I started reading Man On His Own, a collection of essays by the German Marxist Ernst Bloch. This was the first of his writings translated to English. It is unique in my experience of writings by a Marxist because it has a foreword and introduction by theologians. Harvey Cox, whose moment in the sun was already fading when the book was published, wrote the Foreword. The German theologian Jurgen Moltmann, whose own work is, as was derisively noted by Karl Barth, a baptizing of Bloch's The Principle of Hope (I wonder to this day if Moltmann ever read anything other than the 53rd chapter of the three volumes), wrote the Introduction.
Born in 1885 in Ludwigshafen, a dirty, grimy industrial city, Bloch's young imagination was fired by, among other things, the horribly pulpy westerns of the German writer Karl May (Bloch's Austrian contemporary, Adolf Hitler, was also fond of May's books, which only proves, I think, that May's influence on the future of European history was far less than some might imagine) and the poetry of Goethe.
Young enough to celebrate the victories of the Bolsheviks in Russia, and to see promise in the failed revolutions in Hungary and Bavaria, Bloch carved out a niche by returning at least some of the romanticism to what had become, under Lenin and Stalin, the dry pedanticism of "scientific socialism". First with The Spirit of Utopia and later (written in exile during the Nazi era; Bloch sat in the New York Public Library writing furiously while his second wife worked menial jobs to pay the bills) The Principle of Hope, Bloch brought out the social-psychological roots of revolutionary consciousness, and saw in the utopian visions of everything from dreams to architecture the framework for a metaphysics in which the future became the only really Real thing, drawing the present toward its ineluctable, fully human realizations (a Platonizing that turns Plato's anti-humanism on its head).
The essays in the collection I am reading were written after Bloch was exiled from East Germany. He had returned to the Soviet-controlled area of Germany soon after the end of the Second World War, hoping to become part of the intellectual vanguard of the revolution in his homeland. Sad to say, his writings did not toe the far-too-narrow party line of Erich Honecker's small-minded Stalinism, and eventually - after being silenced, having his works smuggled to the West to be published, and serving some time under house arrest - he ended up in West Germany, where he took up a position that became meta-critical. Still insisting he was in line with Marxist tradition, he railed against the smallness of both East and West, against the shallow and violent triumphalism of Stalinist orthodoxy that brooked no dissent, and the equally shallow and no less violent triumphalism of western anti-communism.
Man On His Own is a very late work, not least because its overriding concern seems to be expanding revolutionary consciousness to include the not-yet of death and what happens after. The opening paragraphs of the first essay, "Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse" deals a summary judgment upon the Leninist tradition, deriding it as a kind of Epicurean superficiality. Seeing in the satisfaction of that most basic need - filling the belly - the sum total of human happiness, this part of the Marxist tradition had little concern with culture in its many varieties. Religion most of all. Bloch, on the other hand, sees in the myths of apocalyptic the most powerful revolutionary critique of bourgeois society and of the "vulgar" Marxism that sees in the satisfaction of our immediate needs for continued biological survival the satisfaction of all our human wants and desires.
This is not to deny the necessity, for Bloch, of a very real political revolution. It is only to point out that, for Bloch, this political revolution, in which the entire structure of human relations is reenvisioned and restructured is the beginning of a more full, more human society.
Our current economic and political overlords - and there really isn't much difference between the two groups anymore - are no less insistent than Marx and his followers were that the sum total of human happiness, of human achievement, is reached when, through the workings of the market, the possibility of real human freedom through the accumulation of resources to stave off hunger has been achieved. The proponents of the the myth of the equation of our democratic Republic and unfettered capitalism, even now in its very real dotage, are no less enthusiastic economic determinists than their ideological foes (I think it is necessary to remember that the original neoconservatives, particularly Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were either full-fledged members of the communist party or fellow-travlers; see Garry Dorrien's The Neo-Conservative Mind). The reduction of our civil life to economic consumerism, the false choices of our politics between two groups fully in hock to corporate interests, and the nihilism of a political class that sees power as an end to itself, rather than a calling to service is the end of any illusions any thoughtful observer should have on the ability of capitalism to serve the full needs of human beings.
Bloch's musings on the possibilities inherent in stories of life-after-death and the apocalyptic musings of Christian and Jewish millenarianism offer a far deeper vision of the possibilities of human life than any kind of "scientific" view of human happiness that asks that we only surrender that which is most important to us in order that we may eat.
Virtual Tin Cup
