a feeling of common purpose shared by all men, though they may not understand the contents of such purpose. When order becomes too overbearing, he chases increasingly apparent manifestations of anarchy, but recognizing that anarchy requires no order, and places no demand on self-regulation, man places on himself a wholly new and unnatural demand for order: that of apathy. In the unnatural state of social man apart from the order of social contract, he forces himself to lose the natural state of his own mind; in other words, man in the absence of state takes absence from his own mind.

This contrived apathy (for words such as apathy and anarchy at this point can be used interchangeably,) leads ironically to an empathy with all other men in the same nothing-state. In the very pursuit of their goal apart from each other, the citizens of nowhere find that they share the common bond of nothing, and its familiar discontents of constant fear and want for order. Again familiarized with one another, they awkwardly approach each other in the midst of violence and together sign contracts which place an increasing number of regulations and demands on themselves. This is born from the learned understanding that man has an innate want for order because he recognizes that apart from order he exists in too much fear to pursue worthy goals.

Hobbes and Locke, then, were both only partially correct in their diagnoses of man in the state of nature, but when synthesized paint the whole picture of man. For life of man in the state of nature is not merely, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” as Hobbes suggests; nor is it simply an extension of his God-given rights of “life, liberty and property,” as Locke purports. Instead, man in the state of nature is as complex as man in any other state, carrying on a Hobbesian natural existence only when he has not accomplished what desire was put into him by nature’s God — namely, the creation of social contracts. Hobbesian man is therefore only natural man in a state of psychological regress, a psychopathic entity necessitated by what psychologist Erik Erikson would call the fundamental failure in the [socio-political] formative state of basic trust versus mistrust. This is because, unrecognized by Hobbes, man in the state of nature creates states.

All has been thought, but travel boldly in pursuit of that novel idea. The tragic comedy by which all great men live: boarding majestic ships of purpose with prior knowledge of the impending wreck.

For there is no host country to original thought, but instead a sinking into the vast ocean of thoughts. And still we set sail, if for no other consolation than that of a suitable burial among the bodies of our brethren.

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.

— Abraham Lincoln

Faith is the conclusion we draw from the understanding that man is not something that merely is, but is instead something constantly becoming. To become requires faith, because why would we try to do more than just be as we are if not for the hope that we could become something more than what we are right now? It is only through having faith in the existence of the formal good that any person can will themselves to become better. This is a small leap that we all make, every day: that this year, this month, this day, we will be better than we were in the last. This is what we live for.

That so many of us stagnate in lieu of improving is merely a byproduct of our myopic and distractive nature, not our innate want to be good; that some may constantly fail to meet or attempt their goals does not mean they do not have those goals. Apathy or lack of desire to improve could be considered a defense mechanism built up over time as patterns of failure impress themselves upon anemic spirits: the more often the weak-willed person’s attempts to improve are thwarted, the more unconscious resistance they build against trying at all. You’ll find in these people who’ve discovered safe haven in their appetite that they often see life as a chaotic meaninglessness, with a “play to win” attitude void of principle and dignity. In them we can see the self in regress.

In health, we all search for that ideal iteration of the self, the key with which to unlock and negate the door which separates all that we are from all that we could be. In this light it isn’t so absurd to have faith not only in the potential for good, but in that for the best; it is only by trusting to the future the existence of some perfect good that we may ever perform our actions in its general direction. If we have no model for success, we are incapable of meeting success. No runner starts without a finish line.

In this same vein, if so many of us seek God—in the context of omni-benevolence, omniscience, and omnipotency—then it is in our conception of God that we can see the depth of our human nature. God is our finish line. In him, we seek to be good, wise or powerful. God is only the vessel through which many of us intend to reach these traits. But he is more telling of our source goodness than our salvation. That God exists allows us to have faith in more than just a creator, but also (and more importantly) the ideal iteration of the self. God is not merely who we pray to, but who we aspire to become. This is why when we are at our lowest points, we turn to our conception of God: to remind ourselves what we’re capable of when we feel incompetent. Our image of God is really the well of faith in ourselves.

The work norms were set so inhumanly high that the extra rations awarded if the goal was met did not compensate the worker for the energy expended: a method intended to drive the always-hungry prisoners to toil by dangling food in front of them. The goal was to extract the maximum amount of labor at the minimum cost (except in human lives, of course) (24).

In this light, it almost seems as though Marx intended, through his silence on easily prescient issues, to damn humanity to material equality. The problem is that he not only outcasts from his summit the previously wealthy, who would be at just as little fault by his calculations as those determined by their environment to be poor, but that he changes the dominant system of currency. What would cost other nations in dollars costs his in lives. And this is forgivable under the auspices of the collective good. His economist’s thinking turns men into statistics, and their deaths become a part of a sinister cost-benefit analysis that places Stalin’s five-year plans (Pontuso 47) and Lenin’s insistence that only by “‘shooting hostile classes wholesale’ could the proletarian victory be gained.” (Pontuso 60)

Ultimately, Marx alienates himself from the whole of philosophy when he relegates humanity to the position of breathing math. That he chooses to be so keen on the details of numbers but unclear on issues of common humanity makes his work monstrous. Marx has his own opinions of his family:

Marx denigrates previous philosophers for making a distinction between thought and action. He proposes that whatever differences exist between theory and practice must be settled in favor of practice—praxis. Indeed, he goes so far as to assert that for something to be true, it must occur in the physical world and not just in mind.  (Pontuso 118)

I wonder what the philosophers he devalues would say in response to his ironic assertion that he should be judged by the work of Stalin and Lenin.

Plato would probably say he was ruled by the lowest of functions: “the appetites, which form the greater part of each man’s soul and are by nature insatiably covetous” (38).

St. Augustine would awe at his call for permanent revolution—after all, the saint assumes that “no man seeks war by making peace. For even they who intentionally interrupt the peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but only wish it changed into a peace that suits them better” (110). What of men such as Lenin and Stalin whose best-suited peace is war?

Rousseau would suggest Marx rescind his dedication to praxis, noting that “it cannot say: ‘What he wills to-morrow, I too shall will’ because it is absurd for the will to bind itself for the future” (231).

Personally, I’d just call him a bastard who conceived a gruesome philosophy. But perhaps it isn’t his philosophy’s fault, if I take into account his social determinism: for what else is to be expected when one is born to an environment of illegitimacy?

Works Cited

Augustine. “The City of God.” Excerpt from The City of God in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Trans. Marcus Dods. Vol. 2. Ed. Philip Schaff. Buffalo: The Christian Literature Company, 1887. Print. Rpt. in Introduction to Political Thinkers. Ed. William and Alan Ebenstein. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. 104-116. Print.

Ebenstein, William and Alan. Introduction to Political Thinkers. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. Print.

Marx, Karl. “The Communist Manifesto.” Excerpt from The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore. Ed. Friedrich Engels. 1888. Print. Rpt. in Introduction to Political Thinkers. Ed. William and Alan Ebenstein. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. 303-319. Print.

Plato. “The Republic.” Excerpt from The Republic of Plato. Trans. F. M. Cornford. London: Oxford University Press, 1945. Print. Rpt. in Introduction to Political Thinkers. Ed. William and Alan Ebenstein. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. 13-57. Print.

Pontuso, James. Solzhenitsyn’s Political Thought. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 1990. Print.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “The Social Contract.” Excerpt from The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G. D. H. Cole. London: Orion Publishing Group, 1947. Rpt. in Introduction to Political Thinkers. Ed. William and Alan Ebenstein. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. 225-245. Print.

If there is any (likeable) philosopher who might give Marx some love, it’s Rousseau. Where Rousseau believes we are determined by our culture, Marx says it is our class. The General Will, which Rousseau claims is for the “good of all”, may as well be for the good of the Party for its stipulation that “to be general, a will need not always be unanimous; but every vote must be counted: an exclusion is a breach of generality.” (231) So every vote must be counted, but not every vote has to count. (Rousseau may have as many gaps in his philosophy as Marx, but at least he acknowledges them with style.) This, in effect, is like a mother who feeds her children a dose of cod oil each morning for their future health. The children may object to the taste, but they at least acknowledge that it is for the best in the long run. Marx’s expectation that “for the success of the cause … the alteration of man on a mass scale is necessary” (qtd. in Pontuso 92) seems to follow along this line. However, Rousseau and Marx both ignore the possibility that the mother might one day begin substituting cod oil with a sledgehammer. What say the little ones then?

While Marx sees private property as a notion to overcome, Rousseau seems to think it just goes against man’s nature. Both Marx and Rousseau’s fundamental want for society is equality, but Rousseau makes it particularly clear that he is willing to sacrifice at least a kind of liberty in order to do that (a sincerity Marx doesn’t ever seem to share.) Rousseau is a pre-industrial precursor to Marx in that he still feels there is a turning point and humanity can undo all the alleged nonsense of culture and civilization. He asserts that this can be done by the whole of society, not through uprising but by cooperative resolve. In order to be a true sovereignty, he explains, it “neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs … The Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, is always what it should be.” By Marx’s epoch, it seems the philosophy becomes more akin to: if you can’t join them, beat them.  In broad fashion, he predicts:

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians. (Marx 306)

Never mind that he leaves open to interpretation whether he expects you to use a gun or a coffeemaker on your oppressors, Marx cries out for equality while whispering to men how different they are from each other. Whereas there’s a confused sort of kindness in Rousseau’s noble savage, you can’t help but feel the sheer force of anger that comes through in Marx’s writing. That he claims to come from a place of love is disingenuous for anybody who’s read St. Augustine, to say the least. In each area wherein Rousseau wants to strip everybody of all differences, Marx wants to spread those differences around—because it’s more fun for a bitter soul to appropriate some of your property than to decide that nobody owns any property anymore, period.

St. Augustine helped forge the primary Christian model as one of foregoing earthly pursuits in better interest of God. I believe his conception had a peculiar impact on the beginnings of Communism and public sentiment during the Bolshevik revolution. According to Pontuso, the Orthodox Church before the revolution “had given a justification for the social order and had provided a spiritual basis on which the inequalities within Russian society could be accepted” (55).

As public confidence in the church waned, along went faith in the tsarist government of the time. The Augustinian construct that led men to be “more concerned with the salvation of their souls than with the satisfaction of their bodies” (Pontuso 55) would become the perfect model for self-devaluation in communist society . It is in this way that Marx brings Augustine’s God down to earth and paints him red. By removing religion from practicing society, there remains an implication—voids are meant to be filled. Due to the unique circumstances during the Bolshevik revolution that combined an “utterly decrepit and demoralized” (Pontuso 55) Church with the opportunity to be a part of something else still greater than them, people became more willing to forsake religion in favor of a spirited rebellion. If a man once sought his spiritual renewal from God, he could now find it in the Party. In contrast to tsarist rule, men who didn’t “profess themselves to be wise [but instead sought] reward in the society of the saints, of holy angels as well as holy men, that God may be all in all” (Augustine 105) would under Communist rule seek their reward in the collective good. Once faith was brought down and collectives could be worshipped, it made it even easier for men to transfer that worship to them later on.

Immediately after Stalin came into power, he made this potential for secular faith in one man embarrassingly palpable. His “cult of personality” was one of self-deification, and Solzhenitsyn suggests, “[he] wants to cure humanity of its maladies; a feat he can accomplish only by making everyone follow a single lead” (Pontuso 44). Stalin’s need for glorification, and his understanding that deeds alone would give him honor in history, led to the massive tragedies of humanity through his aims toward hyper-industrialization (Pontuso 46). It is in part the ambiguity of Marx’s teachings, held then as the new Scripture, which gave Stalin his perceived right. Marx commits a “sin of omission [with doctrine that] makes no provision for governing, institutes no checks against tyranny, and lays down no limitations on the exercise of power” (Pontuso 84). The dangers of a vehemently secular revolution in a religious culture is that it expects people will abandon their basic understanding of the world without any further consequence:

Marx’s disregard for the importance of politics led him to misunderstand one of the most elemental of human desires. When one ruling class is overthrown, the leaders of the revolution are bound to take its place. (Pontuso 85)

Augustine makes it clear in The City of God that in order to gain acceptance into the City of God, one must also respect the laws of the City of Man (106). He probably finds reason for this in the Scripture, wherein “[the] authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted” (New International Version Bible, Rom. 13.7). If faulty reason leads one to replace God with Marxism, why would they not be expected then to attribute to Marx some of the features they’ve until now associated with God? The problem with trying to superimpose an entirely new perspective onto a world that’s just not there yet is that it forces a distortion on previous beliefs.

For it leaks like acid through the gaps of the Manifesto and distorts everything touched by the philosophies on top of which it has been set.

Plato created the prototype for all political philosophy and suggested states with his Republic. For Marx to have even set out to write his considerations of political economy owed much to Plato’s groundbreaking, and that they both wrote works on ideal governments is at least one thing they share completely in kind. But these men would not sing over beers together. If Marx were the freed prisoner in Plato’s cave allegory, he’d escape only to see the halogen light of the corporate workplace—if Plato’s light revealed to him a case for absolute truth, Marx’s dim assessment shone but a dollar trail.

This is no doubt influenced by Marx’s own youth, during which he was witness to the material value of virtue: after a long-held rabbinical tradition in the men of his family, his father abandoned Judaism and converted to Christianity to enhance his job opportunities. This would play out in Marx’s own valuation of faith and perception of what is at the root of all things.

Whereas Plato’s obsession with truth and justice leads the Greek to center his Republic on the concept of rule by the wise—namely, the philosopher-king—Marx’s materialistic obsession forces society into an uncomfortable box and makes it stay there until it’s learned its lesson. Hypothetically responding to Plato’s case that the state is necessary because “no individual is self-sufficing; we all have many needs” (19), Marx argues that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (303). The former lauds the division of labor as something that makes each man best at any particular thing and the latter considers it a form of alienation.

It’s almost as though Marx sat down at his desk with only a paper and quill and copy of Plato’s dialogues, and then set out to explicitly create something that would surely piss the old man off royally. Plato embraces the class structure: he accepts a communitarian system within his guardian and auxiliary classes, ruled respectively by reason and spirit, but denies it for workers, whom he sees as too appetitive and beneath the honor required of such an environment (18).  Marx puts this on its head, arguing that the workers are the only ones worth a damn and the bourgeois—Plato’s would-be guardians—writing in Capital, that their currency “lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

Plato is an absolutist and tackles the issue not merely as one of building an ideal state but of building the ideal state. While he did not define matters of foreign policy in his Republic, it can be inferred that justice-spreading Plato would not coexist peacefully with the Procrustean brand of equality Marx propones to proliferate. Instead, he would agree with Solzhenitsyn in his critique of the West’s relaxing standards of truth:

A truly farsighted policy must recognize that freedom is indivisible. The world cannot exist half slave and half free. … [If the West] comes to doubt that value judgments of the kind that attribute superiority to one way of life as opposed to another, are impossible to make, then the West will not be able to defend its own highest principles. (Pontuso 184)

It is spiritedness, Solzhenitsyn asserts (and I think Plato would agree), that gives us the upper hand among the live-and-let-live relativists that, yes, “there are such things as morality and justice” (Pontuso 194). Plato’s lens of the tripartite soul would surely not allow rulers led by appetite and not temperance or spirit to sustain. If Lenin gave the Germans everything they needed to invade the Soviet Union, and worse, Stalin “could not conquer Finland and … panicked during the Nazi advance” (Pontuso 197), while using his position “to satisfy his desire for female companionship, good wine, and good food,” (Pontuso 41), then to Plato, both were unfit to lead. It was Plato who claimed, “a passion for honours or for money is rightly regarded as something to be ashamed of” (18). Having been taught by his mentor Socrates that “to know the good is to do the good,” he would have certainly taken notice and made advancements to free the Soviet Union from the grips of its shameless leaders.

But the entire structure dooms itself to constant collapse—both in ideology and practice—because Marx chooses ambiguity for moments that demand detail, and torturous precision for those better left interpreted in their time. Raymond Aron writes, “The philosophy of Marx, precisely because of its intrinsic ambiguity, … has always lent itself to many interpretations, some of which are more convincing, … but all of which, strictly speaking, are tolerable.” (qtd. in Pontuso 73). More disastrous than anything is that Marx lays down the foundation for his vision on shaky settlement. At best, Marx’s bold obsession with materialism dooms his potential genius. At worst: the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin.