footpad, posts by tag: rumination - LiveJournal (original) (raw)

As my last purchase in America (except for a sandwich), I picked up an e-book reader, one of these little black-and-white low-powered devices that will probably be eclipsed by sleeker coloured tech in a year or two. It's a marvellous little gizmo, which has revolutionised not only how I read but what I read. Flicking on at the touch of a button, and going for weeks between battery charges, it effortlessly swallows e-books, PDFs of scientific papers, RSSed periodicals, textual Web pages, and tucks them all in my pocket to be perused anywhere. The thing even has several built-in dictionaries, including English-German and German-English, so I need only double-tap on a word to pop up its definition or translation. Neat!

In particular, because I can load it with a mix of light and heavy reading, it makes it feasible to tackle those denser tomes which I previously never got around to because, half the time when I wanted to read, I just wanted something easy to relax the mind; and I wasn't prepared to carry several books around with me to satisfy the other half of the time. Now those several books go in exactly the same pocket that previously housed my regular sci-fi paperback, and I'm a hundred-some pages into Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith—what a guy!

The most surprising thing I've so far read, though, was The Communist Manifesto, a document I don't think I'd have been likely to come across in print, nor to take the time to read on the Web when I could be exercising my baser predilections.

The Communist Manifesto is one of the most glorious, horrible, apotheotic pieces of history I've ever read. Even now, getting on for two centuries after its publication, it rings like a clarion with its call to social revolution. It's not hard to see how magnetically, irresistibly charismatic this document must once have seemed—how Marx must have ripped away the mask of righteousness from the social evils of the age, and fired a million impoverished hearts with a savage hunger for economic and social justice.

Nowadays, as we read the Manifesto through the trampled and bloodied veil of history, its deadly flaws are bitterly apparent. Blood is sprayed on every page, and each cry for revolution echoes with an undertone of screams. Abolition of property, dissolution of the family, the framing of history as a war of the many against a few—nowadays we recognise these as inhuman propositions and the harbingers of tyranny. Yet in the mid-19th century, against the desperate gruelling hardship of the workhouse and the slum, the workers must have fervently agreed that they had nothing to lose but their chains.

We in the western world are richer now. Along with a smidgen of imperialist exploitation, the immense productivity of the capitalist system has paid off for us in ways that Marx could not have begun to anticipate. The great majority of us enjoy health, education, warmth, shelter, comfort, security and food—a state of grace that was unknown to the proletarians of Marx's day.

On the other hand, how much of this plenty would we taste, if not for Marx and his contemporaries, the communists and socialists who championed the lot of the poor individual against the massed, faceless economic tyranny of the bourgeoisie? Our wealth springs from the employment of capital, but the stability, decency and relative egalitarianism of our societies sure as hell don't. (I should know—I work for a Swiss investment bank, and I wouldn't trust those buggers not to scalp my granny for a farthing.)

Marx was in many ways a genius, a man with a towering intellect coupled to a fierce humanitarian concern for the wretched lot of so many people in his time. His policies were turned into the doom of millions and the seal of tyranny on billions of human lives. Yet at the same time he understood the radical flaws of his society more clearly than any other before him, and that legacy of understanding has likewise benefited innumerable people across the centuries and the globe. It's just a pity that, like so many revolutionaries, he thought he could control the consequences of a radical solution.