Victor Alexeyevich Vaziulin
This article was first published in the journal Yasnopolyansky Vestnik, No. 5, 1993.
The famous psychotherapist Fritz Perls[1] once wrote, ‘A few years ago, I came across a book called A Cow Can’t Live in Los Angeles. It was about a Mexican man who taught his relatives how to live in America. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Americans are wonderful people, but there is one thing that really upsets them. You mustn’t tell them they’re corpses.’
I couldn’t agree more with this Mexican. I believe this is an extremely accurate description of the ‘ailments’ of modern man. ‘Our man―is dead, he is a puppet (the emphasis is mine―V. V.) and his behaviour is indeed very similar to that of a corpse, which ‘allows’ those around him to do whatever they want with him, even though he himself, by his very presence, influences them in a certain way.’
He goes on to describe today’s people as follows: ‘they are deliberate and calculating, devoid of living desires, wants and aspirations; their lives are boring, empty and meaningless, and they play out various roles, usually fake ones, which prevent them from being and living.’
To get to the heart of the matter, Perls states nothing less than that modern man―is an object, that modern morality is duplicitous morality. It is the market and commodity-money relations that turn humans into objects.
The tragedy of human existence in a world dominated by commodity-money relations, where business reigns supreme and people ‘die for metal,’ has penetrated the conscience of many Western scientists, Western ideologists. They see, for example, as the eminent psychoanalyst Karen Horney does, ‘the contradiction in that, on the one hand, we value and extol the concept of competition as the engine of progress, and on the other, we never tire of promoting brotherly love and humility, that, on the one hand, the American (and market-based in general―V. V.) way of life and prevailing morality dictate that we be persistent and aggressive, eliminating competitors, while on the other hand, church leaders instil humility and love for one’s neighbour.’
An attentive historian would note that the views of Karl Marx played an exceptional role in bringing the tragedy and contradictions of human existence in a market world dominated by commodity-money relations to the attention of contemporary Western scholars and ideologues. This fact can only be disputed by ‘our’ homegrown haters of Karl Marx―the ‘great intellectuals’ who dominated the intellectual landscape during the perestroika and post-perestroika periods.
However, it is not only the case that Marx’s views had a significant influence on global public opinion, including on ethical thought.
The point is also that they continue to have this impact. It is no coincidence that the ideas of Karl Marx are taught in one form or another in virtually all major higher education institutions in developed capitalist countries. Furthermore, despite numerous borrowings from Marx, these institutions do not convey the essence of this brilliant thinker’s views.
In his work, Marx did not merely state the contradictions and tragedy of human existence in a world dominated by market and commodity-money relations. Despite making these observations with such clarity and consistency, none of the people who borrowed his ideas recognised its influence.
He achieved what no one had achieved before him, and what was poorly understood after his time, if at all,―he provided a profound explanation of a society dominated by commodity-money relations, in which everything, including human beings, is turned into a commodity. In particular, he explained the morality of this society.
Such a society appears, on the sphere of the surface, the sphere of exchange, to be one in which free commodity owners operate, exchanging their commodities freely to satisfy their needs. On the surface, during the process of exchange, it appears that the wage labourers freely sell all their labour and receive its equivalent in the form of wages.
‘This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence’.[2]
Does this not remind us of the ‘captivating’ ‘democratic’ ideals of the last years of perestroika and the post-perestroika period? Is this not a concise summary of the basic ideals of the democrats? Isn’t that their idea of a perfect society?
However, Marx does not linger on the paradise of the representations of the surface. Instead, together with the intelligent and perceptive reader, he delves into the underground spheres, the depths of market society into the sphere of production and through all the circles of this hell. Here, hidden from everyday conscience, from the world of the surface, the enslavement of wage labourers, the appropriation of the labour of others, and inequality reign supreme. Here lie the roots of the modern form of alienation, of the predatory nature of two-legged animals…
The hell of capitalist production acts as a foundation that supports the free exchange or circulation of goods, the paradise of natural human rights and ‘universal human values’. Only by descending into this hell and understanding its fundamental nature can one discover paradise as an objective reality. Only then can the contradictory nature and tragedy of the paradise of free exchange be consistently identified and explained in all their complexity.
Karl Marx’s explanation is systematic and comprehensive in nature, requiring a disciplined and developed mind to comprehend it, as well as a willingness to abandon any social prejudices, no matter how fashionable, widespread or generally accepted they may be and no matter how long they have misled people. In other words, to understand (not to mention develop) Marx’s explanation requires not only a sufficiently disciplined mind armed with methodology, but also to mentally reject a world of alienation in which man is reduced to the status of an object and in which hypocrisy and falsehood permeate all human activity.
Notes
[1] Friedrich Salomon Perls (1893-1970), better known as Fritz Perls, was a German-born psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. Perls coined the term ‘Gestalt therapy’ to identify the form of psychotherapy that he developed with his wife, Laura Perls, in the 1940s and 1950s. Perls became associated with the Esalen Institute in 1964 and lived there until 1969.
[2] Karl Marx, 1867, Capital Volume One, Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power.