Karl Marx believed that man is created by economics, not the other way around. No soul is involved. Nebuchadnezzar, Jesus, Attila the Hun, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, Albert Schweitzer, and Alanis Morissette are all just different versions of investment maven Warren Buffett. And mankind, like Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway company, moves ever forward economically. History, to Marx, was nothing but the inevitable evolution of economic systems. First there was snatch and grab, followed by hunt and gather, then feudalism, capitalism, and, finally, there will be snatch and grab again, as much as you like, in the communist utopia. Marx insisted that these economic systems determine everything. He lived in the capitalist age, so all of what he saw around him was a construct of capitalism: marriage, family, religion, government, nation. When communism came, these would disappear. Poof! No more wife and kids, and you don’t have to go to church on Sunday, you can play golf. Unless golf is a capitalist construct, too, in which case you’ll be standing in the grass with a niblick in your hand and no idea what to do. Faith in the primacy of economic determinates is, in brief, putting a price on your mother. As I pointed out in the last chapter, a good economist can do this, if pressed. But Marx was not a good economist. He espoused the Labor Theory of Value, the idea that the value of a product is determined by the work required for its production. Thus, a hole in the ground is worth more than a poem. (Although this actually happened to be the case with much of the poetry written in the Soviet Union.) Marx also believed that once private property was eliminated and communism had arrived, all of humankind would be gathered into one huge, cohesive, all-pervading socioeconomic cooperative. How this would happen, however, Marx hadn’t a clue. He hinted it would be accomplished in a big, gooey, spontaneous, Woodstock way. In Russia, it was done with guns. There’s a problem with such an immense, omnipotent, and ubiquitous organization (a problem, that is, besides the millions of people killed to create it). What is this thing supposed to do? Karl Kautsky, another leading crackpot left-wing theoretician of the nineteenth century, said, “In the socialist society, which is after all just a single, giant industrial enterprise, production and planning must be . . . organized as they are organized in a modern, large, industrial enterprise.” But a modern, large, industrial enterprise producing what? Game Boys? Inner peace? Blow jobs? Candy and gum? Without rational prices,
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