Karl Marx: An Irrelevant Man; D. G. Smith

315 The justification they giveis similar to that for sub sidizing sports arenas. Supposedly, everyone in a community will benefit, even those who prefer to sit home with a can of beer and watch all-star wrestling on television. There are many other examples of special inter est groups seeking public funds for goods and ser vices that primarily benefit them. Just follow the proposals and requests that come before meetings of locally elected officials. You probably will be surprised at the number of "socially concerned" people who have identified some urgent public "need." D Karl Marx: An IrrelevantMan by Donald G. Smith I remember reading Karl Marx in college. The assignment was, to understate the case, a tedious experience. There is a quality about this ponderously dull man that makes the eyelids heavy, and his work is not recommended for a pleasant afternoon at the beach. In defense of Marx, however, the writing that we see is a trans lation, and the passage of thought from one lan guage to another often has the effect of squeezing out the pithy phrases and the clever shades of meaning. I doubt that this happened to any signif icant degree with Marx, but it is still possible that he is more of a thundering bore in English than in the original German. Let's give him the benefit of a doubt on this one.

Mr. Smith is a writer living in Santa Maria, California. He has been a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal. Over the years I have also remembered Marx as a man who was simply wrong in the conclusions that he reached, but here was another judgment that couldn't be put to rest that easily.I have always had some trouble with the word wrong in regard to Karl Marx because he wasn't one for hitting nails squarely on heads, and his oblique phraseology didn't lend itself to the simplicity of right and wrong. Adolf Hitler was wrong throughout Mein Kampf, but not in the sense that the word would apply to Marx. There is a certain specificityto being wrong that applies to a Hitler but not to a Marx. It is wrong, for example, to say that Altoona is the capital of Pennsylvania, but the word cannot be so easily applied to the proposition that Altoona is, or is not, a nice place to live. Hitler would have gone with the first statement and gasped his last mortal breath insisting that it was 316 THE FREEMAN • AUGUST 1991 correct. Marx would have preferred the other proposition, making fuzzy and ill-conceived state ments that have no basis in fact but are hard to sup port or refute.

I have been rereading Marx in recent weeks, and I am turned off to the same extent that I was in my undergraduate days. I now believe, however, that I can pinpoint the reason that Karl and I just don't get along. The word that I had sought for so many years was not dulland it was not wrong.The word for Karl Marx is irrelevant. One will note that Marx prattled incessantly about the great class struggle. This might have had some meaning for 19thcentury Europeans, but it means absolutely nothing to Americans of any century. We are a nation of individuals with very little concept of social or economic class. Our group affiliations are temporal: an afternoon cheering for the home team, a lodge meeting, or a get-together with the property owners' associa tion, but it ends when we step outside and become individuals again. I suppose that a con temporary American could hold his or her income up to some economic scale and find a place in a pre-selected bracket, but it really doesn't mean much to anyone. Certainly there is no class struggle, and I don't think that I know anyone who could define the term, or who cares enough to find out.

The Irrelevanceof Labels Marx uses the words bourgeoisieand proletar ian repeatedly, and both are about as relevant to our lives as hoop skirts and butter chums. I know what the words mean, or what they meant to Karl Marx, but there are too many people who fit into both categories, or neither, for the words to have any applicability.I would be hard put to label any one I know as one or the other. If a man repairs shoes, for example, he is probably a proletarian, but what if he owns the shop and he is the only employee? This makes him the boss and also the one who does all the work. In the great revolution, Marx would probably have him destroy himself. Marx was obsessed with the idea of class,but to most Americans this is a vague, if meaningless, U lJ.llJ·· .llJ'iJJ J This portrait, taken in 1882 the last known photo of Marx. concept. We see the world as individuals, a group of divergent entities, each with a unique value and making up a collective body that is less important than its parts.

If one would ask the proverbial man-on-the street American to pinpoint himself on a class scale, he would probably come up with an answer of sorts, but it would be offered with a shrug of the shoulders and a "Who cares?" tone of voice. Class loyalty is about one step below loyalty to a bowl ing team or an alumni association in human inten sity. Certainly no American is going to take to the streets for the honor of the citizens in his salary bracket. This, I believe, is the reason that Karl Marx has made so little impact on American thought pro cesses. No one is quite sure what the man was talk ing about, and if they ever found out, they wouldn't care anyway.He wasn't evil, he wasn't insane, and he certainly wasn't stupid. On our side of the Atlantic, he is merely irrelevant. To put it succinct 1y' Karl Marx is a man with nothing to say to the American people. 0 317 A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK A Child of Fortune by John Chamberlain W e almost lost our Constitution before we had one. Jeffrey St. John, a journal istoftalentswhodecidedto put himself into a reporter's position at the secretive meetings of 38 delegates who framed the Constitution in the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787, opens the sec ond book of a trilogy with the story of a narrow escape.