This in turn led to what I believe is Karl Marx's greatest mistake: his assumption that raising the proletariat--the poor and working class--to effectively be the new ruling class in his classless society, was the ultimate answer to class warfare. This solution is, in my view, short sighted, and demonstrates Marx's lack of knowledge in both mass and individual psychology. A complete leveling of human society is impossible; human nature militates against it. As George Orwell so astutely observed in his book Animal Farm (1945), sooner or later the maxim of "All animals are equal," devolves into that of "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." Any attempt at the complete elimination of class and rank in every aspect of human society perpetuates the class war by creating a new ruling class of those who lead the revolution, and a new underclass of those who opposed or were indifferent to it. This in turn requires yet another revolution, ad infinitum.
Professor Marx was also incorrect in depending on humanity's rationality to achieve his goals. The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach had stated in his criticism of Hegel that a man eats before he reasons. Several years ago, a friend of mine pointed out to me a simple fact: that humankind consists of rationalizing, not rational beings. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., observed that we cannot control a man's thoughts, only a man's actions. Humanity will rarely act for long under any rational impetus, even if they have all of their needs met, Too often we will act according to the emotional impetus of either anger, envy, greed, lust, gluttony, sloth or pride singularly, or in some combination. (Yes, those are the Seven Deadly Sins of the Catholic Church, proving that even a blind pig can find an acorn sometimes.)
In my quote from Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts above, note the list of activities that the acquisition of wealth supplants under unregulated, i.e., free-market capitalism, "[The economics of capitalism--RJG] " is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise [emphasis added--RJG] " the less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc.." Marx went further concerning the dehumanization of the worker, and the subordination of the worker to his employer and the employer's needs in Das Kapital :
"...Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital." ( Das Kapital, Volume I ; Part VII, The Accumulation of Capital; Section 4: Different Forms of Relative Surplus Population, The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation; page 401.)
Let see what Marx has to say, as he looks at the exploitation of workers outside of the workplace:
"...Universal exploitation of communal human nature. Just as each one of man's inadequacies is a bond with heaven, a way into his heart for the priest, so every need is an opportunity for stepping up to one's neighbor in sham friendship and saying to him: 'Dear friend, I can give you what you need, but you know the terms. You know which ink you must use in signing yourself over to me [blood and sweat]. I shall cheat you while I provide [the means for] your pleasure.' He places himself at the disposal of his neighbor's most depraved fancies, panders to his needs, excites unhealthy appetites in him, and pounces on every weakness, so that he can then demand the money for his labor of love.
This estrangement partly manifests itself in the fact that the rent of needs and of the means of fulfilling them gives rise to a bestial degeneration and a complete, crude and abstract simplicity of need; or rather, that it merely reproduces itself in its opposite sense. Even the need for fresh air ceases to be a need for the worker.
Man reverts once more to living in a cave, but the cave is now polluted by the mephitic [hellish stench--RJG] and pestilential breath of civilization. Moreover, the worker has no more than a precarious right to live in it, for it is for him an alien power that can be daily withdrawn and from which, should he fail to pay, he can be evicted at any time. He actually has to pay for this mortuary. A dwelling in the light, which Prometheus describes in Aeschylus as one of the great gifts through which he transformed savages into men, ceases to exist for the worker. Light, ire, etc.--the simplest animal cleanliness--cases be a need for man. Dirt--this pollution and putrefaction of man, the sewage (this word is to be understood in its literal sense) of civilization -- becomes an element of life for him. Universal unnatural neglect, putrefied nature, becomes an element of life for him.
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