“The rich human being”: Where have we seen him before? Readers of Goethe and Schiller will recognize the imagery of classical German humanism here. But those humanists believed that only a very few men and women could be capable of the inner depth that they could imagine; the vast majority of people, as seen from Weimar and Jena, were consumed by trivialities and had no soul. Marx inherited Goethe’s and Schiller’s and Humboldt’s values, but he fused them with a radical and democratic social philosophy inspired by Rousseau. Rousseau’s 1755 Discourse on the Origins of Inequality laid out the paradox that even as modern civilization alienates people from themselves, it develops and deepens those alienated selves and gives them the capacity to form a social contract and create a radically new society.5 A century later, after one great wave of revolutions and just before another, Marx sees modern society in a similarly dialectical way. His idea is that even as bourgeois society enervates and impoverishes its workers, it spiritually enriches and inspires them. “The rich human being” is a man or woman for whom “self-realization [seine eigene Verwirklichung] exists as an inner necessity, a need”; he or she is “a human being in need of a totality of human activities” (91). Marx sees bourgeois society as a system that, in an infinite number of ways, stretches workers out on a rack. Here his dialectical imagination starts to work: The very social system that tortures them also teaches and transforms them, so that while they suffer, they also begin to overflow with energy and ideas. Bourgeois society treats its workers as objects, yet develops their subjectivity. Marx has a brief passage on French workers who are just (of course illegally) starting to organize: They come together instrumentally, as a means to economic and political ends; but “as a result of this association, they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what [begins] as a means becomes an end” (99). Workers may not set out to be “rich human beings,” and certainly no one else wants them to be, but their development is their fate, it turns their powers of desire into a world-historical force.
“Let me get this straight,” my mother said, as she took her book. “It’s Marx, but not communism, right? So what is it?” Marx in 1844 had imagined two very different communisms. One, which he wanted, was “a genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man” (84); the other, which he dreaded, “has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even attained to it” (83). Our twentieth century had produced a great surplus of the second model, but not much of the first. The problem, in short, has been that the second model, the one Marx dreaded, has had tanks, and the first, the one he dreamed of, has not. My mother and I had seen those tanks on TV; in Budapest, killing kids. We agreed, not Communism. But if not that, then what? I felt like a panelist on a TV quiz show, with time running out. I reached for a phrase I had seen in the New York Times, in a story about French existentialists—Sartre, de Beauvoir, Henri Lefebvre, André Gorz, and their friends—who were trying to merge their thought with Marxism and create a radical perspective that would transcend the dualisms of the Cold War. I said, “Call it Marxist humanism.” “Oh!” my mother said, “Marxist humanism, that sounds nice.” Zap! My adventure in Marxism had crystallized; in an instant I had focused my identity for the next forty years.
And what happened then? I lived another forty years. I went to Oxford, then Harvard. Then I got a steady job in the public sector, as a teacher of political theory and urbanism at the ever-assailed City University of New York. I’ve worked mostly in Harlem, but downtown as well. I’ve been lucky to grow old as a citizen of New York and to bring up my kids in the fervid freedom of the city. I was part of the New Left thirty years ago, and I’m part of the Used Left today. (My generation shouldn’t be embarrassed by the name. Anyone old enough to know the market’s ups and downs knows that used goods often beat new models.) I don’t think I’ve grown old yet, but I’ve been through plenty; and through it all I’ve worked to keep Marxist humanism alive.
As the twentieth century comes to an end, Marxist humanism is almost half a century old. It’s never swept the country, not in any country, but it has found a place. One way to place it might be to see it as a synthesis of the culture of the fifties with that of the sixties: a feeling for complexity; irony and paradox, combined with a desire for breakthrough and ecstasy; a fusion of “Seven Types of Ambiguity” with “We Want the World and We Want It Now.” It deserves a place of honor in more recent history, in 1989 and after, in the midst of the changes that their protagonists called the Velvet Revolution.
Mikhail Gorbachev hoped to give it a place in his part of the world. He imagined a communism that could enlarge personal freedom, not crush it. But he came too late. To people who had lived their lives within the Soviet horizon, the vision didn’t scan; they just couldn’t see it. The Soviet people had been burned so badly for so long, they didn’t know him; he called, and they didn’t return his calls. But we can see Gorbachev as a Willy Loman of politics—a failure as a salesman, but a tragic hero.
Some people think Marxist humanism got its whole meaning as an alternative to Stalinism and that it died with the crumbling of the USSR. My own view is that its real dynamic force is as an alternative to the nihilistic, market-driven capitalism that envelops the whole world today. That means it will have plenty of work to do for a long time to come.
There is a wonderful image that emerged early in the 1990s—at least that is when I first heard it, at my school, City College of New York—from the street life of America’s black ghettos, and particularly from today’s hip-hop music scene, where music becomes itself not by being harmonized, but by being mixed. Here’s the image: caught up in the mix. “She’s all caught up in the mix”; “I got myself caught up in the mix.” This image has stuck because it captures so much of so many people’s lives. My father was caught up in the mix. So were the friends who betrayed him. I think Marx understood better than anybody else how modern life is a mix; how, although there are immense variations in it, deep down it’s one mix—“the mix”; how we are all caught up in it; and how easy, how normal it is for the mix to go awry. He also showed how, once we grasped the way we were thrown together, we could fight for the power to remix.
Marxist humanism can help people feel at home in history, even a history that hurts them. It can show them how even those who are broken by power can have the power to fight the power; how even survivors of tragedy can make history. It can help people discover themselves as “rich human beings” with “rich human needs” (89–91), and can show them there is more to them than they thought. It can help new generations to imagine new adventures and arouse their powers of desire to change the world, so that they not only will be part of the mix, they will get to do part of the mixing.
This essay was first published in Adventures in Marxism, Verso, 1999.
The idea that I have called “the politics of authenticity” is a dream of an ideal community in which individuality will not be subsumed and sacrificed, but fully developed and expressed. This dream is at once old and new. “New,” first of all, in that it is modern: It presupposes the sort of fluid, highly mobile, urban society, and the sort of dynamic, expansive economy which we experience as distinctively